TRIGGERnometry - July 23, 2023


The Case Against Democracy - Curtis Yarvin

Topics
American communism cancel culture gain of function research marketplace of ideas corruption
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Curtis Yarvin
Mentioned
Hitler Elizabeth I. Well Stalin Earl Browder Shakespeare Aristotle George Floyd Vivian Gornick Ernst Jünger Bella Dodd Bolshevik Krzysztof Kozlowski Thomas Carlyle Deng Xiaoping Human Smoke John Reed Pobrinovsev Roosevelt Mussolini Rothbard and 35 more
Olympian Sharron Davies - The Fight for Women’s Sport The Eye-Opening Truth About Western Civilisation - Marc Sidwell

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 11 minutes

Words per minute

171.86

Word count

12,207

Sentence count

838

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

20

sentences flagged

Hate speech

36

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of Trigonometry, Francis Foster and Constantine Kishin are joined by Curtis Yavin, an intellectual godfather of the so-called "New Right" movement. They talk about how the New Right came about, why it exists, and what it means to be a New Rightist.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The 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.
00:00:12.180 Even if these ideas actually harm these victims, which I would argue, you know, they do, they feel good.
00:00:19.540 And 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.
00:00:33.160 The mechanism that basically creates that coordination of ideology is promotion rather than suppression.
00:00:41.400 It's attraction rather than repulsion.
00:00:43.840 What about these unbiased, you know, experts?
00:00:46.640 But the thing is, you give power to the experts and power corrupts them.
00:00:51.660 And suddenly they become, they develop these conflicts of interest.
00:00:55.080 They become sort of corrupted.
00:00:57.260 And basically, when you give power to the marketplace of ideas, the marketplace of ideas corrupts itself.
00:01:03.920 And you get basically a world of absolutely terrible ideas.
00:01:16.640 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.
00:01:20.160 I'm Francis Foster.
00:01:21.380 I'm Constantine Kishin.
00:01:22.500 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:01:27.160 Our brilliant guest today has gone from an anonymous blogger to one of the intellectual godfathers of the so-called new right.
00:01:33.340 Curtis Yavin, welcome to Trigonometry.
00:01:34.880 Thank you so much.
00:01:35.840 And I'm enjoying being here and being in the UK.
00:01:38.300 Well, it's great to have you on the show.
00:01:39.620 So we'll get into whether new right is the right term.
00:01:44.040 But before we do that and all the rest of it, tell us who are you?
00:01:47.200 How are you, where you are?
00:01:47.860 What's been the journey that brings you to be sitting here?
00:01:50.220 Well, I'm an American.
00:01:51.980 And here I am.
00:01:54.120 And I just turned 50 years old.
00:01:55.820 And it's been a rather strange and interesting journey.
00:02:00.360 I actually grew up as what we call a foreign service brat.
00:02:04.900 So I grew up as a child of the American Foreign Service, in case you don't know the Foreign Service.
00:02:12.740 I believe you have one of your own.
00:02:14.360 We go around the world and rule it, essentially.
00:02:18.320 And, you know, perhaps one of my...
00:02:19.600 We used to do that here.
00:02:20.780 Yeah, well, you know, you still help us.
00:02:23.240 You're so useful, you know, for this and that.
00:02:26.100 And, 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.
00:02:38.900 They have very, very fine wine there.
00:02:41.060 And I was reading his unclassified cables back to America.
00:02:47.980 And he used to have me proofread them.
00:02:50.020 And 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.
00:03:00.660 And I sort of realized that actually the purpose of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Portugal is not to relate between equals.
00:03:09.540 You 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.
00:03:18.540 But also if America is attacked by Canada or Mexico, for example, Portugal will help defend us.
00:03:25.500 And I'm like, you know, actually, why are there 50 Americans, some of the best Americans in the world in Portugal?
00:03:34.100 I mean, wonderful people in the Foreign Service.
00:03:36.060 I've only praised for them.
00:03:36.960 But their goal, their mission is clearly to, in fact, supervise the government of Portugal.
00:03:42.780 And 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.
00:03:59.260 And, you know, Thucydides would have recognized it as just as unequal as the Delian League.
00:04:06.980 And that sort of sparked, I mean, you know, I stored that away, you know, for a number of years.
00:04:13.240 I'm actually a retired computer programmer, computer scientist, some people might even say, although.
00:04:17.820 And after 2000, I started working on a computer science research project.
00:04:26.860 And, you know, research is hard.
00:04:28.600 You read a lot of books.
00:04:30.400 And, you know, it'll pass the time when your brain isn't on the computer science.
00:04:34.840 And I started to sort of really through the reading of libertarians such as Mises and Rothbard and Rothbard student Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
00:04:43.720 I don't know if you know the name.
00:04:44.920 He wrote this book, Democracy, The God That Failed.
00:04:49.100 And, 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.
00:05:05.020 You know, we have this picture of our ancestors, but we've seldom reversed the question.
00:05:10.020 You know, we know what we think of Elizabeth I.
00:05:12.680 Well, what would Elizabeth I think of us?
00:05:14.620 You know, we're sitting here right next to Westminster Abbey.
00:05:17.520 You know, what would she think?
00:05:19.420 What would she say if she could see Britain today?
00:05:22.820 And 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.
00:05:35.520 And 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.
00:05:51.320 You 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.
00:05:58.680 And, you know, when you look at our cell phones, our computers, you know, these things are sort of clearly superior.
00:06:04.620 But are we as superior as human beings?
00:06:07.980 Are our values and perspectives superior?
00:06:11.580 This seems to me to be a subject well worthy of debate.
00:06:15.580 And especially what started to concern me is that there's a sort of almost a sort of provincialism to the present.
00:06:22.640 Because 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.
00:06:35.120 And, 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?
00:06:47.620 And 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.
00:06:58.500 And 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.
00:07:12.440 And 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.
00:07:21.460 And, 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.
00:07:33.460 It's called the People's Cafe, Coffee with the People.
00:07:36.160 It was covered with 60s, you know, propaganda from that time.
00:07:40.400 And I was thinking about, you know, this great movie, The Matrix.
00:07:42.960 And 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.
00:08:02.400 And to sort of take that and flip it around and turn it into a revolt against the present seemed like a very subversive act.
00:08:11.580 And so I started to use this metaphor from The Matrix of the red pill.
00:08:17.600 And 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.
00:08:26.800 It was wrested for me immediately in two directions at the same time in my very abstruse content.
00:08:32.780 They broke open the pill.
00:08:33.960 They dumped out my, you know, very abstruse, you know, criticisms of Carlyle and whatever.
00:08:39.600 And 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.
00:08:50.440 And 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.
00:09:00.000 But, you know, the term is still used.
00:09:03.840 And so it's sort of, you know, I obviously, I'm not going to take credit for everything that's described as red-pilled.
00:09:10.720 It became more mainstream than either of those two eventually.
00:09:13.640 Yes, 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,
00:09:26.720 a 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.
00:09:41.880 And 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.
00:09:52.840 And 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,
00:10:11.880 the 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,
00:10:30.880 who have this kind of purely negative nihilistic vision, but there actually, I think, has to be something more than pure nihilism.
00:10:40.900 You know, when you're in an orthodoxy, nihilism is sort of very attractive.
00:10:45.260 And 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,
00:10:57.220 which 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,
00:11:07.540 I 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.
00:11:15.580 And 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.
00:11:24.820 How 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?
00:11:32.880 And the teacher says to them, well, it's very simple. The opposite of this is being a Nazi. 0.51
00:11:38.460 And 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.
00:11:47.140 Okay. 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.
00:12:07.080 I 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.
00:12:22.320 And the past is much more enormous.
00:12:24.480 Let'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?
00:12:31.900 So, you know, I would say, for example, that, you know, to take Shakespeare seriously is much more radical than being a Nazi. 0.60
00:12:40.500 And 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.
00:12:52.780 And so, for example, I, you know, it's a digression, but I happen to be like, like many very intellectual people.
00:12:59.060 I happen to be an Oxfordian. I believe that Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford.
00:13:02.740 And 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.
00:13:22.840 You'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?
00:13:46.620 There'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.
00:14:02.020 You know, the idea that it could become a serious thing that would result in serious consequences for people was unthinkable to these German aristocrats.
00:14:10.900 And 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.
00:14:28.780 And 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.
00:14:44.080 And 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.
00:14:54.060 My own grandparents in America were Stalinists. They were, you know, Jewish communists of Russian origin, I think, like some of your ancestors. 0.53
00:15:02.020 In 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. 0.91
00:15:15.600 Because 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—
00:15:24.040 I was just in Utah, but they didn't tell me that.
00:15:26.020 You were a Gentile in Utah. 1.00
00:15:27.980 Interesting.
00:15:28.680 And, you know, regardless of your ethnic origin, you're a Gentile because it means you're not a Mormon. 0.97
00:15:33.720 So, you're not a Mormon. You could be a Hindu. You could be a Zoroastrian. 0.87
00:15:37.920 And so, you know, to say what do Gentiles think, what is Gentile thinking, is, you know, fundamentally a parochial and false categorization.
00:15:49.520 So, 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.
00:15:58.280 And 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.
00:16:15.040 You 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.
00:16:23.080 They were being taught in American universities in the 70s. They were actually, you know, go back solidly to the 30s.
00:16:29.180 And, 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.
00:16:40.200 And 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.
00:16:57.900 But 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.
00:17:12.040 And, 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.
00:17:27.940 So but I'm not Hitler. But let's go, you know, 10 percent toward Hitler. I'm a moderate. I'm a moderate. 0.80
00:17:32.200 You know, you know, as they say, the best way to fight, you know, radical racist terrorism is to support moderate racists.
00:17:39.800 And 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.
00:17:54.760 And 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.
00:18:07.000 But, 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. 0.82
00:18:17.040 And 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.
00:18:26.020 And 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.
00:18:37.740 And 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.
00:18:47.120 You end up in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Well, you know, the Holocaust is one of the best attested facts, you know, in history.
00:18:56.020 But 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. 0.56
00:19:06.200 Yeah. 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. 0.72
00:19:26.520 We 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. 0.86
00:19:50.020 Oh, 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.
00:20:02.180 Yeah.
00:20:02.420 He'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. 0.97
00:20:11.660 Yes, 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.
00:20:34.740 Right.
00:20:35.020 And 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?
00:21:03.220 And so, you know, this is sort of tremendous catastrophe, actually. You know, the book that I recommend, you know, the writer Nicholson Baker?
00:21:09.480 No.
00:21:10.020 Amazing 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.
00:21:30.180 And, 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.
00:21:46.060 And 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.
00:22:01.660 And, 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.
00:22:22.400 I feel like I have to apologize to your forebears for...
00:22:26.860 You're not responsible for the sins of your ancestors, as I keep trying to make the point on other issues.
00:22:31.220 There you go. There you go. I don't believe I'm responsible, but, you know, it provides a certain...
00:22:36.060 I'll take the reparations.
00:22:37.120 It 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.
00:22:56.520 And 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.
00:23:18.760 And 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.
00:23:46.380 Red 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.
00:24:09.860 But 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.
00:24:37.600 Imagine 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,
00:24:52.220 first 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?
00:25:11.660 Yeah. 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.
00:25:34.000 I 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?
00:26:02.660 What 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.
00:26:32.120 And 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.
00:26:54.120 And, 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.
00:27:14.340 We'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.
00:27:26.900 You 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.
00:27:36.020 They 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.
00:27:44.960 Yeah, because they would have been the ones that physically suppressed it with great enthusiasm.
00:27:48.540 Yeah, 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.
00:28:04.600 And 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.
00:28:21.840 Because 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.
00:28:34.340 Sometimes I think Yakovlev was, most of the ideas of Glasnost and Perestroika came from Yakovlev.
00:28:40.840 These are not great individuals. These are not violent individuals.
00:28:44.720 There's a crowd of a few thousand people in front of the Russian presidential palace, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:28:50.840 And this old Bolshevik would be like, well, where's the Soviet youth? Where's the Komsomol? 0.87
00:28:55.960 You know, what is the Komsomol doing? How many people are in the Komsomol?
00:28:58.940 And you'd be like, well, there's about 100,000 people in the Komsomol.
00:29:01.600 And where are they? Why are they not fighting for Soviet power?
00:29:05.460 It's like, well, they mainly joined the Komsomol to get jobs.
00:29:08.280 You 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.
00:29:17.220 And 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.
00:29:29.600 And so, you know, to answer your question very directly, I'm a monarchist.
00:29:35.000 I used to say I was a royalist to, you know, distinguish myself from the people here who believe in costumes and so on.
00:29:42.940 You 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.
00:29:53.080 And, you know, one of the questions I ask is very simply, what would Elizabeth I have thought of Elizabeth II?
00:30:00.660 And, you know, and that's a like, once you put yourself in that framework, you know, the answer is obvious.
00:30:09.800 You 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.
00:30:19.380 I wouldn't absolutely, sorry, Fran.
00:30:20.840 So, yeah, I was going to say, so let's look at the globe.
00:30:24.200 So who would be your idea of an effective absolute monarchy?
00:30:31.200 Are we talking about something like Saudi Arabia?
00:30:33.480 Are we talking about the UAE, the crown prince?
00:30:36.380 You know, these are very foreign. 0.98
00:30:39.580 You 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.
00:30:47.820 So, 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.
00:31:05.020 You know, you know, did an amazing job with that country.
00:31:08.220 Deng Xiaoping, you know, is arguably the greatest leader of the 20th century. 0.98
00:31:13.100 If 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. 0.97
00:31:26.120 And then, you know, the power of Mao, he's an absolute nut. 0.98
00:31:30.260 And like Stalin, you know, the revolution needs its own. 0.85
00:31:33.660 He needs to destroy kind of all the people who brought him to power so that he can rule alone. 0.80
00:31:39.720 And Mao is this, you know, crazed Chinese emperor. 0.90
00:31:43.160 And 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. 0.59
00:32:04.680 You know, those cameras made in a monarchy.
00:32:09.300 Can you make that in Britain?
00:32:10.800 No.
00:32:11.260 You could.
00:32:11.800 You could.
00:32:12.540 It would be a lot worse and it would cost a lot more.
00:32:16.940 And this must remind you at a certain level, again, of the late Soviet Union.
00:32:20.720 There's a wonderful, do you know the director, Krzysztof Kozlowski?
00:32:24.840 I don't know.
00:32:25.320 He did the three colors.
00:32:27.180 You know, Poland, you know, communist Poland had this great film tradition, right?
00:32:31.440 Right. And Kozlowski was trained under the, you know, the communist system.
00:32:36.040 He later, you know, he went to France.
00:32:38.920 He's one of the great directors of our time, but he did this film Blind Chance.
00:32:43.840 And in Blind Chance, there's a lovely scene where a Polish communist bureaucrat has gone to Paris.
00:32:49.820 You know, these visits to the West were like jealously guarded.
00:32:53.080 And one of the things he did when he visited the West was, of course, to shop.
00:32:56.900 And he's brought back from Japan a solar calculator.
00:33:00.200 And there's a scene of these, you know, it's like the 80s.
00:33:03.400 And there's a scene of these 80s communist apparatchiks just looking at this solar calculator and thinking, we can't do that.
00:33:10.580 And so, you know, when you look at, you know, China, for example, I'm from California.
00:33:15.480 We're trying to build high-speed rail there.
00:33:18.060 You know, if you look at a map of the Chinese, you know, subway system, the high-speed rail system, it's like a cancer sprouting. 0.93
00:33:24.680 You know, in California, they've been trying to build a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
00:33:33.520 But hang on a second, Curtis.
00:33:34.740 So you're talking about innovation here.
00:33:36.800 But what about the Uyghurs? 1.00
00:33:38.260 What about the Uyghurs? 1.00
00:33:39.100 What about the Uyghurs? 1.00
00:33:40.680 And 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.
00:33:54.260 And you're seeing, essentially, you see all of these kind of atrocities.
00:34:00.780 And basically, one of the things that, you know, Lord Acton, you know, a great Englishman, said that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
00:34:09.920 And I used to believe that.
00:34:10.920 I used to be a kind of a classical liberal, even a libertarian.
00:34:13.620 And 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.
00:34:31.800 And, you know, Salazar is a very, you know, like a very mild fascist.
00:34:36.740 But he still has a secret police.
00:34:38.060 He 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?
00:34:53.080 And 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. 0.79
00:35:11.000 And it's basically...
00:35:12.740 But are all regimes insecure at a certain level, Curtis?
00:35:15.680 All regimes are insecure at a certain level.
00:35:19.320 And basically, when you look at, you know, say, you know, Elizabeth I, for example.
00:35:24.820 So Elizabeth I is under a constant threat of being assassinated by Catholics. 1.00
00:35:29.680 There are many, you know, Jesuitical plots against her.
00:35:33.900 And, you know, the consequence of this is that, you know, to be a Catholic in Elizabeth's Britain is no easy time.
00:35:41.120 Actually, you know, there are many features of Elizabethan England that make us think of dictatorships today.
00:35:48.480 There's censorship of the press.
00:35:50.320 You know, there's a play by Ben Johnson, Isle of Dogs, which is lost because it lampooned sort of powerful figures.
00:35:56.620 And 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.
00:36:08.940 Because 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.
00:36:17.800 And so, you know, this is sort of, you know, she didn't send Catholics to the death camps.
00:36:22.360 But if they tried to plot to assassinate her, yeah, that was going to be a problem.
00:36:27.620 And so, you know, it's sort of, you know, tempered by the kind of level of insecurity there.
00:36:36.380 And that level of insecurity also, you know, we're very fortunate to live in a relatively, you know, nonviolent age.
00:36:44.220 And 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.
00:36:58.860 And 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.
00:37:12.600 And 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.
00:37:27.640 At the same time, basically, there's another country which has a land border with China, which is Afghanistan.
00:37:34.940 And, 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,
00:37:58.980 in 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. 0.82
00:38:12.240 Hold on, but that isn't the comparison we're talking about.
00:38:14.340 We're talking about a Chinese-style authoritarian system versus the system we have in the West, right?
00:38:21.680 But the system we have in the West is a system for governing Western people.
00:38:27.540 And so basically when we say the reason, you know, these countries are neighbors, they're very similar cultures.
00:38:34.860 And 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.
00:38:55.660 I just don't want to get sidetracked into that.
00:38:57.520 Let's stick with the West, right?
00:38:58.960 Let's stick with the West. 0.61
00:39:00.000 Let's stick with the West. 0.61
00:39:00.820 And so, you know, let's sort of take this.
00:39:03.520 You use the word authoritarian.
00:39:06.360 And 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.
00:39:19.320 You know, there really isn't anything in political science that Aristotle didn't understand.
00:39:23.340 And, you know, one of my, you know, basic beliefs or core beliefs, you know, we sort of have this belief in like limited government.
00:39:31.620 For example, today, every government is unlimited.
00:39:35.340 Every, you know, every sovereignty is absolute.
00:39:39.500 Sovereignty is conserved.
00:39:40.660 And 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.
00:39:49.440 That's a British tradition.
00:39:50.980 You know, I just spoke with someone this morning who is being investigated by the police.
00:39:55.740 He's facing 14 years in prison for satirical tweets.
00:39:58.720 And, you know, of course, this is, you know, people being prosecuted for the tweets.
00:40:03.360 Is that a very common thing here?
00:40:04.660 Because I just want to, I understand what you're saying.
00:40:07.000 And these are all good points that we've covered on the show plenty.
00:40:09.620 So the fact that Western governments are violating some of arguably the sacred principles of their own societies is a problem.
00:40:19.200 And I agree with you.
00:40:19.860 But I want to make a different, no, it's a different point.
00:40:21.500 But we mustn't compare that to what we actually mean when we say the word authoritarianism.
00:40:24.620 I think, yes, and I think there's actually, there's a very important point there.
00:40:29.400 And, you know, the sort of the difference, you know, as I understand it, you'd describe yourself as a classical liberal.
00:40:35.260 And so you see these kind of principles.
00:40:37.900 I don't think I ever have, but it's not too far away.
00:40:40.360 It's not too far.
00:40:41.060 It's not too far away.
00:40:41.940 And 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.
00:40:52.200 Certainly, 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.
00:41:01.120 And we've come to a very different place from that.
00:41:05.240 And 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?
00:41:15.920 How do we roll the clock back to the 90s?
00:41:18.320 And, you know, you're not going to roll back the clock to 90s.
00:41:22.560 And I think it's partly a technological issue, right?
00:41:25.600 What the Internet did is it changed the way we communicate.
00:41:29.000 And 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.
00:41:36.380 Well, it is.
00:41:37.000 It is.
00:41:37.380 It is.
00:41:37.760 But, you know, we started, we were talking about, you know, World War II earlier and, you know, cancel culture in specific.
00:41:44.700 And let me tell a couple of stories.
00:41:46.020 So, you know, one of the things, and you basically, you know, people who lose historical conflicts get written out of history very easily.
00:41:57.760 And so you don't understand the age of what we call cancel culture.
00:42:03.180 And so, you know, for example, just as, you know, I'll give you two examples.
00:42:09.420 One is a woman named Bella Dodd, completely forgotten by history.
00:42:14.480 She was a member of the U.S. Politburo of the CPUSA.
00:42:18.000 She was a schoolteacher in New York's, communist schoolteacher in New York City, very like my grandmother, a little more successful in the party.
00:42:24.660 She becomes a member of the Politburo.
00:42:26.820 She's a member of the faction of Earl Browder, who was basically pushing the popular front line of unity between liberals and communists.
00:42:34.120 You 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.
00:42:42.640 And, you know, sort of competing factions of progressivism.
00:42:47.680 And as a result, Stalin, who controls the American Communist Party, purges its leadership.
00:42:52.860 Browder is purged and Bella Dodd has to be purged. 0.59
00:42:55.720 And the way in which they purge Bella Dodd is very interesting.
00:42:58.520 You can read it in her autobiography, School of Darkness.
00:43:01.800 They basically accuse her of being unfair to her Puerto Rican building superintendent. 0.91
00:43:07.040 In fact, they accuse her of what was not at the time called racial chauvinism, but actually racism.
00:43:13.260 Of course, this is completely untrue.
00:43:15.020 And so if you wanted to be tried in a kangaroo court, and they had process within this party.
00:43:20.260 Literally, they had kangaroo courts.
00:43:21.980 If 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.
00:43:30.640 Right. 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.
00:43:44.880 Gornick grew up in the party in the 50s, you know, and in the 70s, she falls out of pure communism.
00:43:52.580 She becomes a new leftist feminist.
00:43:54.280 This is not an anti-leftist book, which is one of the things that makes it so valuable.
00:43:58.480 It was recently republished by NYRB, so you can get your hands on the copy easily.
00:44:03.820 And she's talking about cancel culture in the 70s and, you know, in the 60s, really.
00:44:09.560 And, you know, one of the things these gifted kids, these brilliant people did in the party was they constantly canceled each other long before.
00:44:17.900 And 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.
00:44:30.400 It was so terrible.
00:44:31.620 You know, you got expelled from the party and your friends would ignore you in the grocery store.
00:44:35.580 It was awful.
00:44:36.180 And then they talked to person B and person B would be, oh, my God, it was so bad.
00:44:40.340 And the worst of them was person A, you know.
00:44:43.220 So 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.
00:44:55.720 So just to sort of broaden this out a little bit.
00:44:58.680 Oh, yeah.
00:44:59.120 Well, 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.
00:45:06.700 You lose your job.
00:45:07.460 You would you're just like my grandfather.
00:45:09.760 Yeah.
00:45:09.940 Right.
00:45:10.200 So I always make this point to people in the West that this this isn't new.
00:45:15.340 And here's the parallel that you may want to think about when you're in this isn't new.
00:45:19.780 But let me tell you a couple of other stories.
00:45:22.160 So Browder, I read this somewhere.
00:45:24.520 And unfortunately, I need a better historical researcher to dig this reference back up because I can't find it now.
00:45:32.480 But it did, in fact, happen.
00:45:34.020 And Browder is making a secret speech to the party, to the American Politburo in the mid 30s.
00:45:41.840 And he's recounting the achievements of the comrades.
00:45:46.000 And 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.
00:45:54.700 But one of the things he says is we have people in all the major publishers and anti-communist books can no longer be published.
00:46:01.260 And 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.
00:46:08.400 Oh, yeah.
00:46:08.840 It goes far.
00:46:09.460 I mean, but Orwell.
00:46:09.960 This is what I always say to people, right?
00:46:11.600 Read the preface to Animal Farm.
00:46:13.500 If you want to if you want to understand what censorship actually is, read the preface.
00:46:17.860 Right.
00:46:18.120 He talks about it.
00:46:18.980 It's not somebody saying this book must be burned.
00:46:21.720 It's the fact that you can't publish anything without ever anyone ever telling you why.
00:46:26.020 That's right.
00:46:26.560 That's right.
00:46:27.000 And it goes and it goes, you know, it goes far, you know, beyond Orwell.
00:46:31.120 Orwell, you know, has is still kind of sign of kind of in sympathy with these these groups.
00:46:36.260 He doesn't get like super canceled.
00:46:38.200 Yeah.
00:46:38.440 But, 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.
00:46:46.460 Go to Marxist.org and read the archive of the new masses.
00:46:49.980 It's like the New Yorker for communists in 1930, which is to say the New Yorker and and joking.
00:46:57.000 And and you'll just see the mind of the present in the past.
00:47:01.040 If 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.
00:47:11.140 There's very few of them.
00:47:13.020 There are overwhelmingly social elites.
00:47:15.080 You'll find them in places like Greenwich Village.
00:47:17.000 I 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.
00:47:24.880 And you basically see these people with these insanely modern attitudes.
00:47:29.000 They live like people in San Francisco.
00:47:31.260 Their love lives are like the love lives of people in San Francisco.
00:47:34.700 These are completely modern people and they're a very small minority and they basically set out to take power. 0.77
00:47:41.860 So here's a couple of examples that are sort of a little outside of the normal space of like anti-wokeness.
00:47:47.920 So 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.
00:47:56.540 What it means to be mainstream publishing is you kind of went through this filtration, this coordination.
00:48:02.540 It 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.
00:48:15.320 Wokeness is decentralized, but it appears it achieves the same, you know, purpose as I'm going to butcher the German Gleichschaltung, you know, 0.99
00:48:24.620 which is basically turning everything, the sort of turning everything Nazi that, you know, happened in the Third Reich.
00:48:32.760 You know, my favorite example of this is a wonderful writer, Victor Klemperer.
00:48:36.240 Do you know the name?
00:48:37.100 He was a Jew who survived the Third Reich because he was married to an Aryan and his wife was a linguist.
00:48:47.300 So he wrote this wonderful book called Language of the Third Reich.
00:48:50.280 He wound up in East Germany, so his works were not, he was actually a member of the East German Parliament later.
00:48:56.320 And so his works, you know, were not widely known until the 90s.
00:49:00.420 And he has this one story in which he had a cat.
00:49:04.080 The cat does not survive the war.
00:49:05.360 It's a somewhat sad story.
00:49:06.520 He had a cat and he subscribed to a cat magazine.
00:49:09.640 And in 1931, his cat magazine was all about cats.
00:49:13.120 But by 1935, it was all about the German cat.
00:49:16.540 And so, you know, you've started to see the German cat everywhere.
00:49:22.000 And so here's one other story about basically how...
00:49:24.760 Curtis, can I just interrupt you just a second?
00:49:26.400 Yes.
00:49:26.680 Because the points you're making, I really agree with.
00:49:29.740 Yes.
00:49:30.080 I agree with the authoritarian element of it.
00:49:32.660 The problem I have is the monarchy.
00:49:35.980 And you were saying we need a monarchy.
00:49:37.900 Yet you have used the example in previous interviews of Google being a monarchy.
00:49:41.900 That's right.
00:49:42.220 Yet Google are one of the instruments that silences people online.
00:49:45.920 So doesn't that contradict your entire argument?
00:49:49.540 So Google, you know, I'm a Silicon Valley person.
00:49:53.060 So, you know, I'm sort of very familiar with kind of the way this thinking has evolved over time.
00:50:04.100 And, you know, where these sort of centralized social media providers came out of,
00:50:09.080 everyone who started these things had this kind of 90s light libertarian ideology of Silicon Valley
00:50:14.080 that I used to believe in.
00:50:15.760 And it used to be you could publish absolutely anything, you know, on Blogger.
00:50:20.540 And when you look at how these companies became these enforcers, it was quite unwilling.
00:50:27.820 And they basically, I mean, now, you know, they sort of, they didn't want to do this.
00:50:34.960 And they basically sort of felt themselves under the same kind of decentralized constraint
00:50:39.960 that basically gave us sort of the German cat.
00:50:43.400 And, you know, you'll notice, for example, that you have, and this is kind of one of the fundamental
00:50:50.160 conundrums of our society.
00:50:52.800 You know, I coined the term the cathedral to refer to these kind of the mainstream intellectual,
00:50:58.720 basically, newspapers and academia.
00:51:01.080 And one of the things you note is that this is nominally decentralized system with all these
00:51:05.420 separate poles.
00:51:06.520 You know, in Nazi Germany, you have Goebbels and his Ministry of Enlightenment.
00:51:09.820 And he's like, oh, you must be enlightened this way, that way, right?
00:51:12.720 You know, just to translate your point into sort of simpler language, what you're saying
00:51:17.400 basically is it's decentralized.
00:51:19.760 No one is sitting at the top going, everyone, everyone must have equity and diversity.
00:51:25.100 No one's doing that.
00:51:26.240 No one.
00:51:26.460 But everyone must have equity.
00:51:27.700 But everyone must have.
00:51:28.720 And so you have the same effect that Goebbels was trying to generate.
00:51:32.160 Yeah.
00:51:32.300 But the mechanism is totally different.
00:51:34.120 Right.
00:51:34.680 And it's a fascinating question of what this mechanism is.
00:51:38.220 Okay, cool.
00:51:38.980 So we've got about 10 minutes left.
00:51:40.740 I want to, before we move on to locals and have the conversation there, let's use the
00:51:45.580 last 10 minutes in a little bit more succinct, concrete way to talk about that mechanism.
00:51:50.140 Why is it that we're now obsessed with the German cat?
00:51:53.100 Why is it that the same ideological positions are being pushed on everybody from corporations,
00:51:59.680 the media, parliament down the road from here, the church, right?
00:52:04.260 I mean, I could, the NHS, everyone is ad hoc to a particular worldview.
00:52:09.740 And you can even believe that's a great worldview and it's exact, everyone needs equity and
00:52:13.420 diversity and whatever.
00:52:14.780 How does that happen?
00:52:16.180 How does that happen?
00:52:16.760 What is the mechanism?
00:52:17.280 There is no more important question.
00:52:19.000 Cool.
00:52:19.320 Let's take 10 minutes very specifically and talk about that.
00:52:21.880 That is the most important question of the time.
00:52:23.740 And the answer is because we're not a monarchy.
00:52:25.540 And, and, and, and, and, and, and let me, let me, let me be really, you know, specific
00:52:31.720 and clear about that because we're not, you know, Aristotle, let's go back to Aristotle.
00:52:38.360 Aristotle is like, there are three forms of government, monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy.
00:52:44.420 You have the rule of the one, the many, and the few.
00:52:48.200 These are actually forms of power rather than forms of government.
00:52:51.840 So these forms of power exist, you know, in every society, you know, you look at, you
00:52:57.540 know, the Kennedys in America, you know, there's an element of monarchy there, but overwhelmingly,
00:53:03.040 you know, you have this fellow Michael Young who wrote The Rise of the Meritocracy, a father
00:53:06.740 of Toby Young, I believe, you know, an Englishman, and we use this word meritocracy, we mean this
00:53:12.880 sort of institutional oligarchy in which decisions are made through process.
00:53:18.820 And the whole idea of the 20th century is essentially that politics has failed.
00:53:25.340 The idea of politicians running the state is horrifying to people.
00:53:30.820 It leads to Hitler. 0.93
00:53:32.040 That's what happens.
00:53:32.900 Hitler was elected, we're less democratically, as a politician, as a demagogue. 0.89
00:53:38.140 And you're basically like, you know what, if we let elected politicians run the state,
00:53:42.080 we get demagoguery, we get Hitler. 0.92
00:53:44.880 It's all true.
00:53:45.780 That's what happened.
00:53:46.540 That's what we got.
00:53:47.200 And so, you know, the response to that was sort of to use the word democracy, when you
00:53:53.420 talk about liberal democracy, civil society, you know, sort of the world of George Soros.
00:53:59.580 And, you know, I think one thing that's worth reflecting on is the way we use the word democracy
00:54:05.900 in politics.
00:54:07.160 So you might notice that the word democracy has a very positive connotation, and the word
00:54:11.740 politics has a very negative connotation, and they're synonyms.
00:54:15.200 And so when we say liberal democracy, civil society, what we really mean is that the government
00:54:23.800 should be run by professors and journalists.
00:54:26.080 And when those professors and journalists and civil servants, like my parents, are basically
00:54:32.000 told what to do by politicians, let's say the politicians can even fire them, you know,
00:54:38.080 that's horrifying.
00:54:38.840 That leads us down the road to Hitler. 0.89
00:54:40.580 And so, you know, the principle of this sort of, you know, technocratic, meritocratic government
00:54:46.380 is that the government should be ruled by experts.
00:54:49.480 And these experts, the ideas of these experts exist in a marketplace of ideas, which is not
00:54:55.640 the sort of democratic marketplace of ideas that gives us QAnon and, you know, weird anti-vaxxer
00:55:01.240 internet stuff.
00:55:02.620 You know, that's a terrible marketplace of ideas.
00:55:04.780 Everything that people say about it is true.
00:55:09.000 And, but the marketplace of ideas among informed experts.
00:55:12.800 And you're just like, how could this go wrong?
00:55:16.300 And let me give you an example that sort of has nothing to do with wokeness, nothing to
00:55:21.200 do with the German cat.
00:55:21.720 Hold on, let me just work through what you're saying so that the logic is clear.
00:55:24.960 Well, it's very easy to see how that goes wrong.
00:55:28.220 Because if you, if the idea of democracy is essentially that you can get rid of the coach,
00:55:34.080 right?
00:55:34.540 If you don't like the coach.
00:55:35.840 Well, if the coach isn't actually in charge.
00:55:38.800 Yes.
00:55:39.380 If the coach actually is in charge, the wire is leading to the election.
00:55:42.420 You can replace the coach, but the team is still going to be run the way that it's
00:55:45.520 by, by the managers, the trainers, you know, right.
00:55:48.340 And so, and, and so, you know what, you know, and this is really, this is very old thing.
00:55:52.600 This is, you know, American progressivism essentially from the early part of the century.
00:55:58.300 You know, you, going back in history, you have this sort of gilded age system in America,
00:56:02.140 very like China, very corrupt, very effective, you know, and the politicians are these, these 0.99
00:56:07.580 scoundrels, these corrupt people, very uneducated, very bribed, you know, things get done in 0.97
00:56:12.340 a messy way. 0.95
00:56:13.480 And, you know, the old American elites, you know, I mean, people like Henry Adams, for
00:56:18.220 example, really the earliest progressives, the farther you go back in progressivism, the
00:56:22.540 more I like these people.
00:56:23.880 And, and the, and they're just like, you know, this society should be ruled by the best
00:56:29.900 people in it.
00:56:30.560 And these people are manifestly not the best people.
00:56:33.060 They are not the experts.
00:56:34.180 They are not the smartest people.
00:56:35.500 But who gets to judge who the best people are, Curtis?
00:56:37.760 Well, at present, who gets to judge who the best people are, are these institutions.
00:56:42.260 Right.
00:56:42.480 And so let me basically, you know, the meritocracy essentially now it gets corrupted by, you
00:56:47.820 know, all this race stuff or whatever.
00:56:49.960 But, you know, let me give you an example of, of, of problem that we're all familiar with
00:56:56.080 and the effect in this.
00:56:57.880 And that example is COVID.
00:56:59.540 Y'all remember COVID.
00:57:01.320 And you probably had COVID.
00:57:02.820 Yeah, I'd rather not remember it.
00:57:04.200 You probably had COVID.
00:57:05.800 Yes.
00:57:05.980 And so I think it's fairly clearly established.
00:57:08.440 It's not really a right-wing conspiracy theory.
00:57:11.460 It's fairly clear that if it didn't happen, it could have happened.
00:57:15.120 And here's how COVID happens.
00:57:16.720 So first you have SARS-1, which basically jumps from a bat to a palm civet.
00:57:21.480 It's very well established, very nasty disease.
00:57:23.360 And this, you know, SARS-1 is a problem.
00:57:29.860 It almost escapes.
00:57:30.760 It almost becomes COVID and it kills about 20% of the people that have it.
00:57:33.760 It makes Delta COVID, which was a nasty disease, you know, look like the common cold.
00:57:38.860 It's an important problem.
00:57:40.580 The way science is funded, specifically science and, you know, including, for example, virology.
00:57:47.000 Virology is not social science.
00:57:48.800 It's very clearly scientific.
00:57:50.440 It's a hard science.
00:57:51.600 And 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.
00:58:03.680 Which, and the thing about an oligarchy is it almost looks like it's no government at all.
00:58:07.180 It's just like, no, there's no power here.
00:58:09.240 It's just science.
00:58:10.420 It's not power.
00:58:11.380 It's just science.
00:58:12.100 You know, but when you look more closely at human, at power, there's always human beings involved.
00:58:17.980 And so the result of SARS-1 is that virology becomes important and specifically bat coronaviruses become important.
00:58:25.560 And the way science, having like dropped out of my PhD program, but, you know, some people think of me as a computer scientist.
00:58:31.720 The way science works is you get funding for things that are important and things that matter.
00:58:36.320 And 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.
00:58:46.440 And they basically said, well, you know, this is a serious problem.
00:58:50.300 We deserve a number of pounds to study it.
00:58:54.020 And so they're like, what if this happened again?
00:58:56.720 What if a bat coronavirus emerged?
00:58:58.880 Well, let's go and find all the bat coronaviruses. 0.99
00:59:01.500 Let's go to all the bat caves. 1.00
00:59:02.960 They literally did this.
00:59:03.960 Let's bring the viruses back. 0.93
00:59:05.980 But the problem is these viruses are bat viruses.
00:59:09.000 They don't naturally infect humans, but they could mutate to infect humans.
00:59:11.940 But waiting for them to mutate is a very slow and random process.
00:59:15.140 So what if we mutated them?
00:59:16.860 And what if we trained them?
00:59:18.500 What if we put a furin cleavage site in? 0.73
00:59:20.620 What if we trained them to infect, you know, humanized mice?
00:59:25.020 What if we did this in a Chinese laboratory with very poor biosafety conditions?
00:59:29.740 You know, the Wuhan virus was not, that's an American virus because it's funded by American
00:59:36.740 science.
00:59:37.720 These people were literally funded to do this research by American grants.
00:59:41.400 And so when you talk to the, you know, the virologists who did this, they're like, well,
00:59:46.040 we need to predict the emergency.
00:59:48.060 Well, what happens if you predict it?
00:59:49.760 What do you do?
00:59:50.400 We predicted it.
00:59:51.360 All right.
00:59:51.700 You know, and it's like you find, you know, come home and you find your 10 year old sitting
00:59:56.200 fire to the kitchen curtains and you're like, why are you sitting fighting at fire to the
00:59:59.760 curtains?
01:00:00.100 He's like, well, you know, there's a lot of fires in the kitchen.
01:00:02.880 Cooking happens.
01:00:03.740 There are accidents.
01:00:04.520 What if the curtains caught fire?
01:00:06.100 Could we get out?
01:00:07.140 Could the dog get out?
01:00:08.640 So, so, so gain of function in research, at least in this context, is clearly a bad idea. 0.83
01:00:14.040 And yet this bad idea, which, you know, any fool on the street can see is a bad idea, basically
01:00:19.720 succeeds in the marketplace of ideas that, you know, consists of professional virologists 0.75
01:00:26.200 with IQs of 150 who've trained for many, many years to study this.
01:00:30.180 And the question of why this bad idea succeeds in the marketplace of ideas is fundamental to
01:00:36.520 the question of why bad ideas, you know, rule our society today and how we tend, you know,
01:00:42.160 like the difference between gain of function research and the idea that colleges should
01:00:48.840 discriminate at admissions by the skin color of the people applying to them, you know, they're 0.66
01:00:55.000 both equally ridiculous ideas, right? 0.98
01:00:57.980 And how do these ridiculous ideas succeed? 0.90
01:01:00.900 And when we use words like authoritarianism, which is basically sort of an anti-monarchical 0.59
01:01:07.380 word, uh, we're basically looking at the sort of the, the pathologies of monarchies, which
01:01:13.260 are systems very alien to the, in very opposed to the kind of oligarchy that runs our democratic
01:01:20.280 societies today.
01:01:21.500 And monarchies, you know, when they fail, when they're bad and any system of government can
01:01:26.360 democracy, oligarchy or monarchy can be good or bad.
01:01:29.900 Basic point of Aristotle.
01:01:31.160 When, when, when bad authority, when bad monarchies distort the marketplace of ideas, it's overwhelmingly
01:01:37.320 by repressing good ideas.
01:01:39.840 Um, and the way that we got here is very different from that.
01:01:44.400 It's by a system that promotes bad ideas.
01:01:48.520 Moreover, it promotes bad ideas, not through a sort of conscious monarchical plan.
01:01:52.880 There's no little council to Supreme elders or something sitting in a little room saying,
01:01:57.000 we're going to, you know, fund this bad idea because we like bad ideas.
01:02:01.280 Uh, that would be better in some ways because it would be easy to get rid of those people.
01:02:05.480 But there's actually, there's no center.
01:02:08.400 There's no little cabal.
01:02:10.320 There's no dictatorship.
01:02:11.800 There's sort of none of that.
01:02:13.080 There's just a system that structurally rewards these bad ideas.
01:02:17.160 And it structurally rewards these bad ideas.
01:02:19.760 First of all, by separating authority from responsibility.
01:02:23.220 And so, you know, someone like, you know, Fauci, who's almost, you know, a little monarch within
01:02:29.160 this oligarchical structure of process, you know, and who is really, you know, critical
01:02:34.860 in, you know, sort of authorizing and continuing this gain of function research will never be
01:02:40.720 held accountable.
01:02:41.480 And so you have this kind of division, this, you know, when bad ideas are accountable, they
01:02:48.760 are not, they're not, not favored in the, in the evolutionary Darwinian contest of ideas.
01:02:56.080 But when you look at the way bad ideas are promoted and it's simply enough to not have
01:03:03.480 that accountability.
01:03:04.260 And when you don't have that accountability, the attraction of bad ideas, not the sort of
01:03:10.220 repulsive, if you think about like electromagnetic force, you have like traction and repulsion.
01:03:14.540 And what happens is basically you have these bad ideas and they feel good for some reason
01:03:23.280 within virology, for example, gain of function research feels good because everyone's doing
01:03:28.440 it.
01:03:28.700 It's the way to get grants.
01:03:29.940 And if you say no one should be doing this, you're basically selling, saying your fellow
01:03:34.160 virologist should not be funded.
01:03:36.760 That's going to be hard.
01:03:38.380 All right.
01:03:39.020 But the thing is, you know, when you basically extend that outside the circles of experts,
01:03:44.380 essentially, you know, when these experts are promoting policies that strengthen power,
01:03:49.460 that reward them, they're like, my field is important.
01:03:52.860 My field is matter, matters, more must be done.
01:03:56.100 And then you extend this to sort of the broader world.
01:03:58.580 Where does this sort of culture of victimology come from?
01:04:02.180 Whether you're looking, we talked about communism, progressivism earlier.
01:04:05.340 And if you look at, for example, the Scottsboro Boys case of, you know, which is promoted by
01:04:10.140 communists in the 1930s, you connect that to George Floyd.
01:04:14.100 There's sort of this clear thread there.
01:04:18.380 And there's, you know, providing people with the feeling of saying, I'm the defender of the
01:04:23.780 victim.
01:04:24.580 You know, I am the white knight.
01:04:26.460 I am the paladin.
01:04:27.880 I am standing up, you know, for.
01:04:30.740 And, you know, the effect of these ideas may be terrible.
01:04:33.960 I mean, I think the effect of the George Floyd riots on, you know, the African-American
01:04:39.180 community in America is straightforwardly negative.
01:04:42.180 It's just very clear social science statistics, massive numbers of deaths from de-policing.
01:04:47.260 Right.
01:04:47.860 But that doesn't have an accountability impact on the marketplace of ideas.
01:04:52.860 What impacts the marketplace of ideas is.
01:04:55.600 What to say that?
01:04:56.840 Because sorry to translate what you're saying into simple language.
01:04:59.200 The people who pushed that narrative didn't get the comeuppance they should have got.
01:05:04.020 Yes.
01:05:04.160 They were not delegitimized.
01:05:05.980 They were not delegitimized.
01:05:07.620 But they felt that positive feeling.
01:05:09.460 Yes.
01:05:09.920 Of feeling incredibly good about it.
01:05:12.460 Their hearts felt warm.
01:05:14.580 They felt important.
01:05:15.680 They felt like they mattered.
01:05:17.220 Yes.
01:05:17.540 They felt like it gave them meaning.
01:05:19.480 Right.
01:05:19.680 And so, you know, the sort of market in that kind of meaning, which is confined in the 1930s
01:05:25.180 to a very small elite set of like American communists, including my forebears, basically
01:05:30.080 becomes mass market in, you know, the sort of George Floyd experience.
01:05:35.100 Now, every suburban housewife feels like they matter, like they're standing up.
01:05:40.240 And what they don't realize is that that's a mechanism that not only promotes bad ideas,
01:05:45.640 the bad ideas displace good ideas.
01:05:47.840 And you get this kind of monoculture, which looks exactly like the kind of monoculture
01:05:53.280 in at least structurally.
01:05:54.580 I'm not saying whether, you know, it looks exactly like the kind of monoculture that's
01:05:59.140 enforced through repressive means by an authoritarian government such as Nazi Germany.
01:06:05.560 But the mechanism that basically creates that coordination of ideology is promotion rather
01:06:13.900 than suppression.
01:06:14.860 It's attraction rather than repulsion.
01:06:16.980 And it's completely, it's inevitable in an oligarchical meritocratic structure of government.
01:06:25.640 And so when these oligarchies were established, you had these marketplaces of ideas.
01:06:30.640 You know, professors had never been involved in government.
01:06:32.600 The idea that professors should run the government in 1900 was as absurd as saying postmen should
01:06:38.020 run the government.
01:06:39.200 And because these marketplaces of ideas in academia were not corrupted by power, they
01:06:45.340 were flat and they were excellent.
01:06:47.460 And people are like, OK, I have these corrupt politicians elected by, you know, democracy.
01:06:53.640 Terrible result.
01:06:54.940 You know, we'll still use the name democracy, just as we still use the name monarchy. 0.97
01:06:59.120 But politicians are awful. 0.99
01:07:00.980 They're corrupt. 0.98
01:07:01.500 What about these unbiased, you know, experts?
01:07:05.320 But the thing is, you give power to the experts and power corrupts them.
01:07:09.640 And suddenly they become, they develop these conflicts of interest.
01:07:13.120 They become sort of corrupted.
01:07:15.100 And basically, when you give power to the marketplace of ideas, the marketplace of ideas corrupts itself.
01:07:21.840 And you get basically a world of absolutely terrible ideas.
01:07:26.420 Curtis, it's an absolute pleasure.
01:07:28.540 Thank you so much for coming on the show.
01:07:30.200 Last question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society
01:07:34.400 that we really should be?
01:07:37.180 I'm going to go back to something that I said earlier about technology.
01:07:41.820 And 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.
01:08:01.320 And I think one of the reasons why the future needs a kind of state power.
01:08:07.340 I used to be a libertarian.
01:08:08.460 I love being a libertarian.
01:08:10.140 I describe myself as a recovering libertarian.
01:08:13.200 I'll always be a libertarian in a way.
01:08:14.720 And, 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. 0.97
01:08:24.700 You have these buildings full of absolutely useless people.
01:08:28.300 And they're just decaying in the most horrific way.
01:08:31.340 And, 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.
01:08:42.800 And then, you know, his grandchildren have this horrific Dickensian existence where they're used as human robots.
01:08:49.240 And now we don't even need human robots anymore because we have robots. 0.91
01:08:52.680 And then suddenly along come these large language models and they start working, killing the demand for basically what David Graber called bullshit jobs. 0.70
01:09:01.800 Suddenly, like paper pushing is under attack.
01:09:04.980 And you're like, whoa, I thought I could have a career pushing papers.
01:09:07.860 And suddenly you can't.
01:09:09.220 And 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.
01:09:17.560 And you're just like increasing productivity is good and more productivity is better and more stuff is better than less stuff.
01:09:24.720 And 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.
01:09:35.180 And then the large language models start writing themselves.
01:09:38.740 And that's the real AI disaster is that you don't need people anymore.
01:09:44.320 It's not that they'll revolt against people in some sort of golem myth.
01:09:47.940 It's that you don't need people anymore.
01:09:50.280 And so, you know, the only way to prevent that is a sort of, you know, regime which says, OK.
01:09:59.740 We better wrap up because there's a protest against you. 0.87
01:10:02.600 You 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.
01:10:15.740 You 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.
01:10:28.480 And that's a very hard and deep question.
01:10:31.200 And I'm sure people are protesting.
01:10:33.080 Are they protesting me?
01:10:34.240 I don't know.
01:10:34.980 We'll find out.
01:10:36.700 Curtis Yavin, thank you so much for coming on.
01:10:38.860 And we've got a great section for locals with Curtis coming right up head on over there.
01:10:42.620 And we'll see you there.
01:10:44.480 In God We Trust is on U.S. currency and no one's grumbled on that.
01:10:47.880 But nevertheless, I'm trying to work out if Mr. Yavin believes we, or rather royalty, should continue to use the facade of a god,
01:10:55.360 which might not exist in reference to emblems and symbols which are used to ceremonially bind us.