The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Brokenomics｜ Are they Evil or Stupid？

00:00:00.220 Hello, and welcome to Brokernomics. Now, dear viewer, if you are anything like me, you have

00:00:04.760 spent a lot of time wondering if the left are evil or stupid. Now, I've made my mind

00:00:09.660 up on this subject and then changed it very many times, so I thought to myself, right,

00:00:14.320 who can we ask to get to the bottom of this important question? And it has to be Charles

00:00:20.100 Hayward. Charles, thank you for joining us.

00:00:23.540 Very pleased to be here.

00:00:25.180 Now, Charles, this is the point of the show, where I should give an introduction to your

00:00:28.460 good self. Now, I thought I had a pretty clear grip on who you were. You were a chap who

00:00:34.780 had made his money in mergers and acquisitions, a bit like Patrick Bateman, although presumably

00:00:39.380 a number of important distinctions. You then become a gentleman of leisure and you become

00:00:44.440 a political commentator, all-round good chap on our side. You wrote for things like the

00:00:49.560 Islander magazine, so thank you very much for that. And you do book reviews, which are incredibly

00:00:55.260 helpful because they're all books that I know that I really should read, although I never

00:00:59.180 get around to, so your channel is incredibly helpful with that. So I thought I had it pinned

00:01:03.200 down who Charles Hayward is, and then I started reading a bit of James Lindsay, and I discovered

00:01:09.420 that you are in fact an arch warlock who is in league with a Zoroastrian demon and the archangel

00:01:15.280 Michael, and that you are secretly controlling the MAGA movement. Now, I've got to say, when I heard

00:01:20.160 that I was both impressed and slightly confused, so perhaps you could clear it up. Who is Charles

00:01:25.700 Hayward? Well, Charles Hayward may have something to do, hopefully, with Archangel Michael, but

00:01:31.840 it has nothing to do with Zoroastrian gods or all the other Lindsay. I will say, just a minor

00:01:38.060 correction, I did not make my money in mergers and acquisitions because that would imply I made

00:01:42.980 my money through financialization. I used to be a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, but then

00:01:48.280 I became a shampoo manufacturer, hence my occasional moniker on Twitter, the Shampoo Warlord. So you'll

00:01:56.840 see that occasionally, and that's a reference to my manufacturing and, well, shampoo and other

00:02:01.780 personal care products. So the only reason I highlight that is because I somewhat disapprove

00:02:07.760 of people who make their money through financialization as opposed to making real things that are actually

00:02:12.940 part of the productive economy. And I would seize most of the assets of people who have gotten

00:02:18.620 filthy rich off of financialization. But that's another story.

00:02:22.780 Right. Well, that's something I'm guilty of. So if you do come to power, give me the heads up

00:02:27.420 that you're going to do that, and I'll have time to quickly flee the country. But the only reason I did

00:02:32.460 that is because it was basically easier. And of course, my friends will, of course, be allowed to

00:02:39.780 keep all of their money. I mean, that goes without saying. It's like basic patronage, obviously.

00:02:44.940 So yeah, otherwise, that's accurate. I mean, I'm now a man of leisure, I suppose you could say. I

00:02:50.080 hobby firm. I interfere in various political commentary things and have a certain following

00:02:57.540 for my book reviews and what have you. So I'm not sure what James Lindsay's beef is with me, but

00:03:04.420 he's kind of gone off the rails. And, you know, I don't actually think about him unless people bring

00:03:10.020 him up because he blocked me on Twitter. So I never actually see his thoughts anymore. So sad.

00:03:15.320 Well, I thought it made you sound very impressive. But anyway, swiftly moving on,

00:03:18.880 the great issue of the day, are the left evil or stupid, Charles? What's going on? How should we think

00:03:23.720 about the left? The best way to think about the left is to think about the left as the kind of

00:03:30.700 modern ratification of the natural bad tendencies in the human race. And I always define the left as

00:03:38.040 having two core ideas or goals or things that sustain them. One is the desire for total emancipation,

00:03:45.760 that is continuous freedom from all bonds, not continuously chosen. And so you see this in

00:03:51.780 everything that the left wants to be able to do, everything that the people should be allowed to

00:03:56.480 do whatever they want to with no restrictions, whether from society or legally, total emancipation

00:04:01.820 combined with something that actually philosophically sits a little bit uneasily with that,

00:04:06.440 which is forced egalitarianism, total equality for everybody. And the left's theory has always been

00:04:12.620 since the Garden of Eden that these two things combined will lead to a utopia. The utopia part is

00:04:19.100 very important because otherwise it's just policy prescriptions. If you don't believe that these

00:04:24.360 things will lead you to utopia, then you're not nearly as aggressive in your pursuit of them. But

00:04:29.940 if you believe, and you see this most visibly with communism, which is merely one branch of the left

00:04:34.400 tree, if you believe that communism or leftist utopianism is achievable, then no price, especially

00:04:40.780 a price paid by other people, is too great to pay for that. So that makes the left evil,

00:04:46.080 kind of in its core state. Of course, the modern left is also stupid. Like Lenin was, right? No one

00:04:53.440 looked at Lenin and said, that guy's dumb and undisciplined. I mean, Lenin was a bad guy, but he

00:04:57.960 certainly had a lot of what might be called virtues. But the modern left is both evil and stupid, would be

00:05:02.900 my answer to that. Okay, well, if that's true, if they genuinely believe that they are headed for a

00:05:09.120 utopia, then they would be justified in truly hating us, because we are the ones standing in

00:05:16.680 the way of heaven on earth. So that makes their hatred entirely justified.

00:05:21.500 Well, absolutely. And it also means that they'll do anything in order to achieve that utopia. Because,

00:05:27.460 for example, if person X, you or me, is standing in the way of utopia, it's not just that we're

00:05:32.300 preventing utopia for the people who are striving for utopia. It's we're preventing utopia for untold

00:05:38.460 generations of future human beings. So our crime is limitless, and therefore the punishment,

00:05:44.380 which is death always with the left, the ultimate goal of the left is expropriation followed by

00:05:49.000 extermination. That kind of logically follows from their premises, if you look at it in a kind of

00:05:56.260 abstract way. So, okay, so they've got a good reason to genuinely hate us, and they do. And does

00:06:02.660 that explain the difference in the way that violence is applied? Because, of course,

00:06:07.940 if a left winger commits an act of violence, they are either not punished at all, or punished very

00:06:13.680 lightly, whereas even the most minor transgressions on the right, including cases of genuine self-defence,

00:06:19.700 are treated incredibly harshly. Is that what follows?

00:06:23.240 It is, but that's kind of on a micro scale, I think, primarily a function of the left politicizes

00:06:30.780 everything. And so therefore, every action is viewed through a political lens as to whether or

00:06:36.900 not it benefits the left or is done by a leftist person, that leftist people are rewarded. I mean,

00:06:42.260 this is more basic, I think, than leftist ideology. The left knows how to reward friends and punish enemies,

00:06:49.080 and the modern right has no idea how to do that. And if you ask them, we'll frequently deny that

00:06:55.020 that's something that is relevant to politics. So I don't think that's even necessarily something

00:06:59.320 that's inherent in the left project. I mean, if you go back to, say, Athenian city-states,

00:07:05.060 especially on the ones that were democratic, you saw the exact same kind of cycle. That is,

00:07:09.540 people, they use lawfare, they use, they, people who committed crimes who were on the right side

00:07:15.460 were not punished, and people who committed crimes on the wrong side were punished. That's not really

00:07:19.620 a new thing or really tied to the left. But it is certainly a facet of what the left does today with

00:07:25.020 its power. So what about the, I mean, you started talking about egalitarianism, which I would have

00:07:30.360 said is perhaps more an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. But you're talking there about a dynamic that goes

00:07:38.060 back a lot further. So to what extent is the left that we have today a modern phenomena? And to what

00:07:46.300 extent is it just these sort of base paradynamic abuses that have been going on for the time immemorial?

00:07:54.000 The left is strictly a modern phenomenon, I mean, strictly an Enlightenment phenomenon. The Enlightenment,

00:07:58.560 despite the kind of propagandistic cloud that its progenitors have managed to surround it with,

00:08:03.140 is simply the reification of these two principles. Obviously, the French Revolution was the

00:08:08.000 first kind of actual application of these things. That's not to say these principles,

00:08:11.980 as I say, don't go farther back in human history, but as a political action, except in extremely narrow

00:08:17.300 situations. So I think it was in the 15th century, some German Anabaptists took over the town of Münster

00:08:22.560 and basically ran a left-wing program, though they didn't call it that. And so you see this

00:08:29.540 occasionally, that these leftist principles being put into political action. But if you asked anybody

00:08:35.560 throughout history from any part of the globe, say you picked the 12th century and you went to China

00:08:40.880 or you went to Europe, and you suggested that these principles should be put into place as

00:08:45.880 political guiding principles, I mean, they would just whack you upside the head and think you are

00:08:50.240 insane. It's only in the modern era that people have decided that these things that can actually be

00:08:54.700 put, these which are generally regarded as either distortions of the Christian message in the West,

00:09:00.480 or as vices, that is taking what other people have, envy, is the basis of egalitarianism.

00:09:06.680 It's only in the modern world since the Enlightenment that these things have been kind of inverted and

00:09:11.220 held up as political ideals rather than as political problems. So if it is something that emerged

00:09:17.360 post-Enlightenment, does that suggest that it is something that we can make go away?

00:09:23.060 It's suggested, but obviously this being the arc of history, it's hard to say. Predictions are hard,

00:09:29.980 especially about the future. So my theory is that if the Enlightenment can be made to be viewed by

00:09:37.720 future people, future men and women, the same way as we view Mithraism, the military Roman cult in the

00:09:44.700 late Roman Empire that we know very little about, but was kind of weird. So basically, I think that we can

00:09:51.080 return to a world in which the Enlightenment principles and the leftist principles, which are

00:09:56.040 the same thing, are completely discredited, except kind of at the margins of society. That seems like

00:10:00.720 it's impossible right now. I think it probably is possible, but the exact mechanism of that is opaque,

00:10:05.860 and it would probably have to involve some kind of catastrophe.

00:10:09.860 Right. Okay. Because I don't know if you've seen this, but I saw some fascinating research on,

00:10:15.820 you know, where they put electrodes in your brains and they see which bits light up.

00:10:19.460 And they basically did it with right-wingers and left-wingers. And when they asked them about

00:10:24.240 things that are important to them, basically with right-wingers, you know, you ask them what's

00:10:28.900 most important to them, and it's, you know, their immediate family. And then it's their, you know,

00:10:33.840 their group, their countrymen, you know, the human race as a whole, animals, plants, you know,

00:10:39.620 whatever, you know, you tend to move out on that scale. But with leftists, it is exactly the opposite

00:10:45.220 way round. They genuinely have less feeling for their own immediate group than they do for the

00:10:53.000 foreigner. It is completely inverted the other way. Now, I think that's a relatively small proportion

00:10:58.100 of what we now consider to be the broad left, because it seems to have expanded beyond that.

00:11:03.060 But it kind of made me think that there is something physiologically broken with these people,

00:11:07.460 that no amount of, you know, good arguments on our part or pointing out the hypocrisy and all the

00:11:14.120 other sort of fearsome weapons that we deploy against these people is really going to work.

00:11:19.560 Yeah, the physiology I can't really speak to, but that kind of fits with my general theory,

00:11:25.300 which is in line with that, that probably only 5%, maybe 10% of the left is actually hardcore

00:11:33.460 ideologues. If there was a different system, the 90, 95% of people would simply adopt the new

00:11:39.200 modes and orders. And this is a constant throughout history, people will just shift with where the

00:11:43.400 prevailing winds are. But it does mean that 5% to 10% of leftists have to be directly suppressed.

00:11:49.080 That is, you know, as I would like to say, lustrated and rusticated, lustration meaning stripped of all

00:11:54.020 political rights and rusticated, basically sent to the country, you know, where they can live out,

00:11:57.940 you know, picking, picking sugar beets in Saskatchewan, but they're not allowed to

00:12:03.680 interfere in broader society anymore. And the Russians tried to do that with the Bolsheviks

00:12:08.460 badly and incompetently, and it wasn't successful. But I think that one of the kind of back to the

00:12:16.600 immediately previous conversation, one of the important things to note is that leftism has largely

00:12:21.200 lost its luster in the sense that in the early 20th century, you could say with a straight face,

00:12:26.180 if we try these things, our society, if not utopian will be greatly improved. Well, you know,

00:12:32.920 after 120 years of this, or 250, if you go back to the French Revolution, it's pretty obvious that's

00:12:38.480 not nearly as convincing a claim as it used to be. So you can imagine a future in which people are

00:12:43.100 like, well, you know, leftism is stupid. And all the people who really pushed it, because they have

00:12:48.340 a physiological basis, or for whatever reason, we don't hear from those people anymore. So leftism is

00:12:53.520 over. Maybe. We'll see. Well, that sounds very encouraging. And I like that idea. The only

00:12:57.980 concern that I have is that, you know, reality has been giving these guys a pretty hard time for many

00:13:05.100 decades at this point. I just made a video just now before I came on on Germany, and about how their

00:13:10.680 sort of industrialization, which sort of holds up basically their entire economy is collapsing,

00:13:16.060 the chart is very strongly down and to the right. So these guys keep getting beaten up by reality,

00:13:22.060 and it doesn't seem to shift anything. They won't change, no matter how much reality whacks

00:13:28.880 them about the face. Why is that going on? Why is this not breaking through?

00:13:34.440 I mean, you did a video on this a couple of weeks ago, I think, relating to civil unrest in relation

00:13:39.200 to various metrics. But the short answer, in my opinion, is that none of the people who are in

00:13:44.160 charge, or who support the left, are actually paying any price for reality slapping them in the

00:13:50.340 face. They offload those costs onto other people. And you see this with like the English farmers and

00:13:55.200 so on. So ultimately, none of these people are going to stop being leftist, because right now it

00:13:59.920 pays enormous social and financial benefits. When it stops paying any financial or social benefits,

00:14:05.160 instead, and you see this a little bit in America with some of the kind of extreme leftist woke stuff

00:14:10.000 inside of corporations. Now it's become kind of, in some narrow quarters, it's become a marker of,

00:14:16.500 a kind of a downgrade marker. Like, you know, you want to have our stuff for transgender children

00:14:25.260 in our store, you know, you're not really the kind of person we want to have around here. I mean,

00:14:29.360 that's a relatively new thing. So once the, but that's a very minor social cost. Once the left has

00:14:34.580 to absorb, and is forced to absorb by, if there's no other way to do it, they'll never choose to do it,

00:14:40.080 the social and financial and other costs of their program, then the program will end. I mean,

00:14:45.200 it's no more complicated than that. Okay. So, I mean, if they shut out the genuine, I mean,

00:14:50.520 let's carry on with Germany, for example, if they end up banning the AFD, for example,

00:14:54.280 they're going to have to go through a collapse effectively.

00:14:57.680 Sure. I mean, because eventually the pressure builds up, but the pressure only builds up

00:15:04.060 when people, the masses of people are immiserated to some degree or another. And I actually just

00:15:10.120 wrote a long piece on the, of all things, the Hungarian revolution of 1956. I'm half Hungarian,

00:15:14.940 so I have a particular interest in that. And one of the things that caused the Hungarian revolution

00:15:19.460 wasn't just that the communists spent the past 10 years torturing and killing people since they

00:15:24.380 had come to power, but the economy was completely in the toilet. Like everyone was starving basically

00:15:29.120 and couldn't get an apartment and what have you. So when enough people are unhappy, that's always when

00:15:34.400 you see, and there's other factors as well, obviously, but people have to be unhappy. And right now,

00:15:38.300 people just aren't unhappy enough. I mean, there's lots of unhappy people, but the porn,

00:15:42.620 the fentanyl, that prevents those people from reaching critical mass.

00:15:47.660 Well, I mean, as we become a more technological society, and as we build up the sort of the capital

00:15:53.140 stock of knowledge, it is harder and harder for us to achieve genuinely poor outcomes, even if managed

00:16:00.880 very ineffectively. So that's kind of worrying for the future. If we have to get to properly a level

00:16:06.720 of immiseration before people are willing to do anything about it. But let's be hopeful on that.

00:16:12.500 What about the top of the leftist pyramid? The guys who are sort of genuinely in control of a lot

00:16:16.900 of this, at least forming the narrative, if not directly in the mechanisms of government. So I'm

00:16:21.060 thinking of people like Don Lemon, who was caught on one of those mics during the COVID era, saying that,

00:16:29.200 yeah, he knew it was made up, he knew it was a nothing burger, but they were going to do it anyway.

00:16:33.440 I'm thinking of people like Camilla Harris, who went around saying that Trump was an existential

00:16:37.260 threat to America and a Nazi and all the rest of it. And then the day after he was very narrowly

00:16:42.320 shot, but survived, sent out a tweet saying that she was glad that he's okay. And Biden,

00:16:47.660 for the same reason, sitting down all smiles with Trump after he had won. Evidently, these people do

00:16:53.820 not believe what they are saying. So what about the guys at the top of the pyramid? Because they

00:16:59.380 clearly are lying and they clearly are evil. Well, I think they don't believe what they're

00:17:04.040 saying in terms of policies and prescriptions. I think they do believe what they're saying in

00:17:08.860 terms of leftist ideology. That is, I think it's a complete myth that there's some kind of apolitical

00:17:13.720 or non-ideological elite who put on a leftist skin suit in order to, for political gain. All these

00:17:21.580 people are true blue left believers. I mean, some of them are low quality left believers. Harris,

00:17:27.580 for example, you know, her like ADIQ probably is not capable of wrapping her mind around the kind

00:17:33.140 of stuff that Lennon would be trying to teach her. But we believe is, and that intersects,

00:17:38.920 of course, with the money and power are given to them as part of their participation in this larger

00:17:43.820 brain. And that leaves aside things that I know nothing about and don't know how real they are.

00:17:49.200 You know, you hear constantly about how there's these, you know, cabals of sex rings or what have

00:17:54.460 you. I mean, Epstein type things, maybe that plays into it too. But these people at the top

00:17:59.980 are leftist true believers. They don't believe, you know, like Don Lemon in the fakeness of the

00:18:07.000 Wuhan plague, because they can kind of believe things that are still consistent with left ideology,

00:18:14.560 but that are based in reality. But when push comes to shove, it's the left ideology that matters to

00:18:19.840 them much. I mean, the other interesting thing I find about the left is that they have this

00:18:23.880 remarkable ability to organise that we on the right simply don't have. I mean, if you get a room full

00:18:28.400 of, you know, right wingers, we will all end up arguing with each other over, you know, different

00:18:33.560 points going our own way. It's very difficult as a group to try and get us to do anything.

00:18:38.520 But the left seem to have this mechanism where they can distill ideas and they all get on board with

00:18:43.400 it incredibly quickly. And you can always see when the left is in torment, because they don't know what

00:18:48.060 the line to take is. And it doesn't happen very often. But when it does, they tend to quite quickly

00:18:53.240 coalesce around something. So what is that mechanism that makes them so much more effective

00:18:59.140 at organisation, which then tends to result in them dominating things like government and media?

00:19:05.240 Having an ideological worldview always gives you a much greater ability to organise simply because

00:19:11.800 what you're offering gives people meaning. And particularly in a society like ours, where huge numbers of

00:19:17.660 people are searching for meaning. For example, you know, single women who are past childbearing age

00:19:23.900 or getting there are universally desperate for meaning. And that's why they gravitate to leftist

00:19:28.300 ideology, but it gives them meaning. And they have, because they have BS jobs, they have nothing to do

00:19:33.480 all day long, but to work for left organisations. And frequently they're, of course, paid. The federal

00:19:39.040 government spends billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions, just funneling it to left

00:19:42.820 organisations because they've captured those centres of power. I don't think it should be overstated,

00:19:47.580 though. There's plenty of examples. The American right, and maybe to some extent, the UK right,

00:19:53.860 which I'm less familiar with, is uniquely terrible at organising in the past several decades. In America,

00:20:01.320 it's a function of various things, including the betrayal of the people like William F. Buckley at the

00:20:06.260 top, who in retrospect, you know, was a total Judas. But if you look at places like Hungary,

00:20:11.160 where Viktor Orban spent many years developing an extremely competent political organisation,

00:20:17.020 or El Salvador, where you can look at historical examples too. I mean, I hate to use this example,

00:20:21.140 but it is actually an interesting example. You know, look at like the National Socialist,

00:20:24.860 the NSDAP, the Nazis, right? You know, they were extremely good at organising. And they were based

00:20:30.440 around an ideology as well, in a way that the modern right isn't. So I don't think there's something

00:20:34.580 inherent to the right that makes the right incapable of organising. Maybe it's a little

00:20:40.240 bit less capable than the left, simply because the ideology is not as utopian and therefore not

00:20:45.340 as attractive. But there's no reason. I think there's many counterexamples of the right organising.

00:20:50.120 It's just that in America, it's a clown show. Does that mean we need to, well, we're going to

00:20:56.540 struggle to agree on an ideology, but does that mean we need to basically pick our strongman then?

00:21:02.460 You know, at the moment, it might be Trump. But do we need to find our method of doing the same

00:21:08.060 thing? Yeah, absolutely. That's the way it works. I mean, you have to have a guy in charge. You don't

00:21:13.040 necessarily have to have someone who's the man of destiny or a strongman, but it has to organise

00:21:18.240 around a single person who has a more or less coherent ideology. But it doesn't have to be an

00:21:23.000 ideology in the sense of a utopian ideology. You can have a set of principles. I mean, you could,

00:21:29.320 in the abstract, I mean, there's various reasons this probably wouldn't work, but you could take

00:21:32.940 Elon Musk's philosophy. We're going to get to Mars. Everything's going to be great. And we're all

00:21:38.800 going to pull and harness together. I mean, that's not going to work probably for a variety of reasons,

00:21:43.240 including that a large number of people who are now, very large number of people who now live off

00:21:49.480 of handouts would not be entitled to handouts anymore. But you can imagine a cohesive society

00:21:55.640 pulling together around a Musk vision, which is essentially a right-wing vision, even though not

00:22:02.000 super ideological, simply because it's based in reality. I mean, Elon Musk looks at things saying

00:22:07.420 like, this is true and this is not, as opposed to the left, which looks at things and says,

00:22:11.820 this is not true, but my ideology says it is true, so therefore it must be true.

00:22:17.780 That's not, in the long term, that's always going to lead to your destruction. If you don't hew to

00:22:22.460 reality, it's not going to work out for you. And under the right person, anything that hews to

00:22:27.020 reality is always going to be coded right-wing. And that will substitute in large part for the

00:22:31.580 kind of the more greater kind of fervor of leftist ideology. Well, and turning more to the right,

00:22:38.040 why is the right so continually disappointing? I mean, so for example, we've been seeing these

00:22:42.580 fantastic Trump picks and, you know, over here in the Lotus, we've been getting desperately excited

00:22:47.440 about, you know, all the good things that are going to flow from this. And then the first and

00:22:52.320 most prominent name that was put out there, Matt Gaetz, was immediately torpedoed by his own side.

00:22:57.560 That never would have happened to a Biden appointee. You know, they would all get in line

00:23:02.280 and they would back his choice. What is wrong with the right that we just don't understand

00:23:11.300 these basic power dynamics that the left do? If you would like to see the full version of this

00:23:15.540 premium video, please head over to lotuseaters.com and subscribe to gain full access to all of our

00:23:20.960 premium content.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - December 03, 2024

PREVIEW： Brokenomics｜ Are they Evil or Stupid？ - with Charles Haywood

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