How to Form a Brotherhood ｜ Interview with Stephen Carson aka Radical Liberation
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Summary
In this episode, I am joined by the founder of the Old Glory Club, Stephen Carron, to talk about the history of fraternal societies and what it means to be a member of a fraternal society. We discuss the importance of a brotherhood and how it can be used to support each other in times of need.
Transcript
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hello and welcome to this very special interview where i am joined by stephen carson otherwise
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known as radley of how are you sir very good thank you for joining us it's good to be with
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you again yeah it's an honor and pleasure if anyone doesn't know we recorded the breakfast
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show this morning and we talked about the um early church a little bit it's been a bit been a while
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but yeah oh oh our original conversation like three years ago or something yeah it's been years
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that was a fascinating conversation yeah i'd like to do it again actually pick your brain more
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right i find i find late antiquity or early the early christian period absolutely fascinating
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i gathered because you quickly i quickly could tell i was out of my depth if it came to anything
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with roman emperors and stuff like that you were you were killing me no no it's fascinating there
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was loads of things in there you you said that i i didn't know so yeah no great stuff okay so today
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though right we thought we'd talk about something completely different yeah we thought we'd talk
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about uh well mutual aid societies the history and what they are what they mean what they could
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mean going forward and everything and so it's a little bit as a speciality of yours if you want
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to tell us yeah but there's two things coming into this uh that i have behind me coming into
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this one is that i did a series on my channel radical liberation on youtube um on mutual aid
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societies where i went through a book by david beto and he was focused more on the american side
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but it's kind of a very similar story in the UK, for example.
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Yeah, so I was the first president of the Old Glory Club.
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And I continue to be on the central, the national organization.
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And then the Islander asked me to submit something.
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And I thought, well, this is an easy topic to talk about.
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And then I did this whole series on the history of it.
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And so I just submitted a draft to them, and hopefully we'll see that in an upcoming issue
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of The Islander. And my proposed title, editors like to change titles, my proposed title is
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Brotherhoods, because that's really what struck me, learning about mutual aid societies.
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They're fraternal societies, brotherly societies, right? And that is the theme that you see running
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through it. It's about, how do you put it? Extending the bonds that we usually think of
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family bonds. Like you've got your cousins and your uncles and your brothers. With a fraternal
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society, you stretch that out just a little to include some like-minded men who are maybe your
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neighbors or neighbors to you in another sense. Like with lotus eaters, a lot of us feel very
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close to each other because we sort of ideologically have a lot in common. Well, these mutual aid
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societies, you might work in a similar industry. You might all be Catholic. You might all be of a
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similar ethnic background. You were all immigrants from Ireland to the United States. And so you work
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with fellow Irish immigrants to support each other when hard times come. But the theme is
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extending that brotherhood. And so in the Old Glory Club, for instance, we refer to each other
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as brothers. And when Central is coming, when the national organization is coming down on someone,
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they'll say things like, you don't talk that way to your brother. We understand you disagree,
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but find a way to express it that's respectful. So there's that emphasis on a fraternal
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kind of relationship. It's funny, and I'm only joking here,
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but often brothers are the most brutal to each other. I'm joking. I'm just joking.
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No, no. Actually, I think that's one of the things that I'm seeing as we do this in real life,
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is that you get a track record with people when you really start cooperating together to do things
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you start to learn who you can trust who who's reliable who does what they say right yeah who's
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who's petty and bickering you know sometimes we don't we don't like that we kind of sometimes
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your worst enemy is your brother or your own father it's never the case in my family
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but you know sometimes right yeah no anyway lesson aside that's a complete an aside um
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so before we dig into sort of um some of the the real minutiae of sort of the the rise and fall
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the nature of uh mutual aid societies and brotherhoods and sort of the more 19th century
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thing and all sorts of examples of the exclusionary nature of it and all that sort of thing i wonder
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if i could just ask you a question or two about sort of in in the broadest sense about it because
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one of the things that um struck me when i was reading your article because i've read your um
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Now, you and I are both the furthest thing from Marxists.
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This isn't me saying, Marx said a brilliant thing I agree with.
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But Marx talked about, or he's not the only one to have done so,
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but talked about sort of the atomization and alienation.
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And in Marx's view, a lot of that was connected specifically to capitalism.
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And the idea that today, in the 2020s, in the West, in places like the United States and Great Britain, that lots and lots of people, particularly young men, but anyone really, that sense of loneliness, isolation, the atomization of society, even family units.
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yeah and uh whether that whether in the marxist view or not that's going to think to do with
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capitalism is something else but it's something that ever since i think since the industrial
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revolution i think for a good couple hundred years now or more that's just increasing and
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if anything if anything i feel like even with the internet it's still increasing still quickening
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going ever faster if anything so some people would say in part because of the internet quite
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possibly yeah yeah you think you've got lots and lots of online friends but actually physically
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you're sitting in a room on your own for most of your life right um and so that then and so that
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i feel that there is a market for for some sort of real life brotherhood yeah whether you want
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to call them mutual aid societies that's quite a 19th century early 20th century way of phrasing
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it but something something yeah yeah um right so so i'm i i'm going to use some language i learned
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for my wife who's a therapist okay so psychological language for a moment okay but it just really has
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do with how humans function as mammals we need bonds we're a pack animal yes we we need connection
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with other humans um yeah you you might know that it's considered a form of torture and it's
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supposedly not allowed that people do it anyway to have someone in solitary confinement for long
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periods of time because you just can start going loopy without connection other people most people
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Yeah, and then there's the failure to thrive thing that happened.
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I think it was after World War II, a lot of orphaned babies, very few care workers to take care of them.
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They're feeding them, they're changing their diaper, and they're dying.
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And they're like, what in the world is going on?
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Finally, they asked some volunteers to come in and just hold the babies, and they stopped dying.
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And what you're talking about is a very frightening development.
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My wife and I are very concerned about the lack of family formation, namely people getting married or coupling.
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I don't care if it's a state-ordained marriage.
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The point is coming together, having kids, building a family.
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And even, and I think this is particularly hard for young men, sometimes they just don't have friends.
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So that's part of the reason I'm passionate about this topic, because there's a real felt need.
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And unlike some of the crazier utopian ideas that intellectuals like us like to talk about,
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mutual aid societies is really grounded in the history of our people.
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And it's not even like, you know, a thousand years ago in the Middle Ages, people used to do this.
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No, like our great-grandparents would have been in mutual aid societies.
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It was actually quite strong, maybe at its strongest in the early 20th century.
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And it's only as you get into the mid-20th century that you start to see a real drop-off in participation.
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Many of these societies are still around, but there's just a lot of old people in them, and they're going to just disappear.
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And so that's in part why we founded a new one rather than joining an old one.
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We wanted to just start with some youthful energy and kind of revive this structure.
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there's nothing wrong with it, really. The welfare state competed with some of the functions of the
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mutual aid societies, which would be sort of like insurance and funeral expenses, and they'd help
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you with things like that, right? And as the state took over some of those functions, that leached
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away some of the practical reasons people would form these. But now, a hundred years later or
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whatever, or more of doing the welfare state, we all know that it isn't all that was promised,
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right? It doesn't really work as well as we hoped. And it's really like an acid to bonds.
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It really breaks families apart. It breaks communities apart.
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The welfare state. Yeah. So keeping it on the family level, on that micro level, for example,
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at one time, part of the reason that sort of a practical reason to have children,
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to keep good relations with them, is they're going to be the ones taking care of you when
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you're old. Well, now the boomers famously just go on cruises somehow constantly and screw the
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next generation. So there's that intergenerational dependency. I take care of you when you're a kid,
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you take care of me when you're old, honor thy father and mother. That was broken by the welfare
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state. But I think a lot of us can see that that was bad. And so I think people are really,
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It's a great time to be looking at this again, because whatever temporary high that people had
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about the welfare state, I think that's long gone. And now people can see, maybe we should try some
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of the older ways again. The idea that the state will see you through from cradle to grave.
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Yes. Is that ideal? Is that actually good? Possibly not.
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and and and and and is it the adult version do you end up with sort of the adult version of failure
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to thrive yes the state gives me money and it educates my children and everything but i don't
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feel connected i don't feel bonded i don't feel part of a community yeah yeah may not even have
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any friends so before we get onto because i wanted to mention the um mark howton and the um the
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basket weavers and yeah a similar sort of thing but let's go back let's go back to the beginning
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because right the the welfare state is a modern very modern thing i mean kaiser or whatever brought
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it in right uh because we'll have like the krupp industry and things like that yeah i mean it's
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it's like second half of the 19th century yeah not even the first half so it's really historically
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speaking it's a blink of an eye that we've had the well yeah oh yeah yeah and we already can see
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yeah maybe that wasn't such a great idea so the vast majority of human civilization
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there was nothing like there was nothing like the welfare state um right so
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you mentioned and i know a tiny bit about it myself that even if you go back to the earliest
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possible seeds of it you might say you're in this in england in this like the 17th century right
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something like that and i don't know much about that very very early history but that's when you
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you first start seeing them forming friendly societies friendly societies yeah so the idea
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that some people we might want to call it philanthropy maybe maybe not but some people see
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some men see a need for um yeah some sort of wider society where they can look after each other
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yes it's quite as simple as that isn't it really the first instance and i think some or one of us
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fall on hard times, we've all paid into a pot, and we might be able to help each other out.
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Yeah. And my profession is IT, tech. So forgive the tech term here, but peer-to-peer.
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Okay. Right. As opposed to a hierarchical. That's what the mutual aid society is focused on.
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We're not going to have some rich guy, and he's going to take care of us. We're going to pool our
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resources not just money but time and so forth right and and we are going to support each other
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so when when you're having some bad fortune hit your life your brothers will be there for you
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and then you'll be there for us so the state's got nothing to do with it it's just like my
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fellow men brothers yeah and uh and but it was it was really quite exclusionary not anyone could
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join. That's the whole point of it, is that you need to be able to rely on them not to be a
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complete drain on it, to be trustworthy, and all those things. So it's not for everyone.
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Well, let's put it this way. In any given brotherhood, in any given fraternal organization,
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there would be, historically, there was some kind of exclusionary mechanism.
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And as I mentioned, it could be religious, ethnic, all kinds of things.
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Anything they want, anything that brotherhood wants.
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Yeah, profession or whatever, some combination of it.
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But what was the practical reason, going into sort of social theory a little bit here?
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The practical reason is that you need to have a little high-trust society, right?
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Yeah, fraternal society is a little micro high-trust society.
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Well, we now know from Robert Putnam and various work on this in sociology
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that diversity actually reduces trust in a society.
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Only here on Lotus Eaters can I say this without anyone blinking an eye.
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But let me get into the mechanics of it, because I think thinking about mutual aid societies
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helps us understand this sort of diversity versus homogeneity thing.
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it's because of um you need to be able to like understand each other right you need to understand
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that when someone says something what it means what their what kind of obligations have been
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created right and the thing about different cultures is that they have different different
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ways that those things function they all have ways to do it but they don't necessarily mesh
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with each other well across those cultures, right? Yeah. So within a culture, a fraternal society is
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going to pick a culture, even kind of a sub-slice of a culture, right? Just English plumbers or
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Welsh plumbers or something, right? And such that everybody in there is speaking the same language
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culturally speaking, right? Has similar expectations, right? You know, the old English
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phrase, well, that just isn't done, right? Well, what isn't done? Depends. Depends on your religion,
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depends on your cultural background, your history, right? All of these things change,
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give you a different idea of what is acceptable and what is not. So it's really hard, basically
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impossible, to form a fraternal society with people who have radically different expectations
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along those lines. You need to have people who just kind of get it implicitly, tacit knowledge.
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They just implicitly understand, oh, this is what we're doing. These are the kinds of expectations
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that are going to be on me and that I can have on other people. This is the kind of commitment
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I'm making. And you have to have something more than, this is not piece of paper stuff, right?
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You have to have personal bonds. You feel loyal to each other. One of the things we found,
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And actually, with the Skildings conference is where it really blew my mind.
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The first time I went to a Skildings conference, a lot of these people I had known online.
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And, you know, online is a, you bicker with each other online.
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And so I wondered what it would be like to get in person together.
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I thought, oh, we'll just all be like bickering.
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Because once we got together in person, we saw that we were very like-minded and that the little
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things that we like to argue about online are like 0.001% of what matters. We immediately felt
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just meeting, it became more real that we had a real connection, a real bond,
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a real like-mindedness. And that's where the old glory club came from, right? We met each other and
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we're like, oh, we can build something with a set of men like us that are just, you know, we share,
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We have these shared values, and we just trust each other.
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I think perhaps trust is sort of the key thing, the absolute key thing.
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And I think this goes back through probably all of human civilization,
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that you need to be able to trust the other members of your tribe,
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whether that is just simply your family unit or something much bigger than that.
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But let's use the word tribe in a very, very broad sense.
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All we have in common is that we've accepted Jesus, right?
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And many, many groups do this just implicitly already, right?
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And it's something that somehow, whether the welfare state's a massive part of it or not, I imagine it is, but somehow in the Anglosphere, in the West, over the last century or more, we've lost that.
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A lot of people in the West these days have got an out-grouped preference, if anything.
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Yeah. And so we're having to, this is kind of an awkward phrase, reinvent social technology or rediscover social technology. How did we have high trust societies in the past? How were we able to do the things we were able to do and cooperate in the way we were able to cooperate? Because now it seems very difficult to just be able to trust other people enough to make long term commitments. Right? You've got to have trust to have a long term commitment.
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I had a conversation with Professor Ed Dutton not too long ago
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How they could implicitly trust each other
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You know that you can trust them with something
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And there's many, many, many, many examples of that
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But it seems that like the Anglosphere, something like that, so we've lost something, lost somewhere along the way, somehow lost that sort of that trust.
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I would sound slightly conspiratorial and say it's actually been attacked.
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Right. And so the point of me bringing up this history of mutual aid societies is to say, number one, our great-grandparents did it.
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This isn't even that long ago. And why not do it again?
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And I mean, you know, it doesn't have to be, you know, the Old Glory Club, for example, is not a political organization.
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I mean, we help when there's disaster relief. We help a brother who has lost a job.
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Hmm. You know, I mean, we go to a historical event, you know, it's the Gettysburg, Battle of Gettysburg
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commemoration. And we go to the battlefield or the guy, the brothers who are in that area
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join together and go to the battlefield and learn more about their own history.
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I say what's stopping us, much less stopping us in the United States.
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in britain we do have or in europe certainly in britain we do have like equality legislation where
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if you said i want to form a society a group well however you want a brotherhood a formal
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organization where people and there's money involved people are paying into it um and it's
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gonna be only englishmen only englishmen from southwest and they must be white and they must
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be protestant let's just say that just random set of things sure sure you know you're not allowed
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to that you have to you have to let women and people of color into it you have to otherwise
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it's illegal the police will come around and knock on your door and say you're not allowed to do this
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maybe now i'm not a lawyer don't take my advice i kind of thought that was true in the united states
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because we have a lot of the similar kind of legislation along those lines right
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but actually it's not okay it depends on what you're doing if you're running a for-profit
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business yeah you can run into that okay but non-profits actually can have a lot of
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a lot of latitude so there might be more latitude than you'd guess okay maybe we should look into
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that yeah that's the point of me bringing it up just while we're on exploring this vein maybe it's
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the moment to just mention um the the basket weavers yes and there's something like that so
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you've you're aware i asked you this morning if you're aware of them and you said of course i am
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yeah yeah well i was i was doing it right so what was your experience with that and how did you
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Yeah, well, this was Academic Agent's suggestion originally. He said, you know, we can't just be online all the time. There's something missing. We need to meet together in real life. And he says, I don't care what you do. Just get together. Weave baskets. So jokingly, they called it the basket weavers, right?
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now what do basket weavers do in practice in a local area they get
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together and they go on a hike or whatever kind of the local and this is
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the true of our chapters in the OGC as well it's really up to the local area
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the members in the local area kind of to decide what they want to make of it is
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this going to be kind of a regular game night that we get together and do board
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games or just have a drink or are we just going to have a pint together
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different people do different things or do a variety of things depending on
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what they feel like that's that's fine right the point is you're meeting together in real life
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you're having the opportunity to form bonds trust loyalty and that means that when something comes
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along that you didn't expect you can think of somebody to call that you don't feel awkward
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about calling right of course it's okay to call these people they know me yeah right right yeah
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and and they'll they'll help me out with whatever this is there's no substitute for that yeah i
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I mean, I've always been, I guess I've always been lucky where I've never found myself in a place in my life where I was truly isolated.
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Where I truly never had any friends whatsoever.
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That would be terrifying if there was no one to turn to, literally no one at all.
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And the state, for whatever reason, just says, no, you're on your own.
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You might not have a benevolent father or an older brother
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And you haven't got any friends, certainly no staunch friends
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Really, I mean, that is sort of like the true atomization
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So to even to do anything, to even begin to address that, because I think it's not isolated
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few people that applies to. I think that might be millions of people in the world that that
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applies to. Yeah. And let me be clear. I'm not bringing up mutual aid societies because I think
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like that solves all our problems. I'm saying it's a piece. It's a piece of the puzzle. You know,
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as a Christian, I would encourage people to become Christians and go to church. Well,
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that's another place to form bonds. But I think we need to try a number of different, we need to
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bring back, not just try, we need to bring back a number of practices that we as European people
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did for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. There were the guilds, so professional
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organizations. There were the mutual aid societies, there were parishes and parish activities,
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on and on and on right we had many many so you know one person would be you know just a member
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of you know their mutual aid society but in their professional organization they're like a leader in
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it right and so forth right so one person would have this very complicated relationship to the
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world around them where they're hierarchically sort of higher and lower depending on what it is
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yeah right yeah um and that's beautiful that's how it should be right right yeah nice so it got
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to quite a sophisticated level for example yeah very near here very near five minute walk from
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here there's a a whole bunch of houses that are just known as um the railway village and where we
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had the british route or the beginnings of the railways in britain again long before the
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welfare state or anything like that you'd have people that worked for the railways they would
00:26:46.980
all join together in what was essentially some sort of mutual aid society and it was just for
00:26:52.120
people that worked in the railways on the railways and swindon used to be a giant hub or the hub for
00:26:57.520
the southwest of all of england where lots and lots of trains got actually built uh there's a
00:27:03.300
big thing there's so many workers there that they they built their own village essentially right but
00:27:10.180
then on top of that, they built their own swimming pool. They built their own basically like a
00:27:15.960
hospital. And it was just for the people that worked on the railways. Yeah. And you're saying
00:27:22.900
this wasn't the company building the swimming pool. This was the workers pooling together and
00:27:28.120
saying, hey, we'd like a swimming pool. Well, let's do it. And it wasn't the state. It wasn't
00:27:32.740
the state yeah okay so they built basically what is a hospital and but out of that over 150 years
00:27:41.640
or more out of that you end up with a giant welfare state the nhs which cost billions a week
00:27:49.420
and everyone's involved in it like literally everyone has to pay a tax that goes towards it
00:27:55.400
all the time anyone that comes over gets any free health care at the point of so it's from that tiny
00:28:01.220
sort of noble righteous beautiful really beginning yeah we've now got this giant insane
00:28:08.720
monster of a thing in the modern nhs which is not fit for purpose it's broken it's it's uh it's
00:28:18.180
bankrupt in the state it's so over the top so crazy it's like this this this this this monster
00:28:26.660
that has grown out of it but the original thing that 19th century thing where it's just mutual
00:28:32.860
aid between a set of railway workers yeah that that was something nothing's wrong with that
00:28:39.000
right there was nothing wrong with very good the good beautiful thing yeah it it worked
00:28:44.020
yeah it works so much better than this this socialist nightmare something clement attley
00:28:50.980
brought in in the late 40s again probably coming what would have been coming from a good place in
00:28:56.060
his heart, I imagine, but is now utterly out of control.
00:29:02.900
So here's, let me draw an analogy from economics.
00:29:06.940
So, you know, money was not originated by the state.
00:29:17.300
I mean, it's just, it's something that naturally arises, right?
00:29:20.300
And it serves a useful function, you know, a means of exchange that is widely accepted.
00:29:26.060
So you have this thing that's there, that's valuable, that serves a socially useful purpose.
00:29:35.320
And he puts his name on it, or the emperor, whatever, stamps his face on it.
00:29:39.400
And then he starts shaving bits off the coin, right?
00:29:42.460
And then you get the ridges on the coin, right?
00:29:46.220
The point is, you have these socially useful, healthy things that someone will parasitically
00:29:56.060
out of all recognition, right? So that is my view on what you're describing. And indeed,
00:30:02.740
as I wrote about, the mutual aid societies very often would like start hospitals, sanitariums,
00:30:10.220
whatever those were, health resorts, I guess. Or for mentally ill people. Or orphanages.
00:30:14.940
Orphanages. All sorts of things, right? Yeah, yeah. They would just see a need of their members.
00:30:19.920
Hey, we've got some members who died. What do we do with the kids? They don't really have
00:30:23.700
relatives to take him in. Your burials and things. Yeah. And so they'd say form an orphanage. And
00:30:29.520
then once it was there, maybe some other people would benefit from it who aren't members of the
00:30:34.060
society, right? You know, once this structure is there, it could have wider benefits, which to my
00:30:40.140
view is all good, right? The problem is when you undermine what built it all in the first place,
00:30:46.840
you you abolish the ability to exclude and so now you have people come along who
00:30:53.480
are not participating in the give and take that a mutual aid society does they're just takers right
00:30:59.780
and it's not going to last when you get that that's not sustainable is it it's not sustainable
00:31:04.720
so that is a key element of it very briefly very briefly the thing that got built
00:31:09.540
you can kind of leech off that for a little while for a generation maybe even right generation or
00:31:16.520
to. And it seems like you're getting things for free, but actually you're eating away at the
00:31:22.560
foundation of what built this beautiful thing in the first place. And soon enough, it'll just start
00:31:26.680
collapsing on you. Right. So that is really a kit. We mentioned it earlier, but that really is an
00:31:32.160
absolutely fundamental element of it is the exclusionary nature of it. Yeah. And is that
00:31:38.300
it's not for everyone that you want to be very, very careful before you let anyone in a mutual
00:31:42.940
a society or a brotherhood whatever you want to call it be extremely careful that you're not
00:31:47.440
letting in someone of in who's there in bad faith that's right they're looking just to leech from it
0.96
00:31:53.880
they're looking for free gibbs right they just that that's not a brother right right and so
0.51
00:32:01.040
that would have to be done to be you can never really know people can you but still you you'd
0.99
00:32:06.480
have to be relatively well you have to be very careful about who and who you don't let in it's
00:32:11.940
certainly not just a blanket. Anyone that's of this age or anyone that lives here, that doesn't
0.79
00:32:18.140
work. No, no, no. In fact, the mutual aid societies, I mentioned some of the exclusionary,
0.90
00:32:23.020
like you would just have to be in a certain profession or whatever, right? But then that
00:32:28.200
wasn't the only requirements. After you met those requirements, they would interview you,
00:32:34.600
maybe interview people who knew you, right? To vet for character, for reliability,
00:32:41.860
that you're not an addict who is just going to come in and destroy everything, right?
00:32:48.580
And then even once a member, you could get kicked out for bad behavior.
00:32:55.480
Someone would say, use the mutual aid for some sick benefits. Hey, I got really sick. I couldn't
00:33:01.680
work for a couple weeks we're right on the edge my family needs some help they'd say great we're
00:33:06.800
happy to help we're going to come and check on you make sure yeah everything's okay and you're
00:33:11.400
really sick yeah right yeah oh it's a trust but verify yeah right oh it's a mutual aid setting
00:33:17.620
it's to do with health and we just need to check that you're not a sexual degenerate and have got
00:33:22.400
late stage syphilis yes before we let you in that is one of the specific things that i found in the
00:33:27.360
research, they would talk about how it was interesting. They'd become requirements,
00:33:34.360
but they also became something that they would encourage. Once you join the Mutual Aid Society,
00:33:39.420
they would encourage thrift and good character and all these kinds of sexually good behavior,
00:33:48.560
right? Because when people do these things that in the old days we would have called sinful,
00:33:54.260
they have practical effects in real life right in particular you end up somebody who getting
00:34:00.460
somebody who's drawing too much taking more than giving because they're living an irresolute life
00:34:06.540
as they used to say and these sorts of things only work if there's a small number of those
00:34:10.840
where you want the absolute minimum number of those right yeah right right and and and so
00:34:16.480
again that leads us on to sort of the modern 2020s welfare state where you've got millions
00:34:23.880
and millions of people that are just simply leeching off of it yeah and that we're supposed
00:34:29.700
to accept that that's okay and in fact can increase indefinitely that somehow that's
00:34:35.860
sustainable right somehow that's good for anyone um but we are supposed to accept that aren't we
00:34:42.020
especially if you're of the of the left right you're supposed to accept that everyone there's
00:34:47.260
no upper limit to the number of people that can be on welfare or there's no upper limit to the
00:34:51.060
welfare bill because it's just the morally correct thing to do right well be that as it may i don't
00:34:57.560
accept that anyway but even if you did accept that well the numbers just simply won't add up
00:35:01.360
eventually reality quite quickly yeah yeah yeah we were just doing the breakfast show uh together
00:35:06.920
this morning and there was that number of the number of people living off just completely
00:35:11.320
living off of the state and it was like 600 000 people or something yeah yeah and and it never
00:35:17.040
occurred to me until you just said this. You would think in the legislation, they would put
00:35:21.120
some kind of cap, maybe not a number, but a percentage, you know, only a certain percent
00:35:26.660
of people can be just fully reliant on this because we know that if that percentage creeps
00:35:32.560
up too much, the whole system will fall apart. Well, you never see that. Have you ever even
00:35:36.180
heard of the idea of a cap like that? No, they won't have. No one's ever talked about it. Like
00:35:40.320
the left, the soft left, or I suppose maybe because you get even conservatives, mostly in
00:35:45.560
britain and the united states conservatives with a small c whether it's whatever it is um but a lot
00:35:51.880
of them a lot of them seem to have accepted lots and lots of leftist paradigms basically like
00:35:58.580
there is no upper limit to that yeah um or the idea that the state is going to pay this bill
00:36:07.220
for welfare and when the numbers don't make sense anymore don't add up anymore the state
00:36:12.440
is then going to borrow money from international bond markets or something,
00:36:16.960
going to borrow it from the World Bank in order to keep paying for this.
00:36:31.520
it brings to mind something I learned from Professor Don Livingston,
00:36:34.800
who talks about, he's a philosopher, he talks about scale.
00:36:42.440
human scale versus the kind of scale that modern welfare states are on.
00:36:48.440
People just don't flourish in that kind of beyond human scale sorts of institutions. He points out
00:36:58.840
that the places where we've had great cultural flourishings like Florence in a certain area,
00:37:06.360
in a certain era, Venice in a certain era. They weren't little. They weren't villages. They were
00:37:13.080
proper cities, right? So it was big enough to support painters and people like this, right?
00:37:18.680
But also, like all the painters in town knew each other, right? It wasn't on some gargantuan
00:37:25.080
Manhattanite scale. It was human enough scale that you actually could be in connection and
00:37:31.860
conversation with other people in that city. And he also talks about ancient Greece,
00:37:40.460
the city-states of Greece. That's the scale at which we really see wonderful things happen
00:37:47.400
culturally. And so in a similar way, the modern welfare state, all the other things we said about
00:37:57.140
being true it's just too big it's just too simple as that right yeah humans don't work well in that
00:38:03.280
way you end up with the kafka kafka-esque experience where you're calling and you're in
00:38:08.440
the phone tree and you can't get to a human and this is the only way you have now because they've
0.90
00:38:13.560
destroyed all the other structures this is the only way you have to get your medical needs met
0.91
00:38:17.960
and you can't find your way through the damn impersonal bureaucratic system right yeah it's a
0.94
00:38:24.280
horrible way to live yeah it is do you know what you made me think of where you talk about that
0.98
00:38:27.900
in florence yeah um there's a there's a great i mentioned it from time to time there's a great
00:38:34.300
uh late 1960s documentary civilization by the historian art historian kenneth clark he talks
00:38:41.280
about a fascinating thing talked about when you look at the grand monumental architecture of the
00:38:46.400
12th 13th century giant giant cathedrals you go in there and it's a it's a giant open space it's
00:38:52.520
meant it's meant to dominate you it's meant to make you feel small meant to remind you of the
00:38:58.560
um the scarcely imaginable um grandeur of the church and heaven and god and all that sort of
00:39:05.500
thing right but it was stupefying to the society then you look at say florence at the very beginning
00:39:12.420
of the uh of the renaissance of the the 15th century the early 15th century suddenly you find
00:39:19.220
in Florence they're very deliberately building ornate buildings on a human scale suddenly the
00:39:29.080
scale of humanity itself is taken into account and you go into certain rooms and the scale of it
00:39:35.580
isn't designed to overwhelm you it isn't designed to do that it's designed to nurture you as a human
00:39:42.180
right as a hip to speak to you on a human scale in a human way and what did you get
00:39:47.720
you've got a rebirth of classicism you've got an explosion of thoughts and ideas i'm not one
00:39:53.940
of these people that's got a problem with the enlightenment in and of itself um and and you
00:40:00.000
see that just in you know it's just interesting that you mentioned uh florence and things being
00:40:05.300
on the human scale you can have things that are institutions whether it's architecture or
00:40:10.500
institutions that are too big, and they don't work. They don't serve the purpose anymore.
00:40:16.420
They don't help humans and humanity. In fact, they're a detriment to them.
00:40:23.940
Yeah. So bringing it back to mutual aid societies, yes, mutual aid societies would often develop
00:40:30.520
chapters, and they might spread from town to town depending on the success of the mutual
00:40:36.500
Aid Society, whether it was run well and grew and all that. But even when that happened,
00:40:41.500
and there were benefits to that, your experience in the Mutual Aid Society would be small and local.
00:40:47.160
It'd be your local chapter or lodge. They often would call them lodges. Your local lodge or
00:40:54.420
chapter, whatever they called it, would be a small enough number of people that you knew them.
00:41:00.200
You knew these people. You hung out. You did social events together. You did charitable
00:41:04.760
efforts together hey you know there's some flooding let's go help out you guys all go work
00:41:10.360
and do sandbagging you know because the river ran over the right um and and so you're working
00:41:15.980
alongside each other which means building bonds hey this is a guy you can count on you know he
00:41:22.340
we kept going into the night together on that you know or whatever not only did you have shared
00:41:26.500
values but you had shared goals right you're working towards the same trying to be trying to
00:41:31.900
pull in the same direction yes whatever it was right um whether it's helping in a flood disaster
00:41:38.580
or just seeing that the local orphans don't just starve to death or die of exposure right right
00:41:45.120
whatever it is um yeah okay so one of the last things then to say well actually before i get
00:41:51.620
onto the last thing i want to say just a quick word about secret societies though yeah and i did
00:41:58.360
The idea that a lot of people, for example, very deeply suspicious of the Masons, right?
00:42:03.820
A lot of people are deeply, deeply suspicious of the Masons.
00:42:06.460
Some people might listen to the conversation we just have and think, they might think,
00:42:15.300
But that's not what we're talking about, right?
00:42:17.880
No, and obviously Freemasons were one of the kinds of mutual societies, but there are all
00:42:26.520
There were all kinds of things, and not all of them had sort of the masonry theology.
00:42:31.240
Because masonry, actually, I did a little course on it, attended a little course on it.
00:42:43.580
And when you dig into the ideas, as a Christian, I don't approve of them.
00:42:47.160
I mean, they're wrong, you know, theologically.
00:42:53.600
Having said that, some men joined the Freemasons because it was a good mutual aid society that
00:42:59.560
provided those benefits of a mutual aid society, not because they were totally committed to the
00:43:05.840
Freemason view of the world. You know what I mean? So I temper my own hostility to Freemason ideas
00:43:14.740
in regards to the actual organizations, because I think often they were just basically local
00:43:21.720
mutual aid brotherhoods or not necessarily to get too fixated on the freemasons themselves but lots
00:43:27.580
and lots of various secret societies right the skull and bone society whatever it is the idea
00:43:31.380
that you have a what might have started off as a mutual aid society or some sort of brotherhood
00:43:36.000
but it turns to the dark side one way or another yeah i don't know i suppose i haven't dug into
00:43:43.020
that aspect of things as much all right fair enough fair enough so one of the last things
00:43:47.560
then yeah to ask you about that the idea that you whoever you are out there could set one up
00:43:55.480
there's nothing stopping you that you would you would advocate that then because i mean you started
00:43:59.740
you're instrumental at least in starting the stuff in the united states and you think that it's
00:44:06.680
it's not impossible it's certainly not crazy and and certainly you know we we've we're legally
00:44:14.440
registered with the state as a non-profit, right? And each of our chapters is a legally
00:44:19.160
recognized non-profit organization and so forth. But that's because we kind of knew that we wanted
00:44:25.860
to build this thing up pretty quickly and push hard in this direction to bring this back,
00:44:32.180
to bring the Mutual Aid Society back. But you don't have to start there. Like with basket weaving,
00:44:36.820
literally just start getting together with some friends, bring some other like-minded people
00:44:41.200
together and start thinking about what can we do now that we have some people who know and trust
00:44:47.260
each other it could just be a whatsapp group a face app a facebook group or a twitter dm group
00:44:54.060
just just to start with yeah but but i think the in-person aspect is really key well that's that
00:45:00.400
is the key though isn't it that's the whole point of it yeah is that you don't just chat online yeah
00:45:06.300
you physically go somewhere and meet them in real life that's right and perhaps and and do something
00:45:11.380
even if it's just having a drink yeah but but but once you have that there's so much you right so
00:45:17.160
so many places you can take well that's just the foundation isn't it yeah from there who knows what
00:45:21.920
you could build beautiful wonderful things that are we need that our society is has lost and is
00:45:27.600
losing and we need to rebuild right great okay well thank you steven thank you very much for
00:45:33.100
talking to me fascinating and i think it's a i think it's a great a wonderful thing it could
00:45:37.340
mean the world of difference for many many people it really could i hope it does thank you all right
00:45:44.220
well i hope you enjoyed that interview um please do consider uh liking and subscribing