The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - How to Form a Brotherhood ｜ Interview with Stephen Carson aka Radical Liberation

00:00:00.000 hello and welcome to this very special interview where i am joined by stephen carson otherwise

00:00:04.980 known as radley of how are you sir very good thank you for joining us it's good to be with

00:00:09.660 you again yeah it's an honor and pleasure if anyone doesn't know we recorded the breakfast

00:00:13.520 show this morning and we talked about the um early church a little bit it's been a bit been a while

00:00:20.640 but yeah oh oh our original conversation like three years ago or something yeah it's been years

00:00:24.460 that was a fascinating conversation yeah i'd like to do it again actually pick your brain more

00:00:28.320 right i find i find late antiquity or early the early christian period absolutely fascinating

00:00:34.700 i gathered because you quickly i quickly could tell i was out of my depth if it came to anything

00:00:39.880 with roman emperors and stuff like that you were you were killing me no no it's fascinating there

00:00:45.340 was loads of things in there you you said that i i didn't know so yeah no great stuff okay so today

00:00:50.160 though right we thought we'd talk about something completely different yeah we thought we'd talk

00:00:54.320 about uh well mutual aid societies the history and what they are what they mean what they could

00:01:00.240 mean going forward and everything and so it's a little bit as a speciality of yours if you want

00:01:04.940 to tell us yeah but there's two things coming into this uh that i have behind me coming into

00:01:10.540 this one is that i did a series on my channel radical liberation on youtube um on mutual aid

00:01:16.480 societies where i went through a book by david beto and he was focused more on the american side

00:01:22.100 but it's kind of a very similar story in the UK, for example.

00:01:28.060 And so I just went through that book

00:01:29.940 because I wanted to understand this history.

00:01:33.160 And then I helped actually form one.

00:01:36.140 I helped form a brotherhood.

00:01:37.820 In real life.

00:01:38.560 The Old Glory Club.

00:01:39.720 Right.

00:01:40.080 I don't know if you've heard of that.

00:01:41.080 Yeah.

00:01:41.460 Yeah, so I was the first president of the Old Glory Club.

00:01:44.520 And I continue to be on the central, the national organization.

00:01:48.160 And we now have chapters in most states.

00:01:50.220 So it's actually going quite well.

00:01:51.220 Really, is it that big?

00:01:51.880 I didn't realize it was that big.

00:01:53.600 It's happening.

00:01:54.440 Oh, wow.

00:01:55.120 Okay.

00:01:55.920 Okay.

00:01:56.520 Wow.

00:01:56.920 That's incredible.

00:01:57.700 Well done.

00:01:58.680 Sometimes multiple chapters.

00:02:00.200 Well done.

00:02:00.760 Well, it's all of us.

00:02:01.880 It's not just me.

00:02:02.580 That's for sure.

00:02:03.380 We have a great president now.

00:02:06.280 And so I've got that in my background.

00:02:09.260 And then the Islander asked me to submit something.

00:02:12.780 And I thought, well, this is an easy topic to talk about.

00:02:15.280 I'm doing it.

00:02:16.580 And then I did this whole series on the history of it.

00:02:18.720 And so I just submitted a draft to them, and hopefully we'll see that in an upcoming issue

00:02:22.940 of The Islander. And my proposed title, editors like to change titles, my proposed title is

00:02:28.220 Brotherhoods, because that's really what struck me, learning about mutual aid societies.

00:02:33.740 They're fraternal societies, brotherly societies, right? And that is the theme that you see running

00:02:41.140 through it. It's about, how do you put it? Extending the bonds that we usually think of

00:02:46.280 family bonds. Like you've got your cousins and your uncles and your brothers. With a fraternal

00:02:52.040 society, you stretch that out just a little to include some like-minded men who are maybe your

00:03:00.660 neighbors or neighbors to you in another sense. Like with lotus eaters, a lot of us feel very

00:03:07.000 close to each other because we sort of ideologically have a lot in common. Well, these mutual aid

00:03:13.120 societies, you might work in a similar industry. You might all be Catholic. You might all be of a

00:03:20.200 similar ethnic background. You were all immigrants from Ireland to the United States. And so you work

00:03:26.860 with fellow Irish immigrants to support each other when hard times come. But the theme is

00:03:33.260 extending that brotherhood. And so in the Old Glory Club, for instance, we refer to each other

00:03:38.080 as brothers. And when Central is coming, when the national organization is coming down on someone,

00:03:43.440 they'll say things like, you don't talk that way to your brother. We understand you disagree,

00:03:48.360 but find a way to express it that's respectful. So there's that emphasis on a fraternal

00:03:53.820 kind of relationship. It's funny, and I'm only joking here,

00:03:57.660 but often brothers are the most brutal to each other. I'm joking. I'm just joking.

00:04:02.140 No, no. Actually, I think that's one of the things that I'm seeing as we do this in real life,

00:04:08.080 is that you get a track record with people when you really start cooperating together to do things

00:04:14.160 you start to learn who you can trust who who's reliable who does what they say right yeah who's

00:04:20.240 who's petty and bickering you know sometimes we don't we don't like that we kind of sometimes

00:04:24.880 your worst enemy is your brother or your own father it's never the case in my family

00:04:28.960 but you know sometimes right yeah no anyway lesson aside that's a complete an aside um

00:04:33.280 so before we dig into sort of um some of the the real minutiae of sort of the the rise and fall

00:04:39.560 the nature of uh mutual aid societies and brotherhoods and sort of the more 19th century

00:04:45.320 thing and all sorts of examples of the exclusionary nature of it and all that sort of thing i wonder

00:04:50.600 if i could just ask you a question or two about sort of in in the broadest sense about it because

00:04:56.560 one of the things that um struck me when i was reading your article because i've read your um

00:05:01.800 The draft.

00:05:02.300 The draft.

00:05:04.180 Well, something that Marx talked about.

00:05:06.040 Now, you and I are both the furthest thing from Marxists.

00:05:09.580 We can learn from anyone.

00:05:11.900 Yeah.

00:05:12.340 This isn't me saying, Marx said a brilliant thing I agree with.

00:05:15.200 I'm not doing that.

00:05:16.640 But Marx talked about, or he's not the only one to have done so,

00:05:20.000 but talked about sort of the atomization and alienation.

00:05:24.520 And in Marx's view, a lot of that was connected specifically to capitalism.

00:05:29.640 But anyway.

00:05:31.280 Yeah.

00:05:31.800 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.

00:05:51.400 yeah and uh whether that whether in the marxist view or not that's going to think to do with

00:05:56.480 capitalism is something else but it's something that ever since i think since the industrial

00:05:59.960 revolution i think for a good couple hundred years now or more that's just increasing and

00:06:05.220 if anything if anything i feel like even with the internet it's still increasing still quickening

00:06:11.040 going ever faster if anything so some people would say in part because of the internet quite

00:06:15.020 possibly yeah yeah you think you've got lots and lots of online friends but actually physically

00:06:19.760 you're sitting in a room on your own for most of your life right um and so that then and so that

00:06:24.940 i feel that there is a market for for some sort of real life brotherhood yeah whether you want

00:06:34.840 to call them mutual aid societies that's quite a 19th century early 20th century way of phrasing

00:06:39.200 it but something something yeah yeah um right so so i'm i i'm going to use some language i learned

00:06:45.640 for my wife who's a therapist okay so psychological language for a moment okay but it just really has

00:06:51.040 do with how humans function as mammals we need bonds we're a pack animal yes we we need connection

00:06:58.300 with other humans um yeah you you might know that it's considered a form of torture and it's

00:07:03.740 supposedly not allowed that people do it anyway to have someone in solitary confinement for long

00:07:09.340 periods of time because you just can start going loopy without connection other people most people

00:07:13.860 Yeah, and then there's the failure to thrive thing that happened.

00:07:19.400 I think it was after World War II, a lot of orphaned babies, very few care workers to take care of them.

00:07:25.820 They're feeding them, they're changing their diaper, and they're dying.

00:07:28.660 And they're like, what in the world is going on?

00:07:30.360 Finally, they asked some volunteers to come in and just hold the babies, and they stopped dying.

00:07:36.740 Because we need connection, we need bonds.

00:07:39.560 And what you're talking about is a very frightening development.

00:07:42.580 My wife and I are very concerned about the lack of family formation, namely people getting married or coupling.

00:07:49.000 I don't care if it's a state-ordained marriage.

00:07:51.040 The point is coming together, having kids, building a family.

00:07:55.440 We're seeing a lack of that.

00:07:58.320 And even, and I think this is particularly hard for young men, sometimes they just don't have friends.

00:08:04.840 They just don't have mates.

00:08:07.100 Right?

00:08:07.660 So this is bad.

00:08:09.520 So that's part of the reason I'm passionate about this topic, because there's a real felt need.

00:08:16.360 And unlike some of the crazier utopian ideas that intellectuals like us like to talk about,

00:08:21.340 mutual aid societies is really grounded in the history of our people.

00:08:25.400 And it's not even like, you know, a thousand years ago in the Middle Ages, people used to do this.

00:08:30.300 No, like our great-grandparents would have been in mutual aid societies.

00:08:33.400 This isn't that long ago.

00:08:35.780 It was actually quite strong, maybe at its strongest in the early 20th century.

00:08:40.180 And it's only as you get into the mid-20th century that you start to see a real drop-off in participation. 0.99

00:08:45.580 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. 0.91

00:08:52.600 And so that's in part why we founded a new one rather than joining an old one. 1.00

00:08:57.100 We wanted to just start with some youthful energy and kind of revive this structure.

00:09:05.060 there's nothing wrong with it, really. The welfare state competed with some of the functions of the

00:09:10.780 mutual aid societies, which would be sort of like insurance and funeral expenses, and they'd help

00:09:16.600 you with things like that, right? And as the state took over some of those functions, that leached

00:09:21.640 away some of the practical reasons people would form these. But now, a hundred years later or

00:09:27.580 whatever, or more of doing the welfare state, we all know that it isn't all that was promised,

00:09:32.880 right? It doesn't really work as well as we hoped. And it's really like an acid to bonds.

00:09:41.200 It really breaks families apart. It breaks communities apart.

00:09:43.760 The welfare state. 0.58

00:09:44.880 Say again? 0.88

00:09:45.600 The welfare state. 0.97

00:09:46.400 The welfare state. Yeah. So keeping it on the family level, on that micro level, for example,

00:09:50.480 at one time, part of the reason that sort of a practical reason to have children,

00:09:57.280 to keep good relations with them, is they're going to be the ones taking care of you when

00:10:01.280 you're old. Well, now the boomers famously just go on cruises somehow constantly and screw the 0.99

00:10:08.720 next generation. So there's that intergenerational dependency. I take care of you when you're a kid, 0.94

00:10:16.400 you take care of me when you're old, honor thy father and mother. That was broken by the welfare

00:10:22.400 state. But I think a lot of us can see that that was bad. And so I think people are really,

00:10:28.720 It's a great time to be looking at this again, because whatever temporary high that people had

00:10:37.040 about the welfare state, I think that's long gone. And now people can see, maybe we should try some

00:10:42.880 of the older ways again. The idea that the state will see you through from cradle to grave.

00:10:48.560 Yes. Is that ideal? Is that actually good? Possibly not.

00:10:54.800 and and and and and is it the adult version do you end up with sort of the adult version of failure

00:11:01.600 to thrive yes the state gives me money and it educates my children and everything but i don't

00:11:08.560 feel connected i don't feel bonded i don't feel part of a community yeah yeah may not even have

00:11:14.160 any friends so before we get onto because i wanted to mention the um mark howton and the um the

00:11:20.240 basket weavers and yeah a similar sort of thing but let's go back let's go back to the beginning

00:11:25.040 because right the the welfare state is a modern very modern thing i mean kaiser or whatever brought

00:11:33.920 it in right uh because we'll have like the krupp industry and things like that yeah i mean it's

00:11:38.560 it's like second half of the 19th century yeah not even the first half so it's really historically

00:11:43.840 speaking it's a blink of an eye that we've had the well yeah oh yeah yeah and we already can see

00:11:48.240 yeah maybe that wasn't such a great idea so the vast majority of human civilization

00:11:52.720 there was nothing like there was nothing like the welfare state um right so

00:11:59.600 you mentioned and i know a tiny bit about it myself that even if you go back to the earliest

00:12:04.800 possible seeds of it you might say you're in this in england in this like the 17th century right

00:12:11.120 something like that and i don't know much about that very very early history but that's when you

00:12:15.120 you first start seeing them forming friendly societies friendly societies yeah so the idea

00:12:20.760 that some people we might want to call it philanthropy maybe maybe not but some people see

00:12:26.660 some men see a need for um yeah some sort of wider society where they can look after each other

00:12:35.960 yes it's quite as simple as that isn't it really the first instance and i think some or one of us

00:12:40.900 fall on hard times, we've all paid into a pot, and we might be able to help each other out.

00:12:47.200 Yeah. And my profession is IT, tech. So forgive the tech term here, but peer-to-peer.

00:12:55.640 Okay. Right. As opposed to a hierarchical. That's what the mutual aid society is focused on.

00:13:02.080 We're not going to have some rich guy, and he's going to take care of us. We're going to pool our

00:13:06.960 resources not just money but time and so forth right and and we are going to support each other

00:13:14.160 so when when you're having some bad fortune hit your life your brothers will be there for you

00:13:21.520 and then you'll be there for us so the state's got nothing to do with it it's just like my

00:13:26.980 fellow men brothers yeah and uh and but it was it was really quite exclusionary not anyone could

00:13:34.660 join. That's the whole point of it, is that you need to be able to rely on them not to be a

00:13:39.640 complete drain on it, to be trustworthy, and all those things. So it's not for everyone.

00:13:45.640 Well, let's put it this way. In any given brotherhood, in any given fraternal organization,

00:13:52.820 there would be, historically, there was some kind of exclusionary mechanism.

00:13:56.820 And as I mentioned, it could be religious, ethnic, all kinds of things.

00:14:02.180 Anything they want, anything that brotherhood wants.

00:14:04.680 Yeah, profession or whatever, some combination of it.

00:14:08.040 But what was the practical reason, going into sort of social theory a little bit here?

00:14:14.100 The practical reason is that you need to have a little high-trust society, right?

00:14:18.480 That's what the fraternal... 0.99

00:14:19.700 In microcosm.

00:14:20.420 Yeah, fraternal society is a little micro high-trust society.

00:14:24.000 How do you have a high-trust society?

00:14:25.560 Well, we now know from Robert Putnam and various work on this in sociology

00:14:30.120 that diversity actually reduces trust in a society.

00:14:35.240 Of course it does.

00:14:36.260 I know.

00:14:37.300 Only here on Lotus Eaters can I say this without anyone blinking an eye.

00:14:41.840 Of course it does.

00:14:42.640 We know this.

00:14:43.600 Homogeneity is...

00:14:45.940 Carry on.

00:14:47.100 But let me get into the mechanics of it, because I think thinking about mutual aid societies

00:14:52.020 helps us understand this sort of diversity versus homogeneity thing.

00:14:56.520 Why is homogeneity helpful?

00:14:58.140 it's because of um you need to be able to like understand each other right you need to understand

00:15:04.680 that when someone says something what it means what their what kind of obligations have been

00:15:11.420 created right and the thing about different cultures is that they have different different

00:15:18.840 ways that those things function they all have ways to do it but they don't necessarily mesh

00:15:24.200 with each other well across those cultures, right? Yeah. So within a culture, a fraternal society is

00:15:32.360 going to pick a culture, even kind of a sub-slice of a culture, right? Just English plumbers or 0.58

00:15:38.100 Welsh plumbers or something, right? And such that everybody in there is speaking the same language

00:15:45.900 culturally speaking, right? Has similar expectations, right? You know, the old English

00:15:52.200 phrase, well, that just isn't done, right? Well, what isn't done? Depends. Depends on your religion,

00:16:00.360 depends on your cultural background, your history, right? All of these things change,

00:16:06.240 give you a different idea of what is acceptable and what is not. So it's really hard, basically

00:16:12.560 impossible, to form a fraternal society with people who have radically different expectations

00:16:17.000 along those lines. You need to have people who just kind of get it implicitly, tacit knowledge.

00:16:22.860 They just implicitly understand, oh, this is what we're doing. These are the kinds of expectations

00:16:28.500 that are going to be on me and that I can have on other people. This is the kind of commitment

00:16:32.660 I'm making. And you have to have something more than, this is not piece of paper stuff, right?

00:16:38.380 You have to have personal bonds. You feel loyal to each other. One of the things we found,

00:16:45.960 And actually, with the Skildings conference is where it really blew my mind.

00:16:50.760 The first time I went to a Skildings conference, a lot of these people I had known online.

00:16:56.620 And, you know, online is a, you bicker with each other online.

00:17:03.360 It's just what you do.

00:17:05.040 And so I wondered what it would be like to get in person together.

00:17:08.040 I thought, oh, we'll just all be like bickering.

00:17:10.060 It'll be kind of Reddit spurg out time.

00:17:13.320 Well, it wasn't that way at all.

00:17:15.960 Because once we got together in person, we saw that we were very like-minded and that the little

00:17:22.260 things that we like to argue about online are like 0.001% of what matters. We immediately felt

00:17:28.860 just meeting, it became more real that we had a real connection, a real bond,

00:17:34.520 a real like-mindedness. And that's where the old glory club came from, right? We met each other and

00:17:39.680 we're like, oh, we can build something with a set of men like us that are just, you know, we share,

00:17:45.480 We have that homogeneity, right?

00:17:46.780 We have these shared values, and we just trust each other.

00:17:50.700 I think perhaps trust is sort of the key thing, the absolute key thing.

00:17:56.480 Absolutely.

00:17:56.800 And I think this goes back through probably all of human civilization,

00:18:02.060 that you need to be able to trust the other members of your tribe,

00:18:05.860 whether that is just simply your family unit or something much bigger than that.

00:18:11.160 Yeah.

00:18:11.480 But let's use the word tribe in a very, very broad sense.

00:18:14.960 that we're of the same tribe,

00:18:17.480 whether it's Welsh plumbers

00:18:19.360 or something much broader than that

00:18:22.200 or something even more specific than that.

00:18:23.740 Or the early church.

00:18:25.240 All we have in common is that we've accepted Jesus, right?

00:18:28.580 Yeah.

00:18:29.260 But we trust each other because of that.

00:18:32.260 Right.

00:18:32.760 Yeah.

00:18:33.420 And many, many groups do this just implicitly already, right?

00:18:39.460 It's something that I think maybe...

00:18:40.760 It's very normal.

00:18:41.660 Yeah, very, very normal.

00:18:42.520 Very human and normal.

00:18:43.260 Right, yeah.

00:18:43.440 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.

00:18:57.020 A lot of people in the West these days have got an out-grouped preference, if anything.

00:19:01.240 Right.

00:19:01.840 What a perverse thing that is to discover.

00:19:05.120 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.

00:19:32.480 I had a conversation with Professor Ed Dutton not too long ago

00:19:35.740 I was talking all about the Quakers

00:19:37.180 Obviously in a particular Christian sect

00:19:39.400 But how sort of tightly knit

00:19:41.860 They are and going back

00:19:43.620 Through to the 17th century

00:19:45.180 Through the 18th and 19th and 20th century

00:19:46.920 How they could implicitly trust each other 1.00

00:19:49.220 Because they're just Quakers 1.00

00:19:50.680 And that's it 1.00

00:19:51.640 You know that you can trust them with something

00:19:54.280 With money, with secrets

00:19:56.000 Whatever it is

00:19:57.720 And there's many, many, many, many examples of that 1.00

00:20:00.620 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. 1.00

00:20:11.220 I would sound slightly conspiratorial and say it's actually been attacked. 1.00

00:20:16.760 No, our ability to trust each other.

00:20:18.940 I absolutely believe it.

00:20:19.760 Yeah, very, very deliberately undermined.

00:20:21.680 Deliberately undermined.

00:20:22.600 Yeah.

00:20:22.740 That's a good way to put it.

00:20:23.720 Yeah, I believe that.

00:20:25.040 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.

00:20:33.160 This isn't even that long ago. And why not do it again?

00:20:37.080 Yeah, what's stopping us?

00:20:38.520 Nothing's stopping us. Just do it.

00:20:40.380 Yeah.

00:20:41.380 And I mean, you know, it doesn't have to be, you know, the Old Glory Club, for example, is not a political organization.

00:20:48.200 I mean, we help when there's disaster relief. We help a brother who has lost a job.

00:20:55.040 Hmm. You know, I mean, we go to a historical event, you know, it's the Gettysburg, Battle of Gettysburg

00:21:02.960 commemoration. And we go to the battlefield or the guy, the brothers who are in that area

00:21:07.920 join together and go to the battlefield and learn more about their own history.

00:21:11.460 That sounds great.

00:21:12.340 Yeah, you'd love those history tours.

00:21:14.900 Yeah, yeah, we do.

00:21:15.740 I say what's stopping us, much less stopping us in the United States.

00:21:20.100 in britain we do have or in europe certainly in britain we do have like equality legislation where

00:21:25.140 if you said i want to form a society a group well however you want a brotherhood a formal

00:21:31.380 organization where people and there's money involved people are paying into it um and it's

00:21:36.760 gonna be only englishmen only englishmen from southwest and they must be white and they must

00:21:43.400 be protestant let's just say that just random set of things sure sure you know you're not allowed 0.89

00:21:47.700 to that you have to you have to let women and people of color into it you have to otherwise 0.97

00:21:52.420 it's illegal the police will come around and knock on your door and say you're not allowed to do this 0.98

00:21:56.960 maybe now i'm not a lawyer don't take my advice i kind of thought that was true in the united states

00:22:02.480 because we have a lot of the similar kind of legislation along those lines right

00:22:06.040 but actually it's not okay it depends on what you're doing if you're running a for-profit

00:22:11.540 business yeah you can run into that okay but non-profits actually can have a lot of

00:22:16.680 a lot of latitude so there might be more latitude than you'd guess okay maybe we should look into

00:22:21.500 that yeah that's the point of me bringing it up just while we're on exploring this vein maybe it's

00:22:29.040 the moment to just mention um the the basket weavers yes and there's something like that so

00:22:33.460 you've you're aware i asked you this morning if you're aware of them and you said of course i am

00:22:36.860 yeah yeah well i was i was doing it right so what was your experience with that and how did you

00:22:41.940 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?

00:22:59.700 now what do basket weavers do in practice in a local area they get

00:23:04.820 together and they go on a hike or whatever kind of the local and this is

00:23:09.660 the true of our chapters in the OGC as well it's really up to the local area

00:23:15.760 the members in the local area kind of to decide what they want to make of it is

00:23:19.200 this going to be kind of a regular game night that we get together and do board

00:23:22.180 games or just have a drink or are we just going to have a pint together

00:23:26.220 different people do different things or do a variety of things depending on

00:23:29.680 what they feel like that's that's fine right the point is you're meeting together in real life

00:23:35.140 you're having the opportunity to form bonds trust loyalty and that means that when something comes

00:23:43.280 along that you didn't expect you can think of somebody to call that you don't feel awkward

00:23:47.520 about calling right of course it's okay to call these people they know me yeah right right yeah

00:23:53.460 and and they'll they'll help me out with whatever this is there's no substitute for that yeah i

00:23:58.640 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.

00:24:06.520 Oh, good.

00:24:06.960 Where I truly never had any friends whatsoever.

00:24:09.980 Right, right.

00:24:10.560 But I can only imagine that would be horrible.

00:24:13.580 That would be terrifying if there was no one to turn to, literally no one at all.

00:24:18.020 Yeah, because things happen.

00:24:19.620 Yeah.

00:24:20.180 It's life.

00:24:21.300 Things happen that you don't expect.

00:24:22.500 And the state, for whatever reason, just says, no, you're on your own.

00:24:25.520 Yeah.

00:24:25.620 So that's a dead end.

00:24:27.180 Right, right.

00:24:27.480 You might not have family.

00:24:28.820 You might not have a benevolent father or an older brother

00:24:32.500 that's able to help you out or whatever.

00:24:34.240 You haven't got any of that.

00:24:35.380 And you haven't got any friends, certainly no staunch friends

00:24:39.100 that you genuinely love and trust.

00:24:41.420 Right.

00:24:41.900 And they'd die for you and you'd die for them.

00:24:43.940 You haven't got anyone like that in your life.

00:24:46.200 That would be really terrible.

00:24:47.740 It's a bad situation to be in.

00:24:48.560 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:24:49.660 Really, I mean, that is sort of like the true atomization

00:24:52.640 of that person almost.

00:24:55.120 Right.

00:24:55.300 So to even to do anything, to even begin to address that, because I think it's not isolated

00:25:03.800 few people that applies to. I think that might be millions of people in the world that that

00:25:09.200 applies to. Yeah. And let me be clear. I'm not bringing up mutual aid societies because I think

00:25:13.880 like that solves all our problems. I'm saying it's a piece. It's a piece of the puzzle. You know,

00:25:18.640 as a Christian, I would encourage people to become Christians and go to church. Well,

00:25:23.040 that's another place to form bonds. But I think we need to try a number of different, we need to

00:25:29.320 bring back, not just try, we need to bring back a number of practices that we as European people

00:25:34.300 did for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. There were the guilds, so professional

00:25:39.300 organizations. There were the mutual aid societies, there were parishes and parish activities,

00:25:46.120 on and on and on right we had many many so you know one person would be you know just a member

00:25:54.360 of you know their mutual aid society but in their professional organization they're like a leader in

00:26:00.640 it right and so forth right so one person would have this very complicated relationship to the

00:26:06.500 world around them where they're hierarchically sort of higher and lower depending on what it is

00:26:12.820 yeah right yeah um and that's beautiful that's how it should be right right yeah nice so it got

00:26:19.400 to quite a sophisticated level for example yeah very near here very near five minute walk from

00:26:26.100 here there's a a whole bunch of houses that are just known as um the railway village and where we

00:26:34.500 had the british route or the beginnings of the railways in britain again long before the

00:26:42.160 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.

00:29:01.380 Right.

00:29:02.500 Yeah.

00:29:02.900 So here's, let me draw an analogy from economics.

00:29:06.640 Okay.

00:29:06.940 So, you know, money was not originated by the state.

00:29:09.800 That's my view.

00:29:10.980 Okay.

00:29:11.540 With some backing.

00:29:12.660 Money?

00:29:13.440 Yeah, the money.

00:29:14.480 All money.

00:29:14.980 You're going back to the ancient world.

00:29:16.120 The idea of using money.

00:29:16.980 Okay.

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.

00:29:25.460 Right.

00:29:26.060 So you have this thing that's there, that's valuable, that serves a socially useful purpose.

00:29:32.680 And eventually the king gets involved, right?

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?

00:29:44.380 And all that.

00:29:46.220 The point is, you have these socially useful, healthy things that someone will parasitically

00:29:53.020 latch onto and twist it.

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.

00:36:21.120 Right. Just use your magic wand, please.

00:36:23.940 You're just living in an insane world.

00:36:25.940 You're living in la-la land at that point.

00:36:28.760 Right. And as you're talking about this, 0.94

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.

00:36:38.000 That's something that in political philosophy,

00:36:39.720 we don't tend to talk much in modern times.

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.

00:40:20.760 Yeah, exactly.

00:40:22.260 It just sparked a thought in my mind.

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,

00:42:10.460 we're talking about Freemasonry.

00:42:12.420 That's not a good idea.

00:42:13.260 I don't like that.

00:42:13.820 I hate that.

00:42:14.360 That's evil.

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

00:42:23.280 kinds of things.

00:42:23.900 The Oddfellows, I love that name.

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.

00:42:35.820 It's not even that secret, is it, the masonry?

00:42:37.480 No, no, you can get this stuff.

00:42:38.380 Everyone knows what the building is in London.

00:42:39.880 Anyone can sign up to it.

00:42:40.880 Yeah, yeah.

00:42:41.160 It's not that secret, not these days.

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.

00:42:49.500 Sure.

00:42:50.100 So, yes, I share at least some of that animus.

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

00:45:49.760 until next time then take care

00:46:03.100 Thank you.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - May 21, 2026

How to Form a Brotherhood ｜ Interview with Stephen Carson aka Radical Liberation

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