Why Young Men Feel Lost - Connor Tomlinson
Episode Stats
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Summary
In the first episode of Generation Z: The New Political Class, Conor and Freya discuss the political divide between men and women in the modern world, and the impact of technology on the way we think about politics and identity.
Transcript
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So what's going on with you young people nowadays?
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Everything they're being taught in the classroom is radioactively uncool.
00:00:06.400
The children of the algorithm, that half of Gen Z, don't curate their own internet experience.
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So all of their interests and personality are, it's not very inauthentic, but they're algorithmically driven.
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You're going to get the revolutionary Gen Z, it's just which flavour do you get?
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Do you get woke communists or do you get the reactionaries?
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Listen, we haven't had actually, I think, somebody talk about Gen Z and your generation from a male perspective.
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So what's going on with you young people nowadays?
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So there has been quite a lot of survey data coming out from the University of Michigan.
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There was a piece published in the Financial Times a few days ago that's showing a bifurcation
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The conspiratorial person in me says that this is driven somewhat by birth control,
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but it's obviously driven by algorithmic trends and certain grievance narratives that are being pushed on social media.
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She's spoken a lot about how young women are pliable at a time of peak anxiety to social trends.
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And so if they're being whipped into a frenzy and they say that all of their male peers are participating in some grand conspiracy of oppression against them,
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And so you're seeing, in retaliation to that, young men are trending more socially conservative,
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even if they're not identifying with the establishment right-wing political parties that we're currently seeing.
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And it's not just a symptom of Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson.
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It's a fact of everything they're being taught in the classroom is radioactively uncool.
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If you're repeatedly being beaten over the head as a young guy who's just trying to make his way in the world,
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potentially if your dad isn't even around, because around 50% of young people these days in the UK
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are raised between two households with their father scarcely or never present, you're thinking,
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well, actually, I don't feel like an agent of tyranny.
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Actually, I feel like you're not credible and you're lying to me.
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And all of this stuff, I just don't associate with it.
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So you're seeing that split, and that split is particularly pronounced, I think, within the Zoomers,
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between the pre- and post-phone-at-school generation.
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So after the Great Awakening, after 2014, after the massive uptake of iPhones,
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you're seeing people trend towards social progressivism.
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This is where you're getting the stats from the likes of Stonewall and Pew Research,
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Gen Z are identifying as LGBTQ by the time they leave school.
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But I think in the reverse, you're seeing a lot of Zoomers who are on the sort of zennial cusp.
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So born pre-2000, they're digital natives, but they're very skeptical of framing.
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They're quite postmodern in this way, but not postmodern in the way that we use it as in
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They don't necessarily buy all of the establishment ideals that are fed to them.
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And unlike the millennials who had a very tight frame of reference for early internet adoption,
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things like even memes were shared like Nyan Cat and Out to Charlie and things like that,
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they have a more personally curated internet experience.
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And so they can lean into subcultures which have particular political identities.
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And so that means they can either follow the kind of Tumblr gender stuff, which is very destructive,
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or they can look towards the traditionalist revivalism, the vitalism,
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the almost Christian nationalism that you're seeing from the states.
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And they can pick a political subculture and identify with that.
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And that might actually allow them to follow a brand of politics,
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which is a rebellion against the current order that isn't serving them quite well.
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So I'm almost defending Gen Z a little bit in saying there's hope for some of them,
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because they can curate their own political identity.
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Well, by the way, we have like literally no reason to have a go at Gen Z.
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It's why are you surprised that Gen Z are a bunch of revolutionaries?
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No matter what flavour, if they can't own a house and have a family.
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And this is one of the reasons I say I'm not interested in having a go at Gen Z.
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I think some of the things that they're acting out and saying,
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But this was, by the way, people, they get old, they forget how stupid they were
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And as you say, you know, our generation faced a housing crisis,
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but it was nowhere near as bad as your generation is facing.
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I'm interested in understanding where they're coming from,
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why we are seeing some of the pretty dumb stuff that we're seeing.
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Frankly, you know, they love Osama Bin Laden, some of them for some reason, all of this nonsense.
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But also the thing that I find really troubling, and you know, I became a father recently to a boy,
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is I've always felt that the demonization of men that I've been seeing,
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It didn't really affect me because my solution to that was, well, look, men just need to be better.
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You just got to study, you've got to improve, you've got to get skills,
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and then you're going to be fine in the world. And that has been my experience, right?
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What I think is happening from an outside perspective observing your generation is
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there are a lot of boys, frankly, to whom that's just not available
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because their entire life has been spent being told how shit they are.
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And it sounds like that's kind of what you're saying is happening with boys of your generation.
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That and if they don't have an at-home model for why they should emulate and appreciate masculinity,
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they're not equipped with the language to push back on this.
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This is something that C.S. Lewis talked about in Abolition of Man,
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which is a great little text I advise everyone read.
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In the first part, he talks about in the 40s how education was stripping boys of their ability to
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appreciate the world around them and have confidence in their morals.
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So he was saying there's this textbook that gaslights young men into thinking that if they look at a
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waterfall and they feel sublime or in awe that they're actually just projecting their feelings
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onto the waterfall. It's not that the real world can reliably elicit a sense of feelings in you.
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So nothing is objective, everything is subjective. And what that ends up meaning is
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we can supplant your existing value system and give you our one. And so if these guys,
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it's almost like the Fight Club quote of we're a generation of men raised by women and we're being
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told that a woman is another solution. If you haven't been raised by a man, which lots of young
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men haven't, then you're either going to look for surrogate male father figures online,
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the healthy versions like Jordan Peterson, the unhealthy versions like Andrew Tate,
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or you're going to be so incapable of defending your masculinity that you fall prey to social trends,
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which is why you're seeing either they're identifying in consumer goods, like all the people that hoard
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Funko Pops or the young boys that are from age 11 upwards getting addicted to pornography. And
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there's now a mass prescription, I think it was 4 million last year, of erectile dysfunction medication
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to young men. So if you've been institutionally gaslit out of thinking there is value in masculinity
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and you haven't had a father in the home to understand the value in that and how to transmit that value
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down a long civilizational chain, then it's no wonder that you either completely check out
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of civilization, that you retreat to your goon cave where you've just got pornography and video games
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and resentful red pill podcasts that tell you that all women are the problem, or you gravitate towards
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the LGBT ideologies that allow you to achieve escape velocity from being a man,
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or you actually find identity in reclaiming masculine vitalism in some way because you feel like
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if you can't be authentic, if you can't be virtuous in the Aristotelian sense, you must be at least
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continent, you must wear the personas of the past like some kind of skin suit until it becomes natural.
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And so that's I think the split we're seeing in Gen Z, we're seeing it between algorithmically driven
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resentment versus those people that want to reclaim something of the past and that thing that they're
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nostalgic for but never actually quite experienced.
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Essentially what you're talking about, Conor, is that basically men don't know how to be men.
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And that's a real problem because if men don't know how to be men, then what we're actually talking
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about is people having a crisis of identity. And when they make up roughly 48, 49 percent of the
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population, plus they're stronger, plus they're more aggressive, plus they're more prone to violence,
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violence. This is a pretty disastrous cocktail, isn't it?
00:09:02.560
Yeah, and I think this is being driven and I've got some degree of sympathy for it until it turns
00:09:08.960
malevolent. It's driven by a lot of insecurity and projection on part of people that are afraid of
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failing through the internet. So a lot of misandric feminism is driven by either people who have made
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terrible life choices and want misery as company from older women to younger women or people who
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have had poor experiences with men and so as a maladaptive coping strategy are mischaracterizing
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all men as the kind of tyrannical abuser that they have encountered in the past. And this is the same
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thing for the Red Pill podcasts as well, which I don't think is a very healthy way of restoring
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masculinity. I think someone like Chris Williamson is far healthier than someone like Andrew Tate for
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example. This is why I've written a piece before saying that Red Pill is actually a kind of sedative
00:10:01.120
for proper male revolution. And I don't mean revolution as in just communist uprising. I mean as in
00:10:07.920
a restoration of a forward-thinking and responsible meaningful masculinity. And the reason they're
00:10:15.600
doing that is a containment mechanism because they rely on a cohort of men who believe that
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they cannot escape their own situation and blame an abstract concept of all women. The
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kinds of women that they see on the whatever. Yeah, it's the female version of the patriarchy.
00:10:32.160
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's that's the best way to put it. Yeah, like the feminists have patriarchy and
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these people have whatever, you know, literally whatever the girls in the whatever podcast. Yeah,
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the emissaries of hypersexual culture, which is gatekeeping you out of having a family.
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If only these OnlyFans girls didn't exist, you would actually be married with a battalion of
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children by now. And that might be true for a couple of people who have fallen through the
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cultural cracks. But there is a large cohort of men that actually could do better. But instead,
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they are spending their income on insulting women who will never know that they exist,
00:11:04.800
and consuming this content to have their own worst fears about the culture reflected back at them,
00:11:11.280
so they don't have to take responsibility and improve. And sure, that might be comfortable,
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but you will end up bitter lonely and dead. So may not be best for you in the long term. But what those
00:11:20.800
both things are aiming at, and this is something that Ivan Illich wrote about in a fantastic book called
00:11:24.480
Gender. The reaction of feminists are very hot on this, and I think they're right, is that yes,
00:11:29.200
the feminists think that they are playing a zero-sum game against men for power, wealth,
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and privilege. And so they think that they are advantaging women as some kind of class by
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confiscating it from the tyrannical patriarchy that's gatekept them out of institutions. But what
00:11:44.160
you're actually doing is you're destroying the ambiguous complementarity that makes men and women
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attracted to each other. This has come about through a transformation in economic conditions,
00:11:51.680
where we're both competing for the same roles and the same resources, rather than being
00:11:56.800
inseparable members of the same household with different jobs, different responsibilities, and both
00:12:01.280
attracted to each other. This is Neen Power's term sibling economy. We have less Adam and Eve,
00:12:05.280
and we're now Cain and Abel. And we're wondering why no one's wanting to start relationships. It's
00:12:09.120
kind of incestuous. But play that out long term, what does that mean? Well, that means that there's an
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incentive for us to both denaturize each other, ourselves, from the kind of sex-based
00:12:20.320
differences that make us attracted to each other, to compete on the same terms. And so actually,
00:12:24.400
it's not just men hating women or women hating men. It's a movement towards the total unisex
00:12:29.840
consumer unit. And so we are totally atomized from each other. We're totally alone. We're totally
00:12:34.400
self-sufficient. But there's a reason in the ancient world that exile was a form of punishment. I think
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there's going to be a lot of lonely people who are confused about their place in the world as a man,
00:12:44.320
as a woman, dislocated from family, who are just endlessly consuming things and finding their
00:12:49.200
identity in stuff. And we wonder why we have mental health crisis. It's a really profound
00:12:53.760
point that you're making. And then on top of that, you've got the social media aspect to it,
00:12:58.720
where we're all essentially become dopamine rats, where we're chasing that dopamine constantly.
00:13:04.800
And that's just another way to fill the void that normally love, companionship,
00:13:09.520
a relationship would fill. Yeah, quite. Have you seen the new Apple Pro
00:13:14.560
glasses headset thing? Yes. I think this is one of the most
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dystopic things that's been invented in a long time, because what we're sleepwalking into is
00:13:24.960
Rousseau's vision of the savage in the abundant civilization. And this is why I think wokeness
00:13:32.080
collects to liberalism, but that's a whole rabbit hole. Rousseau believed in the false
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anthropology of liberalism, where before civilizations were set up and resources were
00:13:40.560
rendered scarce and unequal, and we needed to enter this zero-sum game. Everything was plentiful.
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We were roaming around in the Garden of Eden. We didn't have to rely on anyone in a relationship
00:13:48.480
to get what we wanted. We were just gleaning food off the ground and everything was paradisal.
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Okay, so what's the job of the revolutionary state? To return us to that. So how do we return
00:13:57.520
to that? Well, we can't have relationships and we can't have inequality. So we need a totalitarian
00:14:02.320
state to oversee every single human interaction to ensure there is no inequality and that no one is
00:14:06.880
having a relationship where one has power over the other. Well, that sounds quite familiar.
00:14:12.320
Quite, exactly. It's the comprehensive liberal state that Claire Chambers, a Cambridge academic,
00:14:16.880
sets up. She references Foucault in it, and she says that basically we need to stop you from forming
00:14:21.680
desires which make you desire unequal things. So we need to actually police the thoughts in your own head
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so you can be free and equal because liberalism. But anyway.
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Well, I'm in the Soviet Union, but you clearly have your own side.
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Well, this is why communism and Marxism are the two cheeks of the same backside.
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But I'm not trying to be provocative, I promise. But these goggles achieve that. You don't need the
00:14:40.560
totalitarian state then. If you've literally got a vision of your own self-created reality in front of
00:14:44.560
your eyes and no one can see what you're also seeing, then you can augment the world to be purely
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subjective as you wish and everyone else is expected to have no social consideration for anyone else.
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So we're existing in a really population-dense civilisation. We're catering all our own needs.
00:15:00.080
Your neighbour could be watching pornography in public. He could have a mod where he's seeing
00:15:03.520
everyone naked. But, oh, what goes on in the privacy of your own goggles doesn't concern anyone,
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right? So we're going to have an entire civilisation of people roaming around in
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Plato's goon cave with the technological assistance to make it so they can have all their desires met at
00:15:17.840
once but never have to worry about anyone else. And I just think that's hellish. And they're just
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going to be burned out on dopamine and unable to ever have their desires satisfied. So some
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companies are going to come along and perpetually sell them new desires that can never be fulfilled.
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And so technology and commerce become the prerequisite for you to even exist.
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And what it also does is make real life look fundamentally unappealing. Because with real life,
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it's deferred gratification. It's working hard. It's having setbacks. It's making yourself
00:15:51.280
uncomfortable in order to progress. It's the fear of failure. But if you're living your life in a
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glorified video game, you ain't really going to get any of that.
00:16:01.040
No. And why would you want to do chores unless you could augment reality to then gamify it?
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You're basically background-tabbing reality, right? And this is where, and I know Freya's
00:16:09.120
spoken about this before, this is where Big Pharmaceutical comes in conjunction with social media
00:16:14.720
and pornography and the like. If you are augmenting your brain chemistry with what you're consuming,
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then rather than stopping consuming because that's having a bad effect on you, all you can do is
00:16:25.680
instead take this pill and just reset your brain chemistry. So every single human experience becomes
00:16:30.560
optional, conditional on what you consume. This is the crazy thing that I thought about the other week.
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You know, we're getting the expansion of LGBTQ rights. This community would not exist if it weren't
00:16:42.960
for technology. They would not be able to meet each other unless it was online. You can't point
00:16:47.280
to the LGBT community on a map. They don't live together. They don't have even necessarily shared
00:16:51.280
interests because one's sex, one's gender. You wouldn't be able to have the trans community without
00:16:55.360
the surgeries to facilitate their transition. And they're getting increasingly complex and the
00:17:01.520
simulacra is getting increasingly convincing the more you can, for example, 3D print an appendage.
00:17:05.760
We're getting into all new layers of hellscape. But the plus there is hiding the fact that it will
00:17:10.560
indefinitely expand along with desires and the way that tech can meet it. The perfect example of
00:17:14.640
this is asexuality. Do you remember that woman that was walking around a little while ago in a
00:17:18.160
leather bikini saying, I want asexual rights now? I do, actually. Yeah, I do. She was quite hot.
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She was. Eh, mid. Not my taste. I actually don't remember her very well, but yeah. Yeah, so that
00:17:30.240
philosophy scales upwards to, I don't have an interest in sex and I deserve rights. What's
00:17:36.320
the right to? It's a positive right to validation and affirmation because we're in the post-scarcity.
00:17:40.000
Wait, kind of slow down again. So just explain that a little bit slower.
00:17:42.720
Okay, so if you're asexual and you have an identity that says, I am not interested in sex,
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what right are you claiming? You're claiming a right to recognition. You're claiming a right
00:17:55.600
for your identity to be validated in the minds of others. And we have entered a post-scarcity economy,
00:18:01.760
so what's the current currency? It's a social currency. It's validation, affirmation, and the
00:18:07.200
like. So you're claiming a positive right to other people's thoughts. Just to stop you there,
00:18:10.720
but there's also a financial element to it as well, whereby if you're married, you have certain
00:18:14.880
tax breaks. I'm not saying I agree with this, but this would be their argument. If you go to a hotel,
00:18:20.160
for instance, a couple's room, you split between two people. If you're single, blah, blah, blah,
00:18:25.360
you pay more. They would argue that there's that premium as well. Yeah, they're basically claiming
00:18:30.080
a positive right to have the same privilege as someone who's contributing to civilization.
00:18:34.080
Yeah. So that's also a positive right. And then the final positive right that I found
00:18:38.000
interesting as an implication was that you have the right to be horny or not on command,
00:18:44.960
and you have the right to whether or not people sexualize you on command. And what's the easiest
00:18:49.440
way to do that? Well, it's to medicate yourself. It's basically to press your hormone system like
00:18:54.640
an on and off switch. We currently have it as default pressed off, as Abigail Fofale said,
00:18:58.560
with the birth control pill for women. So as soon as we want to press it on, we've now created a whole
00:19:03.680
new bureaucratic infrastructure from pharmaceutical companies to make human nature optional. So this
00:19:09.040
is just scaling upwards to make you a totally independent, optional person, but it's only
00:19:14.720
optional insofar as you can buy and consume something. I would much rather have a normal,
00:19:19.680
wholesome, embodied life that doesn't require me buy all my meaning from some company. Thank you very much.
00:19:25.280
You know? And what's stopping your generation from having that meaningful, embodied life?
00:19:32.000
We talked about the housing crisis. We can talk more about that if you want. Yeah,
00:19:35.280
there are material conditions and material pressures. Mass immigration is a main one. That's
00:19:39.120
definitely driving down birth rates. It's cyclical in a way. It's driving down birth rates. How so?
00:19:44.320
Okay. So if we are importing net 750,000 people every year, and we're only building 200,000 homes,
00:19:51.120
there is major pressure on the housing market. People need a house and a level of independence
00:19:57.200
in order to start a family. So native British people, that's one of the exacerbating factors.
00:20:02.960
Also, even if we could flat back build Barrett new builds ad infinitum and accommodate the entire
00:20:08.640
third world, those people aren't necessarily assimilating to our values. So why would you want
00:20:12.960
to bring a child into the world if you don't recognize the world on your doorstep, especially if
00:20:16.560
you haven't consented it to changing so quickly? So that background anxiety is discouraging
00:20:20.880
people as well. So yeah, there are massive financial pressures. But in terms of believing
00:20:27.520
to be a part of a meaningful story, this was one of the themes of ARK that you contributed to.
00:20:33.120
People don't really believe that. I think there is a reclaiming of it among some Gen Z,
00:20:38.000
but this was highlighted. So when we went to National Conservative Conference,
00:20:41.920
I did a segment on GB News that day, and they asked me what I thought about it. And I was arguing with
00:20:47.280
some Lib Dem woman named Jo Phillips. And they asked me at the time, okay, Miriam Cates and Danny
00:20:53.120
Kruger are coming out with these radical proposals like the nuclear family and not divorcing is best
00:20:58.000
for children. That's terrible, isn't it? And so they asked Jo, who's in her late 50s, early 60s,
00:21:04.960
what she thought about that. And she said, oh, it's awful that you're saying that women shouldn't have a
00:21:08.560
choice to stay home or go to work and drop their kids in daycare. We should have subsidised childcare.
00:21:14.720
And I turned around and said, actually, well, the child is the only person in this relationship
00:21:18.240
who doesn't get to choose to be here. So you should parent as if, if the child were to choose,
00:21:23.920
they would choose you. So that means that you should be mindful of your obligations to them.
00:21:28.080
You should be present. You should honour them as they are later commanded in Scripture to honour
00:21:33.840
thy mother and thy father. And there was a clear look of confusion on Jo's face because she just went,
00:21:40.000
what, you would want your wife to stay home all times? And I said, no, I wouldn't want to pick
00:21:46.160
someone who would privilege an abstract pursuit of freedom over the obligations to their own children.
00:21:52.640
And what this highlighted to me is that there's a big difference between the boomer and the zoomer
00:21:57.840
paradigm. The boomers, particularly post-war, they have the mindset of what F. Scott Fitzgerald put
00:22:04.640
at the end of this side of paradise. They were a generation that awoke to find all gods dead,
00:22:09.120
all wolves fought, all faith and men shaken. So they recognised the horrors that runaway nationalism
00:22:17.360
could inflict on the European continent, particularly German nationalism. They felt constrained by the
00:22:22.480
church, weighed down by cultural expectations. And so they thought, okay, we're going to fight for
00:22:26.720
freedom. We're going to fight for the sexual revolution, the pill, women's for economic
00:22:30.560
independence and workplace enrollment, daycare so that we can have children raised by specialists
00:22:36.240
rather than make it so that women are trapped in the kitchen with drudgery. Okay, we aren't
00:22:40.720
necessarily connected as zoomers to that post-war paradigm. We've had enough time and distance and
00:22:47.120
exposure to the adverse consequences of globalist neoliberalism to know that Tony Blair's promise
00:22:53.280
that things can only get better didn't really come true for us. And so we can sit there in a
00:22:56.480
and evaluate and say, okay, are these decisions, were they good? Or did they have trade-offs?
00:23:01.440
Is it that freedom is an axiomatic good unto itself? Or is it more that Matthew Arnold said,
00:23:05.840
freedom's a fine horse to ride, but you've got to ride it somewhere. And so we're trying to search
00:23:09.440
for some meaningful constraints. We're trying to search for a life narrative that we can live up to.
00:23:14.400
And so I think part of the reason quite a few of my generation are having kids is definitely
00:23:18.080
material pressures. But it's also because they can't really see the value of it if they're still trapped in
00:23:23.360
the atomistic freedom paradigm that says you've got to go out and be financially independent and
00:23:28.960
go and have experiences and your body is, there's no metaphysical aspect to it. It's just a pleasure
00:23:35.600
making machine and you've got to maximize that pleasure, right? They can't justify making sacrifices
00:23:40.240
under that framework. Those who seek a parallel framework, a different story, are going to be
00:23:44.240
the ones that end up having kids and searching for that. And only by disconnecting from that sort of
00:23:48.960
boomer mindset, can they really get there? It's interesting you talk about freedom because
00:23:52.560
I think it's also true for our generation too. We're about 15, 20 years older than you.
00:23:58.160
Because I think the conversation about freedom was starting to get a bit old for us too because
00:24:04.320
of what you're saying, which is there's a big difference between the freedom to do things that are
00:24:08.800
valuable and freedom from constraint in general. And they're very, very different types of freedom.
00:24:14.480
The freedom from constraint that you talk about, the endless liberation, doesn't lead to anywhere
00:24:20.240
good because it doesn't create anything good. Whereas the freedom to do things that are of value
00:24:25.760
to you and that are going to make your life what you want it to be and give you meaning is a whole
00:24:30.560
different thing. And it seems to me like actually maybe with young people now, they don't actually have
00:24:36.480
the freedom to do the things that would make their life meaningful because of the material constraints
00:24:41.040
to a very large extent. Because I can tell you there's nothing more meaningful than having
00:24:46.320
children for example, right? But if you can't get that, if you can't make that happen for very
00:24:52.560
practical reasons, then you are only really left with the glasses and the apps and the porn and the
00:24:58.960
whatever. Well also if you can't justify the constraints under the prevailing logic that your
00:25:04.080
civilization is operating on. So it's bound up between, because Gen Z have a lot of freedom to
00:25:09.440
have stuff, but it's disposable stuff. It's the same as we don't have any shared cultural
00:25:17.520
reference points compared to your generation. So you grew up on 80s movies, you can list a bunch
00:25:22.000
off. You were shaming me on the drive over here for not having seen The Wire, right?
00:25:24.880
Correct. And you should, we're going to do it publicly now. He hasn't seen The Wire.
00:25:28.880
I'm 25, give me a break. But lots of people in my generation, particularly those that started
00:25:33.200
school with their smartphones, all the content that they consume is disposable. This is why there's a new
00:25:38.000
influencer every year. This is why all the content gets memory hold. It's 30 seconds,
00:25:42.880
it automatically scrolls, it's fed to you by an algorithm. You don't even, the people that follow
00:25:46.800
the algorithm, the children of the algorithm, that half of Gen Z, don't curate their own internet
00:25:50.560
experience. So all of their interests and personality are, it's not very inauthentic,
00:25:54.880
but they're algorithmically driven. It's happened to them.
00:25:57.680
Exactly. Yeah. And it's happened to them because frankly, and this is because households have been split
00:26:01.760
up and because institutional care has become the norm, particularly across both parties,
00:26:05.760
both conservatives and labor want to subsidize infant care from six months upwards.
00:26:10.640
Loads of health complications resulting from that. We have outsourced, well, not we,
00:26:15.920
generations prior to us have outsourced their obligation to act as custodians of culture
00:26:21.280
and pass it on to their kids by being present parents to screens. How many times you've entered
00:26:25.600
a restaurant and some kids watching Peppa Pig, right? Any parent that currently gives their kid
00:26:30.640
an iPad and gives them unfettered access to the internet is mad. We had Elsagate how many years
00:26:35.280
ago? If anyone doesn't remember that, it was YouTube kids were having these algorithmically
00:26:39.040
generated cartoons uploaded to their service and they weren't being vetted. And the contents involved
00:26:44.240
the incredible Hulk shooting up heroin and hit dancing with Elsa and all these weird and
00:26:48.480
disturbed things that were being fed into kids content. Same thing with all those parents that as soon
00:26:52.880
as work from home started, they noticed, sorry, what's in my kid's curriculum at school? What was I turning a blind
00:26:58.480
eye to this whole time? So frankly, if you don't raise your own kids, someone else will. And so
00:27:02.240
those kids are being raised as children of the algorithm. Whereas the other cohort of Gen Z are
00:27:06.160
like the gleaners of the fields of our deracinated culture. This is something that Dennis Prager and
00:27:11.680
Ian Hirsi Ali have talked about before, the cut flower culture, right? If you cut flower from its
00:27:15.440
roots, it might look beautiful for a time. This was the 90s, but it will wither and die eventually.
00:27:20.720
What you need to do is pick up the seed from that and replant it when the soil is fertile once again.
00:27:24.800
Now, politically, the soil won't be fertile for quite some time because we're locked into this paradigm
00:27:28.400
but culturally, in small enclaves and small groups, you might have fertile enough soil for
00:27:35.600
some reactionary zoomer to walk along their culture, pick up the seed and plant it elsewhere.
00:27:40.160
I think that's the only element of hope that they have at the moment.
00:27:43.600
Conor, there'll be a lot of people who are listening to this, who are Gen Z and above, who are going...
00:27:53.520
They're all in their 50s going, what the fuck are these young people talking about?
00:27:56.160
Yeah, exactly. But there'll be lots of people who are listening to this, particularly women going,
00:28:01.760
you have got and you are making some excellent points. However, in order to run a household now,
00:28:07.840
I've got two kids. Both of us need to work. What can I do? What can I do? If I don't work,
00:28:14.320
we're not going to be able to pay the mortgage. The interest rates are going through the roof. The
00:28:18.720
mortgages are going through the roof. The food prices, blah, blah, blah.
00:28:21.920
What do we do? We're trapped. And I have a lot of sympathy for that point of view,
00:28:28.640
I have total sympathy for that point of view. I'm very frustrated. And I respect what Matt
00:28:32.080
Walsh has done with What Is A Woman, but with the Matt Walsh-style takes of whenever there is
00:28:36.800
a Zoomer girl who complains on TikTok about how soul-destroying her nine-to-five is,
00:28:40.640
the commute stops her from seeing friends and starting a relationship. She's barely paid. She's got an
00:28:45.440
apartment that doesn't allow her to save for her own house. You see people in their 40s and upwards
00:28:50.320
on the boomer con right go, Snowflake, just work harder. No. Okay. Wages have stagnated in real
00:28:56.400
terms since the 70s. In 1997, the house prices were three times your average income. Now it's about 11.
00:29:01.280
I've already said about how we're competing against the mass influx of people that we can never build
00:29:05.360
enough to accommodate, right? So all of these are economic pressures.
00:29:08.960
By the way, one of the reasons wages have stagnated.
00:29:11.040
Absolutely, yeah. All of these are bearing down on men and women trying to make subsistence
00:29:17.920
households together in mutual solidarity. Absolutely. So yeah, we do need some structural
00:29:21.840
change. The kind of structural change that I would advise is treating households as the
00:29:26.560
primary unit rather than individuals. This was the case well before Tony Blair's tax reforms,
00:29:31.440
and I think it should be similar again. This is because the government has a perverse incentive
00:29:36.400
if it wants to grow its GDP graph, not GDP per capita, because we don't have to care about how rich
00:29:39.920
people are, just how rich we look compared to other nations, to only count an individual's
00:29:44.800
economic activity no matter what the activity is. It doesn't matter if you're... We don't
00:29:48.720
distinguish between types of economic activity. We don't say that having a child is worth more
00:29:54.240
than just bringing in someone who isn't as educated in our culture and doesn't have the same skill set
00:30:00.800
as everyone else. It's just as long as the graph is ticking up, that's all that matters. It's a very
00:30:05.280
inhuman way of doing economics and politics. So yeah, we need massive economic transformation,
00:30:10.720
lowered migration, considering households as the primary consumer units again, of course. But there
00:30:15.600
are some limited things that you can do. This is what my friend Mary Harrington has spoken about before
00:30:21.760
in that women did work prior to the sort of 1950s economic aberration of you just stayed at home and
00:30:30.320
cooked in the kitchen while your husband went out and worked an office job.
00:30:32.640
It's just that they worked part-time around also facilitating childcare. And the digital economy,
00:30:38.000
for as long as that lasts with the waning petrodollar, might be able to facilitate that
00:30:42.240
again. It won't facilitate it for everyone, which is why we need economic reform. But that's something
00:30:47.200
that you can do. And you can lean into your gender roles and find someone that wants to facilitate
00:30:52.480
that as best they can to try and insulate yourself from the most perverse incentives that are going on at
00:30:58.480
the moment. And the other real challenges, and we've kind of touched upon it, but not really,
00:31:03.440
is concentration spans. So when I was teaching, and this is anecdotal evidence, but I remember
00:31:10.000
talking with my fellow teachers going, concentration spans are dwindling before our eyes. And you could
00:31:16.640
see a very real difference between one year and five years down the line. You go, they just can't focus,
00:31:24.880
they just can't concentrate. Their interpersonal skills are much more limited. They're more prone
00:31:31.200
to outbursts of violence, aggression. They literally can't listen unless you have an interactive
00:31:39.360
whiteboard and something is playing. Then you'll grab their attention. But a book, that's a real struggle
00:31:45.280
for them. And that's another problem, isn't it? Which whereby if you haven't been trained to
00:31:51.200
concentrate, what can you actually access apart from a 30 second clip on your phone?
00:31:57.280
Well, someone alerted me to this new trend that is very profitable, but nightmarish,
00:32:03.440
of YouTube shorts or TikToks that are split into two. And you've got someone talking about a topic on
00:32:08.720
the top half of the screen. And on the bottom half of the screen, it's someone playing some sort of
00:32:12.320
mobile game. So it's flashy and stimulating and it will draw your attention. So they need that
00:32:17.760
light and sound stimulation to be tricked into listening to someone saying something more complex.
00:32:28.560
No, we had a good conversation, but he was like clicking on stuff the whole time. And then I
00:32:33.200
watched some of his content and I realized that most of the time he does these videos where he's
00:32:37.520
playing a game while talking about politics. And I can't concentrate on the serious conversation
00:32:43.520
while someone's playing a game. But what you're saying is these people can't concentrate on the
00:32:48.720
serious conversation without a game being played.
00:32:50.320
Yes, quite. They need an overabundant level of light and sound stimulation. And then we wonder why,
00:32:55.200
I mean, I'm sat here in glasses, we wonder why we're having so many posture problems, why our eyes are
00:33:01.040
being burned out, why test scores are going down. I know someone in my family who has just left
00:33:06.800
primary education. And you'll know this, last week of any term, you don't really do much work.
00:33:14.720
Kids didn't want to watch a Christmas film too long.
00:33:17.760
Yeah. Genuinely worrying. Some of the reasons for this aren't just because of phones and algorithms,
00:33:22.240
though. This is something that you said in your ARC speech and something that Kate's
00:33:27.520
spoken about quite a bit. And Erica Commissar and other people. It's that institutional care
00:33:33.440
creates separation anxiety from a child's parents. And if you have that level of insecurity in your
00:33:41.520
life, then you're going to try and seek identification and certainty in other avenues. So, for example,
00:33:48.400
if you from six months onwards are separated from your mum because she needs to go out to work to
00:33:53.200
support the household because the government screwed up the economy. And then the government decides
00:33:56.480
to subsidise childcare. A baby in the morning has a circadian rhythm of cortisol. And if they have
00:34:02.160
skin-to-skin contact, it regulates. If they are separated from their mum and placed in daycare,
00:34:06.160
it peaks, it stays at that peak, and it stays at that peak throughout adolescence. And so that can
00:34:10.720
induce all sorts of things like lifelong anxiety disorders. Same with attachment styles. These have
00:34:16.640
been studied by various psychologists. If you have an anxious or avoidant or anxious avoidant
00:34:20.720
attachment style, like your Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars, where you want to suffocate someone one
00:34:25.120
minute and then push them away because you're afraid of being abandoned, do we think that those
00:34:28.880
people are going to engage in the world as healthy adults?
00:34:30.800
No. No. Okay. So, if you've been fed a diet of silly grievance narratives,
00:34:35.280
if you have been told that the reason you can't have equal pay, household, all that is because of
00:34:42.320
the toxic cis white male patriarchy, and you don't have a stable home life because your parents off-handed
00:34:47.680
you to some low-paid managerial class professional who was also caring for 30 other kids and was tasked
00:34:53.520
with behavioural management and you didn't have your needs met.
00:34:57.280
How are you going to feel connected to civilisation? You don't have a model,
00:35:00.160
you don't have some kind of unit you belong to, you don't have a unit you think you can transition
00:35:05.040
to, you don't see the value of it, and you feel that you've been robbed of an inheritance,
00:35:09.120
so why wouldn't you burn down the entire village to feel its warmth?
00:35:12.400
And it's not only that they can't concentrate, they can't invest in civilisation at all,
00:35:15.840
they're totally checked out because nobody's ever given them a reason to be.
00:35:19.680
What you're painting is a fundamentally tragic picture of that generation. Does it ever frustrate
00:35:26.560
you? And we've touched on it a little bit, does it ever frustrate you the way that your generation
00:35:31.120
has been painted by older generations, where you think, OK, I get the point, I get some of them,
00:35:37.440
but actually this isn't accurate and it's deeply uncharitable as well?
00:35:42.320
Quite. You made us. So, no parent can... Jordan Peterson wrote in 12 Rules for Life,
00:35:50.880
never do something that allows you to hate your own children. Well, that's what lots of
00:35:55.280
generations have done, they've thrown out... Never let your children do something that...
00:35:58.720
Never do something that lets you hate your own children.
00:36:03.600
Sorry, just to clarify, are you talking about that one or the one where he says,
00:36:06.560
never let your children do something that makes you hate them?
00:36:09.120
Well, they're symbiotic because you don't... What your children do is contingent on what
00:36:13.920
you instruct them to do and what you... To allow them to do.
00:36:15.920
Exactly, yes. So if you throw your hands up and don't provide any cultural guidance...
00:36:19.440
The reason I'm being anal about this is I think what... Maybe there's two separate ones. I think
00:36:26.160
the one you are referring to is never allow your children to behave in a way that makes you...
00:36:31.120
Yes, quite. That's the one. That's what I meant here.
00:36:33.040
So it's more about allowing them rather than don't do something, because there is a difference,
00:36:39.440
Well, yeah, I look forward to it. If you throw your hands up and relinquish your duty to act
00:36:46.240
as a cultural custodian, don't be shocked if the children don't feel connected to the culture and
00:36:49.520
they aren't grateful. Douglas Murray in War on the West has a great chapter on resentment. But we have,
00:36:55.520
I think, focused as people that sit down and talk for a living on ideas too much and not incentives,
00:37:02.800
because not everyone is as focused with ideas. They just sort of bumble along and fall into the
00:37:08.720
cultural safety net and the safety net should be there to allow you to live a wholesome life,
00:37:13.600
according to that. Or material pressures, as you said about housing and things like that.
00:37:18.640
So I think what's happened, and you see this with the strange application of
00:37:26.080
prior generations' adult standards to the current generation, is that they just...
00:37:31.200
I don't want to sound like you just don't understand me, Dad, but it kind of is that.
00:37:35.440
A great example of this was when recently there was a discourse around
00:37:39.840
banning smartphones for under-16s, banning the sale of them, and prohibiting kids from going on social
00:37:45.840
media. There is also the discourse adjacent to that on applying age verification to online porn sites.
00:37:52.720
The immediate reaction is, well, adults should have a right to consume with anonymity. It's like,
00:37:59.040
we're not talking about adults, we're talking about children. That's the point. But we always
00:38:02.880
apply adult standards to children because, and I think the prevailing paradigm of the individual
00:38:09.200
consumer unit that we operate under during liberalism can't really account for kids because
00:38:12.960
they're dependent, they're not self-actualizing. And so we always treat kids with legislation and
00:38:16.800
culture as if they're adults, and then get frustrated when they're not living up to adult
00:38:20.400
standards. When in fact, no, there should be certain cultural safeguards there that protect and sculpt
00:38:24.640
kids into the kind of citizens and subjects that will uphold and feel invested in a civilization.
00:38:30.960
Well, right. The thing that I always find strange, and it's a conversation we have on so many issues, where
00:38:35.360
it's, I keep hearing that we need laws for things that parents should be doing. It's like the government
00:38:44.000
needs to stop children from having access to phones. Why? Why aren't their parents responsible for giving
00:38:50.240
or not giving them a phone when they think it's appropriate? Do you know what I mean? Because
00:38:53.680
children are different too. I mean, we may disagree on this. I get the sense that we will.
00:38:57.120
Yeah. Right. But my point is this. There are some children who may be perfectly ready to have a phone
00:39:03.120
at 14. Maybe not. But that is up to the parents to decide. The parents may be more involved in that
00:39:10.480
child's life. They may be better able to supervise them. They may feel that, you know, they may have
00:39:15.440
certain values around that that they want to pass on to their children, as I would with my son on
00:39:20.400
certain issues. So like my son is not getting the phone until he's, I don't know, 35. If my wife has
00:39:26.240
her way. My point is, on almost every issue, it seems to me like we're trying to have the government
00:39:32.720
get involved and solve a problem that a lot of the time is up to the parents to solve. And there's a
00:39:39.440
whole variety of issues in which I could give you an example, but you clearly disagree. So don't get me
00:39:45.920
wrong. I am very sceptical of especially this government and the government in waiting's
00:39:51.200
ability to build power sensibly. We've just had the COVID pandemic, which I think was a criminal
00:39:56.720
confiscation of freedoms. Not that I'll ever hold my breath for any accountability on that. However,
00:40:01.520
when dealing with children, we do intervene. We feel it reasonable to intervene when a parent is
00:40:07.120
inflicting a level of abuse on the child. Of course. Yes. And I think that we can say that these
00:40:13.040
companies are knowingly profiting off of the developing and impressionable brains of children.
00:40:19.920
They're inducing anxieties in young girls and they're developing their marketing strategies
00:40:22.640
to do so. We've just seen from the sound investigations that the porn companies are
00:40:26.800
actually making content with 11 and 12 year olds in mind to say, oh, what if a young gay kid watches
00:40:33.040
this and realizes they're gay? Isn't that wonderful? It's like, why are you making porn for children?
00:40:36.720
Let's say you're 12 years old. You're still figuring out your sexuality, maybe even your gender.
00:40:45.360
Wouldn't it be helpful to see, not a celebration, but just like maybe a normalization of
00:40:52.000
something that you think is what you want, you know? Probably helps a lot. Let's say I was 12 and I
00:40:59.200
saw like trans angels. I saw all these different sites. It would help me figure out what I do like
00:41:04.560
what I don't like. If you're exposed to nothing, you have no idea and maybe you're more like pliable.
00:41:11.600
You don't want age verification on there because you're factoring in
00:41:15.360
a demographic that shouldn't be watching it into your numbers to sell to advertisers. You're
00:41:19.120
actively profiting off of this. I obviously wasn't talking about porn. No, I know, but these
00:41:22.560
are all connected to the devices. So I think we do need to go after these predatory institutions that
00:41:29.920
if they do distinguish between an adult and child, it's because they know that the children are more
00:41:33.840
impressionable and therefore a cash cow. So it's even more predatory. So I do think there is a
00:41:38.160
reasonable role for a government to step in here. I just wish it was a more competent government than
00:41:42.160
the one we currently got. So that being the case, and we're looking and you've made a very
00:41:49.280
articulate argument for the crisis that your generation faces.
00:41:52.880
Are you worried that a backlash is coming? That you are going to see a group of young men,
00:42:02.160
a significant percentage of young men going, no, we're going to check out of this, which,
00:42:10.080
if you look at pop culture through the years, things like punk, teddy boys, whatever it may be,
00:42:15.760
has always existed. But with the ability to be connected globally and in your country could
00:42:24.480
manifest in something quite worrying. I think that the revolutionary appetite
00:42:30.320
among the Zoomers is not up for negotiation. We just need to pick our flavour. And I don't say that as
00:42:37.040
necessarily an endorsement because I'm not a crazy woke communist. But what leads me to believe this is
00:42:50.400
there was an Onward paper about two years ago that broke down by demographic, age groups rather,
00:42:58.960
faith in democracy. And it was nearly 50% of Gen Z that was split between we want governance by experts
00:43:05.600
versus we want a strong man who can circumvent parliament and the military to take charge.
00:43:10.320
And frankly, it's because, as already alluded to, for us, history didn't end. We were born well after
00:43:17.280
the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of the Nazis and the like. And so the moral myth,
00:43:26.000
and I'm not saying myth as in untrue, but like morally loaded story, that created the post-war order
00:43:31.200
doesn't have as much of a hold over us. What we're instead seeing is, is the system that is
00:43:36.080
currently purported to be the best option we have necessarily working? For example, if you are a
00:43:42.640
migration sceptic, for every single election for the past decade and referendum, you voted for lower
00:43:47.840
immigration. And what happens? It gets raised record numbers. So democratic accountability seems to be a
00:43:52.400
kind of fallacy in practice. This is something that I think that Hans Holmen Hopper got right. He's a
00:44:00.640
libertarian, but also a monarchist. Very strange. But he said, actually, hypothetically, a monarchy would
00:44:05.920
be more accountable than a democracy with a sort of blob class of unaccountable advisers. Because there's
00:44:14.240
one guy, he might well be more considerate over his subjects than the people who are elected that can
00:44:20.000
just betray you at a moment's notice. And he can be deposed far more easily than the government could
00:44:24.000
be voted out. So it's less about the system, and more about all the people governing of good
00:44:29.280
character. And do they care about the people that they're meant to be representing? Or do they represent
00:44:34.160
some abstract anywhere class over in Davos, Geneva, wherever it is. So I think what's going to happen is
00:44:42.400
this total disconnect and dispassion with democracy is going to gravitate more over towards
00:44:48.080
something like a Bekele figure. And I was just thinking about him.
00:44:51.920
So he retweeted me yesterday, because I said he is the right wing vibe. What you want isn't a
00:44:58.240
with an existential threat, right? You gentlemen have done a great job in platforming
00:45:03.520
views that you disagree with to show to the public where they might line up. But there are some people
00:45:07.680
that you just genuinely cannot have a conversation with. There is no having a conversation with people
00:45:11.680
that think they are right to set up a sanctuary state in California, confiscate your children from
00:45:17.120
from you, and sterilize them. You can't negotiate with those people, right? That's just an existential
00:45:21.920
threat to your way of life. So what the right wing vibe is, is basically to identify accurately the
00:45:26.960
existential threats, crush those, and then give your victory speech on the balcony of a neoclassical
00:45:32.560
palace with your wife and kids by your side. That is every noble man's dream, frankly. And that's what
00:45:38.160
the reactionary types among Gen Z are going to gravitate towards. And they're going to be less
00:45:42.400
concerned about the levels of democracy and the processes than they are being effective.
00:45:47.440
This is why, did you see the, I can't remember who put out the poll the other day, but Trump once
00:45:53.040
joked about, are you going to be a dictator? Only on the first day. Would you support Trump being a
00:45:57.040
dictator for a day? 40% said yes. And it's just like, okay.
00:46:00.240
Yeah, but those aren't Zoomers. That's just 40% of Americans who will support anything Trump says,
00:46:04.800
let's be honest. Not necessarily anything that Trump says.
00:46:08.160
I think, well, his voter base expanded in 2020.
00:46:11.520
The Trump guys love Trump. Everything he says that's quote-unquote problematic to the mainstream,
00:46:17.120
they take it as a joke and they love Trump. That's kind of that. But I think your point about
00:46:23.120
Salvador is much better, actually, which is, I follow the logic of it. I think it's a very
00:46:30.320
historically illiterate way of thinking because this is the slogan of every revolution, right?
00:46:38.880
The system isn't working. We've got a better one. You have a revolution. Turns out the system
00:46:44.160
that you created was even worse. And then eventually things settle down and hopefully
00:46:48.480
over the course of history, you kind of make progress. But when I say it's a much better point,
00:46:54.720
what I mean is, it's kind of inevitably, do your generation feel this way?
00:47:00.160
I don't think you're going to have a sort of French revolution or a Bolshevik revolution.
00:47:04.080
Yeah, exactly. They always end up eating their own children.
00:47:07.120
What I think instead is, the left have already done the long march through the institutions.
00:47:11.040
And so the global managerial state is going to liquidate sex difference and make your consumer
00:47:17.200
units and stick you in the goon cave. Or there's going to be a reverse long march
00:47:25.360
or a charismatic enough leader to use the mechanisms of populism before democracy dies on its fumes.
00:47:31.760
But you can't. This is why I'm very sympathetic to the argument making, because we've had populism.
00:47:37.760
And look where it's taken us. Look in this country, right? Nigel Farage is the most popular
00:47:43.760
politician as a single man or woman in this country. It's a fact. You can like it, dislike it.
00:47:50.000
You can think he's evil. You can think he's far, whatever. It doesn't matter. He's the most popular
00:47:53.520
politician. He led a populist revolt in Brexit, right? And look at Donald Trump. He gets elected
00:48:01.760
on a populist wave of support in America. And the media lie about him constantly for four years.
00:48:07.520
And they sabotage everything he tries to do to the point that he indulges in his own worst instincts,
00:48:12.720
of which he has many. He can't govern properly. He can't get the country sorted out. They kick him
00:48:18.080
out. They try and sue them. He's going to get elected again. He's not going to do anything again
00:48:22.160
because they won't let him. And what are people supposed to conclude from that? They're going to
00:48:27.280
conclude democracy isn't working. Populism isn't working. We need a guy who's not going to be
00:48:31.840
constrained by any of these things. He's going to come in and sort it out. That's what they're going to say.
00:48:35.360
You just made my point for me. I know. I know. That's what I'm saying. Your point is very logical.
00:48:39.600
I see what you're saying. Yeah. Totally. I'm not saying I agree with it or like it,
00:48:44.080
but I almost at this point kind of see it as inevitable. Especially if the current politicians
00:48:49.600
have deafened their ears to what the people genuinely want. And we're going to get a continuity
00:48:55.040
candidate under Keir Starmer who said that his loyalties lie more with Davos than in Westminster.
00:48:58.800
Oh, but, but this is the problem as well. Like you talk to politicians, which I increasingly do
00:49:03.840
and behind the scenes of the cameras are not on, they all get all the problems. They understand
00:49:08.560
everything. Oh yeah. Immigration. Yeah. We need to leave the issue. Oh yeah. And then they go on
00:49:14.160
question time or they go on this and they go on that. And they, they all more houses. That's it.
00:49:18.960
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I'd like to have a good argument against you. I don't, I don't. I can
00:49:25.520
see why people feel this way. Yeah. I think what it is. And the blubocracy, which you alluded to,
00:49:29.440
is, is where the, like we did an interview with Steve Hilton, who's a former advisor to David Cameron.
00:49:33.840
And like, it basically made me want to kill people, which, which doesn't take a lot these days,
00:49:40.400
because with my son, I don't get enough sleep and whatever. But, but he's basically saying,
00:49:44.640
look, like the, the people you elect can't do anything because the civil service won't let them.
00:49:49.680
Yeah. It's a liberal managerial paradigm. Right. And the deep stay in America,
00:49:52.720
people like to say it's a conspiracy, but it's not. This is the thing I think people
00:49:56.560
don't understand with Trump. When he gets elected with Schedule F, I mean, on the run-ups of the
00:50:01.280
election, they're already bringing 90 odd charges against him, fairly bogus court cases, the
00:50:06.560
difficult to believe, uh, claims by E. Jean Carroll. Uh, all of these things, they're not,
00:50:14.560
they're stopping at nothing to destabilize his, his run to the White House. And he thinks on day one,
00:50:18.800
he'll be able to fire 50,000 federal agents and there'll be no consequence. So do you think your
00:50:24.880
enemies are just going to accept being homeless? They're not going to let him govern. They didn't
00:50:27.600
the first time. Why would they now? Yeah. So this is what I mean by you're going to have to confront,
00:50:32.720
basically existential threats. Uh, this is, this is why people are getting sort of tired of liberalism.
00:50:37.600
I mean, there's a critic called Carl Schmitt, um, who joined the ill-advised party in the 1930s
00:50:44.800
in Germany, uh, later announced and was friends with Jewish scholars. So better choice. But he made
00:50:51.760
some very insightful observations about the nature of liberalism being incapable of making its own
00:50:56.080
argument. So he used the analogy of, uh, if you ask a liberal Christ or Barabbas, he will convene a
00:51:01.760
committee. And by the time he has made a decision, the wrong man will have been crucified. And it's
00:51:05.920
because it presupposes in its procedures to be neutral. It presupposes that it doesn't have a
00:51:10.960
comprehensive doctrine of the good, but it also thinks that it can contain all privately contained
00:51:16.000
conceptions of the good, like Christianity and Islam, even if they're totally incompatible within
00:51:20.960
its borders. And it can ameliorate all of those contradictions and conflicts until everyone
00:51:26.480
sings Kumbaya and John Lennon's Imagine. And that's the delusion that I think our global elite
00:51:32.400
are operating under and the managerial class in the UK. And because they're pursuing this
00:51:39.760
impossible dream, there's a reason Thomas More called it utopia, because it literally means
00:51:42.880
nowhere. It can't exist. We're suffering for that. And I think because people are saying,
00:51:47.600
okay, the procedures aren't working, the existing ruling class aren't listening, we need a new paradigm and
00:51:53.520
a new way of doing politics. You're going to get the revolutionary Gen Z. It's just,
00:51:57.360
which flavour do you get? Do you get woke communists or do you get the reactionaries?
00:52:00.960
So let me, and this is very unusual for me, let me put a more positive spin on this.
00:52:06.080
That is very unusual. That is very unusual. One of the ways the liberal elite or the establishment,
00:52:11.120
whatever you want to call them, has always controlled the working classes, the middle classes,
00:52:17.600
whatever else, is through the media. Now we're seeing more and more that the establishment
00:52:22.640
media, their power is crumbling. Nobody's watching it. Piers Morgan just announced recently that he's
00:52:27.520
moving entirely onto YouTube. As the power grows of influencers, people were able to speak more
00:52:35.120
honestly, people like Lotus Eaters, people like ourselves. Might that help to start a change?
00:52:42.720
Might that help to put pressure on the political classes now that they no longer have this tool in
00:52:49.360
order to control the narrative? I think it will encourage some people to insulate themselves from
00:52:56.960
the most perverse of cultural incentives and to not adopt the kind of technologies that will render
00:53:02.000
that obsolete. But I think as the technological landscape changes and as the elite get increasingly
00:53:07.200
insecure, they'll do two things. The first thing I think is they'll seek to control the means of
00:53:10.880
meme production. This is what the online harms bill is about. This is what Caroline Dynage sending
00:53:14.640
letters out over the Russell Brand affair. Again, he hasn't had his day in court so I'm not going to
00:53:19.280
bother commenting on the allegations. What I am going to say is that they were so worried about
00:53:23.440
people saying maybe he should have his day in court first that they tried to get one of my friends
00:53:28.640
censored on GB News and they tried to revoke his right to have his show on Rumble without any criminal
00:53:33.360
charges. The government is getting very concerned about the ability to control the narrative now that
00:53:39.040
we don't have a shared cultural reference point, now that we're not all gathered around the television
00:53:42.240
getting the same message. This is why they all hate Elon Musk. This is why at Davos, Ursula von der Leyen
00:53:48.400
and in their 2024 risk report, they put absurdly the most luxury belief concern possible as number one,
00:53:55.600
misinformation, disinformation. They put, what was it, involuntary migration, they euphemised it as, down on the
00:54:01.360
list and like number 15 or something. And then in 10 years time, they said, oh, it won't even be a problem.
00:54:05.120
Again, it's another managerial thing, right? And then the other thing that will happen is going back to the
00:54:10.240
goggles. Everyone have an entirely customised, solipsistic consumption experience. So actually,
00:54:18.640
brainwashing won't even matter because people will be so distracted by bread and circuses that they
00:54:22.400
won't really involve themselves in the real world. Because if you have an AI girlfriend for the kind
00:54:26.640
of guys that were watching the Red Pill podcast and hopeless, if you have six tabs of pornography open
00:54:32.320
at once, if everyone around you is enmeshed in their own little bubble of AI generated movies,
00:54:40.560
you're never even watching the same movie if you put the same prompts again. We're never going to
00:54:43.200
have the same artistic experience again. Everyone's going to be individually siloed and very easy to
00:54:47.600
control because they're not even going to realise that they're being controlled. They're going to be
00:54:50.640
CS Lewis's chestless men. They don't have the language to give voice to what was lost. So we're
00:54:57.040
living in the intermediary age at the moment. All we can do is, through media, encourage people to
00:55:01.440
not adopt this technology, not atomise themselves, reclaim the morals of the past, enmesh themselves
00:55:06.320
in a responsible community and a family. And when the competence crisis or the technological collapse
00:55:11.280
comes, then you'll be aside from that. And it will be like, as Eric Kaufman said, the religious will
00:55:16.160
inherit the earth. We'll be the only ones having kids. It's been a wonderful interview. Thank you so much
00:55:22.240
for coming on the show. The final question that we always ask is always the same. Before we go over
00:55:26.560
to our locals where they get to ask questions to our guests, what's the one thing we're not talking
00:55:31.440
about as a society that we really should be? The insurmountable worldview divide between the boomers
00:55:39.840
and the zoomers. This is what is going to drive total political change and at the moment is driving
00:55:48.320
intergenerational resentment. The greater divide than between men and women, than between classes
00:55:53.360
and races, than between even every human heart, as Solzhenitsyn would have said, will be between
00:55:57.920
generations. And there is a lot of resentment building among the young. And what is that divide?
00:56:05.520
Whether or not they believe the current system is serving their interests and whether or not they
00:56:08.960
believe that they should be paying the pensions and the healthcare and propping up the housing market of
00:56:14.640
older people who are not going to intend to pay that forward. If you're relying on younger people
00:56:21.120
to take care of you in your old age, rather than importing a low wage care class who have high rates
00:56:27.520
of abuse, then maybe treat them a little bit kinder or they might decide to upend the entire thing.
00:56:34.000
You know what? I wish I could disagree with you. I really do. But I can't. I can't. I mean, look,
00:56:38.560
I keep, I've been saying this for 20 years now. Initially it was to my 30 Facebook friends, but
00:56:45.280
eventually to a larger audience. How can we continue to have levels of debt in this country
00:56:51.840
that we do and expect young people to give a shit about this country and the future? You can't do that.
00:56:57.680
You can't in debt your grandchildren and be like, why don't you love us? That doesn't work.
00:57:06.240
As young men are becoming more conservative, do you think they will also begin to embrace
00:57:12.720
traditional religions because they contain well-defined behaviors and boundaries?