00:00:00.000The sense in which ideas in this oligarchical system, which we call, you know, democracy, tend to prevail over good ideas is that the bad ideas are empowering.
00:00:12.180Even if these ideas actually harm these victims, which I would argue, you know, they do, they feel good.
00:00:19.540And the society that we're living in, you know, that that promotion of bad ideas has gotten so strong that the bad ideas are now able to use authoritarian techniques to repress the good ideas.
00:00:33.160The mechanism that basically creates that coordination of ideology is promotion rather than suppression.
00:00:41.400It's attraction rather than repulsion.
00:00:43.840What about these unbiased, you know, experts?
00:00:46.640But the thing is, you give power to the experts and power corrupts them.
00:00:51.660And suddenly they become, they develop these conflicts of interest.
00:02:20.780Yeah, well, you know, you still help us.
00:02:23.240You're so useful, you know, for this and that.
00:02:26.100And, you know, perhaps my, in terms of formative, you know, intellectual experiences, perhaps my most formative moment was when I was 15 years old and my father was consul in a porto.
00:02:41.060And I was reading his unclassified cables back to America.
00:02:47.980And he used to have me proofread them.
00:02:50.020And I'm reading these cables and it suddenly struck me that the relationship between the U.S. and Portugal, although on paper it's a symmetric relationship, there's something asymmetric there.
00:03:00.660And I sort of realized that actually the purpose of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Portugal is not to relate between equals.
00:03:09.540You know, we have this treaty that says if Portugal is attacked, perhaps by Morocco or Spain or even the Soviets, America will come to its defense.
00:03:18.540But also if America is attacked by Canada or Mexico, for example, Portugal will help defend us.
00:03:25.500And I'm like, you know, actually, why are there 50 Americans, some of the best Americans in the world in Portugal?
00:03:34.100I mean, wonderful people in the Foreign Service.
00:03:36.960But their goal, their mission is clearly to, in fact, supervise the government of Portugal.
00:03:42.780And so to basically sort of go from this worldview of kind of, you know, this worldview of the Cold War liberal that I grew up in reading the International Herald Tribune, The Economist, and I'm like, suddenly I'm like, this is an empire.
00:03:59.260And, you know, Thucydides would have recognized it as just as unequal as the Delian League.
00:04:06.980And that sort of sparked, I mean, you know, I stored that away, you know, for a number of years.
00:04:13.240I'm actually a retired computer programmer, computer scientist, some people might even say, although.
00:04:17.820And after 2000, I started working on a computer science research project.
00:04:44.920He wrote this book, Democracy, The God That Failed.
00:04:49.100And, you know, he was a libertarian, but he's sort of bringing me, you know, bringing in this worldview from kind of before the Democratic Revolution and really opening you to the very difficult question of how our ancestors would see us.
00:05:05.020You know, we have this picture of our ancestors, but we've seldom reversed the question.
00:05:10.020You know, we know what we think of Elizabeth I.
00:05:12.680Well, what would Elizabeth I think of us?
00:05:14.620You know, we're sitting here right next to Westminster Abbey.
00:05:19.420What would she say if she could see Britain today?
00:05:22.820And our attitude toward the past, you know, as I started to read the writers of the past, I got into, I'm a huge admirer of Thomas Carlyle, who's now, you know, very unknown and very misunderstood.
00:05:35.520And as I started to sort of read the past, I started to get a sense of kind of stepping outside, you know, whether it's the Overton window or Plato's cave or whatever, I started to get a sense of how the past would see the present.
00:05:51.320You know, we live in a time that, you know, we live in a time that considers itself very, very superior to all of human history in a number of respects.
00:05:58.680And, you know, when you look at our cell phones, our computers, you know, these things are sort of clearly superior.
00:06:04.620But are we as superior as human beings?
00:06:07.980Are our values and perspectives superior?
00:06:11.580This seems to me to be a subject well worthy of debate.
00:06:15.580And especially what started to concern me is that there's a sort of almost a sort of provincialism to the present.
00:06:22.640Because when you're in a very provincial society, you tend to be very centered on where you are and you dismiss sort of the rest of the world as heathens, barbarians, you know.
00:06:35.120And, you know, you seldom in this sort of provincial context, you basically seldom sort of flip the script and say, what would they think of us?
00:06:47.620And to be sort of cosmopolitan in the present is to be able to flip that script and think, this is how we see the Mongolians, but this is also how the Mongolians see us.
00:06:58.500And so, you know, to answer the question of how the Elizabethans would see us, of how Shakespeare would see the present, you know, sort of opened up this kind of vast, unopened field of thought.
00:07:12.440And I felt that, you know, in a way, you know, by starting to think this way, I felt myself, you know, sort of, as one might say, exiting the matrix.
00:07:21.460And, you know, the thing that I'm kind of most notorious for, in some ways, is back in 2007, I was sitting in a cafe in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.
00:07:33.460It's called the People's Cafe, Coffee with the People.
00:07:36.160It was covered with 60s, you know, propaganda from that time.
00:07:40.400And I was thinking about, you know, this great movie, The Matrix.
00:07:42.960And I was like, and of course, when we think about kind of breaking our frames, as I was taught to think, of course, you grow up in the 20th century, and I'm very much a child of the 20th century, you grow up thinking of your, you know, breaking your frames as sort of a revolt against traditionalism.
00:08:02.400And to sort of take that and flip it around and turn it into a revolt against the present seemed like a very subversive act.
00:08:11.580And so I started to use this metaphor from The Matrix of the red pill.
00:08:17.600And now everyone, you know, has this metaphor of being red-pilled or pilled or whatever, which, you know, actually this metaphor was far too powerful for me.
00:08:26.800It was wrested for me immediately in two directions at the same time in my very abstruse content.
00:08:33.960They dumped out my, you know, very abstruse, you know, criticisms of Carlyle and whatever.
00:08:39.600And it was replaced, one, by the pickup artist community, who started to talk about being red-pilled in terms of seeing the, you know, the truth about women or whatever.
00:08:50.440And then, of course, by, you know, full-on Nazis, or rather neo-Nazis, or post-Nazis, or, you know, the party office is no longer issuing membership cards.
00:09:00.000But, you know, the term is still used.
00:09:03.840And so it's sort of, you know, I obviously, I'm not going to take credit for everything that's described as red-pilled.
00:09:10.720It became more mainstream than either of those two eventually.
00:09:13.640Yes, yes, eventually it became sort of more generalized and mainstreamed, and now it's lovely because it means almost nothing but, you know, to, you know, and at the same time, and this would have definitely happened without me,
00:09:26.720a lot of people as sort of the ideas of the 1960s kind of hardened, you know, out of their kind of original freshness because these ideas felt very fresh, you know, 50 and 60 years ago, kind of hardened into a kind of orthodoxy.
00:09:41.880And so people were looking for ways to controvert that orthodoxy, to deny it, to sort of push back against it, especially in sort of anonymous places on the internet.
00:09:52.840And so you got this sort of world of like 4chan, you're familiar with 4chan, I was never a 4chan person, but, you know, there was a lot of sort of seething ferment of, you know, how strongly people in that could basically spit in the face of,
00:10:11.880the powers that be. And the people, you know, who, the people in that world, you know, which is a world, I sort of, you know, I kind of, I respect people in a lot of ways who are sort of performative dissidents,
00:10:30.880who have this kind of purely negative nihilistic vision, but there actually, I think, has to be something more than pure nihilism.
00:10:40.900You know, when you're in an orthodoxy, nihilism is sort of very attractive.
00:10:45.260And I think that one of the things that happens, you know, all around the world is people, kids go to these schools and, you know, they sort of receive this content,
00:10:57.220which strikes them as very wrong and very disturbing. And at a certain point, they go to their teacher and they say, you know, maybe in deep confidence, you know,
00:11:07.540I don't believe in any of this stuff. It seems wrong. It seems very strange. This obsession with race seems very odd and very unpleasant.
00:11:15.580And we're taught, you know, at the same time in the U.S. to believe we have these two concepts of equal protection of the law and protected classes.
00:11:24.820How do these things, you know, interact? You know, it's very Orwellian. But, you know, if I don't believe in this, what do I believe in?
00:11:32.880And the teacher says to them, well, it's very simple. The opposite of this is being a Nazi.
00:11:38.460And at this point, your 15-year-old says, well, then I'm a Nazi. And I'm using the British pronunciation, you know, just because I'm here in the U.K.
00:11:47.140Okay. And that's a sort of, like, that antagonism where basically you're part of the kind of stereotyped, you're sort of, when you do that, and, you know, I like to warn people against that choice because it's not that to be a Nazi is to be too radical, actually.
00:12:07.080I think you must be much more radical than that. But it's like the sort of, you know, you're inhabiting this caricatured opposition to the frame, whereas actually to be outside the frame is much bigger and much more interesting.
00:12:24.480Let's talk about that. So I want to give you an opportunity to also clarify what you said, being more radical than a Nazi. What are you talking about?
00:12:31.900So, you know, I would say, for example, that, you know, to take Shakespeare seriously is much more radical than being a Nazi.
00:12:40.500And so, you know, when you look at the world of Elizabeth I, it's a world that when we take it seriously, we can almost, we can barely understand.
00:12:52.780And so, for example, I, you know, it's a digression, but I happen to be like, like many very intellectual people.
00:12:59.060I happen to be an Oxfordian. I believe that Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford.
00:13:02.740And so, for example, to take the world of Elizabethan court poetry seriously and to take, there's a wonderful speech in Troilus and Cressida where Ulysses sort of has this kind of defense of inequality and his defense of rank and his defense of like nobility.
00:13:22.840You'll not find an ounce of democratic sentiment in Shakespeare, you know, whereas, for example, Hitler is a demagogue, you know, he's a very, and if you look at, for example, the relationship between Hitler and the kind of the German nationalist right, great writers like Ernst Jünger, who, you know, there's recently, I don't, do you know Jünger?
00:13:46.620There's recently been a Jünger revival, amazing, amazing writer. And these people look down upon Hitler as a sort of peasant, you know, and antisemitism, you know, in German society in 1900, you know, was a sort of peasant belief.
00:14:02.020You know, the idea that it could become a serious thing that would result in serious consequences for people was unthinkable to these German aristocrats.
00:14:10.900And so, for example, if I, you know, place myself in that time, I'm sort of with much more with a kind of Steffenberg, kind of the old German aristocratic right who tried to, eventually tried to blow up Hitler with a bomb and failed.
00:14:28.780And Jünger himself is almost caught up in these purges and killed. But Ernst Jünger, Ernst von Salomon, Friedrich Reck, some people you probably haven't heard of, you know, those, for me, are the writers to read from the time.
00:14:44.080And so, to say, for example, that you're an anti-Nazi, you know, you could basically say, okay, if you're an anti-Nazi, you could be a Stalinist.
00:14:54.060My own grandparents in America were Stalinists. They were, you know, Jewish communists of Russian origin, I think, like some of your ancestors.
00:15:02.020In fact, I believe our names end with the same last two letters. And so, to say that you're not a Nazi, it's like, you know, one of my favorite things to explain is the word Gentile.
00:15:15.600Because when we use the word Gentile, it's a negative set. It means that you're not a Jew. Or in Utah, it means that you're not a Mormon. Actually, you and I could go to—
00:15:24.040I was just in Utah, but they didn't tell me that.
00:15:28.680And, you know, regardless of your ethnic origin, you're a Gentile because it means you're not a Mormon.
00:15:33.720So, you're not a Mormon. You could be a Hindu. You could be a Zoroastrian.
00:15:37.920And so, you know, to say what do Gentiles think, what is Gentile thinking, is, you know, fundamentally a parochial and false categorization.
00:15:49.520So, to say what do anti-Nazis think, you could be a Stalinist, you could be an American liberal, you could be Ernst Jünger or Julius Evola.
00:15:58.280And so, to sort of expand, basically, once you say, going back to my example of the 15-year-old kid, to say, okay, I'm not woke. I'm post-woke. Whatever.
00:16:15.040You know, what does that mean? You know, this word woke dates to 2012 as though we invented these ideas in 2012, which is absolute nonsense.
00:16:23.080They were being taught in American universities in the 70s. They were actually, you know, go back solidly to the 30s.
00:16:29.180And, you know, so to say that I'm not this, you know, once you say that not this means that, you're sort of making the mistake of saying Gentiles believe this.
00:16:40.200And to escape from that pattern and say, no, actually, you know, to say, I don't believe, for example, you know, to say, you know, the meaning of I don't believe in democracy, you know, that can be, have a huge number of meanings.
00:16:57.900But to group, for example, Hitler and Elizabeth I, either of whom believed in democracy, I mean, I can't imagine that, you know, Queen Elizabeth would have let that little man in her presence for more than a few minutes.
00:17:12.040And, you know, and so sort of it's so crucial to basically say, OK, I'm escaping from this, you know, dichotomy and even to sort of view this dichotomy as kind of a single line and say, OK, well, I don't believe in woke.
00:17:27.940So but I'm not Hitler. But let's go, you know, 10 percent toward Hitler. I'm a moderate. I'm a moderate.
00:17:32.200You know, you know, as they say, the best way to fight, you know, radical racist terrorism is to support moderate racists.
00:17:39.800And no, we don't say that. And so there are all these other different, fascinating, amazing directions to go to when you kind of let yourself out of the very narrow prison of the present and kind of into the past.
00:17:54.760And so, you know, when I speak, I, of course, like to, you know, kind of red pill people are kind of living within this very constrained intellectual universe and say, you can get outside this.
00:18:07.000But, you know, I also like to speak to the Nazis. And, you know, I want to say, actually, you know, there's a sort of paucity of imagination.
00:18:17.040And there's a sort of when you do that, you're kind of remaining within the frame. And it's very important to sort of leave that frame.
00:18:26.020And so, like my example of the, you know, the 15 year old, the brilliant 15 year old kid who becomes a Nazi, which I've seen millions and millions of cases of, OK, not millions, but very many.
00:18:37.740And it's sort of very sad because you get sort of trapped in that space. And especially you're sort of looking for what is the most taboo belief in the modern world.
00:18:47.120You end up in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Well, you know, the Holocaust is one of the best attested facts, you know, in history.
00:18:56.020But if you're looking for the truth about World War Two, actually, almost every other World War Two conspiracy theory is true, except Holocaust denial.
00:19:06.200Yeah. And so President Roosevelt had prior knowledge of Pearl Harbor. Totally believe this. For example, I, you know, I don't want to go into details on this, but, you know, and so when we understand this sort of enemy, like if you look at kind of pop history, professional history, kind of studies of the Third Reich, you know, we understand it clearly as glass.
00:19:26.520We see Hitler almost perfectly. Understanding Stalin. You know, have you read, there's a recent book, Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin that came out, a lovely history, you know, kind of a revisionist history or something, but impeccably academic of, you know, sort of Stalin's perspective in the war, kind of recapitulates the icebreaker hypothesis.
00:19:50.020Oh, yeah. You know what? It's funny because that is, I'm not, I, there's most conspiracy theories I think are complete nonsense, but there's a few Russian writers and the one you're talking about has actually been bettered.
00:20:02.420He's been bettered by other people, including Salonian, who, I mean, that's a legit thing that Stalin wanted to stab Hitler in the back. That's why they signed in on aggression.
00:20:11.660Yes, yes, yes. And I happen to also believe that FDR had prior knowledge of that. And I, there's no way to prove it. Can't be proved. You know, only circumstantial evidence. And so the thing is, when you sort of go back and kind of look at that period, you know, again, you know, when you're just like, okay, something smells funny, I'm a Nazi, you know, you're just missing all of this subtlety.
00:20:35.020And all of this, you know, actually this amazing history, you know, you can read Charles Beard, President Roosevelt in the coming of the war. Charles Callen Tansel was the leading American diplomatic historian of the time. He was granted unfettered access to State Department papers. He wrote Back Door to War, which is basically like, you know, FDR organized this war, which killed, I mean, and well, I mean, was it good for the Jews? You know, as one says, right?
00:21:03.220And so, you know, this is sort of tremendous catastrophe, actually. You know, the book that I recommend, you know, the writer Nicholson Baker?
00:21:10.020Amazing American writer, novelist. He's written fiction, nonfiction, really one of America's great writers. And he wrote this book about 15 years ago called Human Smoke. And Human Smoke is a history of World War II told in chronological tweet-length excerpts from primary sources. It's amazing.
00:21:30.180And, you know, you come away from this, and if there's just one thing that I kind of want people to believe about World War II, it's that it was not a Marvel movie. It was not in any sense a Marvel movie. There's no Marvel movies. History, World War I, my gosh, you know, is certainly not a Marvel movie.
00:21:46.060And so, you know, when you step outside of this material, you really, really, really need to step outside of this sort of, you know, linear, you know, here I'm a progressive, here I'm a Nazi.
00:22:01.660And, you know, by the way, when we use the word progressive, my grandparents actually were American communists. They were Stalinists, to be exact. And they met at a Communist Party meeting, I believe, in the late 20s or early 30s. And they were Stalinists all the way through the 70s, which took a lot of, a lot of, you know, persistence.
00:22:22.400I feel like I have to apologize to your forebears for...
00:22:26.860You're not responsible for the sins of your ancestors, as I keep trying to make the point on other issues.
00:22:31.220There you go. There you go. I don't believe I'm responsible, but, you know, it provides a certain...
00:22:37.120It provides a certain accountability for sort of understanding what went on. And I only learned that my, you know, they were so secretive. It was such a secretive time. I only learned that my grandparents were communists from my parents. My grandparents themselves would never talk about it. The word they used and said was progressive. They only said progressive.
00:22:56.520And if you go back, there's a wonderful resource called Marxist.org. It's about this fellow Karl Marx. But it includes a lot of sort of leftist, you know, archival material from the past. And you can go and read the pages of The Communist, which was the official journal of the CPUSA. And you can look at the way they used the word progressive.
00:23:18.760And they used it in exactly the same way to describe the same set of people. It is always a positive word. It always means our friends. And so in a way, when you use the word progressive, you know, without realizing it today, you know, the old left becomes the new left. So the old left in America is the kind of party left. It's centralized. And the new left, which consists largely of, you know, the term red diaper baby that we use in the US.
00:23:46.380Red diaper baby means sort of a child of the party world. And so like my father, for example, is a red diaper baby. And yeah, and the new left basically kind of takes kind of the value system of 1930s communism, and it becomes a decentralized thing. There's no longer a party. You know, it's now this sort of movement that that sweeps through society.
00:24:09.860But if you look at the connections between what people who were communists in the 1930s, and everyone cool in the 1930s was communist, almost exclusively. And it was just an amazing group of people. I mean, they were brilliant. They were like, you know, when I try to explain 30s communism to people today, I'm like, you know, okay, maybe you went to gifted school, maybe you're a little smart, you're watching, you know, a very intellectual podcast, probably, you know, you've got a little bit up top.
00:24:37.600Imagine all the gifted kids in the world decided to form a party to take over the world. That was American communism, an amazing, amazing experience. And what this experience sort of, you know, devolves into is, you know,
00:24:52.220first of all, it becomes like progressivism, and people sort of forget where progressivism comes from. There's a sort of history of American anti-communism, which sort of takes on these kind of nationalist overtones and thinks of it as like this, you know, sort of infection stemming from Moscow. I'm like, how'd it get to Moscow?
00:25:11.660Yeah. How'd it get to Moscow? You know, you know, in, in, of course, because, of course, in Russian intellectual history, you have the spectrum of easternizers versus westernizers. So you on the one hand, you have Lenin, Nechev, you know, Kropotkin, people like that. And on the other hand, you have Dostoyevsky, Pobrinovsev. Do you know Pobrinovsev? You do.
00:25:34.000I know the dichotomy that you're talking about. Yes. Yes. I'm just aware that Francis hasn't asked a question about how that works. No, no. You can hear me. No, no. I'm really, well, I'm really, first of all, it's because I'm really enjoying you talk about it. And I'm really enjoying the way that you analyze what has happened. And it's through a very different lens. I guess my question to you, Curtis, is you've identified the problems. Yes. So what is your vision?
00:26:02.660What is my vision? So my vision is essentially to see the present as sort of continuous with the past. And my vision is to kind of, in a way, break out of kind of, not even, you know, as a progressive, the 20th century revolution, but really to ask questions about the 19th century revolution and the 18th century revolution.
00:26:32.120And so, you know, for example, one of my favorite writers is, you know, named Joseph de Maistre. So de Maistre is, he was trained as an Enlightenment man. He was trained basically in the school of Voltaire. And he basically sort of, you know, criticizes the French Revolution from his somewhat safe position as a minister in Savoy.
00:26:54.120And, you know, to sort of find the French Revolution discussed in a book, you know, published in 1797 that could as well apply to the Russian Revolution to sort of, you know, even, although so much of the 20th century bloodthirstiness has vanished, which is, I think, absolutely wonderful.
00:27:14.340We're very, we're very peaceful people. And, you know, this is one of the reasons why I can imagine kind of very great political change happening in a peaceful way, whereas most people see it as sort of violent.
00:27:26.900You know, imagine sort of, you know, the fall of the Soviet Union from the perspective of a 1920s Bolshevik of like the era of like war communism.
00:27:36.020They could have never imagined that this enormous thing would disappear without a fight or that you would see sort of the Velvet Revolution in China.
00:27:44.960Yeah, because they would have been the ones that physically suppressed it with great enthusiasm.
00:27:48.540Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. And if you'd asked basically, you know, and this is why I'm sort of, you know, in a way of leading up to, you know, this answer is that most people imagine a kind of political change like this only coming, you know, at the expense of great violence.
00:28:04.600And if you'd asked, and I don't believe that's necessary or desirable, even possible, and if you'd asked basically the Bolshevik of the 1920s to look at the events of 1989 to 1991, he would have been very confused.
00:28:21.840Because what he would have seen is this, basically, the fall of the Soviet Union was brought about by a windbag and a drunk, that is Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
00:28:34.340Sometimes I think Yakovlev was, most of the ideas of Glasnost and Perestroika came from Yakovlev.
00:28:40.840These are not great individuals. These are not violent individuals.
00:28:44.720There's a crowd of a few thousand people in front of the Russian presidential palace, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:28:50.840And this old Bolshevik would be like, well, where's the Soviet youth? Where's the Komsomol?
00:28:55.960You know, what is the Komsomol doing? How many people are in the Komsomol?
00:28:58.940And you'd be like, well, there's about 100,000 people in the Komsomol.
00:29:01.600And where are they? Why are they not fighting for Soviet power?
00:29:05.460It's like, well, they mainly joined the Komsomol to get jobs.
00:29:08.280You know, and so sort of all of the energy and power and people who are like progressives today don't really realize where this came from.
00:29:17.220And so the ability for these kind of, you know, intense revolutions to kind of collapse completely in a way and to sort of lose their force, you know, is fairly considerable.
00:29:29.600And so, you know, to answer your question very directly, I'm a monarchist.
00:29:35.000I used to say I was a royalist to, you know, distinguish myself from the people here who believe in costumes and so on.
00:29:42.940You know, what we have is this in this country, what you have in this country is this kind of costume monarchy, you know, which is purely symbolic in nature.
00:29:53.080And, you know, one of the questions I ask is very simply, what would Elizabeth I have thought of Elizabeth II?
00:30:00.660And, you know, and that's a like, once you put yourself in that framework, you know, the answer is obvious.
00:30:09.800You know, so when I say I'm a monarchist, I'm a believer in essentially absolute, though accountable monarchy, which strikes everyone as very, very strange.
00:30:39.580You know, one of the difficulties is that you have to go to sort of very foreign countries to look for an equivalent at the sovereign level.
00:30:47.820So, you know, if you're looking at 20th century political leaders who are essentially monarchs who I admire greatly, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, who is in a way an Englishman, he's a sort of Englishman, is because Singapore is the strange half Asian thing.
00:31:05.020You know, you know, did an amazing job with that country.
00:31:08.220Deng Xiaoping, you know, is arguably the greatest leader of the 20th century.
00:31:13.100If you look at kind of the transformation of China under his leadership, he takes this absolute crap power that's created by Mao, who was a nut, an absolute nut.
00:31:26.120And then, you know, the power of Mao, he's an absolute nut.
00:31:30.260And like Stalin, you know, the revolution needs its own.
00:31:33.660He needs to destroy kind of all the people who brought him to power so that he can rule alone.
00:31:39.720And Mao is this, you know, crazed Chinese emperor.
00:31:43.160And somehow through the turmoil of Chinese politics, he's replaced by this intensely practical person, Deng Xiaoping, who sort of turns this deranged third world country into, you know, as I look around this room, think about all the things in this room that were made in a monarchy.
00:32:04.680You know, those cameras made in a monarchy.
00:33:40.680And so, you know, when you look at, and this is one of the points about 20th century, you know, monarchies, essentially, is that when you look at 20th century monarchies, or as we like to say, dictatorships.
00:33:54.260And you're seeing, essentially, you see all of these kind of atrocities.
00:34:00.780And basically, one of the things that, you know, Lord Acton, you know, a great Englishman, said that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
00:34:10.920I used to be a kind of a classical liberal, even a libertarian.
00:34:13.620And I started to realize at a certain point why, you know, you have, you know, these sort of new monarchies, these fascisms in the 20th century, Hitler being the worst, probably, you know, the best of the 20th century fascist leaders is Salazar of Portugal.
00:34:31.800And, you know, Salazar is a very, you know, like a very mild fascist.
00:34:38.060He still has, you know, and, you know, if you're even in Mussolini's, you know, Italy before the war, if you're, you know, an anti-fascist in Mussolini's Italy, you get, like, sent to an island, you know, and it's not Auschwitz, right?
00:34:53.080And so, you know, the, like, sense of, you know, the reason, you know, when you say, like, what about the Uyghurs, you know, for example, you're basically looking at a regime which is insecure at a certain level.
00:35:50.320You know, there's a play by Ben Johnson, Isle of Dogs, which is lost because it lampooned sort of powerful figures.
00:35:56.620And yet, also, when we look at these, you know, at Elizabeth's England, we're not looking at a world like Stalin's Russia, you know, where anyone could get in trouble for any reason, often completely spurious.
00:36:08.940Because we're not looking at a world like, you know, I mean, there were plenty of Catholics in, you know, she didn't send Catholics to the Gulag.
00:36:17.800And so, you know, this is sort of, you know, she didn't send Catholics to the death camps.
00:36:22.360But if they tried to plot to assassinate her, yeah, that was going to be a problem.
00:36:27.620And so, you know, it's sort of, you know, tempered by the kind of level of insecurity there.
00:36:36.380And that level of insecurity also, you know, we're very fortunate to live in a relatively, you know, nonviolent age.
00:36:44.220And so when you look, for example, at the Uyghurs, you know, there, of course, there are Central Asian people and, like many people around the turn of the century, kind of a lot of Saudi money and sort of went in.
00:36:58.860And they developed a terrorist movement there, which I think what really kicked that off was this, a bunch of Uyghurs went to, I forget what city, on a train station and, like, started massacring people with knives.
00:37:12.600And the response of the Chinese government is not, you know, certainly it's not, I mean, this is, of course, post-eng, you know, it's not a response that, you know, sort of matches what I would do.
00:37:27.640At the same time, basically, there's another country which has a land border with China, which is Afghanistan.
00:37:34.940And, you know, and when you look at basically the U.S. approach to Afghanistan and you're like, okay, would I rather be a Uyghur in, you know, Xinjiang or would I rather be live in Afghanistan for 20 years of war and watch this being done the American way,
00:37:58.980in which we spend $2 trillion and countless lives of ours and theirs to basically take Afghanistan from the Taliban and give it to the Taliban.
00:38:12.240Hold on, but that isn't the comparison we're talking about.
00:38:14.340We're talking about a Chinese-style authoritarian system versus the system we have in the West, right?
00:38:21.680But the system we have in the West is a system for governing Western people.
00:38:27.540And so basically when we say the reason, you know, these countries are neighbors, they're very similar cultures.
00:38:34.860And so, you know, when we're sort of comparing apples to apples, you know, actually it's a very apples to apples comparison to look at the Western system of governing, you know, Afghanistan and the Chinese system of governing what is after all really a Chinese colony of Xinjiang.
00:38:55.660I just don't want to get sidetracked into that.
00:39:06.360And the word authoritarian is a very interesting word because when you get into kind of basic, you know, sort of, again, pre-Enlightenment political science, you're reading like Aristotle and so forth.
00:39:19.320You know, there really isn't anything in political science that Aristotle didn't understand.
00:39:23.340And, you know, one of my, you know, basic beliefs or core beliefs, you know, we sort of have this belief in like limited government.
00:39:31.620For example, today, every government is unlimited.
00:39:35.340Every, you know, every sovereignty is absolute.
00:39:40.660And when you say, you know, there's, you know, a limited government, I just, you know, spoke, you know, okay, in America, we have freedom of speech in theory.
00:40:41.940And so from the perspective of most people who see this like woke authoritarianism or whatever, they kind of identify it as a somewhat new thing.
00:40:52.200Certainly, I remember kind of the freedom speech on the Internet in the 1990s when you felt that anyone can say anything for any reason and no one cared.
00:41:01.120And we've come to a very different place from that.
00:41:05.240And so understanding the causes of that and saying, are the causes of that deeper than this kind of, you know, superficial question of how do we get past wokeness?
00:41:15.920How do we roll the clock back to the 90s?
00:41:18.320And, you know, you're not going to roll back the clock to 90s.
00:41:22.560And I think it's partly a technological issue, right?
00:41:25.600What the Internet did is it changed the way we communicate.
00:41:29.000And so the authoritarianism that you see now, it's a response to the fact that communication has become much more powerful than it ever has been.
00:41:46.020So, you know, one of the things, and you basically, you know, people who lose historical conflicts get written out of history very easily.
00:41:57.760And so you don't understand the age of what we call cancel culture.
00:42:03.180And so, you know, for example, just as, you know, I'll give you two examples.
00:42:09.420One is a woman named Bella Dodd, completely forgotten by history.
00:42:14.480She was a member of the U.S. Politburo of the CPUSA.
00:42:18.000She was a schoolteacher in New York's, communist schoolteacher in New York City, very like my grandmother, a little more successful in the party.
00:42:24.660She becomes a member of the Politburo.
00:42:26.820She's a member of the faction of Earl Browder, who was basically pushing the popular front line of unity between liberals and communists.
00:42:34.120You know, they win the war, World War II ends, and there's a split between the liberals and communists, sort of like the Sino-Soviet split, you know, in some ways.
00:42:42.640And, you know, sort of competing factions of progressivism.
00:42:47.680And as a result, Stalin, who controls the American Communist Party, purges its leadership.
00:42:52.860Browder is purged and Bella Dodd has to be purged.
00:42:55.720And the way in which they purge Bella Dodd is very interesting.
00:42:58.520You can read it in her autobiography, School of Darkness.
00:43:01.800They basically accuse her of being unfair to her Puerto Rican building superintendent.
00:43:07.040In fact, they accuse her of what was not at the time called racial chauvinism, but actually racism.
00:43:21.980If you wanted to be tried in a kangaroo court for racism in the West in the 1940s, you had to be on the Politburo of the Communist Party.
00:43:30.640Right. You know, fast forward about 30 years, there's a book that was republished recently called The Romance of American Communism by a lady named Vivian Gornick, also a Russian Jewish communist of Russian Jewish, you know, extraction.
00:43:44.880Gornick grew up in the party in the 50s, you know, and in the 70s, she falls out of pure communism.
00:43:54.280This is not an anti-leftist book, which is one of the things that makes it so valuable.
00:43:58.480It was recently republished by NYRB, so you can get your hands on the copy easily.
00:44:03.820And she's talking about cancel culture in the 70s and, you know, in the 60s, really.
00:44:09.560And, you know, one of the things these gifted kids, these brilliant people did in the party was they constantly canceled each other long before.
00:44:17.900And Gornick would go in this amazing oral history and she would speak to someone and they would be like, oh, the cancellation, you know, person A, oh, the cancellation was the worst.
00:44:36.180And then they talked to person B and person B would be, oh, my God, it was so bad.
00:44:40.340And the worst of them was person A, you know.
00:44:43.220So and, you know, this so it sort of became this kind of circular firing squad, you know, which wasn't done with bullets in the same way as Stalin, but was done, you know, by cancellation.
00:44:55.720So just to sort of broaden this out a little bit.
00:44:59.120Well, that's why I always say to people the late Soviet Union wasn't Stalinism, but it was exactly exactly that, which is why what's happening now.
00:45:34.020And Browder is making a secret speech to the party, to the American Politburo in the mid 30s.
00:45:41.840And he's recounting the achievements of the comrades.
00:45:46.000And he's like, one of the things that we've done, of course, you know, you know, they sort of took over Hollywood screenwriting and made it almost a union shop of party writers.
00:45:54.700But one of the things he says is we have people in all the major publishers and anti-communist books can no longer be published.
00:46:01.260And when I read material from the 30s and 40s, and I've read quite a bit of it, you know, of course, you've probably heard the story of like Animal Farm couldn't be published.
00:46:38.440But, you know, when you look at American publishing in the 20s, it goes all the way from, you know, all this communist stuff, you know, the new masses.
00:46:46.460Go to Marxist.org and read the archive of the new masses.
00:46:49.980It's like the New Yorker for communists in 1930, which is to say the New Yorker and and joking.
00:46:57.000And and you'll just see the mind of the present in the past.
00:47:01.040If you're looking for people who have the same worldview as the average American college student in 2023, and you're looking for those people in 1923, 1923.
00:47:13.020There are overwhelmingly social elites.
00:47:15.080You'll find them in places like Greenwich Village.
00:47:17.000I always advise people to watch the film Reds, which is a very, you know, with Warren Beatty as John Reed, young John Reed, only American buried in the wall of the Kremlin.
00:47:24.880And you basically see these people with these insanely modern attitudes.
00:47:29.000They live like people in San Francisco.
00:47:31.260Their love lives are like the love lives of people in San Francisco.
00:47:34.700These are completely modern people and they're a very small minority and they basically set out to take power.
00:47:41.860So here's a couple of examples that are sort of a little outside of the normal space of like anti-wokeness.
00:47:47.920So basically, you know, this thing with the publishers is done and this sort of kind of defines what it means to be like mainstream media.
00:47:56.540What it means to be mainstream publishing is you kind of went through this filtration, this coordination.
00:48:02.540It was a very different process in Nazi Germany, but this ideological coordination, which was centralized in Nazi Germany, except for the CPUSA, which is long gone, it was decentralized in this country.
00:48:15.320Wokeness is decentralized, but it appears it achieves the same, you know, purpose as I'm going to butcher the German Gleichschaltung, you know,
00:48:24.620which is basically turning everything, the sort of turning everything Nazi that, you know, happened in the Third Reich.
00:48:32.760You know, my favorite example of this is a wonderful writer, Victor Klemperer.
00:57:51.600And in the principle of the second half of the 20th century, the way that science is funded is sort of, you know, consistent with this kind of government by experts principle.
00:58:03.680Which, and the thing about an oligarchy is it almost looks like it's no government at all.
00:58:07.180It's just like, no, there's no power here.
00:58:12.100You know, but when you look more closely at human, at power, there's always human beings involved.
00:58:17.980And so the result of SARS-1 is that virology becomes important and specifically bat coronaviruses become important.
00:58:25.560And the way science, having like dropped out of my PhD program, but, you know, some people think of me as a computer scientist.
00:58:31.720The way science works is you get funding for things that are important and things that matter.
00:58:36.320And so within virology, basically, people realized that they could get quite a bit of grants by referring to this very real problem of bat coronaviruses.
00:58:46.440And they basically said, well, you know, this is a serious problem.
00:58:50.300We deserve a number of pounds to study it.
00:58:54.020And so they're like, what if this happened again?
01:07:37.180I'm going to go back to something that I said earlier about technology.
01:07:41.820And I think the thing that we're not talking about when we talk about technology is, you know, technology's destruction of labor demand and the way it makes, you know, absolutely ruthlessly acts to make human beings useless.
01:08:01.320And I think one of the reasons why the future needs a kind of state power.
01:08:10.140I describe myself as a recovering libertarian.
01:08:13.200I'll always be a libertarian in a way.
01:08:14.720And, you know, one of the things that has happened to these societies is that, you know, you have a society, go to the tower blocks, you know, 10 miles from here.
01:08:24.700You have these buildings full of absolutely useless people.
01:08:28.300And they're just decaying in the most horrific way.
01:08:31.340And, you know, this and this is a very long train of history that starts with, you know, Goldsmith's deserted village, you know, like all the labor demand for like the local blacksmith disappears.
01:08:42.800And then, you know, his grandchildren have this horrific Dickensian existence where they're used as human robots.
01:08:49.240And now we don't even need human robots anymore because we have robots.
01:08:52.680And then suddenly along come these large language models and they start working, killing the demand for basically what David Graber called bullshit jobs.
01:09:01.800Suddenly, like paper pushing is under attack.
01:09:04.980And you're like, whoa, I thought I could have a career pushing papers.
01:09:09.220And so, you know, we have, you know, the system of technology is, you know, economics refer, economists refer to, you know, technology as basically productivity.
01:09:17.560And you're just like increasing productivity is good and more productivity is better and more stuff is better than less stuff.
01:09:24.720And we come into this economy where there's actually demand for like 10 guys who write, you know, 10, you know, men and women who write the large language models.
01:09:35.180And then the large language models start writing themselves.
01:09:38.740And that's the real AI disaster is that you don't need people anymore.
01:09:44.320It's not that they'll revolt against people in some sort of golem myth.
01:09:47.940It's that you don't need people anymore.
01:09:50.280And so, you know, the only way to prevent that is a sort of, you know, regime which says, OK.
01:09:59.740We better wrap up because there's a protest against you.
01:10:02.600You know, when you're basically saying, you know, the purpose of government is the health of the people, not the luxury of the people, not the wealth of the people, but the health of the people.
01:10:15.740You go back to thinkers like John Ruskin and Carlisle who are like, wait a second, you know, power needs to step in and power needs to basically regulate the economy to make people needed.
01:10:28.480And that's a very hard and deep question.