The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - February 03, 2026


PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Pillars of Civilisation

Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Karl Greeks Plato Gauls Braz
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1345 PREVIEW： Realpolitik #32 ｜ Iran war？

Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

136.97

Word count

2,714

Sentence count

200

Harmful content

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of Brokonomics, I'm joined by the philosopher Karl Marx to talk about the origins of civilization and the role of religion in shaping it. We talk about religion, identity and morality, and how they are related to one another.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Brokonomics.
00:00:30.000 Now, in this episode, it kind of relates back to a previous episode that I did.
00:00:36.040 So I know that I promised that I would come back and talk about the reframing of the way
00:00:42.540 that I see society now, but I've basically got to keep thinking about that until I get
00:00:47.460 it properly locked down.
00:00:48.880 But what I did do in a previous episode, that one about Morgoth and the origins of civilization,
00:00:57.740 I waffled quite badly and sort of came away with an article from that and some various
00:01:05.640 other bits.
00:01:06.660 And then I got discussing it with Braz and we started riffing on that.
00:01:12.300 And I then went to put some more thought into it.
00:01:14.740 I think I've got something that's vaguely intelligent to say about that.
00:01:17.800 And we were going to do everything we thought of, but then Karl had strong opinions on one
00:01:25.920 particular element of it.
00:01:27.560 So maybe we're going to do this over two parts and get Karl in for the next one.
00:01:31.320 And he's going to tell us all about...
00:01:33.800 Northern European identity and virtue in Northern European societies and Germanic societies.
00:01:40.720 That was the one.
00:01:42.000 And how it fits in with Christianity or fits in with Protestantism and sort of elaborate
00:01:48.940 on that a little bit.
00:01:50.080 Yes, he's a big fan on the whole Protestant angle.
00:01:52.880 Yes.
00:01:54.520 Which I am deeply hostile to.
00:01:57.040 Fair enough.
00:01:57.760 Fair enough.
00:01:59.520 I mean, first of all, on the previous video that I did, you probably haven't seen it, but
00:02:03.480 it was one about Morgoth and the origins of civilization.
00:02:06.200 I came out of that thinking that it was the worst episode that I'd ever recorded.
00:02:11.560 And I was right on the verge of getting the editors to delete it.
00:02:15.000 Okay.
00:02:15.540 And then re-record it another time because I was just waffling for like 90 minutes.
00:02:22.060 And it turns out the audience loved it.
00:02:23.940 So it's a bit weird how that works sometimes.
00:02:26.420 Yes.
00:02:26.700 I don't understand.
00:02:27.260 It is funny.
00:02:28.220 It is funny.
00:02:28.960 I don't get it either.
00:02:30.760 Whenever you get YouTubers together, that is like the number one thing that they discuss,
00:02:34.340 how something that they thought was going to be awful did well and how, okay, it's all
00:02:38.760 over.
00:02:39.140 That happens.
00:02:39.960 But one of the things I was waffling about in that was my idea that civilization is, because
00:02:47.800 I think that our elites think that civilization is something like on a video game tech tree.
00:02:53.820 You unlock it and then you've got it.
00:02:56.620 Yes.
00:02:57.200 And then you can do whatever you like because you've got it.
00:03:01.060 Yes.
00:03:01.280 Whereas the argument that I was making in what is now going to be an article, which I might
00:03:06.740 even actually even get into the next edition of Islander, is that no, actually, the civilizational
00:03:13.880 substrate is something which is inherited before it's understood.
00:03:18.020 Yes.
00:03:18.800 And that is built up over a very long period.
00:03:23.440 And for me, the essential framing criteria is that of winter.
00:03:26.920 And the reason being is that if you live in a part of the world that has winter, that
00:03:35.380 has a strong selection mechanism, you have to adopt certain characteristics, forward planning
00:03:41.880 obviously, but norm enforcement, shared rules, deference to hierarchy, because all of those
00:03:49.440 things allow you to get through the winter.
00:03:51.500 You know, an easy example of this would be, if you're living in Africa and somebody steals
00:03:56.960 your mango, then you have to go and pick another mango.
00:04:01.220 And it is quite annoying, but you can understand why that isn't cracked down on terribly hard.
00:04:06.920 If I'm living in Scotland and you steal my grain reserves, my entire family starves in February.
00:04:13.240 And so it is a whole different category of enforcement of norm mechanisms.
00:04:21.380 And what I'm kind of arguing is that behavioural characteristics seep into the genome.
00:04:30.280 And there's good arguments for that, but they do it very slowly.
00:04:34.140 So if two parents are tall, it's likely the child is also going to be tall.
00:04:37.840 That's a fairly strong relationship from generation to generation.
00:04:40.480 Behavioural characteristics, they encode very weakly.
00:04:45.720 But if you have a society that's got through winter for thousands and thousands of years,
00:04:50.400 the cumulative addition is that you basically get an entirely different set of substrate of
00:04:55.680 behaviours, meaning that civilisation is not communicable.
00:05:01.220 You cannot just pick up somebody from somewhere and move them into another society and expect
00:05:07.500 that civilisational bedrock to translate across.
00:05:11.740 It is specific to the people.
00:05:14.260 Now, when you heard that, you sort of started coming back in a number of ways.
00:05:19.340 I don't know if anything jumps out at you immediately.
00:05:21.760 So what you're arguing put in a different light.
00:05:26.980 A restatement of your case would be along the following lines.
00:05:30.180 And this restatement was made by the Catholic reactionary thinker, Joseph de Mestre.
00:05:36.540 And his whole argument was that civilisation, state, culture, these are all emergent properties.
00:05:46.660 Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
00:05:47.920 They are not things that you can impose on a society.
00:05:51.760 You can't, in fact, liberate people from their norms because these norms, these structures
00:05:59.940 that are often reflected in the way the state is formed have far deeper causes that explain them.
00:06:11.520 And one possible explanation is being forced to plan for winter and making sure that you
00:06:18.700 don't loot each other while starving.
00:06:21.520 And the only way for that to happen is for everybody to take responsibility for themselves
00:06:27.860 and to behave in a particular way and to plan for the future.
00:06:33.440 And if they don't, you brutally enforce that they do.
00:06:37.080 Yes.
00:06:37.480 You brutally enforce the exception.
00:06:39.080 Firstly, you brutally enforce the law.
00:06:41.460 Second, it imposes order on everyone.
00:06:44.740 There is a bit of a problem here that emerges with sort of places like Central America or India,
00:06:51.100 which have built civilisations but don't have the same kind of challenge.
00:06:57.740 Yes, whether they're durable or not.
00:06:59.900 I mean, I'd argue there is a reason why Britain colonised India and not the other way around.
00:07:06.960 Absolutely.
00:07:07.400 Even though both had a civilisation, one of them was considerably more durable than the other.
00:07:11.720 Absolutely.
00:07:12.120 And it's not just the durability of it.
00:07:15.600 There is also a metaphysical dimension.
00:07:19.400 There is always a metaphysical dimension to this because what we set as acceptable norms
00:07:25.560 has certain meaning.
00:07:27.380 And one example here would be the Roma population, which lives in Europe, which has to suffer through 1.00
00:07:34.100 winter, but they believe that they're allowed to steal whatever they want to steal and to
00:07:39.740 keep on roaming as a result.
00:07:41.520 But do they steal from each other?
00:07:45.680 Well, that's the thing.
00:07:47.100 Yes.
00:07:47.400 There is always an in-group, out-group preference.
00:07:50.260 So there is always an identity.
00:07:53.820 There is always a conception of who we are and what God or the gods allow us to do in different
00:08:02.760 faith systems.
00:08:03.400 So there is the material element, which is the kind of pressure that is imposed on you
00:08:10.880 by having to plan for four months, five months, six months with no food.
00:08:15.860 You see norm enforcement strongly in tribal desert communities with a strong tribal code that has
00:08:27.980 always an in-group, out-group preference and always endless warfare against out-groups.
00:08:35.020 But the planning ahead part, while stationary in a winter environment, imposes a different set of
00:08:46.660 restrictions.
00:08:47.220 And so the Mediterranean can get hard winters, especially in mountainous areas in the Mediterranean.
00:08:55.900 That does happen.
00:08:57.380 And that does impose discipline.
00:08:59.800 Somewhere like Egypt, where you have the flooding of the Nile that you have to plan for, because
00:09:05.040 if you build incorrectly or you build in the wrong location, like that's it, you're erased from
00:09:10.380 existence.
00:09:12.960 And that environment, by being unforgiving, imposes on you the need to plan.
00:09:20.460 And if you are a non-nomadic society, the exact term has escaped me right now, then that planning
00:09:33.700 has to be more involved and has to be paired with the enforcement of rules and norms.
00:09:39.760 Because unlike in the desert, you can't just raid the tribe next door and loot their sheep and cattle.
00:09:46.160 But I knew many groups in the Middle East do do exactly that.
00:09:49.460 And I've continued to do that for a long time.
00:09:51.260 So yes, those are the nomadic tribes.
00:09:54.040 If you live on the border with nomadic tribes, you will constantly see that these urbanized communities
00:10:01.900 or these settled communities have an insane amount of hostility towards the nomadic tribes.
00:10:08.600 And they might trade with them, but it's very clear that there is zero trust in that relationship
00:10:15.420 because you don't know what they might be up to.
00:10:17.780 Yes.
00:10:18.520 Because they might buy something from you, give you the money, and come back the next night
00:10:22.440 and rob you.
00:10:25.040 So...
00:10:25.520 And I certainly take your point about Egypt as well.
00:10:27.800 Because, I mean, of course, Egypt did have a long-running civilization well before Europe.
00:10:31.000 The interesting point for me, perhaps, there is what I keep going back to is the durability
00:10:36.240 of European civilization.
00:10:38.740 Because, yes, the Near East, Egypt, has had these precursor civilizations that were very
00:10:45.520 long-running and did well.
00:10:47.160 But what seems to be a feature of those regions is that, quite often, civilization runs to a point
00:10:53.600 and then resets.
00:10:54.460 In fact, was it Plato made this point in his, depends how you view it, either the parable
00:11:03.320 of Atlantis or the absolute truth of Atlantis, whichever way you're going to come at it.
00:11:08.460 We might do a lad's hour on that soon.
00:11:09.780 Where he basically said, look, the Greeks have had civilization many times before.
00:11:15.580 And it keeps resetting and it keeps restarting again.
00:11:18.680 There is something about that region that is kind of forgiving enough to let it get civilization,
00:11:24.040 but also let it collapse and then have to restart from fresh.
00:11:27.420 Where European civilization, at least so far, has done well, is that it's kind of durable
00:11:33.280 and is built upon itself.
00:11:35.860 Well, it depends on your time frame.
00:11:37.720 You didn't have much by way of civilization in Northern Europe until Christianity came along. 0.97
00:11:45.980 So for most of Northern Europe, the Germanics were famously barbarians. 1.00
00:11:49.520 The Gauls were barbarians. 1.00
00:11:53.340 Yes.
00:11:53.560 And then the civilization was centered on the Mediterranean.
00:11:59.180 And that's where the Greeks were and that's where the Romans were. 0.75
00:12:01.540 And presumably you would argue that Christianity was key to building that civilization.
00:12:06.460 I'd argue that it changed the moral norms to a high degree.
00:12:11.800 And it imposed a vision that could only be expressed through art and architecture.
00:12:21.380 And the Europeans, the Northern Europeans, took to it and built wonderful things using it.
00:12:29.380 There is an argument that the reason why Christianity was so effective in building civilization
00:12:35.860 is after you've got that sort of what I described, which is those inherited mechanisms,
00:12:43.600 behavioral norms that kick in, you're still based around a fairly tribal system
00:12:50.320 where you've got your in-group and your out-group.
00:12:52.020 It's either us or the Celts or the Scots or the Germans or whatever. 0.97
00:12:56.060 And each of these had their own bands as well.
00:12:58.060 I mean, French history is replete with different bands fighting each other.
00:13:01.800 I mean, all of them are.
00:13:02.820 All of them are.
00:13:03.280 Yes.
00:13:03.440 What Christianity could have done is it came along and created a bigger kinship container 0.99
00:13:11.140 that everybody else went in.
00:13:13.640 Yes.
00:13:14.400 So you are kin because you're also Christian.
00:13:18.280 These are the behavioral norms that we adopt.
00:13:21.320 And therefore, we can treat everybody in this container as being part of our kinship.
00:13:25.280 And when that scales up Europe-wide, what you get is effectively a Europe-wide civilization.
00:13:30.780 Yes, there was different manifestations of it.
00:13:32.440 But, you know, the German king would send his daughter to be married in Austria or France or whatever it was.
00:13:38.860 You know, you have that sort of broader container.
00:13:41.760 So this happened, I would argue, in two ways.
00:13:46.540 One was the banning of cousin marriages, which had always been a historic norm.
00:13:52.820 Until about two weeks ago, yes.
00:13:54.140 Well, yes.
00:13:55.740 Until you had some recent arrivals of questionable character.
00:14:00.720 And that meant the dissolution of tribal structures.
00:14:04.240 And therefore, your kinship group had to expand.
00:14:09.320 There's another element, which is the idea of monotheism.
00:14:14.340 You were no longer worshipping different gods and having slight variations on all kinds of different moral systems.
00:14:23.640 There was only one god.
00:14:27.300 And that god is characterized by his own sacrifice for your sake.
00:14:33.800 Then there's the element of not only was it for your sake that God sacrificed himself on the cross, but it was also your fault.
00:14:48.900 Because while historically it was the Jews who called for the crucifixion of Jesus and the Romans who did the deed physically, 0.61
00:14:59.540 the theological explanation has always been that he died for your sins and he died to redeem you.
00:15:07.320 So that's a redemptive feature, which is different, I would argue, from other religions.
00:15:15.120 Not that other gods didn't make sacrifices for the sake of their people, but not in this way.
00:15:24.140 And then there was the, I would argue, especially the theology around sin and virtue.
00:15:31.220 Because if you look at the seven deadly sins,
00:15:34.840 these are all of them, not actual acts, but sins of temperament or thought.
00:15:46.520 So lust, not just the act of sexuality outside marriage,
00:15:54.040 but the mere, the desire itself is what's described as a sin.
00:16:00.900 It's not suppressing the thought in your own head.
00:16:04.840 Well, it teaches you to discipline the thoughts in your head.
00:16:09.800 So the theology is a bit complicated.
00:16:12.660 Just the feeling itself isn't necessarily a sin.
00:16:16.060 But the sins are defined as lust, envy, wrath, gluttony, greed, pride, etc.
00:16:27.980 So the moral outlook is focused on what drives you to bad acts.
00:16:41.840 It's wrath that causes you to murder someone or perhaps envy.
00:16:46.460 Yes, the only thing is they're taking it one level up and placing the responsibility back on you.
00:16:51.620 They're not saying don't, they do say elsewhere, don't murder.
00:16:55.540 Exactly.
00:16:56.120 But the sin is getting yourself into a position where murder is the next logical step.
00:17:02.680 Exactly.
00:17:02.860 Because you've succumbed to wrath, you've succumbed to lust, you've succumbed to greed.
00:17:07.240 Precisely.
00:17:07.640 And so on.
00:17:08.400 Precisely.
00:17:10.080 And the virtues are not just virtual acts.
00:17:14.460 So charity in the virtues doesn't mean give away money liberally.
00:17:20.560 It means think well of others so that when you see a poor person, you will treat him fairly.
00:17:27.060 That's charity.
00:17:28.260 So obviously there is the physical element of giving to charity.
00:17:33.220 But charity, the virtue, isn't focused on tithing, for example.
00:17:41.040 Hope, faith.
00:17:44.820 And then you have the other virtues.
00:17:47.920 Prudence, fortitude, not courage, fortitude.
00:17:52.040 The ability to withstand things.
00:17:54.000 So the dynamics kind of changed from thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not desire your neighbor's wife.
00:18:07.480 That's also a sin.
00:18:09.140 Honor your mother and your father.
00:18:11.180 It changes from action to temperament.
00:18:15.240 And if you are already under an enormous amount of environmental pressure that forces you to behave in a certain way that respects norms, that is kind of the next evolutionary step.
00:18:32.000 Because you take that norms and planning that are required to survive in a harsh climate with months of winter, and you have to internalize them in a way that changes your temperament, all the while admitting your own guilt for Christ's sacrifice.
00:18:55.180 Yes.
00:18:55.980 Okay.
00:18:56.340 So I don't want to come back to that, but just narrowing down on the point of how a lot of the civilizational substrate is inherited.
00:19:07.960 And I think we are right to counterpose it with the Middle East that doesn't have a lot of the same starting conditions. 0.60
00:19:17.360 But nevertheless, you see aspects of this appear.
00:19:19.200 I mean, one of my arguments is that if you get the right norms, the right behaviors, which tend to be embodied in the population, that is the cheapest possible policing that you will ever get.
00:19:31.380 Yes.
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