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Don't have another car yet?
I could trade it in for this car I love.
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I want to welcome everyone back to the P. Kenyatta show.I am here with Curtis Yarman.How are you doing?Pretty good. We are here to read a chapter that our mutual friend, academic agent wrote in his populist delusion book about James Burnham.
Is this under his real name?Yeah, he wrote it under his.
His real name is Nemo Parvini on the cover.Got it.
It sounds like it sounds like a gay Italian porn star, but you know, it does.
It does.It does.Maybe Indian, Italian, something like that.
But, um, it's aptly titled Managerial Elites, and I'm just gonna start reading, and stop me whenever, and comment when you think you can add to it, because obviously I wanted to talk to you about Burnham, because it's Burnham.
Alright, I'm gonna get this up on the screen.Alright, Chapter 7, Managerial Elites. In the 1930s, James Burnham had been one of the leading American exponents of Trotskyism.He's Trotskyism to the fourth, I believe.
However, in the 1940s, he broke decisively with Marxism and accepted the basic validity of the Italian elite theorists, Mosca, Pareto, and Michels, to whom he had been introduced by Sidney Hook.
In 1941, he published his most famous book, The Managerial Revolution, which argued that Marxism had misconstrued the true nature of the revolution that had taken place.
It was not the proletariat who overthrew Bush while capitalism, but a new class, the managerial class.
So what always bugs me, what always bugs me about Burnham is that he doesn't understand the difference between a manager and a bureaucrat.I would say that essentially in extremists, a manager is a commander and a bureaucrat is essentially a judge.
And so there's sort of all throughout the Manjaro revolution, and I'll be like complaining about this as you go along, there's basically this confusion between these two very, very different roles.
Now, as a social class, we can sort of definitely say that they have something in common, but that's a separate point.
So let's go on.Okay. This book created an intellectual storm at the time of its publication and was reviewed very widely, not only by academic journals, but also by mainstream newspapers.
Two years later, he followed it up with The Machiavellians, in which he explored the ideas of the elite theorists, together with George Sorrell, and from which I have already drawn.
Burnham was read by and profoundly influenced George Orwell, who was chilled by his amoral scientific view of power. Burnham's outline of the managerial state inspired both Animal Farm and 1984.
His coldly realist view was said to be the model for both the character O'Brien and the book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emanuel Goldstein, in the latter.
In the 1950s and beyond, he became part of the conservative establishment in the USA, helping William F. Buckley found National Review.
and becoming a leading advocate of a tough line against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, to the extent that now Burnham is sometimes called the first neoconservative.
Later in 1964, he published The Suicide of the West, in which he is severely critical of liberal attitudes and assumptions which he argued are naive to the point of being suicidal.Anything there?You want me to keep going?
Here we will focus on the core ideas.
I'm not sure.I mean, hang on.Let me let me step back for a second.I'm not sure.Naive is a rather simple word for the suicidal nature of these suicidal ideas.Let me just flag that.
And I'm not really sure that's the way it's described in suicide of the West either.
But let's go on.OK. Here we will focus on the core ideas of the managerial revolution rather than the entire body of his thought.
It is obvious to anyone familiar with the elite theorists that Burnham had fully internalized the teachings of Mosca, Pareto, and Michels.
So as not to repeat ourselves, we will take their conclusions as granted and suffice only to show what is original in Burnham.In 1960, Burnham wrote a short article called Managing the Managers, which condensed his core thesis to just five pages.
This very useful summary will serve as a guideline throughout.Before starting, it is important to emphasize Burnham's explicitly Machiavellian frame.There is little optimism in Burnham's view of human nature.
Of all the thinkers we are considering, he was the one who most emphatically and avowedly wore the mantle of Machiavellian, seeking to write only about what is, not what ought to be.
He embodied what Thomas Sowell might call the constrained or tragic vision of man.
Niccolo Machiavelli once said that human appetites are insatiable, but the thing that they desire most is not wealth, but power I mean, let me let me let me let me just step in for there for a second.
I mean You could almost say wealth is a form of power and that money is the ability to tell other people what to do um the I think that
you might actually perhaps a better comp for power here is sex because it's sort of like both power and sex give you this feeling that you're literally your genes are likely to be passed on.
I mean the powerful you know the chief chimp is like much more likely to reproduce than some like incel omega chimp right you know And so there's this sort of sense of like power feeling really, really good in a way.
And because it feels really, really good, it is frequently mistaken for something good.
And yeah, just a note on that.Okay.Burnham's fundamental view of human nature was a Hobbesian struggle driven by an almost Nietzschean will to power.
Perhaps this is nowhere more evident than in Suicide of the West when he argues that the liberal assumption that mass education would solve the problems of yesteryear is wrong-headed.
The 19th century liberals overlooked, and the 20th century liberals declined to face, the fact that teaching everyone to read opens minds to propaganda and indoctrination at least as much as to truths. But step ahead to the next one.
No one truly strives for the public good, but rather to seeks to increase power and prestige for himself and his clique.
Okay, that's a sort of vaguely correct model, but I think that it's sort of, it's not really necessarily psychologically true in a way.
It's like, when I think of, you know, the immortal question that we can never know the answer to, you know, what are progressives thinking?
It's like asking, you know, Wittgenstein had this thing where he was like, you know, if a lion could speak, would we understand it?
You know, and sometimes, you know, there's a sort of gap there that kind of sunders, you know, the sort of two kinds of thinking.And I see it, it's a sort of very like, it's of course narrower than the gap between sort of the person
And the lion, but there's basically a way you can sort of everyone has a bit of that inside them and the sort of the best way I can find to understand it is to sort of think about sort of liberal thoughts that kind of activate you that still make you like warm in a way.
like there must be some just find one find one find a liberal thought where you're just like oh maybe it's something that's actually good sometimes these things are actually good there's plenty of lib stuff that's actually good and you know just find one that feels like really good and just like kind of you know feel that thought in your body man you know and that's sort of the feeling of
being a lib, and it's sort of like,
the feeling of you know changing the world, making an impact on the world, doing a good thing for the world, doing a good thing for people like you, thus power and prestige for himself and his clique is sort of relevant.
it's like you're not really when you're striving for your clique you know even sort of in an unconscious way you're just like we are good, the things that make us feel good are good
and so you're basically you know you're I mean prestige is just status it's the thing that gets chimpanzees laid power is a little more you know prestige is one of the benefits of power but one of the you know the definition of power is sort of a little more obscure I think that one way to say to rewrite this sentence to sort of make it ring a bell with everyone out there
trying to write their college application essay and decide what they mean, you could say, you know, no one truly strives for the public good, but rather seeks to matter.
You know, like, and it's sort of that sense of mattering that is what the chief chimp matters.The omega chimp, you know, one day they went on a raid and somebody lost track of him and they never saw him again.
And it was like three days before the rest of the chimps noticed, right?But the chief chimp, right, matters.
right you know and that's a chimp who matters and so that sort of sense of kind of translating what you know these two sentences kind of mean and how they produce what we know and love as progressivism today is
sort of you know it's not that sort of Burnham is kind of wrong about any of this stuff it's that he's sort of he doesn't go quite deeply enough into like what is actually going on here.how are these people thinking?
how are you know what is sort of in the minds of these people and what's in the minds of these people is that you know the sense that if you matter in some way then there is an idea that mattering in this way is sort of connected to good.
Let's say, for example, that the way in which you wanted to matter was to deface all statues of Martin Luther King. That's one way of mattering.And then another way of mattering is to deface all the statues of Robert E. Lee.
And, you know, you can feel that the person who it's it's even you and I are as conservatives are much emotionally closer to the person who defaced the statue of Robert E. Lee.It's easier to see in a way.It's easier to understand that person.
And that person obviously is much more important because those statues get defaced and other ones don't get defaced.
So, you know, the sense that basically, you know, if you look at what teaching everyone to read opens the minds to, what teaching everyone to read basically creates a marketplace of information for the information that these minds want to see and hear.
And these minds want to see and hear things in general that make them feel like they, the audience, matter.You know, Slava Ukraini, right?You know, basically, you know, suddenly it's not a baseball game anymore.It's not the World Cup.It's a war.
But, you know, the sort of somewhere in today's, like, understanding of politics, like, you know, the war in the Ukraine and, you know, the World Cup.
And Eurovision kind of all blend together in a way they're all sort of this like kind of fan spectacle thing and so the sense that basically the ideas that.
blossom in these minds, like the bacteria that turn into big blobby things on your plate of agar, the ideas that blossom in this basically fertile science experiment that you've created by letting and telling everyone they can read anything,
I'm in teaching them in fact to do so is you know what blossoms in that is basically ideas that feel like.
Believing in this idea helps you matter and of course this is the same thing is like my political formula because then you can basically say ok you know. It matters that I'm, like, rejecting Robert E. Lee.
It matters that I'm defacing this statue because it will help my African-American countrymen lead a more dignified life, you know, by remembering that these statues of their oppressors are not among them or something.
You have that some connection to something that's good that's done and, you know, at the end of this basically everyone in New Haven is going to Yale.
you know and the um or something like that right you know and and so this connection the thing about psychologically feeling the need to matter is that this connection can be a little diffuse nobody really reality checks it nobody wants to know if hey maybe spray painting a statue of robert e lee won't do anything for black lives at all right you know but that's sort of that possibility you know
it's like when when he says there's little optimism in Burnham's view of human nature he's talking about basically the lack of the sort of rosy glow that kind of leads from these things that are conventionally said to like matter in in a good way um to like what you can do and what you can believe and like you know and and sort of the reason that I go kind of deeply into this is that
I think it underscores sort of how hard the problem is and how, you know, sort of intrinsic, not just to quote liberalism in this kind of Stalinist progressive sense than we have, but really essential to classical liberalism to liberalism in the 19th century of the, you know, view of the word.
This is a disease that afflicts the free and open marketplace of ideas.Yeah. And so yeah, that's my that's my little interjection there.
And when I was reading Suicide of the West, I made sure every time that I read the word liberal to make sure to put a classic in front of it.
Because he was. There's something to be said for the coined shit lib.I mean, it's really rude and disrespectful and unpleasant, but there's sort of a reason it's kind of caught on.
It's this like sort of directly fecal binding, like I will not let this word twist loose from my grasp.You know, I will accompany it with the most disgusting substance on earth.I don't know.It's, you know, it's for those who like that sort of thing.
It's the sort of thing they like. But, go on, please.
Libtard worked for a while, shitlib works a lot better now.It'll be around a lot longer.Sorry, go on.No problem.
Burnham thus harbored no illusion that a particular form of society, agrarian, theocratic, or feudal, much less socialist, liberal, or democrat, could adequately restrain the appetite for power.
Like Mosca, he recognized the need and utility of a political formula, which can apparently motivate men by appealing to their sentiments.
But like Pareto, he essentially viewed all ideologies as thinly veiled justifications for the interests of power.However, unlike Pareto, he saw psychology as the decisive factor.
Burnham retrained, perhaps, retained, perhaps from his Marxist origins, an economic emphasis, as we shall see.Obviously, I also see psychology as the decisive factor.
Where the analysis of power and the ruling class has conveniently rested in the government itself, Burnham saw the managerial class operating across the so-called public-private divide and in every large organization.
In effect, the bureaucrats who emerged in Mosca and Michelle's
through the iron law of oligarchy, come to control every institution and then come to recognize each other as an identifiable class with common interests, with common skills, interests, beliefs, and goals.
Alright, I think that basically if you're looking for a parallel, and admittedly this is falling down in the present sort of military,
if you're looking for a parallel between just like Burnham was an intellectual he did not know anything about the like business world or how business works or any of that stuff it was basically as far from him as like the empire of japan
And so, you know, understanding basically that, you know, it's true that you can get sort of so-called bureaucracy, you can get outposts of very bureaucratic bureaucracy and like HR departments and so forth in the private sector.
You can also have things in the public sector which are run basically by command, but the main difference is basically organizations that run on a command, a true top-down basis versus organizations that run on the basis of procedure.
And so if you basically look at essentially the essential principle of capitalism when it's functioning normally is on the command basis and the essential principle of bureaucracy is the procedural basis.
Now, the procedures can be manipulated and bent in various ways to actually sort of exert kind of personal power or like little mafias do things.But basically, at least the way it's supposed to operate,
In a procedural, basically, organization, everyone who works there has some procedure that they're supposed to be doing.
If they encounter an exception that they don't understand that doesn't fit in their procedure, they kick it up to their, quote, manager.But their manager is not a commander.Their manager is an exception handler.
and so when weirder and weirder things happen, it goes all the way up to whoever the decider is.And in the federal government, that ball can go all the way up to the president.
The president is making a decision, but he might as well be a magic eight ball.And those can make decisions too.
In the private sector, when you're a commander or the military, in an effective military at least, when you're a commander, you have what's called mission orders, which says basically, you're a captain, you want your lieutenant to take a hill.
You say, lieutenant, take that hill.You don't say how he takes the hill.
He she or they or ours a reserve takes the hill You you just say take the hill and that basically that top-down command structure allows Sort of every every commander to have essentially absolute authority within their Specific domain which creates much much more flexibility and it creates it creates a different mindset so the basically if you go if you go to parade I guess we're not going to
Deeply into predo here but you know he has this theory of of residues of basically sort of the lion personality in the fox personality.And, you know, the. the lion is commander and the fox is bureaucrat.
And so basically when he uses this word manager in the managerial revolution, he's kind of confusing kind of lion roles with fox roles.
Now as for being an identifiable class, there's clearly this sort of college educated upper class thing, which is like a thing, right?And
the like in and it certainly is trained by the same institutions and it sort of gets the same kind of recycled ideology but really like you know to say the active heads of the bureaus are the managers in government the same and nearly the same in training function skills and habits of thought as the managers in the industry is basically his central thesis in this book and unfortunately his central thesis is just plain wrong
All right, let's keep going.Yeah.I'm fine with that.You're here to talk about Burnham because I don't think anyone knows more about him than you.
In the new form of society, this is quoting now, in the new form of society, sovereignty is localized in administrative bureaus. They proclaim the rules, make the rules, issue the decrees.The shift from parliament to bureaus occurs on a world scale.
The actual directing and administrative work of the bureaus is carried on by a new man, a new type of man.It is specifically the managerial type.
The active heads of the bureaus are the managers in government, the same or nearly the same in training, function, skills, habit of thought as the managers in industry.
See, if he pulls like every time he's sort of constantly spicing up his discourse by drawing this kind of broad connection, which really fails.
You know, I think in his time, to be fair, the corporate middle manager and the career civil servant were probably a little more similar to each other.
Perhaps it was an age of big, you know, big stagnant companies and like very dynamic young bureaucracies may look a little more like each other.
But, you know, if you drew lines from the civil servants to the professors who educate them, he'd be drawing, I think, much more defensible lines.But please go on.
Thus, power seems as if it is decentralizing but, in fact, is concentrating and consolidating itself in a more diffuse way across every possible institution, node, and society.
If we use Juvenal's idea of power centers being like castles which center power needs to capture,
central power needs to capture, the managerial class quietly takes over government while capturing every castle to create an extremely broad central power base which has the appearance of being made up of disparate and separate spheres of influence.
When Burnham talks about managers in industry and managers in government, it brings to mind the corporate middle manager and the career civil servant, but he actually has in mind a much wider range of people than that.
Senior executives at board level in At board-level incorporations, for example, the CEO are very often managers, paid employees.
Beyond the mid-ranking civil servants, top-level advisors of every stripe, senior diplomats, communications directors, and so on, are all managers.
Even the politicians themselves who sit in parliamentary democracies, we might picture someone like Tony Blair or Angela Merkel, take on a distinctly managerial air.However, the scope of the man...
Yeah.Yeah.Say the next one.
Okay.However, the scope of the managerial class is wider still than this.It is not simply those who work in and around corporations and government, but in all major institutions across society.Want me to keep going?
Yeah, I mean, no.So what we're really identifying here in a way is sort of what forms a class is kind of two things, or three things, or four things.Well, there's race, let's not get into that.
but then there's basically parental inculcation of traditions, and there's institutional inculcation of traditions, and there's work.
So, you know, what's common basically across this class is, and what's to a great extent managed to homogenize this class, is simply the modern American educational program, where basically
In order, it is true that to get, you know, whether it's a private sector, you know, job or a government job, you have to basically go to the same institutions and basically excel at the same institutions.And so basically the ideology or sort of the
Even just the idea of how to do things that is prevalent in those institutions becomes a thing.What people will find often, and this may have changed since my younger days, but the
usual experience in a top quality company of like a new high-level CS grad is that they sort of usually had to be taught which way which end is up and if they were a PhD they had to basically be taught which end is down and and and like the PhDs required much more retraining so you know it's it's um
Like there is still this commonality in this sort of, you know, these institutions create social groups.There's the group of people who graduated from this school, that school, whatever school.
So, you know, to sort of overlook that as a class, I mean, that is a kind of class forming thing.
It's just that sort of the kind of tasks of being, I mean, the reason why being a bureaucrat is like being a professor is that they're sort of both kind of Fox positions.
They're both positions which work by exercising influence rather than sort of command and decision.
and sort of all of the lion prince that you know basically one of the things that's often cited as kind of the downfall of the late roman empire was that it had this rigid separation between being the career of being a general and the and the career of being a bureaucrat and a lot of bureaucrats and they were all quite unmanly and you know there's no one like caesar who is a general a writer and an administrator and
So when you have this separation between basically lion careers and fox careers, and bureaucrats are all sort of very, very bored foxes, basically, you know, you have a problem.
But yeah, I think that's the, you know, the, the line Fox separation is just what Burnham misses.So I'm sorry, I'll stop.
No, that's good.You're good.Um, chapter three on this, I already recorded with Oren McIntyre, who you, you met when we did a stream together.Um, yeah.And we went,
He goes deep into deep into foxes and lions there So what you're talking about is not going over anyone's head if they listen to that episode on chapter three So, all right, excellent.
Let's keep going It is worth quoting burnham at length here within the huge trade unions a similar managerial officialdom the labor bureaucracy Consolidates its position as an elite
The elite is sharply distinguished in training, income habits, and outlook from the ordinary union member.What's great is that these people still exist, but I don't think they actually do anything at all.So maybe it's a third point of fear.
The trend extends to the military world, the academic world, the non-profit foundations, and even auxiliary organizations of the UN, of the UN armies, of the UN.
Armies are no longer run by fighting captains, but by Pentagon-style managerial bureaucracy.That's a bit more true than it was 80 years ago, but... Within the universities, Proliferating administrators have risen above students.
Proliferating administrators in the 40s.
Yeah, exactly. Proliferating administrators have risen above students, teaching faculty, alumni, and parents.
Their power position expresses... This isn't from the main... This is much later.This is because you wouldn't be talking with the United Nations in the middle of a revolution.Right, right, right.
Okay, yeah, this is probably written in the 60s, I think.
Well, this is from Managing the Managers.He mentioned that, the one that he wrote in 1960 to update, to consolidate, do a consolidation. Yeah.All right.And yeah, I noticed that too.
There's still been some proliferation of administrators since 1961.I believe statistics will show.I'm sorry, go on.
The great nonprofit foundations have been transformed from expressions of individual benevolence into strategic basis of managerial administrative power.
Everyone should read, everyone should read Rene Wormser's Foundations, Their Power and Influence.He was the chief counsel of the only congressional committee that ever actually investigated the Great Foundations.Please keep going.
Wormser, W Worm S E R. United Nations has an international echelon of managers entrenched in the Secretariat.
When was the last time you heard about the United Nations? It's been a while.Isn't that amazing?It's still there.It's just like ticking along, sitting there in turtle Bay, but like basically it used to be so relevant.
You had these fiery speeches at the United Nations.I believe the chief justice of the U S actually stepped down Arthur Goldberg to become the ambassador to the UN felt to be a very high profile position.And it's just like a void.It's incredible.
But as far as I know, they're still spending money and parking their cars illegally.
But it's taking up a really expensive friggin riverfront property right there.
I know.I know it could be given to the home of the underprivileged.
That's exactly what I was thinking.
Exactly. There are fairly obvious parallels in the managerial structures of diverse institutional fields.For example, managers in business are to stockholders as labor managers are to union members.
as government managers are to voters, as public school administrators are to taxpayers, as university and private school administrators are to tuition payers and fund contributors.
Yeah, it's just very loose.
It's very loose going.When Burnham was writing, the managerial class had not fully consolidated its power, so the truth of what he is saying was not readily visible to all but the most astute observers.
Detractors would often focus on irrelevant details and incorrect predictions while missing the bigger picture.
At the time of writing, in the 2020s, when all these organizations appear to speak with one voice, when none dare to disagree, the truth of Burnham's analysis appears so obvious as to seem trite.
In fact, the scope now extends beyond what even he envisioned to encompass practically every major church denomination too.
Well, I mean, yeah, technically, legally, there was, from my research back in way back in 2001, back in 2001, there was 50,000 Protestant denominations registered in the United States.Wow.That had to have doubled or tripled by now.So yeah, yeah.
And well, you know, three quarters of them are our pride flag and the other quarter is QAnon.But I'm sorry.These are true religions, but I exaggerate.This is exaggerations.It's only 2022.
Sorry, go ahead.Even the Holy Roman Empire has been paused.Yeah, yeah, indeed.
Where Marxists believe that the decisive factor in history and society is ownership of the means of production, Burnham argued that the relationship between ownership and control has been severed due to the rise of limited liability corporations, which, as C.A.
Bond shows, were always a legal creation rather than a facet of the free market.
I mean, I don't know what rat hole we're going down here.But like, I feel like basically Burnham knows about as much about limited liability corporations as he does about like, you know, the liver of the lobster.
I mean, I think it's green, that liver.But yeah, I just, yeah. Anyway, yeah, let's let's let's let him say more about public corporations and then have have my opinion there.
Okay.So quoting the divorce of control or power or power from ownership has been due in large part to the growth of public corporations.
So long as a single person, family or comparatively small group held a substantial portion of the common shares of a corporation, the legal owners could control its affairs.
Even if they no longer actually conducted the business, the operating managers were functioning as their accountable agents.
But when the enterprise became more vast in scope, and at the same time, the stock certificates became spread in small bundles among thousands of persons, the managers were gradually released from subordination to the nominal owners.
de facto control passed for the most part to non-owning managements.All right.
All right.All right.All right.Hold up.Hold up.Hold up.So, you know, basically. I feel like there's something that this motherfucker does not know about business.And I've worked in a number of businesses.
I've done business, I've started businesses, I've owned businesses.And there's something really basic to the nature
a business that I think not just James Burnham, but most people fundamentally at a certain level just don't understand, which is they don't understand the purpose of a business.
The purpose of a business, and really it's like any business, the purpose of a business, I know this will come as a shock, is to make money.
And what's important about this, relative to this question of ownership, is that the whole concept of, if you imagine businesses having other nefarious purposes, let's say you pretended that your purpose was to make money, but your real purpose was to conquer and annex Mexico.
you know, then you'd be like sort of pretend or turn the world in paperclips, another fine internet example.You know, you'd be like pretending to make money, but you'd actually be engaged in this other thing.
And presumably this other thing would be the direction of the owners.So the owners, you'd have a little cabal of people that, of this company that pretended to be mining gold, but was actually plotting the invasion of Baja.Let's just say Baja.
you know, and they would be doing gold mining things, but also like bar invading things, right?You know, whereas the thing is that every company does something different.
Every company has a different sort of purpose and companies in the olden days used to be defined by corporate charters that limited them to a specific purpose.Anything else was held ultra virous or out of bounds.
That concept is something of a dead letter.Your gold mining company could start selling dental floss. But even if it starts selling dental floss, its purpose to selling the floss will be to make money.
So what makes a company work really well is the reason it doesn't matter who the owners are or how many bundles amongst thousands of persons. you know, the ownership is spread among the interest of all of the owners is completely aligned.
They're not here to change the world or like create environmental sustainability or whatever.They're here to make money.And and because they're all here for exactly the same purpose, it's like a laser.It's like coherent light.
Their purpose is completely aligned.I've always you ever see it like a European company in like Spain or something.And instead of, you know, Co or Inc, after it has the letters S.A.Do you know what S.A.
stands for? No, what does it stand for?
It stands for anonymous society.And what a corporation is, is an anonymous society.So first of all, it doesn't matter who the fucking owners are, okay?They're just the people who get checks.
And the only way it matters is basically, if they look at the company and they're like, something is not going on right here, we're not invading Baja.Well, forget the Baja.No, we're not mining enough gold.
Maybe the CEO is stealing half the gold and then they can step in and do something.So the second thing to understand about corporate governance is that it has two layers.It has a board and it has the shareholders.The shareholders elect the board.
This election is almost always completely meaningless.Actually, if even the board is involved in managing the company, something is probably fucked.
And if the shareholders are involved, there's like war in heaven or like a proxy battle or like something is just fucked.
And you know, but in a smaller company and a little bitty company like the kind I've been involved in, it means if the shareholders involved, it means something is fucked.Okay, so in the normal and even if the board is involved, something is fucked.
The role of the board is really should be like, what is Mark Zuckerberg's board do?Like, actually, Mark Zuckerberg is an absolute ruler, his board has no power over him at all.So basically, they just meet and say, Hi, Mark, you know, nice job.
Um, maybe they have some thoughts and views, but it doesn't matter.Uh, you know, Google's board, um, what's the name of the, the president of Google Sandeep or something.Um, yeah, yeah.And, um, he, um, Google's board actually has control over him.Um,
But obviously he's doing a fine job.Stock keeps going up.Revenue keeps going in.Web keeps getting shittier.So it's fine.But I mean, the web keeps getting shittier is an effect, I'm convinced, of Google, but it's not Google's intent.
It's not like invading.It's an externality.It's not an intentional externality like invading Baja.
So the thing is basically in a normal company, there are no acts of intentional externality that flow from the owners, whether it's one owner or, you know, all the, everyone on the NASDAQ.
There's sort of no intentionality that goes into the management of the company.
The only reason why you have anything but the top-down hierarchy from the CEO or president or whatever down is basically to act as an accountability layer in case the CEO loses his touch or gets a brain tumor, needs to be replaced for some other reason.
And so, from the CEO down, it's simply an army.And just as an army's, I mean, an army has much more complicated tasks than a company because a company's job is just to make money. An army is like, well, do I conquer this?Do I conquer that?
Do I build, you know, peace?Do I make a desert and call it peace?You know, like none of those questions of purpose are relevant for the company.Its goal is just to make money.
And so this is something very fundamentally different from sort of anything that exists in these kind of procedural bureaucracy systems.End of rant.
All right, onward.In effect, Burnham's key insight was to apply Mischel's iron law of oligarchy to shareholders and corporate managers, and then to apply the same logic to every other organization.
So Murray Rothbard, the great Murray Rothbard, I think he had a number of laws, but one of Rothbard's laws, which ironically may have affected Rothbard to some extent, was that everyone puts the most attention into the thing that they're the most wrong about.
Because Burnham is literally right about everything else except for this but like but that's his key insight.
I'm sorry going okay Burnham's conception of the behavior and methods of managerial elites owes a lot to Michelle's They look after their own interests at the expense of those whom they are supposed to represent and serve
Yeah.See, if you're working, that's true in a bureaucratic elite.In a corporate elite, basically, no.Anyone who's a middle manager at a business is well aware that the purpose of business is business, is to make money.
And so basically like looking after your own interests in that sense is like taking kickbacks from like your purchasing manager or something like that's something that's sort of basically non-existent.
I would go further and say that what Burnham is doing is he's basically taking all of the bad press that has already by this time been aimed at evil corporations and he has this aha moment and he's like what if we could redirect that at these fucking bureaucracies by calling them the same thing.
It's just a typical rightist, like three cushion pool shot that like just lands the eight ball in the corner pocket.Quoting the cue ball, sorry, cue ball.
OK, so scratch.OK.Yeah.All right.Quoting once the managers consolidate their position within an institution, their objective interests no longer fully correspond to the entrance interests of the other groups involved.
Voters, owners, members, teachers, students or consumers. A decision on dividends, mergers, labor contracts, prices, curriculum, class size, scope of government operations, armaments, strikes, etc.
may serve the best interests of the managers without necessarily contributing to the well-being of the other group.
See, the reason why this is true in every group except the sort of corporate structure.The corporate structure it's not true in because basically corporate
you know, like the military discipline of actually having to win your wars, corporate discipline of actually having to make money sort of keeps organizations tight.
So they actually, unless they're, you know, this breaks down a little bit in like really gross monopolies.I think really gross monopolies are gross, but in like a normal capitalist environment,
everything is basically has, you know, is sort of, there's no slack in that because that slack should be sort of instantly sucked out into profit.
And so you have these organizations where basically people are just used to like executing shit without slack.And then you go over to the post office and you're like, why is this different?Right.
You know, and it's different because the whole theory of the post office is managers too. The post office is a corporation.Okay, it loses a little bit of money.You know who else loses money?Uber, right?But Uber isn't run like the post office.
But maybe if you made Uber a government department and gave it 100 years to mature, it would be run like the post office.And in fact, I'm pretty sure it would be.
And, and so like that, that difference of, you know, basically for the managers to be pursuing their, their own self interest is a kind of slack, which are basically tense, you know, organization that's running efficiently is not going to do any more than a car that's running efficiently is not going to like belch like gasoline fumes at the tailpipe.
All right.Onward.Their ends are almost entirely self-serving and self-justifying, focusing on problems that expand their control and power.
Again, this is a case of the problems are like successful memes that make people feel important.Going back to our earlier... I'll let you keep going.
Talk about the progressives.Yeah.All right. Quoting, managerial activity tends to become inbred and self-justifying.The enterprise comes to be thought of as existing for the sake of its managers, not the managers for the enterprise.
A high percentage of the time of the managers and their staff is spent on housekeeping and other internal problems.
Self-justifying managerial control tends to keep alive operations which have little social purpose other than to nourish an enclave of managers.This is conspicuously true of governments.
Many acute, expensive problems which our society faces, for example, in agriculture, radio, TV, railroads, finance, etc., are largely manufactured by the managerial agencies founded to solve them.
Okay, here one might think of the issue of climate change or the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In both cases, every solution to the problem entails expanding the remit of the managers, creating new jobs for managers, and instituting new power centers from which managers can control the masses. Stop there.
So basically when you say every solution to the problem, again if you just kind of flip your lens slightly and say an idea will be seen as a solution by
bureaucrats in a network like this, an idea will be seen as promising if it offers that capacity for expansion.
So if you can basically pose it as a solution to a problem which is within the remit of some small oligarchy, and it also sort of is an idea that has impact
on within that oligarchy, if it lets you expand your remit and create new jobs and institute new power centers, it will be seen as a very sweet idea.
Whoever discovered, and you know, the best ideas are like America, like someone discovers this idea and then just like a whole flock of professors can like descend on it.
Right you know and and you know there's sort of space enough for everyone this is like the dream idea normally it's pretty cramped and.
And so that sort of way of thinking about it is like you're like weird ideas of these solutions come from where does the idea.
in covid-19 or the idea that really created covid-19 that we have to go around and collect all the bat coronaviruses where does that idea come from why is that a popular idea and why once we collect them do we have to genetically engineer them to be more dangerous you know and so the idea you know it would seem that among virologists whose purpose in life is to control viruses that
gain-of-function experiments would be the opposite direction.You might be more interested in loss of function.This is literally how you create a traditional vaccine is by partly loss of function, right?
And so the fact that you're studying gain-of-function is like, why is that so exciting and interesting?And eventually it creates
it's not that the people who are doing these experiments were like we're going to create a pandemic and then we're going to get more money because we're the virologists and it's a virus pandemic but that's in fact sort of the feedback loop that happens and that literally happened.
I mean we're spending more money than ever on finding the back all the back coronaviruses it's like fucking pokemon out there you know and we're training them too you know and so
you know, the, like, the fact that these ideas of solutions basically prosper in a liberal marketplace of ideas or within the expert marketplace of ideas, especially because, you know, nobody in virology cares what, like, you know, Linda Lee in Topeka thinks of virology.
It's the expert network that matters.But within the expert network, basically, the idea that here's this kind of research that everyone is funded to do and that looks very, very impactful is actually bad is not going to be a popular idea.
And the idea that who the heck prospers in an academic career by killing the guy in the next office's funding doesn't work that way.You may not be allies, you may not be working on the same grant, but at least you'd better be a team player.
And so just the very nature of these oligarchies tends to promote these kinds of basically oligarchical political formulas.
Onward.In addition, the managerial class is anti-democratic in practice, though not in rhetoric. Managerial predominance tends towards regimentation and the suppression of active democracy.
The rising power of a managerial group in a given institution is, in fact, usually equivalent to a lessening in whatever form of democracy is relevant.In other words, the power of the stockholder, voter, member, consumer, faculty, taxpayer, etc.
decreases as the power of the manager increases. The combination of managerial groups, as when there is a collusion between labor and business management, means the decline of democracy in the conjoined fields.
In this connection, we must remember that totalitarianism is nothing more than an integrated front of managerial groups achieved either by mutual agreement or unilateral coercion.
Well, I mean, there's a silver lining in every cloud.
I mean, you know, but yeah, I mean, you know, it's like, I mean, if you can imagine democracy on the scale of even a small institution, I mean, like imagine a restaurant in which the diners vote on the food.
Imagine a restaurant in which the staff votes on the food.
and that's just a restaurant, you know, imagine a movie which is made by the votes of the cast and the crew, right, you know, this would be like some ridiculous 60s experiment and it would be like unwatchable, just improbable fucking thing, you know, and so the sense of basically like, again, he's sort of
I think what Burnham adopts in later life is something that happens to some pundits who become important.They basically are like, wow, people are actually responding to my words and making decisions because of them.
And I'm going to, instead of writing sort of, or like looking as coldly as I can to see what is true, I will be like, what will be the useful, powerful, effective thing to say?
and so the reason why Burnham doesn't look too closely into his like bogus manager bureaucrat sort of analogy or like why he's like oh this is anti-democracy well democracy is the cult of the age so I'm gonna write that it's anti-democracy and that's like you know bad um is like you know it's beneath him in a way it's like beneath the author of the Machiavellians okay
They are also practically impossible to dispense with owing to the interchangeable nature of managers.Even today, though individual managers in business can lose their jobs, a Napoleonic campaign is needed to get rid of a corporate management group.
As for government or educational administrators and trade union officials, a nuclear explosion would hardly be enough to dislodge them.
Yeah, the latter is certainly true.It would have to be a big explosion.
Firing one manager will simply result in another one taking his place.He will have the same managerial tastes, interests, ideas, goals, and so on as the last one.
You can just read bureaucratic there, and that should be a specific warning to the people in the proposed next administration who are working on the Schedule F problem.
Go on. Why did this change come about?For Burnham, it is no great secret.Quoting, there is no mystery in this shift.It can be correlated easily enough with the change in character of the state's activities.
Parliament was the sovereign body of the limited state of capitalism.The bureaus are the sovereign bodies of the unlimited state of managerial society.
Indeed, much of the managerial revolution is devoted to contrasting capitalism, by which Burnham means the small-state laissez-faire bourgeois capitalism of 19th century, with managerialism.
The differences between capitalism and managerialism manifest themselves in their respective ideologies.
Capitalist societies promote individualism, opportunity, natural rights, especially the rights of property, freedom, especially freedom of contract, private enterprise, private initiative, and so on.These ideas justified profit and interest.
They showed why the owner of the instruments of production was entitled to the full product of these instruments and why the worker has no claim on the owner except for the contracted wages.
I mean sorry go on, go on, go on.I mean so one of the you know the trends of the time is the sense of like big and bureaucratic is good.
It's sort of like the like like remember like the Japan is taking over everything, business craze in the in the 80s like black rain you know like and so basically there's a sort of thing that is like looks back at
kind of 19th century capitalism and also sees it as kind of more of an abstraction, whereas in fact, it's just like large bodies of men being commanded in a military style, just to make money, not to conquer.And so the extent to which that
is that that rather than the sort of classical liberal ideology things that he talks about are kind of the essence of 19th century business and though he doesn't realize it, you know, because of this kind of fad for 20th century business as well.
Go on.Burnham notes that where these were once progressive slogans in 1941, they are recognized as revolutionary and as the cry of the cries of Tories.
Yeah, that's an important that's an that's an that's an important point.
So basically, one of the things you know, classical liberalism in say that, you know, the old Manchester days going back to like the really the first half of the 19th century that is always basically a left wing standpoint that is basically striking down sort of throne altar and monopoly.
And so there's just this you know, because it's sort of a destructive force of these old powers that be in its nature, it's inherently destructive.
Of course, once the old powers are gone, you know, and new powers arise, that force can is also an asset to those new powers.And so it becomes a right wing force.That's why we that's why we perceive capitalism is right wing now.
And 150 years ago is left wing.I'm sorry, go on.
In contrast, managerialism is oriented away from the private individual and towards the public collective, away from free enterprise and towards planning, away from providing opportunities and towards providing jobs, less about rights and more about duties.
One must remember you got you got something.Yeah.Yeah.Yeah, keep going.
That's just what I was just fantasy Okay, one must remember here that burnham did not only have the united states in mind But also the soviet union and nazi germany as managerial states The soviets and germans were more blatant in their messaging than the americans who felt the need to pay lip service to the older ideologies
In a passage that seems shocking to read today, perhaps owing to 80 years of propaganda between 1941 and now, Burnham notes that the masses in Britain, France, and America simply did not want to fight World War II for the elites, that their messaging was tired and outmoded and simply failed to animate the young men despite mass unemployment at the time.
He contrasts that with the picture in Germany where the masses enthusiastically supported Hitler. He argues that it is shallow and absurd to imagine that mass support for the German war effort was down to terrorism.
And skilled propaganda alone rather the cause was genuinely popular So I I think this is I mean, maybe it's like exaggeration I think it is correct that world war ii is more popular in germany than at first than with the allies um, especially as the germans started up by winning I would say important to remember that in world war one the war is Much more popular than world war ii Just worth noting Okay
In France, meanwhile, the masses were passive and did not have the will to fight because democracy and capitalism were not causes that animated them whatsoever.
He points out the awkward and undeniable fact that both Britain and the USA had to resort to the draft rather than relying on millions of enthusiastic and willing volunteers at a time of mass unemployment.
However, managerialism ultimately had a globalizing tendency and totalitarian character.
As Barnum warned in 1960, the directing managers of each nation should preserve a healthy remnant of national individuality from becoming dissolved into the global managerial state that looms under a variety of labels as the ideal goal of a total managerial society.
However, it seems that Burnham's thinking retains a residually Marxist economism whereby material conditions ultimately create the need for ideologies, or in Marxist jargon, the base creates the superstructure.
The process by which capitalistic firms become managerial is driven initially by economic and practical concerns and only laterally by ideological ones.
Burnham argues that managerialism comes about initially because of the economic need for startup capital, especially in times of contraction in which the interest rates are high and investors are risk-averse, such as during the Great Depression.
Yeah, I mean, I'll just leave that one.Like, yeah, I wouldn't even know where to start to try and refute that argument.It's just, it's a piece of the 1940s that just hasn't really worked out intellectually.I'm sorry, go on.Alright, so quoting.
The internal crisis of entrepreneurial capitalism compels the expansion of the state.Massive amounts of new capital cannot be mobilized from private sources and must come, directly or indirectly, from the government.
The managers, indispensable to the technical processes of modern production, find cooperation with the state and the use of its coercive monopoly valuable for the continuation of production and for their own interests.
Here, the defender of entrepreneurial capitalism might object and argue that a firm might raise funds by floating themselves in the stock market as an IPO.In other words, issuing shares in exchange for liquid capital.
But the publicly traded company relies on the state for its legal status and automatically comes under increased regulation and managerial oversight. Furthermore, in practical terms, control over such companies is often handed over to managers.
it relies on the press, which really, you know, for its PR status, and we live in a press-run state.
And so basically, where, you know, the two forms of governance that really drive things are the press and basically, you know, the, what Christopher Caldwell calls the Second American Constitution, but it's actually like the fifth, by which I mean like the law of protected classes.
And so the, you know, right in a way, I'm not sure the like, yeah, I mean, like, regulation doesn't matter.I don't know.But like, yeah, it's sort of a little doubling down here.Let's keep going.
OK.For example, one of the great American tycoons, Henry Ford, died in 1947.
Although his son Edsel had technically been the president of the Ford Motor Company from 1919 until his death in 1943, Henry had always assumed de facto control over the company.The board and the management had never seriously defied him.
The Roosevelt administration had developed a plan to nationalize the Ford Motor Company should Henry becoming capacitated.Thus, he resumed direct control of the firm.
Before his death, owing to his old age and declining mental health, and somewhat cajoled by his wife and daughter-in-law who owned controlling stakes in the firm, he agreed to hand over the day-to-day affairs of running the Ford Motor Company to his grandson, Henry Ford II.
It was soon losing $9 million a month, and the corporate manager, Ernest R. Breach, that's ironic, was hired to become executive vice president and then board chairman. The Ford Motor Company became publicly traded in 1956.
Thus, even though the Ford family retained a 40% ownership of this company, it can be said to have fully transitioned into being a node of managerialism after the death of its founder, Henry Ford, who once commanded it as a visionary entrepreneur and leader.
Yeah, so the separation between basically, when you separate family or concentrated ownership companies like Facebook today from say a company like Google whose ownership is distributed, you see that there's not a whole lot of difference in behavior between Facebook and Google.
There's a little bit of difference. with basically someone like Elon Musk, who sometimes does maybe kind of have some ulterior motives, except he doesn't seem to want to buy Twitter, unfortunately.But maybe there's some motives there.I don't know.
you know again the sort of the obsession with this kind of robber baron muckraker storyline where which is just this really tired storyline even by the 40s where basically you're like oh the evil robber baron you know like is plotting to invade Baja you know to find ice hey anyone out there have some Baja vehicles it'll be like storm area 51 except storm
Baja but you heard it here first but on the Pete Quinones show but Storm Baja but yeah I mean you know that there's a difference between those things is sort of not particularly great in a way and so yeah he's just barking up the wrong tree on the difference between sort of managerialism and
I mean, Ford is still a perfectly efficient company that efficiently makes cars and really hasn't done anything else besides make cars.Its cars may be a little less exciting than they were after the death of the Elon Musk of cars.
But they're still perfectly good cars.It's not like Ford has transitioned entirely into making like experimental theater or something. it couldn't because basically those strings are tight, right?
You know, whereas the Ford Foundation, I guess we're about to get to the Ford Foundation.By the way, you mentioned, I think Ernest R Breach is a really cool name, but I recently met someone living in Austin who has the coolest name of all the time.
He's actually an academic.He writes, I think he's written for like City Journal or Manhattan Institute or something like that.He works on homelessness and as well he should because his name is Judge Glock. Oh my god.Exactly.Isn't that amazing?
You didn't even make it up.
It's an old Swiss name apparently.Anyway, fucking brilliant.Not even artificial or so I'm told.Anyway, the same can be said for the... go on.
The same can be said, and doubly so, for the Ford Foundation.Shortly after Henry Ford's death, Henry Ford II signed a document stating that the Ford family would exercise no more influence over the foundation than any other board member.
He regretted the decision for the rest of his life.Since then, the Ford Foundation has supported almost exclusively left-wing progressive causes that would make Henry Ford a well-known social conservative, That's to say the least.
Mildly, mildly putting it.To turn in his grave.For example, between 1970 and 2010, the Ford Foundation gave $46,123,135 to LGBT causes alone.
This is typical of how managerialism captures institutions and turns them against their original purposes for managerial ones.
See, when you get all the way over on the other side of the aisle, managerial is just another euphemism for communist. Right.And basically, well, he says that shortly afterward, I guess.
But like if you hear if when you're talking in this sense, you hear the word managerial, just substitute communist and it will make perfect sense.In fact, you could do it as you read.
OK.Here, left wing progressivism and communism are synonymous since the solutions of the former always involve the expansion of the latter.
To stay with the example of LGBT causes, these may seem remote from something as technical as communism, but consider the armies of HR officers, diversity czars, equality ministers, and so on that are supported today under the banner of LGBT and used to police and control enterprises.
The philanthropic endeavors of the Ford Foundation in In this regard, lay the infrastructure and groundwork to set up new power centers for communism under the guide of this ostensibly unrelated cause."Jesus, it does work.Oh my god.
Similar case studies can be found in the issues as diverse as racial equality, gender equality, Islamist terrorism, climate change, mental health, and the management of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The logic of communism is to create invisible problems which can in effect never truly be solved, but rather can permanently support communist jobs that force some arbitrary compliance standard such as unconscious bias training, net zero carbon, the ratio of men and women on executive boards, or whatever else.
In the communist state of the Soviet Union, well, no, hold on, I'm gonna, well, let me do that again.In the managerial state of the Soviet Union, such managers would simply be called commissars of the CPSU.
In the communist state of the United States, they will simply be called things like equality, diversity, and inclusion officer for Ford Motor Company, but their function is identical.
In both cases, their post and its duties are backed by the full force of the law in the state. The latter is an example of the fused political-economic apparatus Burnham describes.
In the end, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not have to nationalize Ford, even if the U.S.government and the Ford Motor Company have the ostensible appearance of being separate entities.
In actuality, they move as one, espouse the same values, enforce the same compliance policies, and so on, as if they were two sub-departments of the Politburo.
Well, they don't make the same kind of tough trucks, you know, I mean, you know, like imagine, imagine if the Department of Transportation had to make the F-150, right, you know, I mean, right, right, right.
And so, you know, the thing is that where you see these little communist colonies in these basically capitalistic enterprises are
HR, PR, sort of stuff like that, that basically kind of take over the brain of the corporation and kind of team it a little bit to, you know, provide jobs, to protect the classes, you know, to make it say and do, you know, there's this huge list of corporations that have filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court asking the court to be more, I don't mean more, I mean, to take race into account when deciding its admissions.
You know, the, I mean, yeah, right.
So these are clearly these kind of little colonies where most of the cells are still, you know, the host, but like the cells from the alien thing that goes in here, you know, are kind of doing most of the work of having
creating two sub-departments of the Politburo, but they're very different departments.
Go on.All right.Thus, we can see that although to retain the Marxist lexicon, the economic base determines the ideological superstructure in Burnham.
Communism also uses the ideological superstructure, which is to say the slogans of social justice or climate change, et cetera, to expand its economic base and therefore its control.God damn it, that works too well.
If you go to Google Ngrams, which lets you graph the use of words and phrases across time, and graph the use of the phrase social justice, which means by themselves these words mean almost nothing.
If you grasp the use of the word social justice from say 1880 till 2020, you'll be impressed.Okay, write it down.
The role of public relations in general is somewhat taken for granted in Burnham and reduced to propaganda, even though, as we saw earlier, he was acutely aware of the power of the press to brainwash the public.
He was also aware that the United States had come to be dominated by Pareto's foxes who rely almost exclusively on persuasion to get their way.
This aspect of communism takes a subordinate role in Burnham's work, but is massively expanded upon in the work of Samuel T. Francis, which we will explore shortly.
While Burnham worked chiefly in the diagnostic mode, he makes some suggestions as to how Western societies might escape Communist totalitarianism?In fact, this is the central thesis of his next book, The Machiavellians.
Burnham had a belief in a pluralistic society in which power restrains power.
I think he's also wrong about this, although he doesn't spend actually most of his time in The Machiavellians talking about the solution.He just wants you to think that there's one out there and that it's not grim.
Saying power restrains power is like in the classical political science, the political science of Greece and Rome, the phrase for basically competing powers would be imperium in imperio, that is sort of power within power.
And it's generally held to be a design fallacy.And usually power doesn't restrain power.One power conquers the other power and then sets it up as a front man.Or a yes man, rather.But sorry, gone.
Thus his solution to communist totalitarianism was essentially to set managers from different spheres.
You could say commissars, bureaucrats.Or we could just go back, we can go back to managerial.
I think we've made the point.Let's go back to managerial.All right.Thus his solution to managerial totalitarianism was essentially to set managers from different spheres against each other as to prevent them from uniting.
The only way to manage the managers, in short, is to keep them busy enough managing or countervailing each other to guarantee that they won't unite and spend all their time managing the rest of us.
This is substantially the same solution as Moscow's juridical defense and separation of powers.
However, as Juvenal's work shows historically, and as history since Burnham was writing has shown, this is easier said than done because power's logic always tends towards centralization, and it seems to me that the managers have a vested interest in convergence at the time.
I mean, yeah, they don't... They converge because their thoughts naturally converge because they have the same ideas, really.
It's like if you expect the house, you know, if you expect one, you know, Harvard to be left wing and Yale to be right wing, what you will find is that the managers in Harvard and Yale cannot be said against each other because they all believe the same thing, despite the fact that they don't work for each other.
And so really, your pluralism is not getting you anything, and I think that's what the author, this Parvini chap, is getting at.
Yeah, so what would be the main difference in ideology between Tony Blair and Facebook? Is there one?I'm sorry.Did you say?
Yeah.No, no, no.I mean, you're anything.
No, it's because there isn't one.There's it's nothing.Yeah.Okay.I got you.Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Great podcasting here, guys.Very deep.We go very deep on this podcast, man.Sometimes we say nothing.
I know where I know where I am.Want me to keep going?Yeah, keep going.I found it.
At the time of writing, they have achieved total global dominance across all institutions.It strikes me that of the possible rival nodes of power, only two have the potential to resist this total dominance.
The first of the Kulak class, or if you prefer the independent middle class or petite bourgeoisie.Wait, wait, wait.
Or it's a petite with any bourgeois, which means a little bourgeois woman.Oh, yeah.Yeah, yeah, yeah.I know.I'm just OK.Sorry.
Actually, this this isn't the finished copy.This is one that he sent me.
Well, you should edit that in because petite bourgeois is funny, but.
I do prefer the petite bourgeoisie.
The first of the kulak class, or if you prefer, the independent middle class, or petite bourgeoisie, who are non-managerial, disparate, and are not, as yet, organized as a minority interest group.
The second are managers at the level of national government whose power represents a threat to global managerialism and therefore must, in the long run, be conquered and dissolved as so many feudal castles.
So long as armies are loyal to nations rather than to global government,
governance structures or supernatural supra-national organizations, there remains at least the foreseeable chance that a power struggle may emerge between the traditional apparatuses of nation-states and the power centers of globalism.
At present, they are united But if history tells us anything at all, it is that they can change quickly.
Yeah, that doesn't seem very likely.I mean, you know, like imagine the Pentagon pulling like a military coup.I mean, the Pentagon can't can't even invade Barbados, you know, I mean, probably invade Barbados.But, you know, the Bahamas might be hard.
It would probably take a few days.It would probably take a few days.Right.They'd have to clear everything through Jags, you know.But yeah, I keep going.
On this score, in the Machiavellians, one thing Burnham does add to the elite theorists is his own idea of how revolutions take place.
There is revolutionary change, one, when the elite cannot or will not adjust to the new technological and social forces.Two, when a significant proportion of the elite rejects ruling for cultural and aesthetic activities.
Three, when the elite fails to assimilate promising new elements.Four, when a sizable percentage of the elite questions the legitimacy of its own rule.Good luck with that.
Five, when elite and non-elite reject the mythological basis of order in the society.And finally, six, when the ruling class lacks courage to employ force effectively.
So I really mostly work on the basis of, I would guess one, four and five, maybe there's some like three involved, but really four, you know, you laugh at four, four is a sweet spot, four is where it's at, man.
Four is what brought down the Soviet Union.
Yeah, you know, it's just one of those things that like, when you read it, it seems so absurd.But then when you look at history, you're like, they actually do that.
four and five is the core man.it's like it's central.it's also good for the non-elite to reject the mythological basis of order in the society.
like you know it's like our society is supposedly run according to this like piece of paper you know from like 250 years ago like none of the actual parts of the government are like basically mentioned in a piece of paper but like we keep on keeping on but you know the like yeah it's just it's like when you
you know, when you're like, oh my God, they're violating the constitution.That's like this basically fundamentally deferential non-revolutionary form of dissent.
You know, I think Lenin said somewhere that, you know, when he realized that the goal was not to seize the levers of the machine. But to smash the machine, he really had, he had a thing going.
And so, you know, questioning the legitimacy and rejecting the mythological basis of order are not grasping the levers of the machine.They're, they're smashing the, you know, the machine.
So in a way, Lenin is, Lenin really emerges as the foremost theory of revolution here with no surprise.Go to the next point, which is really, really good.
It is notable that of these six criteria, only one considers the discontent of the masses, and even then, it is only half of the point, or in other words, five and a half out of the six criteria concern the elites.
The discontent of the masses is BS.It almost never has an effect.If you just, if you actually starve people, they'll become like quiet as mice.
There's this whole system of bullshit in the American political tradition that are like, the more oppressed people are, the more likely they are to rise up and seize power.It's the opposite.
The more oppressed they are, the less likely they are to rise up and seize power.And the worse their conditions are, the less they'll be interested in contending for power.
last two and a half years should make a lot of things clear to a lot of people.Especially that a lot of the political ideology that most people are holding on to just isn't in reality.
It's just like for like kindergartners.It's embarrassing.It's like you're a grown man.You're a grown woman.Like why do you care about this stuff?Yeah.
When considering our current situation under managerial dominance, we might say that the current elite do adjust to new technologies, still have an insatiable appetite to rule, do not question their own legitimacy and believe their own myths.
We're working on it.We're working on it.
Y'know.Cut us a break out of ya.Sorry to go on.So far, so good.However, to go through the six points again, they are at risk of mismanaging new technologies if they are too forceful in their climate change agenda.
People accustomed to driving their own cars and enjoying other methods of travel, and who are used to eating meat at affordable prices, are likely to revolt should these luxuries be suddenly removed.
No, no, no, no.Nobody revolts.Like, they're back to discontent at the masses shit.It's like... No, I mean, yeah, no, yeah, they had no problem being locked.
And no one ever being locked down.
So, you know, shit, no shit.There were some people complained a little bit.And I think in Australia, there was a little pushing and shoving at some point.
You know, yeah, the penal penal colony was the penal colony just showed itself to be, you know, they like being prisoners.Yeah.Somewhat.Yeah.
And they may find some elite backing by vested interests who still want to make money from the massive industries associated with them.
They have also not yet found a way to manage the new social forces unleashed by widespread resentment against mass immigration and other facets of globalism that led to the Brexit vote in the U.K., Donald Trump in the United States, and so-called populism in Europe, most recently embodied by the meteoric rise of Eric Zemmour in France, who has flanked Marine Le Pen by being more radical in his rhetoric to challenges.
What I like is that all of these things are politically dead.Actually, they have thrown it away.It's easy.
Yeah, yeah.I mean, when I saw Zamora, I was like, when I heard him, I was like, okay, that's not, he's not going anywhere.
So, um, the current tactic of simply branding such people as beyond the pale insurrectionist fascist ad nauseum has not worked in any respect since 2015.
You know, Peter, since 2015, you know, Peter, when you're a dissident, I just got to say one thing.It's really important to keep your hand off your dick. since 2015.All right, keep going.
In fact, four years of such relentless rhetoric from the corporate media resulted in a hate... You can quote me on that.You can quote me on that. Oh man.
In fact, four years of such relentless rhetoric from the corporate media resulted in... Okay, corporate media, corporate media.
This is an example of exactly the same thing that Burnham is doing.He's like taking this like stupid equation from this like illiterate site, you know, propaganda narrative that corporate means bad.
Therefore, if we call the media corporate, it will mean they are bad.Actually, like, you know, there's
nothing that's corporate about them in a sense they're disguised government departments and they're actually you know bureaucracies you could say uh the official media even that's tendentious i just i like just saying the prestige media uh but corporate media is actually leading people down the long rat hole because just they've you know they've spent 15 years going to movies you know
corporation bad.You know, it's just like in the Third Reich, you'd be like, Jew bad, Jew bad, Jew on screen, Jew bad, right?
You know, it's like this, like, you know, and so this thing of like leveraging these stupid two minutes hates, you know, crap is just intellectual laziness, and it should be stricken from the earth with a red pen.
All right, in fact four years of such relentless rhetoric from the corporate media resulted in the hated donald trump increasing his total votes by over 14 million people Which would have been a resounding victory had he not been against the most popular The most popular presidential candidate of all time joe bud is is he trying to say something here?
It's just like some subtext.
I'm reading this in AA's voice when he's being like that sarcastic.
Do you want me to do some reading?I could do some reading.Do you want me to do some reading?If you want to, go ahead.
The populist phenomena are perhaps a symptom of the fact that communist dominance and convergence will increasingly seek to dissolve the nation state as an obsolete unit.
Indeed, globalists use separatist groups such as the SNP in Scotland or the Catalan independence movement in Spain as battering rams against the national governments.
It's very interesting to notice when certain nationalist parties are either basically communist or fascist, but not like in between.
And there appear to actually just simply be two meanings of the word nationalist, because the meaning that refers to the Catalan independence movement is not the same that refers to Hitler, I'm just saying, or Trump.
In juvenilian terms, if globalists constitute the center and separatists the peripheries, the national governments are the subsidiaries whose feudal castles must in the long run be destroyed.Okay, this is just like too fertile a metaphor, I think.
So long as national governments maintain standing armies, it is possible to imagine scenarios in which they may turn on the globalists. For example, the populations will not brook the punitive carbon taxes that globalists wish them to enact.
Here we are in social dissent again.The political incentives to side with dissidents against globalists may be too strong for leaders to resist.
I don't know how long the Orban regime in Hungary will exist, but I don't think the cause of them is carbon taxes.I don't think that's the main issue down there in Hungary.I could be wrong.
But in any case, basically, there's plenty of Hungarian globalists.The globalists are going to win.They always win.It's just a question of how long.Do you want to read some?
Yeah, this is actually the last paragraph.Awesome.The elite are also actively turning away promising new elements, which is simply to say talented people with the wrong political views, skin color, or gender.
Either these people are not hired in the first place because of the affirmative action programs and increasingly absurd
Diversity quotas or they are hired but later sacked for transgressing the regime in some way what color what color would this never mind go on?
I wonder In the long run this will create an entire class of disaffected Well would be elites who will put their who will put their skills and talents towards their eventual overthrow Especially if they feel locked out of what would have been their career path in a normal and well-run society
I think everybody's locked out of a career path in this abnormal and poorly run society, but go on.But this is good.This is good.
Furthermore, around 30% of people have turned decisively against the elites in the past few years, taken together with disaffected would-be elites.
These dissidents form a non-elite who increasingly reject the mythological basis of order in the society, where the basis is some empty managerial slogan of social justice that becomes a precondition to enter the workplace.
So these are your infamous dark elves, right?Yeah.Notice how well the communist slogan of social justice works there.
I was just going to say that. Which brings us finally to the question of force and whether the managerial foxes are prepared to use it.
Which brings us finally to the question of force and whether the communist foxes are prepared to use it against the dissident population.
Time will surely tell, but according to Burnham's criteria, while the communist elite may look secure and united now, they are faced with a threat that cannot be managed using their usual tricks of persuasion, since the people who constitute that threat have become actively hostile to their increasingly patronizing message.
force will become necessary, and then as Oswald Spengler once put it, will come the hour of decision.
Here, I got to read that last sentence for you, man.Go ahead.Absolutely. force will become necessary and then as Oswald Spengler once put it, will come the Allah of decision.
I was down in Austin recently and I was taking an Uber ride and the driver was some Mexican guy, he looked really Mexican and I have a little bit of Spanish and one of Austin's local disabled population, you're doing a really weird thing with your background like you're... I know.
It's unnerving.You know, this is actually my house back here.But I like the, what does it say on your shirt?It's a gas station shirt.
It's from Sun Studios where Elvis recorded.
That building used to be an electric Anyway, I'm in Austin and I'm talking to my Uber driver in Spanish and one of Austin's local mentally disabled populations kind of drifts through the intersection in this mildly lethal way.
And you know, I just say to this guy, I'm like,
The only possibility for that situation is strength.
gentle force, beautiful happy force, you know the force of the surgeon and not the butcher, the force that cleans and heals and you know doesn't leave ugly piles of bodies lying in the street but force.
you know I think that's the in a way it's like when you try to imagine a way out of the solution of the armies of bureaucrats.It's not violence that you need to imagine, it's force.And these are very, very different things.
It wasn't violence that brought down East Germany, it had simply lost the force to cohere.It was kind of just sucked, almost like, you know, a planet being sucked into a black hole by West Germany.We don't really have a West Germany.But the
the sense of basically this, you know, you can see how prophetic he is in his sort of sense that basically the kind of the core challenge is this loss of faith and this loss of like respect for the mythological order and it sort of goes along with something that I often say is kind of the correct definition of rightism, which is really it's not a positive belief system at all.
It's just an absence of leftism.Leftism is a phenomenon which you can study, but the absence of anything is not a phenomenon that can be studied.I always compare it to the word Gentile, which doesn't refer to a class of
could be a Hindu, could be a Christian, all we know is it's not a Jew.And you can't say what are the qualities of Gentiles, whereas, you know, one could say that.I mean, one shouldn't, you know, about the Jews, right?
the, you know, the sense of basically abjuring the sort of state religion is a much, much clearer and much, much more important sense of dissent than like, you know, remember when we were kids, people are like, you say, you know, I'm a capitalist, I'm a libertarian, I believe in this, I'm a Christian, right?
No, it's like, okay, you can believe in those things, those are fine things to believe in, but what really brings all of you dissidents together is that basically you don't believe the shit that's on TV.
And moreover, there aren't really very, very good filters for unofficial information.So actually just reducing your consumption of non-official information is not a bad thing as well.Just keep your brain empty and ready for service, basically.
And so there's a sense in which basically there's some apocalypse of something different that sweeps these bureaucracies away.They can't be gradually reformed.And there's also a sense that the state capacity
that will come and do this is in the private sector in a way, which is sort of why the kind of unification of bureaucrats and managers is so misleading.
It's like, when you look at, for example, the Obamacare healthcare sign-up site, which I harp on, at first they tried doing it with bureaucrats, and many of those bureaucrats were in the private sector because that's the way DC's Beltway Bandit contracting system works.
They basically were like, we just spent, hundreds of millions of dollars trying to do this thing with bureaucrats.Let's give up.Let's do it with managers instead.And they did it with managers and it cost a few million dollars in a few weeks.
And so like there's a really radical difference in competence there that maybe wasn't necessarily there in Burnham's day.And like the difference has only grown greater and like more important.And you're just really, really lucky to be living
in a country that does have this, I mean, capitalism, especially startup, any kind of highly dynamic area of capitalism is kind of a school for kings in a way.
It's a school that basically teaches a non-trivial number of very capable human beings to basically organize a large number of other people up to tens or even hundreds of thousands on a single task.And if you compare, let's imagine that
you know, people are like Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, you're like, okay, sure.Imagine that if you basically took the management structure of Apple,
you gave Afghanistan to Apple and you were like Tim Cook your new name should be Khan Tim Cook and Tim Khan maybe and you shall do with Afghanistan as you will and you got to conquer the place first because we fucked it up so badly that the Afghans are back in church but you know the do with Afghanistan as you will let's see where you are in 20 years and then you said to the people who I ought to try to I guess not conquer but of course
liberate Afghanistan, you will be like, you're now in charge of liberating Apple, you're the new management of Apple.Let's see how far you get with that.
And you know, then we'll take a look at our like iPhones in 20 years and our Afghanistan 20 years.And I'm betting that basically, probably the iPhone would be outsold by something made in Afghanistan, and designed in Afghanistan.
And so this huge disparity in competence is one of the things that Burnham wrote about when he wrote about revolutions.It's like there's sort of no obvious way for this competence to switch over.
And instead of affecting just one tiny new website of a government to be like, no, we're actually going to do the whole thing the Silicon Valley way.But once you do that, just like,
you know, it'll be like the end of inception, like buildings will be sliding into the sea everywhere, you know, and nobody will get hurt.And you don't need to hurt these bureaucrats.These are not violent people.Right?
Think about it, you fire, you know, one of my favorite, you know, policies, which I point to it, you know, anytime I can is just dissolve the American empire by basically laying off the State Department and bring all the embassies home, close the Truman building, shut the whole thing down.
okay, you've got 50,000 people who work for this organization.You know, 50,000 people, you know, how many divisions is that in army terms?Is that five divisions?Like you think about this and you're like, holy shit, this is a menace.
These like laid off, you know, FS4s or whatever could like, you know, seize Georgetown.And having seized Georgetown, they'd set up picket lines and then you're just like, nah.
know these people they'll go home right they'll tend their gardens right there's 50,000 people probably 700 of them own a gun and you know 200 of them have ever been in a fistfight and you know three of them have ever killed someone you know and like you know I mean actually that's the great thing about this sort of late stage bureaucracy is that actually
it could just be pushed.it's humpty dumpty.it could just be pushed off the wall and it'll just fall and people don't understand that at all.but yeah that's my rant.was that enough ranting at James Burnham?it was beautiful bro.
Niva, the gay Italian dude.the gay Italian porn star.the gay Italian porn star.yeah that's right, that's right, that's right, that's right.he's hung like a cassowary but Give your give your give your plugs.Um, um, i'm curtis yarvin.
I rate a gray mirror.I'm, usually not this vulgar.Um, and that's gray mirror dot substack.com That's gray when it with an a the american way and uh, thank you so much for having me on.Um, And let's do the skin sometime Thank you.Curtis.
Take care All right, cut I want to welcome everyone back to the picanha show returning Evelyn, how are you doing? I'm good.Thanks for having me out.No problem.We are here to do Chapter 8 in the Populous Delusion.
It's called Elites and Ideology, and it concentrates on the teachings of Samuel T. Francis.You're pretty familiar with Sam, right?
I mean yes, but my experience with Sam Francis I think is about, I did it backwards so I wasn't really familiar with him as the writer for I think it was National Review and the other outlet that I think it was Buchanan run for a while that he wrote for and I know he wrote for some more kind of radical fringe stuff as well right from the 80s through to the 90s.
And I've laterally kind of found that stuff, but for me it was, I think I was listening to some, I think it was Edward Welsh, I think the guy that's one of the editors for the Chronicles magazine.
And he was on somebody's stream, I think it might have even been one of academic agents or something.And he was like, oh, well, what's the one book you've got to read there?The question was something like that.
And he was like, Sam Francis' Leviathan and Its Enemies.And I thought, hmm, that's interesting, I'll give that a read.And bought this big paperback, hardback, 840 page tome,
having only just been slightly familiar with Burnham before it, so I really dipped myself in the deep end, but it's been one of those books about some of the really good Austrian works where I'm always coming back to it.
Anything I'm looking at tangentially, I'm always like, well, did Sam Francis mention something about this?And more often than not, he normally does.He has the same sort of ability as Rothbard to sort of see through time, as it were.
It'd be really good to get a PDF and be able to search it for things, cause I've looked online for a PDF of it and I can't find it.
ALICE I think I have one I can send to you.
JUSTIN Alright, that's cool.You can send us your telegram.Alright, so, the way I'm doing this with everyone, I'm gonna read it. stop me any time to comment, and we'll just go from there.Alright?You can interrupt me.Even A.A.
was interrupting me mid-sentence, and it was fine.You know.ZACH.
As is his book, after all, I suppose.He was only really interrupting himself in a sort of roundabout way, I'm sure that's how he rationalised it.
JUSTIN.Alright, let's get this up on the screen for people.Alright, I'mma start reading.Chapter 8, Elites and Ideology. Samuel T. Francis appears to have written Leviathan and Its Enemies in 1991 because this is when he dated its preface.
He did not publish it during his lifetime.He died in 2005, and it was found by Jerry Woodruff, who was given a box of three and a half inch computer floppy disks, one of which was labeled in Sam's handwriting, Leviathan and Its Enemies Complete.
dated 3-27-1995 and containing word-perfect 5.1 text files.It was published in 2016.Francis had been a firebrand paleoconservative journalist who wrote regular syndicated columns as well as speeches for Happy Canon.
It's one of the things I really took on from being at the Mises Institute the other week.Thank God there are people who, when these sort of writers that we venerate pass, that someone makes sure to go through the stuff.
Because from what I've seen and heard, and I've obviously read the big preface and stuff myself to the book, No, he never told anyone about it or anything really.
It would just, it would have died with him and we'd never have that book had it not been for, you know, Jerry Woodruff here going through Sam Francis's old stuff just to see what he had lying around.
Yeah. Yeah, and talking about the Mises Institute, Patrick Newman figuring out Murray Rothbard's handwriting for Conceived in Liberty Volume 5 for the Progressive Era.
Yeah, I mean, these are things that were just, I guess he didn't tell anybody he was writing them, and then they're just found years later.So thankfully, thankfully someone found them.All right. It was first published in 2016.
Francis had been a firebrand paleo conservative journalist who wrote regular syndicated columns, as well as speeches for Pat Buchanan.
He was an early victim of canceled culture for his politically incorrect statements about race and was fired by the Washington Times after an attack by the neoconservative Dinesh D'Souza.
He was known for his sharp analytical insights, blistering rhetorical style and a barbed wit. Posthumously, he was blamed or praised, depending on who was writing, as the intellectual basis for the rise of Donald Trump.
Whatever controversy surrounded him in life, intellectual history will record Francis as a much more important and influential thinker than de Souza or any neoconservative writer at the National Review.
However, Leviathan and Its Enemies features none of Francis's signature polemics, and it is written in a more coolly analytical mode.
Again, I really like the constantly bashing D'Souza and just never letting people forget that that happened.
But I always find it strange when the left picks, you know, these sort of almost somewhat obscure and kind of dead thinkers on the right sometimes as the key influence for X thing happening, you know, in the case here, Donald Trump.
How many of us would maybe not have got round to reading Sam Francis if it wasn't for the fact that this was claimed?
Yeah, for as much as they love power and they are conniving, sometimes it really does come back to bite them in the ass.It's like they've never heard of the Streisand effect.Yeah, exactly.
Francis had long been a protege of James Burnham, having written a monograph on him in 1984 that was republished in 1999.Leviathan and its enemies can largely be read as a 1990s update of the managerial revolution.
Francis had fully internalized the thought of the elite heiress and of his mentor, and much of the book covers terrain that we have already traversed.
Thus, what is of interest to us here is what Francis adds to Burnham or else where he disagrees with him.
One important dimension of Leviathan and its enemies is that it has the benefit of 50 years of hindsight since Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution, during which time many objections were raised against the managerial thesis.
After restating Burnham's central arguments at some length, Francis devotes considerable space to dealing with the chief counter-arguments that were raised since 1941.
The foremost of these came from C. Wright Mills, whose book, The Power Elite, published in 1956, constituted the main left-wing rebuttal to Burnham.
The chief contention was that although the managerial function undoubtedly exists, property elites maintain a controlling ownership over firms.For example, you got anything to say?
Well yeah, this is, I mean it gets slightly further into a different point but it is something I'd always considered and I think it's also something Burnham touches on at one point where there is almost a sort of democratising effect that happens in major industries as they become legislated to a point whereby for either because of getting round legislations or trying to have a bigger market cap or whatever excuse they give for it, they basically have to sell
elements of the company off to the public and then the public elects a board to run the company.
So there isn't, as he's going to go on here and describe Ford as a sort of owner entrepreneur sort of character where he, and I think it even relates to a point in the next quote really well, when he built a factory, he had to homestead it.
He had to think logistically about how it was going to integrate into a local economy.
in a way where someone who's just on the managerial board of Ford nowadays doesn't have to give two hoots about that, because as we're going to get into and describe a little bit, the revolution of mass and scale has already happened.
They enjoy democratized industry as opposed to the homesteading entrepreneurial industry you would have had even in the turn of the century.
But even so, in Burnham, in Managerial Revolution, some of the things that he says about corporations really hadn't come true yet.
Yarvin talked about how it almost seemed like he was projecting some of his Trotskyite past onto corporations at the time, where corporations really hadn't at that point fallen to managerialism.It was more like a foreshadowing when you look at it.
Most corporations at that time were still pretty top-down in 1941. So, all right, for example, when I discussed Burnham, I used the example of the Ford Motor Company of a firm transitioning from the entrepreneurial to the managerial.
However, as I noted, the Ford family maintains to this day a 40% stake in the company.In addition, William Clay Ford Jr., the great grandson of the founder, currently serves as executive chairman, having previously acted as president, CEO, and COO.
Mills argues, therefore, that there is no distinct break with the old regime of entrepreneurial elites, and thus Burnham's managerial revolution is a mirage.
Burnham would argue that, in the case of William Clay Ford Jr., he trained as a managerial elite, having attended Princeton and MIT, and is thus a professional manager whose roles have been literally interchangeable with executives from Boeing and elsewhere who do not carry the Ford name.
Francis, however, argues,
It is largely, quoting Francis, it is largely irrelevant whether the property elite acquires managerial skills, takes an active part in managing corporate enterprise, or has assimilated non-property elite managers into its own class and interests.
What Mills and his disciple, William G. Dumoff, and their school do not sufficiently perceive or appreciate thoroughly is that the interests of the property elite have changed substantially with the revolution of mass and scale.
The property of elite or grand bourgeois of the bourgeois order may not have changed significantly in family composition, and certainly it retains wealth and status.
Its economic interests, however, have changed from being vested in the hard property of privately owned and operated entrepreneurial firms, usually comparatively small in scale, to being intertwined with and dependent upon the dematerialized property of publicly owned state-integrated managerial
managerially operated mass corporations.
It's a word salad, but it's brilliant.
I very much like the point that both Francis and Burnham heavily focus on and sort of almost as them channeling a bit of Kaczynski or Allule when they really heavily narrow in on the revolution of mass and scale and that
not one that is, of course, a fundamental prerequisite for you to have the managerial class.Otherwise, there'd be no role for them in society.
But furthermore, that fundamentally changes the incentives of human behavior, not just in a universal sense, but up and down the chain when it comes to people who are elites or people who are not.
their incentive structures are not as they were when, say, for example, the principles of classical liberalism were knocked out in the 1700s or the 1800s.
It's much different then to look at, especially as Francis looks on, you know, not just the start of post-war sort of consensus liberalism, but towards its end and the turning of the millennium.
In other words, whether or not a man of the property elite such as William Clay Ford Jr.
takes an active or a passive role, his interests are now synonymous with the managerial regime while those of his great-grandfather were in many respects antagonistic to it.
Francis argues that a family such as the Fords are now entirely dependent on managerial capitalism for their continued existence as property elites and are thus, in the final analysis, subordinated to the system.
The property elite, the grand bourgeoisie, thus do not retain an economic interest in acting as the leader of the bourgeois order and defending its ideologies, values, and institutions.
Its material interests push it towards defending the complex of managerial interests.
I think this is where you can almost see the influence that Rothbard had on Francis, where he's almost discussing here that in that very basic economic sense, if you promote business by subsidy and cronyism, then you'll get more business by cronyism and subsidy, whereas if
businesses just fueled by entrepreneurial elites, then they will want to spread and recruit other entrepreneurial elites and creates, you know, if you if you pay for more of it, you're going to get more of it.
If you pay for less of it, you're going to get less of it.And that continues and compounds.
That, of course, though, is if you're those those entrepreneurial elites are not people who run companies.So you're going to have to hire people to run your company.And that's when the managerial elites come in.
But that is, of course, a consequence of the revolution of mass and scale.Yes.All right.
Yeah.It's great when you when you read Francis, because he did know his economics.So.All right.This perfectly explains why virtually none of the so-called grand bourgeoisie have taken a firm stance against what is today called woke capitalism.
Whether they are property deletes or not, executives who dare take a stance against the office managerial ideology are quickly removed, as was the case with Tripwire Interactive CEO and co-founder John Gibson, who was forced to step down just 53 hours after tweeting his support for a ban on abortion in Texas.
Similarly, John Shatner, the founder of the Papa John's pizza chain and a billionaire, was forced out of his own company by the board after making racially insensitive comments on a conference call in 2018.
And let's just remember that he was just repeating, like he was quoting He wasn't giving his opinion, he was quoting something.
It's this new version of the high-middle-low dynamic.
You offend the great saints of progressive ideology and for that, you as the middling CEO, co-founder of your business is rejected and disempowered so that the low progressive causes of whatever charity or
group or Bank of America or whoever it is that's pushing HR policy and your work can feel good about themselves.
Brendan Eich was forced to resign after only 11 days as CEO of Mozilla when it was found he had donated to a political campaign against gay marriage and employees launched a social media campaign to oust him.
I might continue listing examples such as these almost indefinitely, but there can be no doubt that Burnham and Francis are correct while Mills and Damoff are wrong about whether power finally rests in the hands of the managers or the owners.
The managers have primacy.If an owner does not adhere to managerial ideology, if the company in any way depends on managerial capitalism, they will find themselves removed in short order.
The second objection to Burnham with which Francis deals is the idea that the managerial elites are not unified, but rather a plurality.In fact, such objections were also applied to the work of Mills and his followers.
Francis had in mind the work of Robert Dahl, David Truman, John Kenneth Galbraith, David Reisman, and Arnold M. Rose.
As we have seen, Francis largely deals with this by acknowledging that while entry into the elite is possible, its narrow and exclusively managerial character, which emphasizes special qualifications and skills, in practice gives it a uniformity that is rare in history.
He points out, citing Mosca, that the old capitalist entrepreneurial regime and even the old feudal system were much more diverse in terms of the makeup of the ruling class.
He seems to almost be more heavily drawing on Allul here.It's quite funny, actually, if you read the preface to Allul's Technological Society, which was written in 54 and I believe the managerial revolution was 41.
So, but in that he sort of briefly mentions in the foreword that Burnham's basic idea of managerialism gets very close to his idea of technological sort of society and the sort of, I think you would say the autocratic nature of technique as it were, and he says that this is one of the closest approximations, but you can see that
In this description here, Francis is then pulling on the same thread.
He's recognising that once you have this replacement of the qualitative with the quantitative, you then have formulas and techniques that are more uniform for performing different tasks in society.
this continues on to what Alul calls the one best way, which is this striving for the perfect technique to achieve whatever goal.
In the same sense that the Austrians would think of economising, but it's saying there's another side to that coin whereby constantly striving for the one best way means that you create
the strange class of alien people who have pursued the one best way and say, in this case, business management, and they have no relation to the people that they actually have working under them or living in the society around them because they're sort of just these bizarre, technically inclined freaks with no other skills really outside of that.
The laptop class, as people might call them.Yeah.
The third objection came from libertarians of the Reagan era. who argued that the managerial regime is being eclipsed by the rise of newly minted entrepreneurs.
Today, minds may instinctively turn to a man like Bill Gates or perhaps the Silicon Valley types such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel.
But virtually none of these billionaires are entrepreneurs in a manner that, say, Henry Ford was.
They each made their fortunes by playing the system of the managerial regime and exploiting the fusion of the state and the economy in one way or another.
But even if there should spring forth a genuinely innovative and entrepreneurial firm, sooner or later, it becomes co-opted and is transformed into being part of the regime apparatus.Francis cites the example of McDonald's.
A more recent example might be Google.
Yeah, but it's a private company, bro.
Hey, they can do what they want.And they do.I mean, how much really how much is Musk?I would really like to know his net worth.What percentage of that is just from government contracts?Because it's basically how he built his wealth, and Bezos too.
It's all leverage and share wealth and none of it's real, none of it's tangible.It's all written in debt for the most part.
Francis's major contribution to the general corpus of elite theory is in his emphasis on the role of ideology, where Burnham emphasized a fusion of the state and corporations, as he put it, managers in government and managers in industry.
Francis immediately recognized the importance of a third category of managers involved in opinion formation, which he called mass public relations or mass organizations of culture and communication.
These include, quoting, not only the media of mass communication, one of the most important instruments by which to manage really elite disciplines and controls the mass population, but also all other mass organizations that disseminate, restrict, or invent information, ideas, and values advertising, publishing, journalism, film, and broadcasting, and broadcasting entertainment, religion, education, and institutions for research and development.
Indeed, the mass organizations of culture and communication, which generally lack the coercive disciplines of the mass corporation and the mass state, are able to provide disciplines and control for the mass population primarily through their use of the devices and techniques of mass communication.
All the mass cultural organizations then function as part of the media of mass communication, and they constitute a necessary element in the power base of the managerial elite.
Lenin levels of propaganda awareness.
Yeah.Yeah.And I mean, could you imagine what he would be saying now?
Well, I don't think he'd be saying anything different because he's so on the money nearly 30 years ago from where we are now.It's just that
he must have had a much more discerning eye than your average person nowadays that it took the whole nonsense of COVID for them to even think about how there is both explicit and implicit propaganda messaging.
I mean, I would love to see his articles during COVID, especially during 2020.Especially during the summer of riots and murders.Sam would have had a lot to say about that.Probably lost his head.
Francis was keenly aware of the ideological component of the managerial regime and his insights owe much to his deep understanding of the cultural turn in Marxist literature after Antonio Gramsci, whom he cites.However, you got something?
No, I'm just, I'll let it carry on.
Okay.However, like both Burnham and Pareto, Francis saw ideology as mere justification for power, usually coming after the fact as a means of consolidation and control. This is to say that he saw the use of ideology as almost entirely cynical.
In his afterword to Leviathan and Its Enemies, Paul Gottfried shares this revealing passage about his own fundamental disagreement with Francis, quoting, Sam and I would argue about his skepticism concerning whether elites accept their hegemonic ideas.
In other words, whether elites really believe their own ideology.In his understanding of circulating elites values and ideal, in his own, I'm gonna do that again.
In his understanding of circulating elites, values and ideals were mere instruments for achieving practical goals.They advanced the interests of those seeking positions of authority.
Sam would quote with pleasure the Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto that those involved in the power game would exploit whatever ideas and visions were most attractive to the masses in a particular culture.
But according to Sam, these elites would approach the myths as nothing more than ladders for their own ascent.
I mean, I have to ask out of curiosity, what side do you see yourself on in that sort of distinction?Because I know I'm ever the cynic, but it seems to pay well being so.
I'm probably on Sam's side. I think a lot of these elites, the only ideology they have is power, and more than money.I think it's power.
So they don't- The ideology is just a technology to them.It's a technique.
And they'll change ideologies.They don't care.Some of them will.Some of them will.If it means that they stay, they don't get circulated out, they will change their ideology.
that's, I think, part of the reason why we have so much issue, especially when people start to really dip their toes into this kind of stuff.Are they neoliberals?Are they liberals?Are they socialists?Are they neoconservatives?
We have all these sort of bizarre terms that really, when you try and identify each one separately, you end up with crossover between them all to the point whereby
you're not really identifying the fact that these people have a subset of ideas, but that there is a subset of ideas that they're willing to interchange at any moment in time, really.
Yeah.Agreed.All right. This is, in fact, the old disagreement between Mosca and Pareto, about whether ideas affect history, restated.Gottfried occupies the Mosca position while Francis takes the Pareto position.
However, all four thinkers would ultimately agree that the ideological function cannot be ignored in any analysis of power.
The culture, even down to the everyday beliefs of the masses, must at some level reflect and buy into the political formula of the ruling class. Vital.Vital.
Francis, however, recognized perhaps more than any other thinker that under the managerial regime, the ideological vision must be totalizing, that's a word, totalizing, which is to say- Just because it's not spelt with a Z that's confusing you.
Which is to say no vestige of the previous regime can be allowed. He illustrates the point in a much livelier way than in Leviathan and its enemies.
In two pieces that were republished in the collection, Beautiful Losers, the cult of Dr. King and equality as a political weapon.In the former good good.
I was going to say, as I mentioned earlier on, is that these are two essays I'm quite familiar with as I've done a stream on them already.
But The Beautiful Losers, I think, is probably, if you're not one for reading giant books of people you've never really heard of before, which is an understandable position, if you can find a copy, there are some still floating out there of new old stock
copies of Beautiful Losers, we managed to get one for a relatively fair price.It's a better way to get familiar with Francis, probably.He's a bit more polemic and emotive compared to the more Burnham-esque.
He's so clinical and Leviathan and its enemies that you might be confused for supporting the Manjiru regime, as Burnham did as well.
In the former, The Cult of Dr. King, he spots, in what has now become almost a commonplace insight, that the ideology of the managerial regime takes on an almost religious air with its own sacred heroes and symbols as embodied in the figure of Martin Luther King.
While the symbolic significance of
of Christmas is fair game to debate politically every year, no such freedom is afforded to the annual celebration of Martin Luther King Day, which must be observed with solemn reverence and can only ever be about one thing, the righteous struggle of the Civil Rights Movement.
No, I think if I remember correctly, towards the start when he's talking about, you know, just like Christmas as well, Martin Luther King Day or whatever he refers to it as, comes with all the unloading of assorted junk
which instantly makes me think of, you know, the way that BLM and LGBT and all these different movements become so quickly commodified in a way that these legacy brands with these sort of reputations that wouldn't be respected normally can, you know, like Nike can jump on to making shoes for whoever that guy was that took the knee and whatever else, you know, and all of a sudden they've got all the clout.
It's the same crap and they've been doing it since the 80s.
In a blistering conclusion, he writes, Martin Luther King's legacy, as its keepers know, is profoundly at odds with the historic American order, and that is why they can have no rest until the symbols of that order are pulled up root and branch.
To say that Dr. King and the cause he really represented are now part of the official American creed, indeed the defining and dominant symbol of that creed, which is what both houses of the United States Congress said in 1983 and what President Ronald Reagan signed into law shortly afterwards.
is the inauguration of a new order of the ages in which the symbols of the old order and the things they symbolize can retain neither meaning nor respect, in which they are as mute and dark as the gods of Babylon and Tyre, and from whose cold ashes will rise a new god, leveling their rough places, straightening their crookedness,
and exalting every valley until the whole earth is flattened beneath his feet and perceives the glory of the new Lord."That is such amazing writing.
Yeah.I mean, there's some interesting stuff as well.We can look at, again, the way that progressives, or people we would think of as progressives, can jump onto any subset of ideas and throw away any other subset of ideas instantly.
you know, Martin Luther King now would be cancelled because he was a heterosexual black man and he was a misogynist and, you know, he was probably toxic and all these other phrases.
It would be giving him a big yikes, as it were, because he was a Christian.However, in the 1980s, he was the pinnacle, you know, he was the symbol of progressivism.
And now they would, you know, it's only been 50 years and they basically turn around and spit on him.It shows you how, as you say, how
purely focused on power these people are that you know that there are people alive nowadays who probably played a part in getting this whole campaign going in the 80s and would turn around and either lie to you straight in the face then or now or probably both situations about what their causes are and what their goals are because at the end of the day it's just all about power.
Yeah, I mean, look at Joe Biden.Joe Biden is the author of, you know, the crime bill, that famous crime bill.I mean, the things he's said in the past.
He has no big shot lawyers of a certain variety.
Yeah, about the bit, yeah.Also, you know, about the black community stuff that he said and how he, you know, says, if you don't vote for me, you ain't black.It's just, I love politics.It's so, oh God, it's so great.All right, moving on.
What may have seemed like hyperbole in 1988 is an observed daily reality in the 2020s, when statues of everyone from Confederates to Founding Fathers are physically torn down by state-backed feral mobs with the full approval of every major corporation, university, and media outlet.
In 2020, after the Black Lives Matter protests, riots, murders, following the death of George Floyd, massive statues of Floyd were erected in many public places across the USA, while Edinburgh University renamed David Hume Tower to 40 George Square, citing 18th century Enlightenment philosophers' racist views.
How do you feel about that as a Scott?
Well, see, I'm not the biggest fan of David Hume either.Right, but still, you'd rather have David Hume.No, that's true.I suppose the lesser of two evils.
I think it's very much, I mean, the examples AA's using here are the same sort of thing that Francis and even Rothbard then want to talk about, you know, when things like the LA riots happened.
They just had sort of big enough gonads at the time to point at that and talk about it in the way we do with BLM nowadays.
Even back there was that 30 years ago, 32 years, a different time.For France's such displays do not signal anything more than a victory lap of the new of the new order over the old order, which must be emptied of all significance.
I'm claiming that victory lap line because I can remember me and Scrump were going over the
that MLK essay in the video when AA was in the chat replying to something, we specifically used the line, the victory lap of the new order or something like that.
I would say the fact that since World War II, progressivism has just been doing ritual humiliation ceremonies and engaging in celebrations because the world died anyway.
In Equality as a Political Weapon, we see Francis's essential cynicism as regards actual belief in the doctrine of equality.He sees this on a passage in Pareto.
The sentiment that is very inappropriately named equality is fresh, strong, alert precisely because it is not, in fact, a sentiment of equality and is not related to any abstraction, as a few naive intellectuals still believe, but because it is related to the direct interests of individuals who are bent on escaping certain inequalities, not in their favor, and setting up new inequalities that will be in their favor.
this latter being their chief concern.
I think that's such an amazing passage from Pareto there.It's hilarious to think that in your economics degree, you'll normally learn about Pareto, but you'll never learn about that stuff that you wrote where he's political economy writing.
No, we just, we just get the boring stuff and production possibilities, frontiers and Pareto maximality and stuff like that.
Moving on, one may think of any number of affirmative action programs as an example of this, but it also brings to mind the central logic of the Juvenalian alliance between the high and low.
The high can always promise to liberate the low from oppressors by promising to transfer advantages to them.Francis sees that this is little more than a cynical power ploy.Quoting,
In the 20th century, egalitarianism has been used principally as a political formula or ideological rationalization by which one emerging elite has sought to displace from political, economic, and cultural power another elite.
and in not only rationalizing, but also disguising the dominance of the new elite.That is brutal.
I mean, that is- Yeah, it's the thing that separates both Francis and Burnham from so many other American thinkers is they drew so heavily on the elite school or the elite theorists, as they're called nowadays, and that you can read as much stuff on theocracy or the old world as you want,
But there is something about the contents of elite theory, the basic sort of statements it makes about human nature are eternal, it seems.
And that once you've really tapped into those, you can sort of skip a lot of things politically that other people would maybe focus time and energy on reading or engaging with, because you've actually, you've got the cheat codes.
You understand how the game works.
You're not just trying to- Or wasting their time writing books on things that don't matter.
Francis points to the behaviorism of B.F.Skinner and others, the belief in human beings as equal blank slates differentiated only by their upbringing as one of the chief strains of egalitarianism in the 20th century.Quoting,
Egalitarianism played a central role in the progressivist ideological challenge, and the main form it assumed in the early 20th century was that of environmentalism, not in the contemporary sense of concern for ecology, but in the sense that human beings are perceived as the products of their social and historical environment rather than of their innate mental and physical natures.
Indeed, the ideological function of progressivism in delegitimizing bourgeois society was accomplished by its identification of the society itself as the environment to be altered through social management.
Oh yeah, this is the great sort of build up and thing you need to hold in your head as you come to some of the other parts from Francis and Gottfried as well on the therapeutic state.
Because you first need that sort of environmental view, which then allows you to sort of transition into a medical or socio-psychological view
where there is more and more quantitative data that replaces the qualitative data that people used to use for decision making processes at the lowest level right up to the top.
And as one of the themes that sort of is drawn out more throughout this chapter is that sort of the illusion of democracy basically allows the elites to build a wall of expertise around themselves with techniques and specializations that people, the average person couldn't grasp.
And as I was saying before, it creates this alien class of people who just cannot integrate into the society that they are actually orchestrating.
It's no wonder that the products we get, the mass media we consume seems so misplaced, because it's made by people who have never lived in the real world as ourselves.
I mean, I think this is something even Eric Ritter von Kuhn outlaid and goes on at great length. when he talks about, again, the same notion of quantitative sort of data and dealing specifically with utilitarianism.
And you would just have these sort of dictatorial men of science roaming around, rearranging and socially managing the world as they saw fit, because it was for the good of science.
The logic of environmentalism or behavioralism thus always points in the direction of ever-increasing managerial control, since it is society that must be changed, and such change can only take place through management."
I really hope people are understanding what this is, because to me, this may be the most important part of the book. I mean, because I mean, this is what really speaks to me, because this is what you're seeing now.
I mean, this this is so clear now that you can just if you cannot understand this and not see it in today's society, you're just completely blind.
And I don't know where I don't know where the only thing I think this little bit of the chapter is missing is just a little twist of a little on the end or Uncle Ted.Why not both?
Francis locates Edward Bernays as one of the chief culprits for inculcating this view among the elites in the 1920s and 1930s.
Quoting, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, also helped develop behaviorist psychological techniques for the managed economy and the science of public relations, which he helped found.
Treating all people as mechanically identical, writes historian Stuart Ewen Bernays, called for the called for the implementation of a mass psychology by which public opinion might be controlled.
As the most important element to any form of mass propaganda is first getting the mass to recognize itself as such.
Yeah. That's good.Good quote.
That's just from me.I said, good quote.
What is striking, if one turns to Bernays, is his naked and unapologetic elitism.
In public relations, he speaks openly about the engineering of consent and warns leaders against following public attitude polls explicitly because they might hinder the progressive agenda.
Quoting, society suffers when polls inhibit leaders from independent thinking, from anticipating change, or from preparing the public for change.
polls exert pressure that may play society under what Jefferson called the tyranny of the majority and throttle progressive minority ideas.
I'm ready for me to see this.
What does he mean by that? Bernays does not see public opinion as something to be followed, but something to be managed and, if necessary, transformed, preferably by using his services and expertise.
Bernays fellow elitist Walter Lippmann was at Harvard class of 1913.I think.I'm pretty sure that's it.I think he was there with John.What's his name?The communist that went to Russia.They did the movie.
Yeah, I think John Reed John Reed.
Yes, yeah, yeah, they were.They graduated together.Funny that shocking.
Bernays fellow elitist Walter Lippmann was skeptical about the extent to which public opinion even exists other than as a fabrication of the media as a pseudo environment and wrote a book on the topic called The Phantom Public.
Look at the name of that.
It's just so- The whole thing with Bernays is sort of interesting as well.He's someone I think I should probably know more about than I do, but I sort of have a brief understanding of what he's about and some of the stuff he was up to.
But he basically worked for Woodrow Wilson directly to engage in propaganda campaigns in South America so that they would adopt and allow the building of American factories and go work in them so that the American war effort could be fueled by cheap South American labor.
And then after the war, he's basically tasked with, well, take that stuff and then just push it on the American people.War propaganda at peacetime.
Yeah, yeah.His book, Propaganda, is very short.It's an easy read.I read it in less than two days.Read it over two days.It begins with a portrait of the disenchanted man, which is a neat summation of the passive masses.
Quoting, the private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake.He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on.
Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually, and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance. Yet these public affairs are in no way convincing ways his affairs.
They are, for the most part, invisible.They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers.
As a private person, he does not know for certain what is going on, or who is doing it, or where he is being carried.In the cold light of experience, he knows that his sovereignty is a fiction.He reigns in theory, but in fact does not govern.
Then another passage dripping in Kaczynski.
Where do you find your surrogate activities, people?
Well, this is one of the things I actually had, I think we're getting towards the end here anyway, if I remember correctly, but it was one of the things I had sort of note was, and I think it's something Francis kind of draws on towards the end of Leviathan and His Enemies.
He's sort of basically pausing the question of, you know, are the surrogate activities no longer good enough?Is the post-bourgeois proletariat not willing to accept, you know, faulty orders from sham captains, as Carlisle would say?
But Lippmann does not, as one might imagine, lament this fact, but rather uses it as a call for a reign of experts, one might say a managerial elite.He says, I think it is a false ideal.I do not mean as an undesirable ideal.
I mean an unattainable ideal, bad only in the sense that it is bad for a fat man to try to be a ballet dancer.An ideal should express the true possibilities of its subject.When it does not, it perverts the true possibilities.
The idea of the omni-competent Sovereign citizen is, in my opinion, such a false ideal.It is unattainable.The pursuit of it is misleading.The failure to achieve it has produced the current disenchantment.
I mean, it's sort of very hard to disagree with him there, especially when he's tapping into the, you know, this idea that the passive actor and the mass, or as Alula would say, the individual alone in the mass, you know, is such a bizarre and novel position to where man used to be before that there really is, you know, it must have been at the time felt like unlimited opportunities to
mold and shape and organized men as you saw fit as someone who was part of this class of experts.
Lippman's solution is simply to do away with democratic fictions and let the elites go on with the task of managing their affairs.Quoting.Based.Yeah.As long as they're good elites, I don't know.Our guys.As long as they're my friends.
The thesis of the phantom public does not assume that men in action have universal purposes.They are denied the fraudulent support of the fiction that they are agents of a common purpose.
They are regarded as the agents of special purposes without pretense and without embarrassment. They must live in a world with men who have other special purposes.I have no legislative program to offer, no new institutions to propose.
There are, I believe, immense confusions in the current theory of democracy which frustrate and pervert its action.
I mean, there's a surprising amount of writing from the kind of left-wing position when you really start reading, you know, people's, like, doctoral thesis for politics, philosophy, economics degrees or whatever, and they'll talk very much in a similar tone about, well, the people think democracy should work properly, and we know it can't work like that because society would basically fall to the ground.
So how do we just keep the illusion going?
Onward.The role of the public is simply to rubber stamp which party of the elites gets to govern, even if there is little difference between the choices on offer.
Quoting, although it is the custom of partisans to speak as if there were radical differences between the ins and outs, it could be demonstrated, I believe, that in stable and mature societies, the differences are not profound.
If they were profound, the defeated minority would be constantly on the verge of rebellion.
An election would be catastrophic, whereas the assumption in every election is that the victors will do nothing to make life intolerable to the vanquished, and the vanquished will endure with good humor policies which they do not approve.
That's pretty much got out the window now.All right, keep going. In the 2020s, it is perfectly clear that, according to Lippmann's criteria, the USA is no longer a stable and mature society.
Lippmann viewed the masses as a bewildered herd whose opinions needed to be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reached beyond the locality.In other words, by men like Edward Bernays.
However, it strikes me that this narrow vision of democracy as a mere rubber stamp of rule by experts who engage in perception management is running towards its death throes.
This is primarily because the internet, a modern Gutenberg press, has destroyed the ability of elites to control narratives, which is causing them to become more desperate, coercive, and brittle.
See, I'm not sure if I entirely buy that theory.
Fair enough, you can use the internet to attack the elite's political formula of we are truth, but what you can't use the internet to do is to demonstrate the falsity in the political formula that we, the elites, are still in power, no matter what you put in the internet.
which in a certain sort of way in terms of propaganda, fair enough, you might feel that you've engaged in a psychological component of rebellion, but you're not physically rebelling against the elites.
So the organizational component, arguably the more important component to any propaganda campaign, it still works.It's still there.It's still got you in its midst.
Basically what you would hope is that rising elites, elites that were on your side, elites that your friends were doing this, were using the internet as a Gutenberg press to realize.
Oh no, I'm not saying we shouldn't, I'm just saying I don't think any of its own is enough and that
A lot of the time and energy spent trying to fight the regime on the internet actually just confirms the regime's position of power because you spend all this time and energy trying to fight them and they've not gone anywhere.
Right.At least not yet.Yeah, which is, I guess we'll repeat it for the millionth time during these readings, is we need to raise up our own elites.Elites that are our friends.
as more people come to see them as unmistakably totalitarian in nature, and as the gap between elite and popular values widens.
It is only a matter of time until we see a circulation of elites because the managerial regime is failing precisely at the moment of its apparent victory lap.I actually believe that at this point.I see it.
I mean, it might not be in my lifetime, but these things don't happen overnight.They may take a generation or two.And I think I see movement.
I think the most important part and something is, AA has pointed out a number of times, and I'm quite happy to see him putting out the same messages, that you need to watch for containment, as he would refer to it.
Don't allow the people who are of the distant right now to be co-opted when the regime puts on a conservative mask for a year or two to release a bit of pressure and angst out of people after they've been agitated for decades towards leftists.
Yeah.I mean, it's leftists take power and they don't really care about anything doing anything else except getting more power while they're in there.
They're just building and building upon power and real conservatives and real right wingers don't do that.And even the fake, even the regime, uh, Republicans, they don't do that because they're just controlled opposition for the regime.
So, well, I think earlier and the equality is a political weapon.
article, he actually makes the point that one of the main reasons conservatives were useless at fighting communism during the Cold War period, if you ignore the fact that maybe the conservatives were in cahoots with them for a number of different reasons, is to notice that they took their egalitarianism on face value.
and they argued with them as if they believed in egalitarianism, which if you've read your Lenin and your Engels, you know they don't believe in egalitarianism.
They just see it as a goal with a way, as you know, in the way that Francis even describes earlier, sort of cutting the heads off all the stems of grass so there's nothing left and flattening every hill.
A near perfect illustration of this failure of narrative control took place in early January 2022.
On December 31st, 2021, Joe Rogan interviewed Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the nine original mRNA vaccine patents, the author of nearly 100 peer-reviewed papers with over 12,000 citations for three hours during which he highlighted many unanswered questions about the COVID-19 vaccine.
In addition to the interview, Dr. Malone leads a coalition of over 16,000 doctors and scientists dedicating to speaking truth to power.
Madhava Sethi, MD, who also holds a degree in electrical engineering from MIT, then asked whether this was the most important interview of our time.
The interview was promptly banned by YouTube and Twitter, who suspended any attempts to upload it, and Dr. Malone was personally banned from Twitter.
Defenders of the regime, such as Dr. Dan Wilson, whose video was pushed to the front of the algorithm by Google managers in Perception, quickly denounced Dr. Malone as having gone full anti-science.
I'm not too sure what to think of the whole Robert Malone escapade, because if I remember correctly, when he was on Rogan's podcast, he had quite a lot of what may be referred to as the boomer truth regime about him, and that he constantly used
sort of analogies or similes that referred to the mid-century Germans because those people of course are the height of evil for what they did in the 1940s and you can't question that.
So as much as he is against the current elites and the vaccine, he's willing to still go with the sort of false notion that you can speak truth to power, which I don't think has ever happened in history.
Power speaks to truth and truth goes away and you have new truth. And the fact that he's only willing to question such a small portion of it, it's the same when you look at anyone who's sort of part of the anti-woke grift.
Fair enough, they might be against ridiculous trans policy, or they'll be against the grooming stuff, or they think BLM's taking it too far. they always fall back on consensus liberalism.
I mean, that was one of the points I found interesting about the MLK sort of pieces that, as I said earlier on, the left is already dispensed with MLK because it's not useful to them anymore.
And the only people that cling to MLK nowadays are right wingers that for some reason are making civil rights arguments.
Well, they have to prove that they're good people, that they're not racist.
Well, yeah, the Democrats are the real racist guys.
It's such a great argument.Imagine if the roles were reversed.
Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot.
Legacy mainstream media outlets quickly set to work to debunk Dr. Malone, who, despite his obvious credentials, was said to have no academic credibility by experts and reported breathlessly by 20-something journalists and well-known and once respected newspapers.
I'd argue with that, whether they were once respected.Then CNN ran a piece hosted by Brian Stelter entitled, Is the media out of touch with the country over COVID?Stelter's colleague, Oliver Darcy said,
A lot of the media does seem, as I look at it and travel the country, to be very out of touch with people.I mean, if you travel the country, people are not really living in the same bubble.It seems that the media is messaging toward.
And so I think this is an issue because if people are tuning out what's going on in cable news, if we're not messaging towards the general population, then they're just ignoring everything and living their lives, and we're really not
And we're not really getting the information that they need to them.
See, this is this is me really tapping into my inner cynic here.This is not people from CNN having a moment of clarity.This is people from CNN engaging in a limited hangout. as they try and make you ignore the idea.
It's not the fact that they're messaging towards a different bubble, it's that they're messaging people to try and move into that bubble.It doesn't exist already, that's why the media messaging is there for it, because they're trying to create it.
They seem to have the causality of their own work backwards.I'm sure they wouldn't make such a silly mistake like that again.All right.
From the standpoint of what we have been discussing as regards managerial elites, this episode is remarkable for at least three reasons.
First, it is obvious that Dr. Malone and his band of 16,000 doctors and scientists are managerial elites by the classic Burnham definition, technical experts.And they have broken decisively with the regime over its management of the pandemic.
Second, Joe Rogan's podcast has become more watched and listened to than CNN or any other legacy media outlet, to the extent that one might question whether the labels alternative and mainstream are still appropriate.
Third, the managerial masters of persuasion openly complained that their messaging is not working and that, in effect, no one is listening to them.If only the White House or CNN could hire Edward Bernays, maybe things might be different.
But one suspects that even if Bernays himself was managing this, he could do nothing about the loss of monopoly control over information flow that has been caused by the internet.Do you, I mean, the problem I have with that is,
That it almost seems and you know, it almost seems like he's writing to the bubble Because most people are not going on the internet to debunk What they're seeing, you know what they're what they're seeing on Twitter and that's you and me doing that You know, it's a a doing it.
It's you know our it's our crowd but the average person who you know, quote-unquote just wants to grill is not going I don't think they're going home and searching the internet and Looking to debunk what they're seeing on the news.
Maybe they don't believe it.
Maybe they think it's fake news Except of course if it's Ukraine if it has to do with Ukraine but the Don't get me started the but Yeah, I I question how many people are actually doing this considering the regime just is going on
You can tell straight away how many people actually sit down and spend the time to read political works and go straight to the source.What did Carl Schmitt actually have to say instead of just reading academic papers where they call him a Nazi?
What did he actually have to say?It's such a small number of people.I think, if anything, it's nice that he is writing to that in-group.He's talking to the vanguard, as it were.
As you say, people like ourselves, if we could do ourselves a hubris to adopt such a label.We are pushing the forefront of specifically these set of ideas that he's discussing here.I think this
This chapter in and of itself, even though it's not the final one of the book, does a fantastic job of wrapping up a lot of the themes that people will have picked up on at the start, I hope.
Sure, because when you're reading the early chapters, there's a lot of theory.There's a lot of things people aren't going to get.They're going to read it, read a page, and maybe say, I don't really know what I just read.I'm just going to push on.
And I think AA does a great job of presenting the theory at the beginning of the chapters.And then as the chapter goes on, it becomes more practical.Well, I don't know if it becomes more practical.
It just becomes he's writing it easier, saying, OK, everything I said back there, Maybe it doesn't make sense to you, I'm breaking it down for you here.
And I think that's what the Francis chapter and the Paul Godfrey chapter does, is it takes the whole book and it goes, this is what's happening now, and just so we can show you that elite theory is real, look at what's happening now.
It's impossible to argue with.I mean, people still want to argue with it, but that's because they're holding onto their ideologies like a religion. Yep.All right.
Let us return to Francis, who longed for a revolution from the middle and saw its scope in what he called the post bourgeois resistance made up of the middle class, including Kulaks or petite bourgeois, the lower middle class and the working class.
This is straightforward.This is a straightforward foxes versus lions or class one residues versus class two residues.Analysis derived from Pareto's strong influence on Francis's thinking.
Quoting.This is also something that Lenin and his friends spent many hours arguing over was the fact that the self-employed, the handyman,
the man that was self-taught in some kind of practical skill was the most reactionary force that existed, even more so than massive conglomerate international organizations of capital and whatever else, because they were slow, they were lethargic, and they ultimately weren't connected to the soil in the way that a self-employed tradesman is.
I've had conversations with people who call themselves Marxist-Leninists, and it's very rare that you actually have a conversation with a real Marxist-Leninist.They always turn out to be woke, bougie progs.
But when you do talk to them and you let them know, hey, I'm self-employed, I work for myself, and they immediately think, you know, this is someone that we can talk to.This is someone that we can recruit.
This is our natural, you know, someone naturally who would be drawn to us.If you're not, they're mad.They get mad.
If you are self-employed, if you are, you know, just a normal cool lock, just the guy who works all owns, owns, you know, a company that he works for himself by himself and drives a pickup truck every day.If you are not down with them, huh,
You become their enemy very quickly.
But those people own their own capital.Why would they want to do that to them?
All right, go back a little bit.This is straightforward.Foxes versus lions or class one residues versus class two residues.Analysis derived from Pareto's strong influence on Francis's thinking.
Quoting, post-bourgeois groups manifest hostility not only to the ideology of the soft managerial regime and to the psychic and behavioral patterns of its elite, but also to the manipulative style of dominance that characterizes the elite and the tendency to acceleration on which the elite relies for the preservation and enhancement of its power.
The managerial use of manipulation and acceleration not only alienates post-bourgeois groups culturally and morally, but also threatens their economic position and social status.
When commentators say that Francis predicted the rise of Donald Trump, it was for passages like this in which he perfectly encapsulates the essential problem.
It does not appear that Francis was aware of Juvenal's work, but he spots the alliance between elites and the underclass, particularly its non-white components.
Although Francis could not have foreseen the rise of the internet, he recognizes several vulnerabilities in the managerial regime.
Drawing from Moscow, he views the fact that the elite are monolithic and uniform as being a weakness, which is ironic, given their famous slogan, diversity is our strength.
Quoting, the formal mechanisms of mass liberal democracy, regular elections, competing political parties, universal suffrage, and legal and political rights do not significantly mitigate the monolithic and uniform concentration of managerial power.
The despotism of the regime, its tendency towards the monopolization of political, economic, and cultural power by a single social and political force of managerial and technical skills, and the expansive, uniform, and centralized nature of its power, is a direct consequence of the contracted composition of the elite and the restriction of its membership to elements proficient to managerial and technical skills.
The narrowness of the elite that results from this restriction insulates it from the influence of non-managerial social and political forces and reduces their ability to gain positions within the elite from which they can moderate, balance, or restrain its commands.
their exclusion from the elite contributes to the frustration of their aspirations and interests and encourages their alienation from and conflict with the elite and the destabilization and weakening of the regime."
What a paragraph.I mean, how more quickly and concisely could you sum up a sort of analytical view of the power dynamics and, as he says, mass liberal democracy?
And I mean, it just goes to show that, you know, you read that and then you look at something like, okay, a bunch of ideologues are gonna take over a bureaucratic organization.
Well, how did, if a bunch of ideologues take over a bureaucratic organization, what's the easiest way to fight back against, you know, to neutralize the influence of those ideologues?The organization has to be run by bureaucrats.
Ideologues aren't managerial.You need managerial people.The managerial people come in, eventually they're going to end up being in charge and dictating the direction.
I think they move one and the same, though, that one tends to follow the other either in both directions. managerialism in an organization allows for science and social science specifically to then inform more and more of its policies.
And then from that, you have a natural tendency to woke crap anyway, because that's what dominates and has dominated the intellectual social sciences for decades.
So it's almost kind of like the point earlier about do they believe in the ideas or not are somewhat irrelevant because it's just the fact that they act in the way that they do anyway.That is the important part.
Last paragraph. This destabilization takes the form of decomposition and fragmentation in the social order, which we have undoubtedly witnessed in the three decades since Francis was writing.
Since the managerial regime is soft and frequently does not actually solve problems, but opts rather simply to manage perception or engineer consent, it seems likely that the de facto Balkanization will begin to occur in both the USA and Europe.
so-called no-go zones, in which the authorities have essentially given up policing, have already emerged in major cities.
While these have, to date, occurred in non-white areas populated by the underclass, as post-bourgeois white populations become more disaffected by managerial elite rule, and even if they come to distrust the authorities themselves, it is perfectly possible that de facto autonomous no-go zones could occur in white areas too.
In the USA, both the Trump and Biden presidencies have been characterized by widespread state-level noncompliance with federal and executive edicts.
If half the country declared that the president is not my president no matter who wins the election, the regime has a serious problem on its hands.
As I have mentioned previously, the current strategy of simply writing off 30% or more of the population as undesirables simply cannot serve.
In moscow's terms, there is a lack of moral unity between the rulers and the ruled and historically this situation has not and will not persist for long We can but only hope Well, you know i'm wondering I wonder just how many people have checked out
Like they just don't care.You know, what percentage is that?I remember a couple of years ago, what was it?Like 45 to 48% of the population here didn't vote in, I think 2016 or 2012 election.So, you know, if, if the, God.
I was gonna say, but as if we learn the important lesson from the previous chapter for McKells, that the total number of what you have in your group really doesn't make much of a difference.And the mass will always be there.
I mean, I put it in, I think my speech on vanguardism for a NOMOS event a while back, that the mass is a sort of an indistinguishable quantity in society, but it reflects the centrality of our cultural products.
And it doesn't mean that it's always 75% of people that consume it or 25%, but there is some number and it's enough to make it look like there is a consensus.
And that's, you know, in the passage we were looking at where Lippmann sort of tries to suggest that public opinion doesn't even really exist, it's just constructed.
Yeah.Well, I think the point of bringing up the amount of people who aren't voting is, I mean, these are, in worse terms, these are people who are either apathetic or they could be angry.And that doesn't bode well for the regime.
So I'm looking for hope.I'm looking for the white pills. I'm looking for the white pills and all of this because, you know, it's, it's very easy to get black pilled over all this until you understand it.
And once you understand that, once you grasp it and once you, once you know how power works, maybe there is that, you know, that denial phase where you're just like, well, you know, there's the denial phase.No, no, it can't work.
And then there is the, um, You're like, well, I mean how we can't raise up people like this.And then you realize we're just going to have to raise up people.We're going to have to raise up our own elites.
Well, that's, that's the thing I've always found sort of very comforting actually, is that when people, you know, they, they work out what's going wrong and they realize that a lot of things are actually arguably possibly a bit hopeless.
But what it means is that your choices of what you can do to affect action are actually quite slim.And once you understand the core goal, which is developing and raising a new class of elites, then that's all you need to do.
And you just need to headlong stick into that with whatever resources and time you have.And that becomes a lot more, as I say, maybe not the best word, but confidence inspiring maybe.Because then you know the path that you're supposed to go on.
Yeah, exactly.Yeah, it's the problem.
I think that, you know, I've had some people contacted by some people and say, not say that they were blackpilled, but said that people had listened to like the first chapter one and chapter two with, um, with Steven.
And then they looked more into elite theory and that it blackpilled them.And, you know, it's like, this isn't blackpilling.If you figure out once you figure out how it works, But that's not blackmailing.Then you just have to come up.
And especially libertarians, they're so good at diagnosing.Well, this also gives you how you fix it, too, because libertarians have that whole South Park thing.It's like collect underpants, question mark, profit.It gives you that middle.
It gives you what's in the middle.
Well, see, I don't know. I find elite theory stuff very easy because, again, without stepping into the depths of hubris, it's kind of how I've just always seen and understood humans anyway.On a fundamental level, we are not all the same.
We are not equal, and that means that we are not equal in capacities to organise, which is possibly the most
Differing fundamental capacity in people as a whole as your ability to organize allows you to be an entrepreneur Be a political actor be an elite as it were Yeah, if you can Organize the problem is as as this book is laid out as the masses are
unorganized and underfunded or not funded at all.So there's your, that's what you have to do.And you know, you're not, the masses aren't going to organize.It's going to be what you call, you know, what you'd reference as a vanguard.
and the vanguard will organize, the vanguard will find the elites, maybe the elites are among the vanguard, and you raise up those elites and then you go to work.
And it may not, and I'll talk to libertarians again, it may not happen in this lifetime, but you're not gonna get Ancapistan in this lifetime. You're not, you know, hope.
One thing you can hope for is you get like a close to something approximating like a Hoppian covenant community or private city or private law city or something like that.
Yeah, that's something I said to a lot of people over the course of the week at Mises U, when there were sort of the issues of culture and other sort of things would come up, and then they would want to crawl into this sort of libertarian safe space of not having to put, oh, well, I'm indifferent on these things.
I just think you shouldn't be able to enforce your values, blah, blah, blah.And I always said to them, well, I love the picture Austrian economics paints, but without radical political action, you're never going to have the canvas for it.
It's a good way of putting it.That's we should probably end on that, because I don't know.I suppose I will say you're going to do any better than that one.I don't think so.
I've had my peak already.
No, I will say, though, if people haven't already do pick up a copy of a book and then if you want to become part of the real vanguard, go grab a copy of Sam Francis's Leviathan and its enemies before it becomes possible to buy.
or hit me up for the archive PDF link.
Yeah, I will hit you up for that, because I'll probably end up doing that, probably use it more as a reference so that I can control F on it.Anything else to plug?
Just that you can find me on the YouTube channel ScrumpMonkey, and then I'm sure, if possible, you could throw the link for the Telegram channel where people can find me in the description or wherever else.
I can absolutely do both of those.
Thank you.Thank you everyone.Take care.You too.I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Quinones show.Returning, Pedro Gonzalez.How are you doing, Pedro?
Doing very well.All right.We are here to read and comment on chapter nine of Nima Parvini's The Populist Delusion, and this one is called The Therapeutic State, and it goes over the writings of Paul Gottfried, and you are an editor at Chronicles.
I believe that Paul is the senior editor at Chronicles.Why is Paul special to you?
I think he's like the most underrated living scholar of our time who really understands the issues in a way that other people don't.Paul's level of learning is unusual.You certainly don't see it on the mainstream right.
Someone who's actually an intellectual in a true sense and I think his ability to entertain
an actually diverse array of ideas and thinkers, even those that are considered controversial, like Carl Schmitt, and then apply what he learns in a way that's relevant, you know, even 10 years after the fact.
In this case, we're going to be talking about Afro-liberalism and managerialism and the politics of guilt.These are not new books.
These are books written, you know, a decade or so ago, and the insights from them are still as relevant or more relevant than ever, actually. Paul is an unusual luminary, I think, in a good way.
Well spoken, well spoken.I've had him on to talk about fascism and anti-fascism, and I've had him on to talk about stress and the neocons.So, yeah, it's amazing, amazing what he knows.
All right, so just like all the rest of the chapters, I'm going to read, I'm going to share a screen, put this up there, and you stop any time that you feel like you need to comment, and I'll do the same.
Alrighty.Chapter 9, The Therapeutic State.In theory, the role of government is not for the sake of its own power, but for the benefit of the people it is supposed to serve.
If a government does not serve the people, then it must be transformed until it does so, or be overthrown and replaced with one which does.
However, in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, published in 2002, Paul Gottfried argued that the modern managerial regime had completely inverted this theoretical relationship.
Rather than transforming itself to serve the people, the managerial regime seeks to transform people in the service of its system of atomized corporate consumerism.
I think you already see here a kind of radical break between Paul and mainstream conservative commentary on this, right?In the sense that Paul understands that we no longer live in a constitutional republic.
And if you get your takes from your typical conservative pundit, they're arguing that either we still do, but it's endangered, or that we, you know, like Mark Levin or something like that, right?
Like, you know, this is this is against our constitution or something like that. You already see that Paul already begins from 10 steps down the road where he's saying, our regime is fundamentally different from what it was initially conceived as.
It no longer actually serves anything that's like a social good and instead it exists to transform people. to engineer a specific type of subject.
So just in the first few lines, you already see why his insights are so radically different, again, from the average conservative who either thinks that we do live in a constitutional republic and therefore it's not okay for the FBI to raid Mar-a-Lago because somehow that's a violation of constitutional rights, which is in theory true, but in reality irrelevant.
Besides the fact right or the people that think that you know, uh We we need to vote in the next election in order to save the constitutional republic that's endangered paul is saying it's dead and gone Yeah, and also he's Crushing anybody's hopes of oh, we still have a free market things like that.
That's I mean, that's that's again, uh, you don't hear this from the uh, the typical conservative the idea that basically um that there's something bad about capitalism, that there's something bad about our culture of consumerism.All right.
It drives ever more closely towards what Juvenel saw as the final destination.It ends in the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the state, and in the denial of every preeminence which is not approved by the state.
In a word, it ends in the atomization of society and in the rupture of every private tie linking man and man, whose only bond is now the common bondage to the state.The extremes of individualism and socialism meet.That was their predestined course.
I actually just wrote a piece about neoconservatism and this is something
This is something that I kind of touch on, but from a different direction and basically like the new neocons, like Bari Weiss and Douglas Murray, who conceive of themselves as kind of breaking with the left.
They kind of see themselves as good liberals, right?And in many cases, that's what a lot of conservatives see themselves as. that the true conservative is actually trying to preserve the liberal order, the proper liberal order, right?
And like the average Bari Weiss reader, like Bari Weiss herself, there was an article recently to give you a concrete example about like the problems with Hollywood.
And in this article, it talks about how, like in the past, there was this kind of noble crusade to root out white racism in Hollywood to break what the author called the white wall.
But then Trump gets elected and a mass hysteria descends upon Hollywood and then everything is bad. And basically, there's no sense of maybe these things are connected, maybe are, are crusading for social justice and individualism.
Individualism at the same time was a kind of contradiction.And the comments are like that too.
The comments are like, I was always, you know, like as someone who's working in the entertainment industry, I was always opposed to racism, but you know, this stuff just goes too far.And, um,
I talk about this in my piece because it's something that James Burnham mentioned too, that basically this tension between individual freedom, the ability to kind of, you know, live whatever life you want, and social justice are at odds.
Because social justice requires uniformity.We have to get people to act a certain way on the basis that certain behaviors are discriminatory and they exclude others, right?Or they stigmatize others.
And so that means that there's not really a whole lot of room for individualism if you believe in social justice, because individual thinking, individual types of behavior can threaten, let's call them certain sacred groups, right?
Whether they're minorities or people that are transgender or whatever.
And the point that everyone from Paul to Burnham to Juvenal has made is that ultimately this kind of like what we're seeing now, it's not like, oh, it's liberalism abandoned and betrayed.
It's like, no, this is the logical conclusion of these two tensions resolving themselves. I mean, other people go back further to Rousseau.
What we're living in right now is a kind of Rousseauian totalitarianism where any kind of dissidence is unacceptable and it has to be crushed.
In other words, liberalism and leftism, it's not like they're different, like Dennis Prager would argue or something like that.No, these things are actually related.
You very much see this in the Barry Weiss, Douglas Murray, the IDW types.I just see them as infiltrators to keep, basically conserve liberalism, conserve progressivism, 100%.
However, Gottfried identifies the root of this not in managerialism per se, which is simply the vehicle through which it and its ends are achieved, but in two proximate causes.
Multiculturalism, which is to say the prevalence of minority groups whose political efforts go towards neutralizing the culture and institutional particularities associated with a majority outgroup,
and a religious and cultural phenomenon owing itself chiefly to a progressive perversion of mainline protestant churches that manifests itself as white guilt.
David French was the first. concrete example of this.This is actually what got St.Francis in trouble in the 90s.He wrote a column in the Washington Times and he was basically mocking this Southern Baptist Church for apologizing for slavery.
Basically, this idea that Christians today in the 90s have any kind of responsibility for something like slavery, right?And also the idea of permanent group guilt.It seems to completely contradict the idea of
forgiveness in this Christian sense, that we can be absolved of our sins.
Instead, what we're saying is that actually entire races of people have this kind of permanent original sin that will not only taint them, but also every subsequent generation of white people carries this sin.
San Francis just argued like this is absurd.It also seems to violate Christian ethics and history.And that column actually got him in trouble.He was right, of course.Everything he said in that column is correct.
But it was just seen as, of course, it was construed as an apology for slavery, which obviously that's not what it was. But the funny thing is, is that that was considered a hot take at the time.
So hot that, you know, like I said, it got him in trouble.And it contributed to his firing from the Washington Times.But today,
There's a unanimous agreement on the right, even the mainstream right, that this actually seems to be a kind of bizarre Christian defamation, the politics of white guilt.
That is a totally mainstream view now, whereas it got a prominent intellectual who was talking about this in the 90s, it got him in trouble and ultimately contributed to him getting fired.
Yeah.Yeah.Dinesh D'Souza.Alright.This results in an atmosphere to which white people must submit in self-abasement and atonement for past sins.
It necessitates the grafting onto administrative states of therapeutic and punitive agencies for forming social consciousness and chastising those with defective sensibility.That is a quote and a half right there.
By now, political correctness and its causes are well-worn themes.It has also become commonplace to identify modern social justice and its dominant theme of white guilt as a kind of religion.
Gottfried arrived at such conclusions at least 20 years before most commentators, as did Sam Francis, whose work we have already explored.The specific causes are incidental to our purposes here, but it is worth listing them.
Gottfried sees the issue as predominantly American, arising from the so-called melting pot, and then exported to the rest of the Anglosphere from the mid-1960s onwards, who,
came to imitate the crusade against discrimination then being waged across the Atlantic.
In the American milieu, the key groups are the so-called WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who have allowed their mainline churches to stray very far from biblical teachings to general sermonizing about the dangers of bigotry and an alliance of minority groups which include Jews, Irish and Italian Catholics, and Blacks.
Godfrey locates at the heart of the issue the feminization of Christianity, the fusion of a victim-centered feminism with the Protestant framework of sin and redemption.
It is not difficult to see a perverted form of the Calvinist doctrine of absolute depravity in contemporary social justice rhetoric.
I think that that thesis that basically
radical social justice, whatever you want to call it, that it was not a European import to the United States, that this is actually something that we – by we, I mean the United States – kind of conceived and then ultimately exported.
That's a controversial opinion, right?A lot of conservative punditry revolves around this idea that basically everything was fine.But then some, you know, like some German idealism or whatever, or Marxism got imported.
And that ultimately brought us to where we are now, that basically was the import of foreign ideas.But
Paul seems to believe that actually this tendency was already present in the United States, or there's something here that made the ideas particularly virulent and destructive.And I mean, this goes against even
institutions like like the Claremont Institute, right?They take the view that that actually, our problems are mostly imported from German from German thinking in German, German views of like the social sciences and stuff like that.
Paul is saying no, like this is actually a homegrown problem.And
It's funny because you recently had the French government talk about this, that basically the woke ideology is coming from the United States to France and that they view it as a kind of threat to the stability of the French regime because essentially it threatens to delegitimize the French government, the French state, by doing what it's doing in the United States, which is
saying that the entire, you know, French society is built on racism, on the exploitation of minority groups and stuff like that.For the United States, it's more about slavery.In France, it's more about colonialism.
But the French government has said, like, this is on the one hand, a threat, an existential threat to French society, and on the other hand, an American import. And I think that point doesn't get enough attention because it's worth chewing on, right?
Like, why is that?Like, what is this?My mind goes to, I think his name was William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist who burned the constitution.And I think he referred to it as like a deal with the devil or something like that.
And I think that you always had this kind of radical tendency that was it seemed like it was, there's always this kind of millenarian tendency in the United States, not in the average American, but there is always this kind of faction in the U.S.
that had this kind of millenarian, radical social justice can't.And I think Paul's really the only person that's, I think, tried to explore this.
All right, going back to reading the author in the first, the author's writing in the first person here.
I recall being at an international conference in 2017 at which a world famous feminist Renaissance scholar at Columbia, undoubtedly a wasp, spoke for almost half an hour in unmistakably religious terms about her shame at being white.
In truth, I could not bear witness to this act of public penance and left the conference hall after 10 minutes. Gottfried does not solely lay blame on Protestantism gone awry.He also points to the political games played by minority groups.
Gottfried, who is Jewish, notes the double standard, for example, of Jews who combine strong nationalist feelings for their own group and for Israel with the advocacy of open borders, alternative lifestyles, and extreme pluralism for their host countries.
That's quoting Gottfried right there.
Elsewhere, around the time he was writing Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, he noted the weaponization of social justice rhetoric by Jewish groups against their chief political rivals, the white Christian right.Quoting Gottfried,
But seeking out bloc alliances with blacks and other marginalized groups is thought to help American Jews in another, more significant way.
Like gays and feminists, blacks are valuable for those who perceive the white Christian right as their major enemy and as the prime source of American anti-Semitism.
I would urge Professor Foreman to look at the Anti-Defamation League's 1994 publication, The Religious Right, the Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America, as an illustration of how leading American Jewish organizations perceive their self-interest.
It is by declaring solidarity with Blacks and others thought to be on the left against the predominantly Southern-based religious right.
Racist, theocracy, holocaust denier, and anti-abortion are becoming interchangeable terms in American Jewish tirades against the Christian right.
Remaining firmly tied to blacks is therefore seen as necessary to preserve Jews against the real enemy, the one they fear and detest most whether or not it poses a real threat to their individual or communal existence.
Paul has said elsewhere, I think, that he thinks that this strategy backfires, that it actually increases, I mean, we're so past like balkanization, but basically that's exactly what it does.
It actually increases conflict between groups in the United States more than it resolves anything.I mean, I think Paul's like one of the few people that has written about this subject is willing to kind of make these points.
But anyways, yeah, I mean, this is like probably Paul's, one of the most controversial things that he writes about, as only probably he could or would be willing to.I mean, yeah, it's a difficult subject, so.
Eh, he still gets called an anti-Semite anyway, so.
Yeah, I think he had family that was killed by the Nazis too, I think, but it's just, yeah, I mean, to his credit, he's even willing to discuss these things, so.
Yeah, it's part of being part of the therapeutic state when you're getting accused of things that are absurd. However, Gottfried notes that other minority groups have played these political games too, including Irish and Italian Catholics.
Of course, good students of elite theory would not be surprised in the slightest that in a multicultural liberal democracy, tightly organized special interest groups should come to dominate the disorganized majority.This is Moscow's law.
What troubles Gottfried most is the manufacturing of consent that we have seen discussed that we have already discussed has been pathologized and even medicalized.
This is where I'm going to say, just stop and say, that when some of us say, especially Oren MacIntyre says this a lot and has almost become famous for saying it, these people are just not going to leave us alone.
The people who want to be left alone are always going to be defeated by the people who aren't going to leave us alone, have no intention of leaving us alone.
So I think that this section right here, this is starting to talk about that where anyone who thinks that this leftist ideology is, they're somehow going to overcome it politically No, that's why these people don't care about politics.
That's why these people will raid the compounds of former presidents.That's why these people will push the mutilation of children.
Yeah.I think this is actually the most interesting part of the chapter, basically the clinicalization of disagreement.
He suggests that since the 1960s, the behavior modification and social engineering programs of the managerial state have relentlessly fought against discrimination and promoted diversity using the looming image of the Nazis or the ghosts of slavery and the segregationist South as cudgels in a permanent slippery slope argument.
He identifies three tactics that are routinely employed.First, the tendency of media and other opinion makers to stress that consensus has already been reached, for example, over immigration or multicultural programs.
In the UK, the BBC would routinely engage in this form of gaslighting on its flagship debate show Question Time.They would routinely present a panel with four pro-immigration voices against a lone anti-immigration voice.
The studio crowd would cheer the pro-immigration voices and boo the anti-immigration voice.
This serves to isolate the viewer at home watching the show who may be against immigration by creating the perception that their stance is held by a despised minority.
In fact, from 1964 to 2017, over 65% of the British public opposed immigration, according to the British election study.The media nakedly employs a persuasion tool known as social proof in a bid to make the public more accepting of mass immigration.
I mean, you've wrote on this on immigration, I mean.
The point about social proof reminds me of something else that I've written about, which is called, well, it's this idea of like socially constructed phenomenon.It's like mass shootings, right?
there's this idea that is constructed by the media that basically like that all mass shooters are white, right?That they're all this implicitly right-wing white person.But obviously that's not true.
The high profile things that we see on TV, they happen to be these white schizophrenics or whatever, but they make up a minority of the total population that is responsible for mass shootings.
And the study that i was starting to make this case actually argues that.One hand you have this this thing the socially construction perceptions of of social problems.Any other hand it actually results in a kind of like misdirection of resources.
um that because we're because our attention is focused on you know what seems to be this this boogeyman of like you know the white um mass shooter our attention and efforts are directed toward essentially like you know increasing our our like anti-discrimination regime like the social engineering to to stamp out like supposed
you know, white extremism, white rage, as General Mark Milley calls it, right?But it's a complete waste, in the sense that it doesn't actually solve anything.
It basically creates a problem that doesn't really exist, and then pours resources and energy into addressing that.And ultimately, all it really does is kind of expand the size and scope of the managerial regime.
You have a more invasive state that needs to root out the causes that supposedly contribute to this problem of the white mass shooter, right?
mean, you could argue, like, I actually believe in this, that there's actually something that's driving people insane about modernity and making them commit these kinds of shootings.But it's not, like, white racial resentment or something like that.
Like, I think it's, I think it's actually much worse than that.It's something about the way that the way that we live, period, today, makes people, I think, nihilistic.But that's much harder to solve than the supposed boogeyman of white extremism.
That's much more serious.You're talking about something that is baked into the cake of the modern West.And you can't really solve that.There's no think tank that can address that problem, right?
But these socially construction narratives like this social proof i think is an example of that.Completely divert our attention and resources to things that are that ultimately serve no one except for the managers if that makes sense.
I thought you were gonna start talking about industrial society and its future right there for a second.All right, let's move on.The second tactic Gottfried identifies is employing the past as a club.
By harping on the real or imagined evils of the past, proponents of state-controlled socialization appeal to the guilty conscience of their listeners and furnish occasions for exhibitions of public righteousness.
Such exhibitions have become by now so routine and widespread that they have gained the label virtue signaling.Who hasn't seen somebody post on social media that they're opposed to slavery?Right.Yeah.In twenty twenty two.
Thank you for.Yeah.Yeah.It's just thank you for letting us know that you're against slavery.
That's great.It's very brave.Very and stunning. However, the third and most insidious method is to treat the unwanted behavior as a form of sickness, to depict unfashionable thinkers and retrograde views as pathological.
Gottfried is rightly perturbed at the implications of treating dissent as a form of mental illness which requires psychiatric remedy.
that pathologizing tendency has its overt post-war roots in the work of the Frankfurt School, and specifically Theodore W. Adrano's The Authoritarian Personality Type.
Gottfried gives a full treatment to this text in his early book After Liberalism, to which multiculturalism and the politics of guilt was a sequel.
Elsewhere, he is at pains to point out that contrary to certain right-wing conspiracy theories, which suggest the injection of Frankfurt School thinking into Western institutions as a Marxist plot hatched from Moscow, that Adorno was sponsored by an
emphatically liberal, but also anti-Soviet sponsor, the American Jewish Committee.In other words, this is not subversion of liberalism by communist agitators.This is the logic of managerial liberalism played out to its natural limits.
Got anything to say about that?
No, I think, again, it gets at this idea that these are imported ideas, right?That no, actually, this actually seems to be something that is homegrown.And I mean, like managerialism, managerial liberalism is a good term to sum this stuff up.
But I think the next part is what I was, like I said, this is the part that I think is really, really fascinating and I wanted to talk about, so.
Let's do it.And after liberalism, drawing on Thomas Szasz, it's Thomas Szasz, right?
Okay.And Christopher Lash, he charts how the fields of psychiatry and psychology gave rise to a new expert class whose role was to regulate, alter, and normalize behavior to conform to the requirements of managerialism.
Quoting, the invasion of government and the courts by behavioral scientists has produced what Thomas Szasz calls the therapeutic state.
Psychiatrists and social psychologists have been given social status, according to Szasz, and their moral and political judgments, though not always founded on hard empirical science, are taken to be expert.
These experts today can affect decisions about the responsibility of criminals, the right to control property, and the custody of children.
Psychiatric theologians have been able to impose their private political opinions as scientific truth, and Szasz cites the fact that the American Psychiatric Association now defines the involuntary treatment and incarceration of mental patients as health rights.
Zaz also observes, if people believe the health values justify coercion, but that moral and political do not, those who wish to coerce others will tend to enlarge the category of health values at the expense of moral values.
health values have also become socialized through a global managerial culture.
Since 1976, the United Nations, through its international covenant on economic, cultural, and social rights, has elevated the enjoyment of the highest standard of mental health to a sacred entitlement.
Henceforth, governments must ensure a sound state of mind as a human right.
This whole thing is so important, and I think the most obvious example of this idea of psychiatric theologians today is transgenderism. I don't think we really appreciate this point enough.
There was a case recently in Arkansas where a judge ruled that Arkansas cannot enforce a ban on gender transition therapy for kids.
And obviously the justification for that is that basically these medical interventions, so the so-called medical interventions are life-saving. And we're going to get into Foucault here in a sec.
I actually think you're better off reading like Foucault at this point than John Locke in order to understand like the modern managerial regime that basically these claims that
like gender transition therapy are life-saving and therefore necessary and you can't stop.You can't even like through the legislative process, it's not okay to prevent kids from getting access to this stuff.
It's delivered in the neutral language of science, which gives this facade of exactly that.This is just objective truth.This is what the academic institutions of medicine have decided is simply true.It's not political at all, but obviously it is.
Every institution is political.It's absurd to think anything else.But that is precisely why this stuff is so pernicious, that you have courts and social workers and all these people that have the power
to deprive you of your children, of your property, or even your freedom, who are grounding their arguments in what are supposedly kind of objective, ethical concepts, like best practices for care and things like that.It's extremely pernicious.
And again, Paul's one of the few people that talks about this.
It's it's so dangerous and it's so scary.I mean these people they can pick you up and there's nothing you can do.They can do anything to you that they want to force Medicaid.There was there was a time I was reading about somebody.
Somebody I've talked about in this podcast before who actually committed suicide because he was in fear that they were going to lobotomize him.
Yeah, yeah, so alright. It is interesting that this analysis of relationship between the field of mental health and power has a parallel on the left in the work of Michel Foucault.
Foucault pointed out how the medical or clinical gaze obscures the functioning of power because of the morally neutral language of science.
However, as much as Foucault is added to university reading lists and read by undergraduates, it seems that no one at universities, least of all those on the left, ever stops to question the relationship between power and public and mental health in the current paradigm.
One might suggest that this is because they now see themselves in power. Instead of using Foucault to criticize the current paradigm, they seem to remain frozen forever analyzing the culture of the 1950s and deconstructing the last one.
Yeah, that's right.That's the irony of of modern political scientists who are bathed in Foucaultian concepts, but don't really seem to apply them to the existing paradigm and existing power structures.
They continue applying them to the past, and the past always provides a justification for reshaping the future. Like I said, I actually think at this point you would get more understanding.
It's probably more constructive to read people like Foucault at this point in order to understand the problems and how power works in the world that people like Foucault made.
than reading Locke and pretending that we still live in this 19th century liberal constitutional republic or something like that.I think Foucault was himself a sexual deviant and a terrible human being, but his insights on power are actually
are really useful, and I think that for Foucault, he was writing as someone who viewed himself as kind of out of power, right?
And so when you're someone who views themselves as part of a marginalized community, because Foucault, he was gay, but not just that, he was part of this French group of intellectuals that signed a petition for abolishing age of consent laws in France.
like the guy was messed up.
But as an outsider who kind of sees all of these, these taboos and taboos exist for a reason, but all of these kind of these things that make people behave and think and act a certain way, as basically kind of constraints on your own individualism, then you're going to want to figure out how these how these power structures work, and how to dismantle them.
And for someone who is on the outside, that makes sense, right?But I think the reason Foucault is useful to the right right now is that we're the ones that are on the... It's a paradox, right?
The right, which is for so long identified with institutions like the military and law enforcement and stuff like that, we're on the outside.We have no control over institutions anymore. The institutions are not conservative, they're not right-wing.
You are basically in the shoes that people like Foucault were in.And that's why it actually behooves you to understand how the regime actually works, rather than how we've been told it does, or how we would wish it did work.
So, I mean, that's my position on why actually you should read Foucault.
Yeah, and Foucault wrote books on prisons, wrote books on how medicine was being handled in the modern time.I mean, we know he was a deviant.A lot of that work, though, is spot on, especially in light of today.Okay, so, all right.
We are quoting Gottfried here.Christopher Lash explains the process by which the therapeutic segment of the managerial elite won moral acceptance.
Despite that it claims to be providing mental health, where always self-serving and highly subjective, the therapeutic class offered ethical leadership in the absence of shared principles.
By defining emotional well-being as both a social good and the overcoming of what is individually and collectively dangerous, the behavioral scientists have been able to impose their absolutes upon a culturally fluid society.
In The True and Only Heaven, Lasch explores the implications for post-war politics of the authoritarian personality.
A chief contributor to this anthology, Teodor Adorno abandoned his earlier work as a cultural critic to become a proponent of governmentally imposed social therapy.
According to Lash, Adorno condemns undesirable political attitudes as prejudice, and by defining prejudice as a social disease, substituted a medical for a political idiom.
In the end, Adorno and his colleagues relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic, to scientific study, as opposed to philosophical and political debate.
Yeah, I think this is another aspect of this particular section of the chapter that I think is really, really important, really fascinating.That Dissent, disagreement is no longer merely a difference in opinions.It's pathologized.
It's indicative, actually, of a social disease.I think that you really saw this play out with the armchair psychology that people performed on Trump while he was in office, right?
And these like popular psychology magazines, people writing about, you know, what makes Trump tick and it's always something like fascism, right?Or what makes his base tick, which is always something like fascism.
It always seems to come back to that.But. The point is that these people literally don't accept viewpoints that they don't hold.It just can't be that way.It has to be indicative of some kind of pathology.
If you don't like transgender activism or LGBT activism, it's probably because you're closeted.If you don't like feminism, it's because you hate women.
It's like if you think that we should have borders and immigration restriction, it's because you hate immigrants and brown people.
It always actually has to be just a kind of surface level, a symptom of some deep-seated, some sickness that needs to be cured by therapy and social engineering.
What's important about that is that it means that they're never just going to accept differing views.
And I think that somehow this is connected also to our foreign policy, this idea that if there's only one set of acceptable political views and social views,
then it follows that there's probably only going to be one acceptable form of government, right?And all other governments that are not that are existential threats to you, and they have to be reconstructed.
And you see this in the rhetoric of neoconservatism and foreign policy.Every geopolitical thing today is always like a contest between autocracy and liberal democracy, right?
We literally can't leave countries alone that our foreign policy establishment does not see as liberal democracies.Why?Because it's unacceptable.
It's unacceptable that there could be another form of government, another consensus, in other words, on governing.It's just not acceptable.And the same thing obviously applies to domestic politics.
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One of the reasons why when the troops are leaving Afghanistan, you see pictures coming out and reports of George Floyd murals in Afghanistan and that schools were teaching gender studies in Afghanistan.
They have to export that to, they have to export that there.And it's a religion.It's very evangelical in nature.Moving on. As per Carl Schmitt, there are no neutral institutions including medical and psychiatric institutions.
If the managerial state makes anti-discrimination the moral center of its political formula, then discriminatory views are diagnosed as mentally abnormal.
In such a regime, unconscious bias training is mandated at most workplaces and for employees of the state, despite empirical proof that it does not even achieve the behavior modification at which it aims by admission of the British government.
The UK Cabinet Office's written statement on unconscious bias training, ostensibly written in the neutral language of science, concludes by reaffirming its commitment to the political formula of the therapeutic state, equality, diversity, and inclusion.
The Civil Service will therefore integrate principles for inclusion and diversity into mainstream core training and leadership modules in a manner which facilitates positive behavior change.
Here is an open declaration that the state is engaged in positive behavior change as a central mission.
At the time of writing, the former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, speaking in an interview with CNN, said, it's an indicator of how broken politics has been that the issue of vaccination should become political.
I mean, it's just a question of science.One might ask Mr. Blair how the issue of having one's body penetrated by a foreign object by order of the government could ever not be political.
this Paul talks about this and after liberalism that that basically like the the clinicalization of everything that in the early and mid 20th century the mid 20th century
I'm not actually going to give a timeline for this stuff because I haven't absorbed it enough, but basically what Paul argues in general is that psychiatry arose initially in the United States as something that was used to address things like alcoholism.
and domestic violence, right?So in other words, Paul suggests that okay, in the beginning, this stuff might, you know, probably did have some merit in kind of correcting deviant behavior.
But then something happened, and progressives, the progressive movement in the United States and its adherents, basically started to view things like psychiatry,
not as correctives, not as a kind of something that we use to treat people who are behaving in a way that's bad, you know, like an alcoholic or something.Instead, we can actually use it to socially engineer society a certain way.
In other words, to foster a certain kind of populace or citizenry that actually, I mean, we say citizenry, but really, you're talking more about like subjects, right?And I think it reminds me of this
this idea that Michel Foucault had, that basically in the 17th century, you had this kind of this emerging new type of power that he called biopower.
That basically, the moment that rulers, the moment that sovereigns took it upon themselves to kind of concern themselves with the
the welfare of the population through things like, not just obvious things like medical services and things like that, and public services, but also even, I think Foucault even includes census keeping.
The moment that we started to put people on Excel spreadsheets, or whatever the 17th century equivalent of that is, and then obviously onward from that, the moment that we started to do that, something happened where
regimes began to concern themselves with with fostering a kind of way of life that that power before that was what Foucault called subtractive.
So power before that, the way that you experienced it was, the regime would take things away from you, it would take your life away from you, it would take your freedom away from you, it would take your, your, your property way, it still does those things, obviously, right.
But then this new type of power, biopower, it's a kind of prescriptive power that regimes going forward started to cultivate ways of living.
And I think this is a really fascinating concept, and I think it's something that the right doesn't think about enough.This whole idea of social engineering I think we do and we don't.
But, I mean, I think Paul's treatment, I'm kind of, I'm butchering right now, but Paul's treatment in Afro-liberalism is, it's really incredible because, I mean, even, I think even, you see the effects of these things
and the way that conservatives have conversations where they make distinctions between sex and gender without realizing that all of this stuff, even the words that we use, it all derives from these institutions that have been totally captured and turned against us to the extent that we don't even realize that we're still kind of operating within the language that these people have created in their paradigms.
when we're trying to refute like leftists or something like that about how like, you know, sex is real and biologically grounded or something like that, we still will use words and concepts that are developed by these people.
I don't know if that made sense, but just conservatives are conserving liberalism and progressivism.
It's worse than that, I think actually, but yeah, correct.
But simply for somebody who, you know, doesn't really follow and read a lot of what we, um, you know, a lot of what we do is basically there, it makes its way in, it makes its way into everything.It insinuates its way even into your thinking.
Yeah.And I think even this idea of like, um, like it's just science, right?It's a question of science.I mean, even that, um, A great, it's funny, I was thinking about this the other day, ask someone what is recidivism?
So ask someone who's like pro criminal justice reform, you know, pro defund the police or whatever and ask them what's, because obviously they'll tell you that like, you know, recidivism programs work.These programs were
where like dangerous criminals can rehabilitate themselves by like washing dogs in prison and stuff like that, that it works.And so you just ask them a simple question because they're so certain that recidivism has been reduced, right?
So you ask them like, what is recidivism?And they'll tell you, well, the likelihood of someone to re-offend once they get out of prison. But that's not true.In Ohio, recidivism is not that straightforward.
If you get out of a prison in a particular county, and you go across the state line to Michigan, and you commit a crime there, and you go back to prison, as far as the Ohio Corrections Department is concerned, you're not a recidivist, because you committed that crime in Michigan.
And I think that gets at this problem of, well, it's science.It's empirical, objective data.How could you argue with that? it's neutral, in other words, but obviously, nothing is neutral.
Your truth claims that you think are founded on objective, empirical fact are not, because they are laundered through institutions that are politicized, like every institution is.
If you really think about this, you might even go crazy, because basically, what we're saying is that the foundation
for truth does not really stand on anything in Western liberal societies today except for basically just the opinions of people who are insane and unfortunately also in power.
It is important for us to grasp here the salient feature of Gottfried's analysis, which is not merely to say that the managerial state has developed and adopted this ideology and those tools of mass manipulation to justify its own power, but also that it has developed them as a political weapon."
Quoting Gottfried. The political class has adopted inclusiveness and diversity as a political instrument, as a means of controlling a society it has set about reshaping.
The diversity machine is a mechanism of state power that operates without anyone being permitted to notice its coercive nature. Therapeutic regimes are packaged in a way that disguises their resort to force.
Both the left and establishment right in the United States, which misrepresent political life, have helped to make this concealment possible.Thus, insidious efforts at social engineering are shrouded in a cloak of benevolence.
In managerial doublespeak, flatly coercive programs are cast as vehicles for empowerment. One is reminded of when Bob Dylan sings, good intentions can be evil, both hands can be full of grease, you know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.
Every moral revolution expands the realm of managerial control.The government, now in place, searches out radical forces in order to break down non-inclusive behavioral patterns and to subjugate citizens.
Those who favor such a course for individual or collective reasons will empower the state to pursue it.
The most blatant example of this in recent years has been the borderline insane push to recognize transgender men and women as being indistinguishable from so-called cis men and women.Go ahead.
No, that's it.You can keep reading.I'll comment after the JK Rowling thing.
Okay. The public maintenance of obvious fictions and falsehoods signals allegiance and obedience to the regime and serves no other function whatsoever than to punish dissidents.
The most famous example of this has been the attempted unpersoning of the otherwise pristinely politically correct liberal J.K.Rowling for her alleged transphobia.Controversy surrounds, you want to do it now?
Yeah, sure.No, I think this is, I mean, this gets at kind of the point that we were discussing earlier where, I mean, and I've been guilty of this too, just kind of out of laziness, but it's kind of like the marriage thing, right?
Like the moment that you start referring to marriage as traditional marriage, to make a distinction between traditional marriage and non-traditional marriage or gay marriage or whatever, you already kind of lost.
because you've already had to make that distinction, and you've created a second category.Patrick Deneen is actually very good at pointing this out when it comes to marriage, but it obviously applies to much more.
So the moment that you start saying cis women, or cis men, or even biological men and biological women, the moment that you do that, you've implied that there is a second category of woman, and that these other people that occupy this category
are not really women, but maybe they are in one sense, you know what I'm saying?
And I think that conservatives, and in a much more absurd level, this applies to the idea that, you know, you have some of these so-called good liberals and some conservatives too, who oppose militantly transgenderism in kids, but are actually fine with the idea of transgenderism as a concept for consenting adults.
who understand the implications of what they're getting into.So they actually accept the most important premises.And I think Rowling kind of falls... I mean, she does and she doesn't.
She's rejected the idea that men who mutilate themselves can become women and all that.But Rowling accepts a lot of other premises that kind of made this whole thing inevitable.And in my view, a lot of this stuff derives from feminism.
idea that we should essentially destroy distinctions between men and women.It's kind of coming back to bite people like rolling.But anyways, yeah, I think the language thing is, is important.
And that's, that's the part that caught my eye about this, this section, the whole, you know, cis men or biological men, stuff like that.
Controversy surrounding her failure to abide by the new managerial edict to recognize biological men who take hormone supplements and wear skirts as women and biological women who take testosterone supplements and wear masculine clothing as men has led to, among other things, a school dropping her name from a building and her virtual erasure from a 20-year Harry Potter reunion.
In 2002, Gottfried predicted, correctly as it turned out, that the ever-widening chasm between the equality, diversity, and inclusion doctrine of the therapeutic state and the lived reality and beliefs of most ordinary people would result in a populist backlash against managerial overreach.
He claimed that the regime faces a paradigm crisis in which the gap between its democratic and liberal self-descriptions and its imposed social policies would become too obvious to escape notice, and therefore the efforts to justify these policies with archaic terminology or human rights rhetoric no longer elicit widespread belief.
At the time of writing, a recent study by the University of Chicago has found that 47 million Americans are said to believe that the 2020 election was stolen.21 million believe that Joe Biden is not a legitimate president.
63% of people agree with the statement that African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.
a belief sometimes called the Great Replacement, and 54% agree that a secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is ruling the U.S.government, which is the key belief in the QAnon movement.
A more recent poll has found that 1 in 3 Americans believe that violence against the government is justified.
Moscow's warning that no ruling class can remain a ruling class for as long as For it for long if the masses do not buy into its political formula seems to ring ever louder Yeah, I think I mean you see this playing out and all these warnings that um
There are two articles that stand out that recently were published.And I think one was in the Associated Press, but it's like, you know, more people than ever before living in their own reality.
Or basically that faith or, yeah, I guess faith in American institutions is plummeting institutions that are responsible for like creating consensus, right.And, um, I don't know.
I think I generally want to agree with Moscow that basically ruling classes historically have required people to buy into their political formula in order for them to stay in power.But something about our contemporary problems seem difficult.
It might have just something to do with the level of comfort the average person enjoys. you know, like as angry as your, um, like your boomer Republican gets about what Biden is doing.Um, not, not just boomers.
This is not just like a boomer problem, but like take somebody who's like super, super angry about what Biden is doing.Uh, and, um, they still will participate in things that contribute to all these problems that they think are ruining society.
I think the most obvious example of this is probably like sports, right?Like watching professional sports.
There are so many conservatives who are addicted to watching professional sports obsessively, knowing that their money and their attention and their emotions are being invested in something that is totally opposed to the things they claim to hold dear.
like pretty much every sports institution is like that, supporting BLM, supporting transgenders and stuff like that.Like, every time that you like buy a jersey or watch a game or something like that, you're supporting those things.
Even though you don't agree with the political formula, right?You reject the political formula when it's presented to you.But then you continue doing things that actually support the system to which the political formula is part.
And I think that that is, I mean, we've always had Brighton Circuses, right?That's nothing new.But something seems uniquely bad about contemporary Brighton Circuses in our ability to, or in its ability to make this whole thing possible.
That people could be simultaneously, you know, angrier than they've ever been since the Civil War, but still seemingly incapable to really do anything constructive with that anger.Yeah.So I think it's a unique problem.
I think, like I said, I agree with Moscow, but I also think that there's like something new has been added to the mix that makes all of this worse.
There is an article came out today from our friends over at National Review showing that 20 teams in the MLB, Major League Baseball, are donating up to six figures and some into six figures for youth gender transitioning.
It's weird to me that people are like, well, this is outrageous.It's like, yeah.Why are you surprised?It's outrageous that you're surprised by this.
Yeah.All right, moving on. Where Francis took his cues chiefly from Burnham and Pareto, Gottfried's chief influence was Carl Schmitt, and in particular, the primacy of the political.
The idea that we could ever reach the end of history has been shown to be nonsense, but Gottfried stresses that a peculiar feature of therapeutic managerialism is its need to maintain the fiction of consensus.
Previous ruling classes had no such requirement and had more actual diversity of opinion within their ranks. However, to function properly, the therapeutic state requires the downplaying of genuine political differences.
The sorts of characters who attend the Davos Agenda hosted by the World Economic Forum, the most elite managers of today, speak in the language of consensus.
One such character, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, who manages over $7.5 trillion in assets and who can name the U.S.Federal Reserve as a client,
uses phrases such as public-private partnership and expresses that it is important for CEOs across all business to be unified.It has never been more essential for CEOs to have a consistent voice.
Although he speaks in gushing terms about the power of capitalism, it is quickly clear that Fink's message is managerial and that his vision for a quasi-command economy in which the controllers of capital dictate the investment agenda for the future.
Quoting, every company and every industry will be transformed by the transition to a net zero world.The question is, will you lead or will you be led?
We focus on sustainability not because we're environmentalists, but because we are capitalists and fiduciaries to our clients.
Divesting from entire sectors or simply passing carbon-intensive assets from public markets to private markets will not get the world to net zero.
When we harness the power of both the public and private sectors, we can achieve truly incredible things.This is what we must do to get to net zero.
Yeah, probably one of the best things about this book is the fact that it really drives home this point that this idea that you're still living in a world of 19th century laissez-faire capitalism is just absurd.
It's funny because you still hear this on the so-called dissident right.You'll still hear people kind of be critical of the, I guess you could say the anti capitalist rhetoric from people like myself, right?
Like, they're basically, there's this concern that maybe we're going too far with with, you know, going after corporations and things like that.But it's like, No, we're actually not going far enough.
And when people like Larry Fink are telling you that we need to kind of have this this increased partnership between public and private sector.The partnership is there.He's just saying that we need to mobilize together.
The so-called capitalists are telling you that they're not really capitalists.I don't know why we're arguing about this.And I think obviously the more correct term is managerialism.That's the kind of economy that we live under.So I don't know.I think
Liberals complain that we live under capitalist society.Conservatives claim that we live under socialism or something, communism.No, it's actually a fusion of both of those things.It's called managerialism.
Simply put, this is not capitalism.This is agenda setting whereby one of the most powerful executives in the world announces five-year and ten-year plans for what the future will look like in an almost entirely top-down managed economy.
The language of consensus conceals the truly political character of what Fink is saying.In fact, he has the temerity to start his letter by saying that
COVID, quoting Fink now, COVID-19 has also deepened the erosion of trust in traditional institutions and exacerbated polarization in many Western societies.This polarization presents a host of new challenges for CEOs.
Political activists or the media may politicize things your company does.They may hijack your brand to advance their own agendas.In this environment, facts themselves are frequently in dispute, but businesses have an opportunity to lead.
Thus, when he sets his net zero carbon agenda later, it is cast in the politically neutral language of inevitability. But in actuality, his letter contains an explicit threat.If CEOs do not get on board with this agenda, they will be left behind.
They will be identified as the enemies of progress, and someone, perhaps someone whose company owns half the exchange-traded funds in the world, might see to it that these enemies no longer have a seat at the table.
In theory, the market decides, but in practice, men like Larry Fink decide. A company can now be sunk regardless of its actual success with consumers simply through investor activism.
Likewise, products that have little to no market demand, such as Beyond Meat, can be thrust onto the shelves despite continually failing to sell.
Appalling sales figures have not stopped massive corporations such as McDonald's and KFC pushing Beyond Meat plant burgers to the front and center of their menus using the full bite of their advertising budgets.
Yeah.Yeah.I think this is get to another important point, which is the idea that go woke, go broke is a thing.It's not, it's a myth.It's a, it's a cope.
Again, that conservatives, I keep hammering conservatives because that's, that's, that's like my audience, right?I'm trying to tell these people that you mean well, but it's wrong.
Um, the, yeah, that if, if places go woke, you know, no one's going to want to buy your stuff.Correct. No one is going to want to buy, you know, or actually in time they will.I mean, that's just how this stuff works.
Like you've got celebrities on the left and right and in the middle that are promoting this kind of stuff, like Beyond Meat.
I don't know where you would put Vitalik, the Ethereum guy on the spectrum, but you know, he tweeted a picture of himself eating their protein bites made out of crickets.
And so like, like, unfortunately, at some point in the future, I'd like this stuff is going to be pushed on more and more people, regardless of the cost, because they believe in it. I think you can't discount that, the power of belief.
And I always try to make it a point to say there are two people in the world, cynics and ideologues.Cynics do it for the money, ideologues do it because they really believe it.
And oftentimes they work together because what they want to do and the direction they want to go overlaps. And I think the ideology part helps to explain why go woke, go broke just doesn't work.They are willing to lose this money.
There's this quote, I think it was, I read it in Breitbart, I don't know where it's originally from, but it was some marketing bigwig from Nike who was talking about the losses that Nike had posted after Nike went woke and made Colin Kaepernick its poster boy.
And this marketing guy just said, Well, we're not worried about it, because we don't think that, you know, the future of Nike is old white guys, old angry white guys.
And so basically, they're willing to lose millions of dollars, because they think in the long run, they're going to win.Because they believe in this stuff.And I mean, yeah, so I think it's important to basically get that out of your head.
Like, the cavalry is not going to come like no one's The market is not going to save you.The invisible hand is not going to come down and crush beyond me.Like it's just not going to happen.
You have to do things that you have to figure out how to do these things yourself.
And there is the chance that if people start abandoning Nike left and right and go to New Balance, maybe a Larry Fink or some of his friends decide to wage war on New Balance.
New Balance.Yeah.So yeah, capitalism.Yeah, that's that's what we have.Yeah.Wonderful.All right. Most of this attempted engineering of consent by the therapeutic regime serves the purpose of identifying Schmittian friends and enemies.
The list of enemy terms which serve to expel you from employment and society at large continues to expand.Sexist, racist, homophobe, transphobe, client denier, unvaccinated, and so on.
These are all markers of ideological impurity which serve to dehumanize.Ideologically conscripted armies tended more and more to demonize their targets.
Those who resisted the ideal embodied by one's nation were no longer viewed as human in thinking or in fact. In the 20th century, this resulted in catastrophic total wars between managerial states.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USA, under the neoconservatives, continued a crusade to spread liberal democracy to all parts of the world and to dissolve any vestiges of outmoded tradition with a missionary zeal.
As these efforts were frustrated, and as populations ever more started to turn against such warmongering, the missionary zeal turned inwards. where in the 1990s and 2000s, so many ersatz Hitlers resided in Serbia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and so on.
In the 2020s, they are at home, not simply the despised Donald Trump, but also his supporters, and now people who refuse to submit to the prescribed remedies of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In time, it will no doubt encompass meat-eaters, people who wish to drive petrol-fueled cars, and so on. The question remains whether society can function while around 30% of the productive population are demonized and dehumanized in this way.
This has never been achieved in history by any ruling class.Stalin and other such dictators simply opted to eliminate their enemies through brute force.They were willing to do so to consolidate power and control.
Managerial elites seem unwilling to use such force and instead must rely on increasingly transparent games of perception management.
At least by the estimation of Ngar Woods, speaker at the World Economic Forum in November 2021, our current ruling elite seem to be aware of their own unpopularity.At an event called The Great Narrative, she said,
At Davos a few years ago, the Edelman survey showed us that the good news is the elite across the world trust each other more and more, so we can come together and design and do beautiful things together.
The bad news is that in every single country they were polling, the majority of people trusted the elite less.Of course they have to come together.They see the writing on the wall. Yeah.
Yeah.But I mean, again, it's, importantly, they're not deterred by it.They like they're, they're confident that ultimately, they're going to win, they've got the resources, they've got brains.And they're not really experiencing any push.
But I mean, the only this is like the, the thing that's difficult to discuss, especially in the United States today is like the only people that are really kind of
pushing back on these Western liberal eat the bug elites are countries like Russia, and maybe even China, right?And I think it is a very strange position to be in.
And maybe I think this also contributes to the establishment's fear of figures like Donald Trump, and obviously, Victor Orban.Because
they represent, I mean, setting aside like Russia and China, guys like Orban and Trump represent the possibility of an alternative.
So, yeah, I mean, this is something that's been on my mind a lot because I had a conversation with my friend who's German and, you know, he grew up his whole life hating Russia and his family hates Russia to this day.And he just told me, like,
He's not a Russophile, and neither am I, but he basically just said, I can't help but think that somehow the West is on the wrong side of history here, unironically.
And that's not to say that Russia's on the right side, but basically it was like he was trying to understand why he felt like he had a stake in Russia not losing this war in Ukraine. And he was like tortured trying to explain this to me, right?
Because it goes against everything he believes.But he's just saying, like, I feel like the same people that want to crush Russia are the ones that want to crush me.And it was really interesting, this talk that we had.
And it's been on my mind a lot because, again, this is someone who hates Russia.He would never live there.He doesn't like Putin.Like I said, he was raised hating Russia. But here he is saying, like, I feel like if they lose somehow, I do too.
But he's also not rooting for Russia, obviously.I mean, I think this is actually on a lot of people's minds, but obviously, it's just not something that you can openly discuss with most people because they just wouldn't understand it.
But I think there's a non-insignificant part of the population that kind of feels this way.
I'm of the age where I grew up during the Cold War and That was our enemy and now I'm looking and now I'm looking and I'm like, you know, I hear Putin give speeches, you know decrying Stalinism decrying Marxism and decrying the West and I'm like All right, I'm not supposed to like this guy but basically the way he talks about
this regime, he would be one of the people that Paul talks about who is targeted if he lived here and he was American.
at least initially, Trump had talked about normalizing relations with Russia.And that was a huge... I think that was a huge factor in the establishment's hate for him.
Because again, it represents the possibility of a different world order, a different political consensus.
And yeah, I mean, again, this is something that you simply don't really hear discussed in the West, or at least in the United States, because of the consensus that's emerged on this.
I mean, maybe in other places like Hungary, you'll hear it more often.But I mean, yeah, I think the I mean, the consensus is overpowering, at least from the institutions of elite opinion-making, right?But yeah, it's an interesting point.
The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report for 2022 lists social cohesion as a major concern and notes that a recent poll in the United States, for example, found division in the country to be voters' top concern.
They expected it to worsen in 2022.
while Gottfried in 2002 was unwilling to predict their ultimate demise, it seems to me that unless the current ruling class is prepared to become openly coercive and use force, it will be overthrown once counter-elites become organized enough to do so in every region and locality."
What's your opinion on that?Because, I mean, that's probably the most controversial is soon these people are going to be overthrown, and so many people just can't see it.
He doesn't say soon.Well, yeah, I know.He doesn't say soon.It's also an if.It seems to me, which is another way of saying if, if the current ruling class, you know, doesn't change its approach, it will be overthrown.
So I think there's, there's, it's obviously contingent on certain things happening, right.And falling into alignment.Um, I don't know.I'm, I'm not really at black pilled. so to speak.
I don't think that it's, I don't think that their victory is inevitable.I think that this is, I made a thread about this recently, and it was well received, but I also got a lot of hate for it.
And basically what I was saying is that the people who I think are actually radical, who are on the dissident right,
And for me, the dissident right was like, I, you know, probably starting in 2016, started to kind of get introduced to, you know, like the radical right.And like reading guys like Buchanan and Gottfried and St.Francis.
And so that was a dissident right for me, basically, like the paleo conservative authors, because they are, which is separate from like the online right, this gets confusing really fast.But the point that I was making was that, like, basically, the
the dissident right, the radical right, has attained a kind of purchase in the mainstream.What I mean by that is that you have some people and institutions in the mainstream that have buy-in to the ideas of the dissident right.
You've got people who are totally mainstream basically saying the same things that only the dissident right was saying a few years ago, like immigration moratorium, dismantle the FBI, basically decapitate government leadership.
I don't mean literally, I mean mass firings and things like that, which is something that that you're hearing about now.
Axios did that story about how the Trump administration is going to fire a bunch of people and staff them with loyalists and stuff like that.
The fact that these ideas are becoming mainstream means that, like I said, the DR has a kind of buy-in on some level.
And what the dissident right has done for a long time is, is basically just kind of point out problems, and basically notice patterns and things like that, things that like no one else is willing to notice.
And my thread was basically saying, like, we can still continue doing those things and noting these problems, you know, like, like the Proud Boys were crushed by the feds, but Antifa, which is far more violent, you know, can openly do armed patrols in like red, Texas.
that's a problem that no one is really talking about.So then, but the next thing that we have to do is actually figure out how to come up with actionable solutions to these things.
You know, how could states actually repress Antifa and make it so these people cannot publicly organize?You know, how could you How could you prevent institutions from forcing or normalizing transgenderism in society?
I've been accused of being like a Ron DeSantis show.The reason I talk about him and write about him so much is because I see a governor that's actually using power effectively.
Threatening to revoke the beverage license of a place that serves alcohol where you have transgender like strippers, you know, prancing around in front of little kids.It's like, okay, you want to do that?
Okay, then we'll take away your beverage license and effectively destroy the business.
Like, I think that's the kind of stuff that we should be thinking about and actually implementing, not just like writing, you know, based, basically kind of statement legislation, which Republicans do this all the time.
Like, here's my draft of this piece of legislation that's never going to go anywhere for like term limits. like, well, we don't actually have to play that game.
Like we have governors, you know, we have people, we already have people in positions of power.And as we get more of them in positions of power, how can we actually do these things in a way that is consistent with what parvenu is describing.
And that's kind of what I'm really interested in focused in, in now is, is actually
Organizing and going beyond the pattern recognition problem recognition part and then actually starting to implement solutions you know the other example that i use for this is this whole thing with disney just basically stripping them of their special tax privileges in florida for
taking the side of transgenderism, uh, against the, against the, uh, not only what the governor wanted to do, but also what like normal people in Florida want, which is, uh, you know, getting transgenderism out of schools.So, yeah.
One thing though, that the right needs is that needs to change their minds.They really have to start embracing the fact that there's power out there and they need to use it. Yeah.
Historically, it's just get in there.We'll tweak a little bit.And all they end up doing is basically continuing the regime.
There's a great example of this last thing I said because we're both running out of time.There's a guy named Mark Elias and he's like a Democrat election lawyer.He's really a kind of legal field marshal.This guy oversaw an army of lawyers that
was responsible for something like 200 pre-election lawsuits that basically made it easier for Democrats to win in key states by removing restrictions on things like mail-in voting and absentee ballots.That was before the election, right?
This is the other thing too.For conservatives who
understandably, because they don't have power, they kind of like they look towards, like, you know, kind of incredible explanations for why things didn't go their way, like dominion or something like that, right?
Like, like, servers in Germany, and like shootouts in Spain and stuff like that.Actually, it's guys like Mark Elias, who are secretly like waging lawfare.And like, changing election laws in your states without you ever knowing about it, right?
And so that was before the election.And then after the election, Elias led an army of lawyers that successfully thwarted like 64 attempts by Trump's legal team to investigate election irregularities.Where is our Mark Elias on the right?
Why don't we have someone like, and like, it's funny, I've made this point to people who are conservatives and like, well, Mark Elias is a sleazebag, he's ruthless.
And I'm like, yeah, so where's my sleazebag, ruthless right winger, you know, who's extremely competent.And I think that's, it's funny because no one, although the initial reaction people was always kind of like, oh, that guy's a dirtbag.
Once I explained like, yeah, he's effective. No one has disagreed with me.Like, yeah, actually, we do need people like Mark Elias, these people who are just totally ruthless, you know, stone cold killers.
Just being being content with having a seat at the table that just has to go out the window.I mean, it's I mean, I can't even know anymore.Plug what you want to plug and we'll end this.I know we got to we got to go.
Yeah, well you can read my column, Theory of a Partisan, at chroniclesmagazine.org, and then I've got my substack at contra.substack.com, and my Twitter, actually I'm on Twitter, Getter, Gab, and other places under the same handle, Emeriticus, E-M-E-R-I-T-I-C-U-S.
I think earlier I said psychiatry in the 19th century, if I did that was a mistake, Paul, and the point about psychiatry is in the 20th century,
with the progressives, so I just wanted to, I was thinking about that, and I was like, no, psychiatry wasn't a thing, like, at the time.
But it was.Freud, early 20th century.Yeah, that's right.Right, appreciate it.
All right, Pedro, thanks, bye.Take care.I want to welcome everyone back to the Peking Yonez show for chapter 10, the very last chapter.I'm here with Charlemagne.How you doing, Charlie?Very well, thank you. and Ryan Turnipseed.
First time on the show, even though we've hung out in real life a couple times.So, how's it going?
RYAN It's going very well, how are you, sir?
JUSTIN Doing good, doing good.Why don't I just throw this chapter 10 up, since this is basically a summary and it's going to take less than five minutes, and then we're going to have a discussion of the, an overview of the book after that.
So, let me share this real quick. Alright, I'm gonna start reading like I've been doing through this whole thing.Either of you wants to stop me and comment, I don't care if it's mid-sentence, just do it, feel free.Alright, start reading now.
The thesis of this book has been that democracy is and always has been an illusion in which the true functioning of power where an organized minority elite rule over a disorganized mass is obscured through a lie that the people is sovereign.
I have called this the populist illusion because of the power of other lies that this central lie conceals, chiefly the myth of bottom up power or people power and the entirely inaccurate view of history this lie creates.
There is never a substitute for the tightly organized minority.This fact, Mosca's law, is the key lesson of the Italian elite theorists, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels,
I believe that the outbreak of populism in Europe and America that started in 2015 was significantly stymied due to a view of power and the functioning of Western systems that was wholly wrong, which is to say that the people who made up those populist movements believed re-articulations of a false political formula that they were taught in their civics or history classes at school.
I think I'd go a step further than that.
I would say that the leadership, the people who presented themselves as the populist leaders, the Trumps, the Orbans of the world, they actually believe in democracy, so they're not gonna be able to get anything done within the system the way it has been structured.
Right, and quite expressly so.And they also believed in this sort of meritocratic view that the system worked, which is why Trump hired people that were absolutely disloyal to him, but appeared to have the expert qualifications.
It's why he staffed his foreign policy side of things with war hawks and complete backstabbing neocons, because they looked on paper the most qualified, but they were not the most loyal, and that's not how this stuff works fundamentally.
Right, it was clear that um, you know As uh as mr. Parvini wrote in the book, uh, very few presidents have actually achieved sovereignty One of the few being fdr And it was clear that president trump believed that he would in fact have Sovereignty merely by winning the election, which was definitely not true and that fundamental misunderstanding.
is really what destroyed his presidency more than the fact that his supporters believe that because even if his supporters had believed that myth, as is made clear in the book, if the president understood that he was not sovereign merely by winning an election, things would have been different.
Yeah.All right.Moving on. The myth of social change being a bottom-up phenomenon pervades our culture and thinking.
It is the essential fiction of the 1960s counterculture and the worldview of the baby boomers, or as AA would put it, it's just boomer truth regime.And the sooner we can destroy that, the better.Sooner we can destroy that, the better.
It is worth returning to the four myths of liberalism that helped to perpetuate this worldview. Myth of the stateless society that state and society were or could ever be separate Do you have any problem with that charlie?
Uh, no, and this actually sort of leads into Uh, well, I was planning on offering some criticisms of anarchism.I know we still have a few Libertarians or anarchists in our mists including mr. Carson.Um, you know who I respect greatly but
To me, the ideal of trying to separate the state from society or any of these other factors, like the economy, as you're about to read, it just doesn't make sense as a goal or ideal.
I mean, I understand the anarchist or libertarian impulse towards freedom, and of course, that's a totally reasonable
uh concept for an american to pursue but i think strictly speaking the idea of anarchy is a bad idea ideal to hold in your head simply because it's completely impossible um politically like it
Having ideals that aren't achievable by man in a religious sense is fine.Like the idea of Christianity, no one can be perfect like Christ, right?
But in terms of our political or economic or social ideals, they should, I believe, be rooted in something that's actually achievable.
I don't want to jump the gun here too terribly.
Well, let me then let me right Let me finish reading the four and then I'll let you I'll let you jump in Yeah, so I'll read one again myth of the stateless society that state and society were or could ever be separate Myth of the neutral state that state and politics were or could ever be separate myth of the free market that state and economy were or could ever be separate and
Myth of the separation of powers that competing power centers can realistically endure without converging so You want to jump in there do you want me to keep reading?
Yeah, I actually, just very quickly, I actually was going to challenge myself this time and try to defend the whole, or not the whole thing, but at least parts of the anarchistic worldview.
Even though I myself don't fully subscribe to it, I don't believe by any measure of the belief system.
But the initial things, I remember whenever this first came out and he talked about the, you know, four myths of liberalism before anyone had really even read the book to find out what exactly he meant.
And he said that you can't separate the state from the market, you can't separate the state from society and all this other stuff.
And the first thing that my mind initially jumped to was sort of like the enlightened absolutism, you know, the ruler cannot be separated from any of the outgrowths of society, the sort of sort of Prussian system.
And that's not really what's being articulated here.And I was very happy because Mr. Parvini has done an absolutely splendid job at throwing clear, concise definitions out this whole book.
And I think it's like right at the very start of one of the chapters, he defines state as a minority that rules over a majority where the majority has to be ruled.
So it's not exactly the typical definition you would get for state from an anarchist or someone like that.So while it is still infeasible, because you're not going to get rid of a class that rules over anyone else,
It's not exactly going fully in the other direction, either.You can still have great amounts of autonomy, as you do see in history, while still repudiating these four myths here at the end.
I figured I would throw that in there just sort of as a... These things are much more strict in definition than they might immediately seem if you haven't read the full book.
Well, one thing I would like to say here, because we are basically talking about anarchism, and I'm on Facebook, but I'm on one of those famous vacations that I always get for 30 days, so I can't respond to things that I see that are absolutely annoying.
But one of the common refrains when it comes to statism. something that libertarians and anarchists like to use as a pejorative other than as a descriptor of somebody's beliefs.
One of the common things they'll say is, oh, you want a state because why do you have to use violence against peaceful people?And It's a good bumper sticker.I like bumper stickers.But I would ask, are these people peaceful?
Is the general public peaceful?And I think a lot of them would say, well, they would be peaceful if it wasn't for the state.So the state is basically the boogeyman for everything.It's to be blamed for everything.It's to be blamed for human nature.
And what I would say about
And then they'll say, well, you know, if we had, if there was no state and, you know, the market controlled everything and everything was based on economics, you know, if somebody got violent, we could just put together, you know, a bunch of people could get together and they could just nip it in the bud right there.
And it's like, I don't know about that.You know, I mean, people have a tendency to tribe up and.
One tribe is going to, and this is just what history tells us, is stronger than another, is going to be more powerful than another, is going to be more violent than another, is going to be willing to commit total war against another.
And I'm not saying the state is here to stop that.I'm just saying that making the broad claim that without a state, things would be better than they are right now, Well, first of all, you have no evidence of that.It's a complete theory.
And second of all, making that claim is really childish.If either of you want to push back on that at all, I'm willing to listen.
I can, I guess, in some ways defend anarchism.I mean, anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, these are fine to have as political myths.You know, there's no real problem with using those in order to help organize people.
But in terms of the organizers, the elite, if you will, actually attempting to organize your minority at the elite level around the concept of anarchism doesn't actually make any sense.And the book,
The book actually makes an interesting comment earlier in regards to how capitalism worked.
You know, in this era when we had free markets, we basically had free markets by force because the capitalist ruling class came into being and made the society capitalist, right?It was made to be that way.
It wasn't just sort of that way in some natural sense. So, you know, this is something I've mentioned before.
I mean, you can basically have your sort of anarcho-capitalist ideal in a very approximate sense if you simply have an elite class ruling somewhat paradoxically implementing that system, right?
But you still have to actually have the state, if you will, implement anarcho-capitalism, which is somewhat of a contradiction. According to the theory of this book, which I think is very well demonstrated, that's simply how it must be.
And people who style themselves as some sort of anarcho-capitalist elite in the sense that they have some intent to organize for political power, say like a Ron Paul or something, they have to operate with that recognition.
Right, and that might even start looking very similar to what a lot of people who claim to be Hoppian, I'm not going to speak for Hoppian himself just because he puts out such a wide volume of works that I'm not going to try to summarize it, but the people that claim to be Hoppians tend to advocate for a system that sounds very similar to what a state is being described as in this book.
Because you have to remember, whenever in page 20 or whenever it is in the first chapter, whenever you introduce the concept of a state, it's not presumed to be some modern system that you can go look around today, there's no DMV that is necessary in the definition of the state, there's no sort of underclass of
a lumpenproletariat needed to staff it that's necessary in the concept of state.It is literally just the organized minority that has to rule over the majority, and that is a fact in day-to-day life.
And then that definition is then extrapolated to apply to these four spheres of society that people try to separate out of that state.
But speaking from earlier on in the book, and that's just, most books typically will have the basic axioms or the basic ideas early on in the book that you can then always refer back to to try to apply that out of things not explicitly stated in the book.
So a lot of Hoppians probably would look at the description of how the state, the minority that rules over the majority, how this book says it comes about, and look on it very favorably.
That it is both, you know, it is voluntary, just because the nature of man necessitates that you can't literally just force someone to do absolutely everything you want them to, there has to be some element of voluntary action in there.
But then also because of the nature of man, it requires people to organize socially.It's coercive in that way.You are tied to that sort of natural need.
So people that argue for covenant communities, that argue for contractual communities and all this other stuff, those types of anarchists that I tend to see as much more real,
probably wouldn't find that much to object to in this, which is, you know, it repudiates sort of the pie-in-the-sky anarchistic thought that Pete definitely goes off against quite often from what I can tell, and it also sort of affirms the more realist tendencies within these people whenever they see how things actually function, which is why these four myths are being stated here.
Even though on the surface, if you have not read the book and you just kind of plunge into it right here, they might look very sort of statist in the pejorative term, if you are to use it.
But in reality, when you read through this book, it is just affirming very real facts that actual realist libertarians or anarchists have come to grapple with for the past few decades.
This is, if anything, it's sort of a codifying of those lessons that have been learned. is what I would say.
Just as a point of interest, Hans Hermann Hoppe does cite the juvenile extensively in Democracy, the God That Failed.
Yeah, and Rothbard cites, I think, all three of the Italians used in this book quite extensively in all of his essays.
And Hoppe would definitely say that you're looking for, in building these communities, you're looking for pillars of the community or what he calls natural elites.So Yeah, I was.
Yeah, I also wanted to say I've I've said this a few times that, you know, we could have in Kapustan tomorrow if the elites wanted it.But then if you're looking at the elites that are there now, you have to question why they would want it.
You know, you're these people.We want our friends in charge.I mean, that's pretty much to me.The message of this book is There's always going to be a state and we need our friends in charge of it.
We need people who think like us and desire the things that we want or else we have what we have now. All right, let me keep going.So talking about the four myths, let us deal with each of these in turn.
The myth of the stateless society permeates the two competing ideologies of the 20th century, liberalism and socialism, at their extreme ends in anarcho-libertarianism, whether left or right, and communism.
Moscow and Michelle's demonstrate that this is fundamentally wrongheaded because minority Organization always prevails from the level of a tribe to the level of global government Humans are simply put the political animal and what is called the state is simply the fact that there must be There must be the political function that there must be the political function in any society Go on because I think we've we probably beat that one to death
The second myth that the state is separate from its laws and institutions is shown to be false by Carl Schmitt, who demonstrates that, despite liberal pipe dreams, there is no escape from the political.
Even though the cloak of neutral or scientific language can be used to mask the ideological content, every institution will bear the mark of the dominant political formula, which acts as a kind of theological holy writ.
If the political formula is equality, diversity, and inclusion, there can be no other official bodies or laws that do not conform to it.
Samuel T. Francis shows that the managerial elites will not stop their social transformations until all relics and vestiges of the old and despised bourgeois regime are replaced by the new religion at every level of culture down to your local museum.
Paul Gottfried shows that this is even taken to the domain of science and medicine to the extent those who resist a political formula are diagnosed with mental disorders.Comments.
Well, I guess it just this this really hits hard because. We were all brought up with the myth that we live in a free country, we have free press and all of our ideas are free, but of course... That's just not true at all.
Everything that people, you know, we have democratic opinions, right?We don't have like free speech.We have democratic speech.You're not allowed anywhere because of the law to, you know, promote fascism, for example.
If you try to do that, you're going to get in serious trouble.
almost immediately and this this book just eviscerates the idea that the the press and the ideas we have are sort of these free ideas that weren't instituted by some sort of political formula um by the state um all of the institutions we have are not free institutions they're democratic institutions at least in terms of the formula and uh it's this is a really important to to hit home uh for people who read this book uh who aren't actually
you know, familiar with these ideas, sort of disabusing yourself of the myth that all of the ideas that you've been taught are sort of free and not tied to some sort of political formula.
That's that's a really important aspect of this book that sort of runs alongside the main concepts of elite theory.
Right and like even a minor point to add on to that because a lot of right-wingers have especially in the last few years Well understood the idea that it's not just what is legally de jure the government But it's also things like the media Things like the press the public schools and all this other stuff that is that what that is what forms?
You know the idea of the government this monolithic entity that will just control every facet of your life whether or not they legally have to answer to a
the president or the leader of the deep state or depending on who you talk to, you know, whatever boogeyman is hiding under the rug.
The contribution here that I don't see many people on the right talking about is, you know, Paul Gottfried's point about the doctors that will diagnose you with mental illness if you dare to go against this political formula or the political reality that just sits in front of you.
They'll give you, they'll call you a mentally deranged, they will have all these medicines or magnetic treatments for your brain, perhaps, if you remember that story, to make you less xenophobic.
They will have all these different pills prescribed to you if you somehow become so disaffected that you look depressed, or any of these other clinical diagnoses.
It's not just things that you would naturally associate as being political or legal in nature, it is literally science itself that has to fall under the formula as well.It is total, much more total than most people talk about.
Charlie mentioned fascism, that you can't even talk about fascism, and we saw this Giorgia Maloney who got elected in Italy and We were on the live stream last night.I was doing with Thomas.
Someone asked him, you know, how close she is to Mr. Big, big chin man from the 1920s.And Thomas said.
her message is no different than Tony Blair's in 1997 coming to coming to power because she's no Tony Blair had the same message so to try to compare him to to to call it fascism is really a is exposing that therapeutic state that Paul Godfrey talks about is that there is something wrong with this woman and um you know I'm
I'm at the point where I think that they may just reinstate lobotomies to try and help people get past us.
I mean, that's what was the the certain scientists from a Middle Eastern country of origin were developing magnetic treatments.You know, that famous story that everyone freaked out about.
I mean, that might you might as well just lobotomize people at that point.But even just to hammer the point home, You're told from a young age, trust your doctor on these medical ideas and all this other stuff.
It's no different than trust the government to carry out the will of the people.At this point, it's such a political organ that it's no different.
The third myth that the state and the economy could ever be separated, the myth of the free market, is the central tenet of classical liberalism.
Bertrand de Juvenel shows that since the political comes prior to any economy, the economy itself can never and will never escape politics.
James Burnham shows that laissez-faire was simply the political formula of the capitalists who gained power in the 19th century, but this, because of the practicalities of mass and scale, gave way to managerialism and the fusion of corporate interests and the state.
We have seen how even the economy in the managerial state is a top-down process.The consumer is not sovereign.
Despite the slogans, the managerial class used the roles of executives at large corporations and financial institutions to set directives and mission statements for the foreseeable time horizon.
The reason organizations such as the UN and the World Economic Forum can announce their visions for Agenda 2030 is because the economy itself is managed. as Charlie and I come from libertarianism.
And Ryan, I believe you are a economics major right now, right?
Yes.And I am studying under a pair by one.So, you know, this is all I was never a libertarian for the record.
Were you not?No, never.Definitely close.Close around maybe 2015 or something, but never quite there.Where were you on Austrian economics? I mean, I think as Mr. Parvini would say, I agree with the...
Austrian economics is 100% correct in terms of how, uh, human action functions, but it's not a political formula.
It's, it's, it's the descript, it's the objective description of human economic action, much like elite theory is the objective description of human power.
Well, what do you think about the statement here that either you can take this, that, um, Because since the political comes prior to any economy, the economy itself can never and will never escape politics.
Do you believe that's true, that the political will always?Because there are a lot of people out there, and they call themselves anarcho-capitalists, who believe that you can actually build a society off of economics.
Well, come before is sort of a strange turn of phrase in a way.I mean, these things always exist simultaneously.If there's human beings, they're going to be making economic decisions, and they're going to be making decisions regarding power.
So these things always exist simultaneously. Economics is a description of how humans trade with each other, but power is always going to be able to supersede that.You can of course have
power sort of as as the earlier chapter alluded to or stated directly when you have a capitalist ruling class you can allow the economy to operate freely but that's always at the behest of power and you know power is always going to come into being as soon as you even have a small tribe of people so
You know, if you have only one person, uh, even he again parvenu even mentions the robinson crusoe situation somewhere earlier in the book You know, if you just have one person or maybe two people on a deserted island, then there's no real power relationship You're not going to have a tribe Having a tribe of two people.
I guess you could technically call it a tribe but only in these weird um edge cases does Do power relationships not emerge to subsume economic activity?So, yeah, I fundamentally agree with his debunking of the third myth.
Sorry, I couldn't, yeah, sorry.
So the only, the thing that I disagree with is the idea that the political becomes, political organization, the political sphere of life precedes economic, the economic sphere, just because it's, both of them are fundamentally social.
And it seems strange to me to say that in every single case, power relations will precede exchange.
But this could ultimately just be seen as hair-splitting, because it's ultimately going to end up the answers at the same time they will come about, which doesn't absolve any of these ideas from the criticism here.
It's more just the certainty that political life precedes the economic.
Now, with all of that, the jab at consumer sovereignty at the end, I can understand why he would take it, just because most people have so distorted it to mean that the consumer just directs and controls everything, when in reality it is simply just can the consumer choose to purchase or not purchase or withhold money, or not even do they have different options, just can they choose to purchase.
at its very base meaning, this is still true.But then you do end up with the question, does that mean they're actually sovereign?Well, depends on what you mean by sovereign.I understand why he takes the jab there.
I don't think he's necessarily attacking the properly understood concept there.
But for all intents and purposes, the sort of pop definition of it that you would get at like a business class or a marketing class, by all means, that has still been debunked.But at least here, I'm not exactly forced to purchase Pepsi or Coca-Cola.
I can just not purchase either, which under the traditional definition does mean that I still have sovereignty.Now,
you know, in the coming future where there might be a, you know, a political commissar standing on the grocery aisle, enforcing a diversity quota in my purchases, then I might need to start purchasing, in which case now you can, you can debunk it.
But this is economics, autism and hair splitting.But I might as well be thorough if we're going to, if we're going to treat this seriously.
Sure.And if you look at the, so trying to separate in the early colonies, there, the early colonies, they had, there was a great degree of freedom that they had from the crown and being 3000 miles away helped a lot.
Um, but then you read Patrick Newman's book, cronyism, and he starts in 1607 and what you, what you're seeing is you're seeing that whenever it doesn't matter if you're just here, if you just showed up on a boat and you're with a bunch of the cronyism always exists.
And To try to, and I hear people, and I probably used to say this all the time, so you can probably find audio me saying it, that a free market would solve that problem.A free market could actually make it worse.
I mean, there could be just much more collusion and laissez-faire of companies coming together.I think the idea that
Monopolies won't happen because people could just, people would be able to start a company that morning because there are no regulations against starting a company.If I had a big company, I would just buy that person out.
I mean, I would offer them so much money that they would be like, okay, well, it would take me years to make this amount of money, so this is what I'm gonna do.Yeah, so the idea that the,
That competition is going to solve every problem and laissez-faire is going to solve every problem.I think we've said this. I've said this numerous times, like really the freest market that you see now is basically the black market.
And even the black market, their prices are going to be dictated by the prices in white markets.
Right.And then, of course, just to hammer the point home, you will come back to sort of the other autistically economic talking point of, well, if there is a monopoly that naturally comes about, does that mean it's bad? Could be.
It could be our friends run it, so it's good.It could be that it's someone we are ultimately indifferent about that runs it, and they just do it well, then okay, fine.
Realistically and politically, this is only a bad thing if it's our enemies running it, and if they do actually have a genuine monopoly just because they are good at what they are doing, that's when it becomes a bad thing.
In other heads, keeping with the realistic analysis, you don't just have to economically challenge them.There are other ways to challenge those sorts of people.Right.And I think we can attest to.
And I think a government that actually did protect the rights of the people, only the most autistic of anarchists would be against it.
you know, that protected our rights, that where the military was just there to make sure that we were safe, that the police were there to make sure we're safe.Um, I, you know, I don't know.I don't know.It's, it's a,
it's hard the world especially after the last two and a half years and really Try to nail down why there are some people who are still talking about statelessness and talk about it on a I mean, that's their main talking a point instead of it just being like the North Star or something like that All right.
I'm gonna go to the fourth myth The fourth myth is that there is a separation of powers in a liberal democracy, which is to say that there are checks and balances between the various branches of government.
This is largely collapsed by the incisive analysis of Schmitt and the process of power's tendency to seek to conquer feudal castles identified by Juvenal.
It is worth noting that at least three of the thinkers covered, Mosca, Burnham, and Juvenal himself, favor a system by which centralization or the convergence of power centers is held in a kind of equilibrium through a constant struggle, even if in practice they recognize the extreme difficulty of achieving this.
I'll go on if no one has anything to say. While it appears that populism largely failed, not because it was not supported by the masses, but because of political naivete, that does not mean a circulation of the elites is not due.
As the lies and manipulations of the managerial regime become more and more visible to a public that has become widely skeptical of our current globalist elites and the system that supports them, Agitation for significant change will continue apace.
Attempts to maintain official narratives and maintain free and fair elections will become more difficult.Please, I want this.I wanted them to build a wall around the Capitol after January 6th.
It strikes me that the system that then faces many possible points of failure, which include de facto balkanization,
the need for more explicit coercion and the use of force, a high-low-middle mechanism whereby national governments become the middle while supranational globalist governance structures become the high and local regions become the middle,
Bioleninism, or in other words, degradation of the elites and exclusion of people of superior skills and talents, causes the ruling class to become complacent and or inept, eclipsed by foreign powers.
There is one more that he leaves out, and this just could be because I didn't read clearly enough, or it could be because it was infeasible at the time of writing this.
And it is the fact that the managerial method of organization that we're operating under,
We accept that thesis by Burnham because he operates under the assumption that it works more profitably for the people in power than any other organization method does.And what you're currently seeing, especially in the last couple of months,
is that that might not actually be the case, because you have to wonder how much money do they need to print, how many foreign governments do they need to coerce to keep the dollars as the global reserve currency, how big can this bureaucracy get with their autistic specializations of management where you'll have a manager for
specific emotions in a team, and then you have a manager for interrelations between groups.How bloated can this get?
And then how much sort of financial black magic and wrangling can they do before you've had one bubble that popped way too big, and it just brings everyone down.
That is, to summarize all of this, it could also be as well that the sort of managerial method of organization is collapsing in on itself.
You got something, Charlie?What I will say is the, and he says in the next paragraph, at the time of writing, we were seeing all five of these in their nascent state.
De facto balkanization, we saw that pretty clearly with the COVID regime in a couple states, most notably Florida.The need for more explicit coercion and the use of force
No more so than the way the January 6th tourists were handled and the FBI raiding Mar-a-Lago, the home of a former president.Real kind of banana republic kind of things.
Bioleninism, I mean, look at some of the people that that are in charge right now.I mean, I could you could even say you can even look at the vice president of the United States.I mean, it's just got.
Right, and look at the universities where they turn out their elites just by the methods that most state universities organize and with a lot of these sort of backlash that private universities are getting, it is unfeasible to hold high standards anymore.
At public universities, they have this sort of quasi, sort of Weimar-esque democratic system, where the students kind of rate their professors, and if the professors get too low a rating, their pay gets cut, they get barred from teaching these things, and you need to teach in order to keep employment.
You get barred from tenure and all this other stuff.And then in private schools, where they have much more control over their classrooms,
Well, students just write petitions, you get enough protected classes to sign on to the petition to where it makes a media headline and the professor just gets fired wholesale.
Their centers for churning out new elites are actively lowering their standards by design and opening themselves up to just being completely outclassed. classed.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be everything, though I don't know if there is a field that is resisting this sort of slide in standards, but it just takes a couple things for the current elites to just be completely outclassed and humiliated and for them to just lose their mandate, you know, to be unfeasibly seen as rulers.
I want to add to what you said earlier about the managerial method possibly becoming less profitable.The way I gauge what's happening right now is that the managerial method is becoming more and more
profitable for the governing elite, which are the managers, but it's becoming more profitable for a smaller and smaller segment of them.
So I think we're getting to the point where the managers are benefiting, but only the very, very upper echelons of the managers are really seeing the benefits of all of the monetary inflation and other things we see going on right
Do you think that there is a war because of that there's a war going on between the elites right now?
You know you point you can point to Roe v. Wade being overturned a number of gun decisions things like that It seems like there are some people working in the background who are working against the the wishes and the goals of the ruling elites right now and
Right, because most of the managers are now effectively just being treated like the kulaks.
So once we're at the point where, you know, I think it's inarguable that the inflation and other regulations we've seen have been of insanely high benefit to a tiny amount of people, but
when you're only actually benefiting a small part of the ruling class like that, you're actually going to get your counter-elite forming.
So the counter-elite may very well form out of the disaffected managers, which is exactly what you would expect based on the theses of this book.
So that's where we ought to look to for being saved from this horrible system is the disaffected managers.
Right, and just to bolster that point, just around here, sort of in the periphery of the Empire, if you will, Oklahoma, you know, plains land with not a lot of development, no real structure or centers of anything except for maybe Tulsa.
All the people that literally do manage in these large corporations, especially the oil stuff around here, something very key to your current system of elites whether they realize it or not.
Basically all of the managers absolutely hate what's happening, but they just don't have an alternative.
So, you know, there is a sort of group and a potential minority coalition there to latch onto, and basically all you have to do is say, you know, we aren't even necessarily going to change much, we just aren't going to make you do the retarded crap.
And you've already got a segment for a sort of organized one of the groups in a minority coalition that's ready to just go on, and the very key one at that, they're, you know, the managers in the managerial system.
All right, let me, I'm pretty sure I'm finishing this up with this last paragraph.Yep.All right, last paragraph.At the time of writing, we are seeing all five of these things in their nascent state.
The political pressure from the public on elected leaders due to the sheer unpopularity of the policies enacted may eventually cause them to break decisively with globalist elites. This remains likely so long as nations maintain standing armies.
Strong indications in France and elsewhere seem to make it almost inevitable that there will at least be a nominal struggle for national sovereignty against globalist overreach.
The political capital spent on the COVID-19 pandemic will exacerbate this, especially given the economic hardship it seems to be bringing.
European populations may have a stated preference to achieve net zero carbon by 2030, but in practice it is extremely unlikely that elites will be able to push ahead with their utopian visions without violent protest.
As the situation worsens, people will become more serious and organized having learned from the populist experiences between 2016 and 2020.
Elites, of course, always have an option to reverse course and a bid to reverse these trends, but one suspects that they believe their own visions with a missionary zeal.I don't know that I agree with that.
If they do not, the will to power is such that their lust for ever greater control will not let up until power is taken from them by a better organized elite with a political formula better suited to the populations they are supposed to serve.
I strongly doubt that this new elite, when they emerge, whether by democratic means or otherwise, will be able to break decisively enough from liberal and democratic myths to do what is necessary to keep Western nations from experiencing certain disaster in the future.
However, after decades of chronic mismanagement from the current managers, perhaps all we hope for is a vaguely sensible replacement for a few years whose interests will be closer to those of, quote unquote, the people.
I wonder to what extent he still believes everything in that paragraph because I've seen an academic agent, you know put forward His belief that they're sort of rolling back some of the worst aspects of Green and woke and everything and some of the studies of Tony's Blair.
So I wonder if he would wonder if he would disagree now with some of the things he wrote there just an interesting question to ask and
Have you have either of you seen that the World Economic Forum, one of the books that they recommend is Dr. Robert Dr. Robert Murphy's Modern Money Mechanics.
But that is a good point, and I think that almost everyone was sort of overestimating the extent that they were just fully and plastically committed to going along with everything that they've been pushing, the elites, because all it took was, you know, one threat, like winter isn't even here yet for most of Europe, it took one threat of a winter of extreme discontent
And suddenly you get various supposedly hardline green governments going back and redefining saying, well, I guess natural gas and nuclear power could be back on the menu again.They're, I mean, mostly green.
And then you get all a bunch of other, I believe it's sort of like the,
Smaller countries, especially Denmark comes to mind where their left-wing party, fitting with sort of like the Danish left-wing traditions, is taking this chaotic wave as an opportunity and starting to close down their border again, trying to preserve Danish demographics.
Even though I believe in the past you would have a lot of these Danish left-wing parties, going out in support of immigration because it's the popular thing to say.
I think that a lot of people might have overestimated, including potentially me, I don't quite remember what I said on this topic for the last few months.
I think everyone might have overestimated the extent to which they are committed, the sort of missionary zeal that is written in the book here.
I want to add, too, because he mentioned something again that's really important, which is understanding what the middle actually is in the Juvenalian model of high-low versus middle.
Notice how he again frames the national governments as the middle here, and it's really important to understand in that frame that middle doesn't just mean middle class.In the American system, it to some extent does map to that, but it's a much
concept than just the the idea of middle class um and that's just interesting too because it highlights the importance of having national governments that are opposed to globalism as globalism is the final convergence of all the power centers to the point where there will be no there'll be nothing left to converge on so that's a really important
Point to consider is that we need to make sure our national governments are in fact not acting as Not acting complicitly in the globalist system and are actually attempting to act in the interest of the middle One of the interesting things about that last paragraph is he talks about people basically growing and
weary and of the government and questioning the government and Ukraine North Stream to all this it's You know Germany is looking like they're gonna have a very rough winter Although I've heard that their reserves are only down like 3% so it looks like they can get through the winter thankfully, but
There is hope.It's just one thing that you get from reading this book is, okay, so who sweeps in as the hero of the day?Who sweeps in to what elites are going to solve this problem?I've said recently, I don't know if publicly or privately, but
It seems like really the one elite that I look at who seems to be the closest to being on our side and I don't trust him at all is Peter Thiel.
He's the only one who's giving money to people that we agree with and pushing certain ideas that I think a Blake Masters is saying the right things.I mean, he's been associated with Thiel for a very, very long time.So yeah, I think,
one thing that this book really helps you to understand, and you can even mix this in with Hapa, is you're looking for elites.You're looking for elites who share your values.And I think that's the white pill from this book.The white pill is that
You don't have to start a revolution.You don't have to pick up arms.That may happen by default in certain areas, but the white pill is you raise up the right people and you can have what you want and these people can be overthrown.
And in terms of the national governments, again, one of the interesting things that happened recently is, you know, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was destroyed.
And it seems like basically everybody just assumed the Americans did it, which would be inconceivable.
lifetime right like that would be the last thing you would think is that the americans did it and now we have other um american allies so to speak basically uh just assuming even if they don't state it outright that america was behind an act of terrorism essentially on european countries
Ryan, I have, uh, unless you guys have anything else to add on that topic, because I was going to switch ever so slightly.Go ahead.Alrighty.
Um, so, uh, he does mention in here sort of like a black pill that he just slips in right at the end of the conclusion.
He says he strongly doubts that a new elite, uh, when they emerge, for whatever means, will be able to break decisively enough from these myths in order to save the West, basically.Um,
This is strange to me, because I know he is very well read on the Bolshevik movement in Russia.
And if you look at every single thing that they were telling the populace, that they were telling the elites that they got on side, that they were telling foreign governments, it was absolutely nothing like what they actually had planned and executed.
There were some moments where they would go out to the crowd and basically tell them directly what they would do if they were in government, and it actually came to pass.
But there were just, quite frankly, a lot of lies that they would throw out to people.They promised much more popular sovereign rule through Russia, which
In reality, they did absolutely everything they could because they understood the system here, that this popularly sovereign system they implemented was absolutely under their control.They knew how the game worked.
But nonetheless, they would still promise to people it would be a golden democratic age. that would descend across Russia.
So you can have elites that can preach these myths in order to get people on side and all of that, and you can even paint the actions that they will take to look like they're still following these popularly held myths that you cannot break from with the population, but you can still just completely
contradict them through very, I don't want to say subversive means, but sort of very hidden means, if you will.Because everything that the Bolsheviks promised, for instance, to keep that example, They did carry it out.
They did bring democracy to Russia and all of us.
It's just that they so knew the system they were going to work with That it was there was no choice quite obviously quite famously so you can do the same I don't think this is the black pill that he is making it out to be at the end here.
I also think that people are starting to read things that they haven't read in the past.
I've heard Blake Masters talk about Ted Kaczynski, and yeah, I mean, for somebody who's running for Senate to do that is, and I've actually seen a couple right-wing voices talking about Yaki, So sure, maybe these people aren't elites.
I mean, I think to me, a Blake Masters is an elite.I look at him as for better or for worse.I mean, we don't know who's we.You don't really know what's in somebody's heart, but at least these are people who are quoting.
You know, they're not quoting Jonah Goldberg.You know, they're quoting people who have a who think differently and also who are able to diagnose the problems of the day at a very deep level.
Yeah, I entirely agree there.So and not only do we have that what you just mentioned, and not only do we have what I just mentioned there, but our side seems to be the only one actively courting competent people.
I think I never actually read or listen through this just because every single time the subject has come up, I've been in exams or midterms.I think that's the concept of the base draft.
Get the highly competent people that agree with you to just either when they get kicked out of the industry or coerce them to leave the industry.You will have the only competent people left and it doesn't matter how.
technically or on paper how well positioned your elites currently are if they're your enemy.If they're incompetent, they are just going to fall apart.
If they can't play the game, if they cannot secure their position, if they can't use their position, they can't stay there. Especially if you're better Someone always is so that's the that's the sort of three things.
I would use to repudiate this a Hidden black pill that he just throws in at this very last paragraph of the book Yeah, well, I guess in order to to back up the black pill one thing I don't see happening in terms of this base to draft is the kulaks Or the middle or really just not organized not organizing at all.
That's really the mission right now, I think for people like us is to actually get that organization kickstarted because it's really not happening.And sort of all agreeing on ideas and meeting and having streams like this. isn't organization, right?
I mean, it's sort of leading in that direction, but actual real organization is when you have a group of elites actually leading some sort of minority and aggregating their ability to exercise influence, be that through money or some sort of social position they have, you actually have to have an elite
Utilizing that collective people power and we really don't have that happening at all we have a sort of intellectual elite.
Who do streams like this right but that's that's a far cry from actually organizing any of the people who might be listening right now.
Right, at least not officially.We don't have people actively taking stock of what talents do we have, what resources do we have, what money do we have available.
And also again, at least not officially, we don't have people saying on this date we are going to do this at this location.We don't have actual plans being organized and carried out and executed.
If you took it so broadly, you can say that's happening on these streams, but then the definition is so broad it doesn't mean anything, because these streams aren't actually... We aren't showing up to these streams with the intention of talking about how we're going to win feasible power at this location at this time for this purpose.
That would be absolutely brilliant to do, but it's not quite what we're geared towards, it's not what audiences want and all that, and it's not our purpose here, quite frankly.
So whenever we talk about we need people to actively organize, it means on that level.Be it sort of at the project head, sort of like the grand planning, or at sort of like the, to use corporate language, the team level.
You know, you're five people, how do you get, how do you keep this plan in motion?You know, what can the six of you do?So.
Well, it's hard when the pagans and the Christians are fighting against each other, and then the Protestants and the Catholics are fighting against each other.
We have a pretty good example of people who put their religious differences aside to come together and defeat a force in their country.Well, except one religion that they
that had to go, but they came together and they just said, well, we have a foe here and it's more important than our religious differences, then we need to come together.
And the more I see that, the fighting just over, oh, well, the pagans are like, well, look what Christians have done in the past.And Christians are like, oh, look what pagans have done in the past.Look at the children that are being sacrificed now.
On this note, I would put forward that it might be the case that certain enterprising Americans are actually working to tackle this problem more directly in the near future.So maybe pay attention to this fear if you're interested in that.
Very much so.Yes.All right.I'll give each of you a chance to say a last word if you want and promote anything you want.So Ryan, go ahead first.
Well, just to summarize my thoughts about the book, and I probably could do a much deeper reading that doesn't have to be done in the course of a couple days or so, but I was genuinely very impressed, and I had a feeling I would be coming out and saying that, but it reads very clearly, there's very precise, very direct, the definitions aren't vague, and it's a
It's genuinely, I don't want to say entertaining, but it's fulfilling to read.It's a great book, go read it.Easy to find, easy to pay for and contribute to a person that most definitely is acting in your interest at least 95% of the time.
That is to say, a friend.And with that being said, though, with a lot of the things that are being articulated in this book, you might go into it thinking that it is just a one giant black pill.
You have to use shadowy means to fight these shadowy elites that are in these official positions that can't be assaulted.It's not that.There's a lot of
He does a good job at making this just cold practicality, you can go home and use this, this book that we just read, to your advantage.Not like in some sort of psychopathic Machiavellian sense like,
get a promotion at work, but you can use this to actually see what's going on in politics and do something yourself, because a lot of the people that we have in our sphere would be absolutely perfect to do these political organizations that we keep talking about, we just don't get, probably because we don't know how to, we're scared to move first, something like that.
It's not that difficult.This book makes that abundantly clear that you just need to be competent.We have competent people.You need to be tightly organized.That is definitely very possible.You need to have a political formula.
That's not beyond us to come up with if we don't just choose one that's out there already. Our situation is, it could be infinitely worse.
We have everything we need, we have everything that we can organize with, all we just need to do now is act, really.Act and plan and execute.So, that's my final thoughts really, especially since we're doing the conclusion.
Charles?I must say that there was a moment about a third of the way through the book where I just thought, wow, this is an absolutely stellar book, which is actually pretty rare.This is an excellent scholarly work.It's well-sourced.
The bibliography, the all-important bibliography is stuffed full of references.
Don't want the size of the book to deceive you, it's small, but actually compressing the core ideas of all of these intellectuals into a short, readable form that really delivers the core concepts from all these works, these tens of thousands of pages of works is
a huge achievement.This is absolutely a book that you should read and buy.I'm actually thinking about buying 10 copies and handing them out at my local city council because the book is really that good.I mean, it's only a little more than 100 pages.
You can read it in one sitting if you want.And it is actually amazing that
Nima Parvini was able to do what he did in this book and compress all of these enormous texts into something very concise that has a very clear narrative from beginning to the end.
So yeah, I'm not just saying that because he's a friend and it really is an excellent work.It might be in a technical level the best book that Imperium Press actually has on their site. So, yeah, I found it remarkable.
And thank Mike from Imperium Press for not only publishing this book, but for publishing a host of amazing books and being able to put works together into, you know, like the Maestros volume one to be able to put all the most important writings into one.
He's doing amazing work over there. Um, do you have anything to plug Charlie?
Oh, just check out my sub stack.I'm doing my, uh, my book notes series and just publishing on there regularly.
I have uploaded a couple short videos to my YouTube channel lately, but yeah, if you want to support me financially, the sub stack is the place to go for that.And I do try to put out worthwhile content for the readers there.
I'm just I'm just finishing up my CIA theme Which I is basically all composed of books that Thomas 7-7 recommended Which were all very good.
So if you're interested in a learning about the history of the CIA I'm about to publish the fourth article the fourth paid article on my substack In a week or two.So Charlemagne dot substack calm awesome
All right, gentlemen, thank you very much for joining me.And this this was great love, not as an insult at all.This was way beyond my expectations.This was friggin amazing.Thank you.
