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I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingese show today.I am here with radical liberation, Stephen Carson.How are you doing?
Very good.I've survived the great flood of 2022 in St.Louis, Missouri.I understand that it made national news.Fortunately, we are very near the Missouri River, but we are up high. We're very high above it.So we're actually quite safe.
But some of the places I shop were a bit underwater in some of the pictures I saw in the news.So kind of scary.
Oh, wow.Yeah, you told me that you actually live at elevation above the city.Yeah.
All right.So tell everybody a little.We're here to, I'll do this intro real quick. We're gonna start reading.I'm gonna read through every chapter of this book with different people.It is the book, The Populist Delusion by Nima Parvini.
A lot of people will know him by Academic Agent on YouTube and other places.But I wanted you to, well, talk about the fact that you and Academic Agent have a connection.So why don't you get in there?
Right, yeah, just for full disclosure, because I guess,
I often am sharing stuff from people that I knew at the Mises Institute and stuff like that But I would say that my connection with a is worthy of a little more fuller disclosure He Helped me get going with my youtube channel by having me appear on his shows on his channel Which is much bigger to this day.
It's still much bigger than mine And I continue to appear there regularly Uh, but it really goes beyond that.
Um, I edited his previous book Um, and I I always get the Defenders of liberty I think it is anyway, but the book that came out before this one.
I was actually the editor or the copy editor Let me not exaggerate my role, but I I copy edited it Uh, and then um, i've met him we we went to a conference together and basically got to spend the weekend hanging out And uh, and we're friends.
I mean, you know, i'm chatting regularly with him in a group chat a couple group chats um, and and others and uh, so, you know, uh You think this cyber thing is a little bit weird at first, but eventually you find that what is it?
My dad said, um a relationship is a a succession of shared experiences, you know And if you're chatting every day with someone, even though you're not seeing them in person, you start to build up something like a relationship.
So yeah, I'm friends with the author of this book.I didn't want to try to hide that under the table.Now, you might think that the danger then would be I'd be too soft on him.
But I actually could have the other danger, which is I want to make it clear that I'm my own man and be too hard on him.But anyway, hopefully we'll strike a balance.
Well, the title of this book is provocative, I assume on purpose.If you were to describe what this book is, the overview of this book, what the message of this book is, what's your take on this book?
Right, so I guess it's sort of the opposite of the hippie days, which I grew up in uh people power Wasn't that a big kind of hippie thing, right?We got it.We got to get that people power going.
We got to march in the streets Right, and we are going to bring about you know, wonderful changes to our society, right?um, and and not just our society, but our our uh,
political, the political regime and the way that things are run and stuff like that.AA in this book, sorry, I say AA short for academic agent, right?So I'm just used to calling him that.
AA in this book tries to completely smother people power in the crib. right, that is completely free your mind from this notion that this is how political change happens, or even sort of social change, as we often think about it.
Instead, he says that, as we'll see in great detail, he says that it is always an organized minority.Think of like a chess club, right?They're all smart people here.It's a chess club, right?But most of them are there to play chess.
They don't want to like sit there and take minutes at the chess club meeting Right.Um, so so what do you end up with you end up with a few members of the chess club?Who basically end up deciding how everything's done?
And and unless you know, just everybody walks out all at once Nothing's going to really change, you know, the organized minority within club is going to run things Well in this book, he argues that isn't just the chess club.
That's that's everything including the state
All right.Well, we're going to read the introduction and chapter one to chapter two today.Is there anything else that you would like to add before I start reading?
Absolutely.So if there's any. I think there's a limitation to the analysis that AA brings, and I'm not picking on him, right?He's really just channeling what's called elite theory here in this book.
I think there's a limitation to it, but as you go through the book, Peter, keep your eye forward and see what you think, and even today.
And that is that this seems to me it's the analysis of the internal dynamics of an organization, specifically, of course, within political organizations.
And that is, it abstracts the regime or the political organization away from being situated in a world of other regimes.And as is often pointed out, at the level of, say, international politics, you're back in anarchy.
We have, so far, thank goodness, no one central authority over the whole world that can make everybody fall in line, right?To some degree, there's a peer kind of relationship.They're divided sovereignty.
We still have divided sovereignty when you look at the globe, right? Um, and and so that's something I think about when I come at this book That this is from in my mind a piece of the puzzle.It's sort of the internal story Of the polity, right?
Um, but there's an external story And so, you know, I don't think we I don't know of yet.
Maybe someone smart will tell me it's it's there and I just missed it I do not know of some sort of like grand unified theory of say john mearsheimer geopolitical theory
Combo that is and elite theory where it all fits together and you now have sort of one way of looking at how an elite works within Say a national government and then also have a lens that lens also helps you understand Great power politics as far as I can tell in my mind Those are just bifurcated.
I have like this set of stuff about You know a geopolitical theory and great power politics and stuff like that.
And then I have a different set of Theoretical tools to think about what happens within a country and and this book is a huge contribution to that ladder It's unclear to me whether it sheds light on the on the on the former the regime versus regime So I I think it's I just thought that would be an interesting thing to have in the back of your head as you go through the book Okay
Mind if I start reading now go for and like I said before stop me at any time Let me get this up on the screen get it up earlier and All right, I'm gonna go chapter one introduction This is a book about the realities of power and how it functions stripped of all ideological baggage It has at its core a thesis which absolutely contradicts the democratic Democratic or populist delusion that the people are or ever could be sovereign
An organized minority always rules over the majority perhaps as a testament to the fact a recent empirical study showed that popular Opinion has a near zero impact on lawmaking in the usa across 71,779 Policy issues and okay.
I just want to pause right on that one because that is insane I love it.What a great way to start the book because we would think that
Well, sure, when it comes to, you know, arms contracts or something, we know, I mean, you know, we have nothing to do, you and I have nothing to do with whether this arms manufacturer, that arms manufacturer gets the contract, right?
We would like know that, right?But then we would think that when it comes to certain other areas, that maybe we do care more about.Yeah, our voice is probably heard, right?
But there's no distinction here between sort of, I don't know what to call it, but the things we think of as the things we would have influence on versus the things we would think that we don't.No, we have no influence across any of it.Forget it.
And I will just mention to people, if you pick this book up, all right, so that's footnote number one, where he shows where that 1,779 came from.
This is one of those books, very much like Scott Horton's Fool's Errand book, where a good portion of the book is footnotes.So the ideas that are being shared, you know where they're coming from.
Yeah, yeah, and just the term academic agent that he somehow magically chose for himself, I have never known it to be more true.I mean, AA, I mean, I know I'm his friend, but I've edited a lot of other people and stuff.
He's on the level in my mind of like Tom Woods as a scholar, Murray Rothbard to some degree, you know, these people who can decide they want to understand something.
dig into all the relevant scholarly literature, understand it, synthesize it, and give it back to you in a way you can understand.So yeah, this is a scholarly book, but don't make that afraid.
It just means that the apparatus is there if you want to look at it.
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It's very straightforward to understand.
Onward.In fact, my thesis goes further than that to suggest that all social change at all times and in all places has been top-down and driven by elites rather than quote-unquote the people.
Those movements which have the appearance of being organic and bottom-up protests, for example, the 1960s civil rights movement in the USA or the Russian revolutions in 1917, were in fact tightly organized and funded by elites.
Those attempts to drive change from the bottom up, which is to say, in the absence of elite organization, we might think of the events of the 6th of January, 2020 in Washington, D.C., or the recent Yellow Vest movement in France, will amount to little more than an inchoate rabble.
This principle holds true regardless of the size of the political unit, be that a small company of 20 people, a large organization of thousands of people, a nation of millions, or even the entire world.
It holds true not only in terms of hard political power, the ability to capture and hold office, but also in two other crucial respects.
First, there is the question of logistical power, simply the ability to execute orders, for it is possible to capture office without achieving the ability to execute, as Donald Trump showed. Second, there is the question of soft power of discourse.
Second, there is the question of the soft power of discourse of information flow and of opinion formation.
So a comment here just from that first paragraph. Why is it that it's so sort of shocking?Probably not to you and me, right?
But to some readers, why would it be so shocking to read that the 1960s civil rights movement was not about marching in the streets?Well, I think part of the reason is, this is not only the populist delusion as A.A.
calls it, it's not only a theory of how things work, which he's trying to knock down, right?It's also a theory of legitimacy.Why is it that the civil rights apparatus that we all live under now, uh, is legitimate.
Well, it's because people, you know, they were so fed up with the injustice.They rose up in the streets.You know, we, we are getting what we, we asked for, so to speak.Right.
But if AA is right in his thesis, then that, that argument of legitimacy is knocked out from underneath these things.Right.
Yep.It's not a populist movement.It's not what the people wanted.It's what the people were sold.
It's what the people got good and hard.
Yeah.Yeah.Yeah.All right.Here's the, uh, here's the part where we'll start triggering the, um, the libertarians and especially the anarchists.
In addition to democratic dilute delusions, there are four liberal delusions that will be subject to significant attack by the thinkers who we will be considering. Let us call these the four myths of liberalism.
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.
Number four, myth of the separation of powers, that competing power centers can realistically endure without converging.In the cold light of reality, these four myths turn out to be little more than wishful thinking.
Well, we could go on and on about these, but better to keep them in mind as we go.I'll just make one comment.Myth of the separation of powers.Now, obviously this is where the United States very explicitly.
It was there in other regimes, right, but it was very explicitly meant to accomplish this, right, that we will have competing power centers because, for example, we'll have the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary.
We're all taught this in school, right?The separation of powers is part of why we're free or whatever.And what we've come to realize is they're all part of the state, right?And they're all on each other's team.
I think we particularly saw that with the 2020 election, right?With the states coming to the Supreme Court and saying, hey, we're concerned about election regularities.And the Supreme Court says, no, we don't care.Right?
That was a wake-up moment, I think. But turning to that international setting for a moment, I think that's worth thinking about.I don't want to dwell on it right now, but we do have separation of powers internationally, right?
As I said, we essentially are in a state of anarchy on the international scene.Can competing power centers realistically endure without converging?Is the lesson of number four on the international scene that a one-world government is inevitable?
I don't know.I, and I don't think he really addresses it in this book, but, uh, but, uh, something to think about.
Okay.Um, yeah.And I just wanted to make a quick mention that if you think, you know, the Supreme court. Failing to address the election issue is basically trump supreme court.
So yeah, just Just tells you exactly how um, you know How much trump had power over that and how much right?Hey, hey, I appointed I appointed you three.Yeah, take a walk guy Yeah, right All right.
I'm gonna keep going before continuing it is worth emphasizing what top-down or elite driven change means
These phrases may suggest shadowy organizations that puppeteer unseen from the sidelines, but that is not the sense in which they should be understood.
Rather, the defining feature of top-down as opposed to bottom-up change is the fact of tight minority organization as against the disorganized masses, and that is unbelievably key.
Whenever I hear somebody talk about, well, if the people could just get together and organize, well, they can't.
It's been impossible to this point, but a tight minority organization that has claimed power, that those disorganized masses actually voted into power, they can come together, they can get organized, because this is all they do.
The disorganized masses have concentrations on, they're concentrating on so many different other things, you know, they just want to grill.That meme.
So yeah, yeah, there's sort of a two-sided argument here right on the one hand our belief that the people in people power is based on a flawed historical understanding and That's part of what he started to address already, right?
We have we tell ourselves a story about popular uprisings that literally is historically wrong.We literally have our history wrong And we have that's where revisionist history like the Thomas comes in.So key, right?and then
Secondly, um, not only is our history wrong, but like our theory is wrong We we um, we have a vague idea that a lot of people marching in the street make stuff happen somehow And he really breaks it down in this book to help you understand the nuts and bolts of why That isn't how change can happen.
Even if it never happened, even if you agree with the revisionism Yeah, okay.It never happened, but it could happen.He says no it can't It's not how it works.It can't work that way
All right, onward.Elite, in this sense, could be the elites in current power or a set of counter-elites who seek to supplant them.
In the former case, we could cite examples such as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, various LGBT movements, Black Lives Matter, or Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion.
In these cases, the current power structure uses its considerable influence and resources, whether through legal means using the formal structure of the state and its apparatuses, education, state-backed media, etc., or through non-government organizations, NGOs, and corporate lobby groups, to manufacture consent and give the appearance of popular support for elite projects.
In the latter case, however, the efforts of the counter-elites will only find success in a revolution.
As outlined in Chapter 7, revolutions only occur when the current ruling class loses its ability and resolve to maintain power, which will produce widespread popular discontent, and when a counter-elite is ready to seize the initiative to fill the vacuum.
Rebellions happen.Revolutions are made.
Yeah, just to put some color on that, one way to think about it is it's the great non-event, right?The people rise up, or a rebellion happens, or a coup happens, and the police and military don't shoot everybody down, right?
So that's what we saw with the Soviet Union, for instance.In 1950, I should know the year, there was the uprising in Czechoslovakia, right? 1968. Yeah, that was brutally crushed by Soviet tanks, right?
Well, fast forward 20 years or whatever, and the Soviet officers will not fire on the people, right?
Um, so so yeah, that's that's part one of those parts He's talking about that resolve to maintain power the will to power right the will to crush descent Uh, even if it is pretty you're pretty cruel about it sure, and I think that when you talk about a
an endorsed revolution, the streets of the United States in 2020, where people who are actually killing people and burning buildings down are not fired upon and are basically coddled, protected.
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All right, moving on.The superior and tight organization of the counter-elite group determines largely why it is that group as opposed to any other that will now take the reins of power.
Historical studies on revolutionary figures, as dramatically opposed as Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler, have noted tight organizational unity and iron discipline as the defining characteristics of their respective vanguards.
Lenin had a profound mistrust of the revolutionary potential of the masses, who he believed, without the leadership of an elite party vanguard, would inevitably become diverted by the bread-and-butter issues of economism.
Likewise, Arthur Bryant described Hitler's NSDAP as a fighting movement of flawless discipline and animated by the same unquestioning devotion to its faith and leaders as the old Prussian Guard.
Bryant goes on, it must place him among the great organizers of mankind that he was able to establish it so quickly.
Aside from this iron discipline in organization, Lenin and Hitler also had in common an utter contempt for democracy, which was seen as a time-wasting impediment to effective decision-making and a total disdain for polite and respective bourgeois society of the status quo they each sought to supplant.
The important point for this study, however, is that neither the rise of the Bolsheviks nor the rise of the Nazis was a popular uprising, but rather the result of the determined organized efforts of counter-elites.
Likewise, the movements of civil rights, LGBT rights, Black Lives Matter, and Extinction Rebellion were not popular uprisings either, but the result of the determined, organized efforts of the elites currently in power, or, if you prefer, the ruling class.
Yeah, so one point to walk away from that paragraph with is the order of organization, right?
Because I think a lot of naive populist movements are like, we'll march in the streets, they will bend the knee to us, and then we'll figure out what to do, right?
But with all these examples he gives, they get organized first, the organization comes first. and then they're able to effectively make a change, seize power, whatever, right?So you don't do the organization later, you do it first.
Right.The example he already used of January 6th is a great example of just.
Now that we're here, what shall we do?I don't know.What do you want to do?Yeah.
Let's get into this.This book will start by introducing the core tenants of the elite theorists, Gaetano Mosca, Chapter two, Vilfredo Pareto, Chapter three, and Robert Michels, Chapter four.
These thinkers give us the indispensable tools and vocabulary with which to analyze politics and power.
It will then add crucial insights from the two other important political theorists, Carl Schmitt, Chapter 5, and Bertrand de Juvenel, Chapter 6, to think more about how power and law function in practice and about how political change, the circulation of the elites, can come about.
Three chapters will follow on the managerial class, the vital second stratum of the elites or ruling class identified by the elite theories, and the special treatment given to this topic by James Burnham, Chapter 7, Samuel T. Francis, Chapter 8, and Paul Gottfried, Chapter 9.
Chapter 10 forms a brief conclusion applying some of these lessons to the current political moment.
Alright, it is worth mentioning here that this book is interested primarily in the fundamental concepts rooted in these works and not, for example, the lives and context of the authors or how their work has been received by scholars over the decades.
I will do my best to draw on the vast body of secondary literature, but purely for the purposes of better illustrating the core ideas rather than critiquing them except where necessary.
There are two key reasons for this, one practical and one pedagogical.The former is simply because of space.One could easily write a whole book on each of the chapter topics.The latter, however, is to avoid confusion.
Many of the thinkers we are discussing were severely critical of, or even outright hostile to, both socialism and liberal democracy, while many of the scholars who have worked on them have been either socialists or defenders of liberal democracy.
Thus, their purposes for taking on these thinkers were usually in the service of defending their ideology, whether by reinterpreting or trying to co-opt the thinker for it, or trying to find ways to disprove the thinker to save it.
This is not to say that any of the scholars in question were dishonest or that their work was bad, or even that their arguments were incorrect, but rather to recognize that they were working in conditions in which they felt the need to pay lip service to the official doctrines, the political formulas, of the status quo.
I feel no obligation I feel no such obligation.Besides, as John Higley has pointed out, the march of history continues utterly in defiance of Democrats and social radicals.
Quoting, many Democrats and social radicals have rejected the early elite theorists' futility thesis.
They have sought to demonstrate that particular elites are not those with superior endowments or organizational capacities, but merely persons who are socially advantaged in power competitions.
Adherents of this view have argued that the existence of elites can be terminated either by removing the social advantages that some people enjoy or by abolishing the power concentrations that spur competitions among them, remedies that often go hand in hand.
There are no historical instances, however, where these remedies have been successfully applied in a large population for any significant length of time. This book seeks to advance a value-free analysis which is not in the service of any ideology.
If power in human societies functions according to certain immutable laws, these laws are not suddenly suspended in the liberal, socialist, or fascist society. Granted, history never occurs in a vacuum.
Complexities and contingencies always play a part in its seismic events.
But this does not mean that we cannot discern identifiable patterns as to the nature of power and politics, which cut across the specifics of time and place and of governmental system.
Okay, so a couple things here that might be new to people, which are familiar for those of us who have been steeped in Austrian economics, this distinction between what we call the positive and the normative is what AA is getting at here, right?
So a positive analysis is just trying to explain what's there.I like to use the term the hard structure of reality. right?This is just the way things work.So an example I like to use is, you know, the law of gravity.
Most people seem to accept that it's kind of uncontroversial, but it's viewed as a positive law, right?It's just a description of how things are.Let's say I have a normative value.You know, this is where you bring in your values, right?
I have a normative value that I think people should, um, be able to fly.I think it's unjust that we can't fly like the birds, right?Um, now,
up a response to some, you know, I say, Hey, I think we should all jump off this cliff because we ought to be able to fly like birds.Uh, and then someone says, well, wait a second.There's this law of gravity thing.
You're going to fall and be smashed against the rocks below and you're going to die.Uh, a response is not to say you just don't really care about our human need to fly.Do you? That's a silly response, right?
Because the point that was being made to you was about the hard structure of reality.It wasn't about how they don't share your values, they don't like your hopes and dreams, whatever the heck.
They're just telling you, this is something that won't work because this is the nature of reality, right?And so that's the primary mission of this book.I mean, obviously, anyone is going to sneak in some values, right?And we'll see them as we go.
But the primary mission of this is a positive mission.It's just to understand how reality works.
All right.Onward.Nonetheless, we should mention at the outset the most generic complaint made by scholars who have sought to critique the thinkers I am covering in this book.
James Burnham, who is one of them, dubbed these thinkers the Machiavellians.
This does not mean that they were all disciples of Niccolo Machiavelli, but rather that they conducted their work in his spirit, to see the world as it is and not how it ought to be. In other words, their watchword was realism.
They each had a pretense to the neutral objectivity of science.
Since it's virtually impossible, when dealing with a topic such as politics, to eliminate the biases and preferences of the author entirely, this has been fertile ground for their critics.
If they could, as James H. Masel put it, demonstrate the hidden moral bias, these claims to objectivity vanish.For example, Gaetano Mosca was kind of liberal, as was Bertrand de Juvenel.
Vilfredo Pareto was read by and influenced Benito Mussolini and voiced some support for fascism before he died.Robert Michels joined the Italian fascist party after being a socialist and a syndicalist earlier in his life.
Carl Schmitt joined the German National Socialist Party.James Burnham was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan, a Republican.
Where the personal sympathies of the author leak into the otherwise value-free work, it does admittedly become a potential issue.For example, C.A.
Bond points out in his book Nemesis, some instances where de Juvenal's otherwise exemplary work lapses into the assumptions of liberal individualism.
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Ettore A. Albertoni shows where liberal ethical assumptions creep into the work of Mosca, especially when he posits juridical defense as a positive ethical category in an otherwise amoral analysis.
Karl Mannheim criticized Vilfredo Pareto for making a myth of the idea of the man of action and said his elevation of this idea was arbitrary.
George Orwell complained that James Burnham too readily wrote off the prospects of making incremental and marginal increases in the standard of living for those worse off in society because of his personal antipathy to socialism.
All these criticisms amount to is that our authors were only human, real men living in real conditions with all the raging political debates that go on in any area.
None of these criticisms significantly attack the core of the central arguments made by these thinkers.Thus, I have presented what is most essential in these various theses while stripping out what I see as the more ephemeral elements.
In other words, it does not matter that Moscow favored juridical defense or separation of powers while Pareto favored a strong man of action or Machiavellian lion.
It does not matter that Samuel T. Francis called for a revolution of the middle or that Carl Schmitt supported the Nazis. We must relegate all these stances to the category of personal policy preferences.
We must separate those, which are merely contingencies owing to the circumstances and tastes of their authors and the essential ideas concerning power and politics.
What matters in each of their cases is whether the core principles of power and its functioning, which they outlined, are true.Does reality bear out in practice what they say in theory, now and always?
This is the only test of a theory that aspires to realism.
And let me just share a story to illustrate his point.I heard of Carl Schmitt because of Paul Gottfried.He's the other personal connection here.I've spent many hours talking to Paul Gottfried over the years.
And he was always talking about Carl Schmitt and how important of a thinker Carl Schmitt was.And I have to confess, it wasn't until AA did this book that I finally started to tune in to Carl Schmitt.
Well, Paul Gottfried, it just so happens, is Jewish and lost family in the Holocaust.He's not, like, friendly to Nazis or something, okay?I know this from knowing him.
But he's a huge scholar of Carl Schmitt, and he thinks Carl Schmitt is a very important thinker.Well, how could he do that?How could he look past you know, Schmitt's endorsement, at least at one time of the Nazi party.
And it's because Schmitt helps us see reality.Right.And even if he didn't like these aspects of Schmitt, he had to admit that Schmitt helped him see reality.
You can learn from anywhere and anyone.Right.I've learned I've learned much from reading Vladimir Lenin.
I don't agree with the man, but I've learned much from reading him.
I'm going to I'm going to keep going.Is that all right?Yep. All right.The importance of taking this realist approach to power and politics is not only theoretical or academic, but also has practical implications.
Those who wish to bring about political change cannot hope to do so if they adopt populist methods or have faith that at some point a critical mass of the public will suddenly reach a tipping point after which elites will be inevitably toppled.
Change always takes concerted organization and cannot hope to be achieved simply by convincing the greatest number of people of your point of view. Power does not care, in the final analysis, how many likes you got on your Twitter account.
In practice, the great bulk of people will adjust to new realities after the fact of change and reorient themselves to the new power structure one way or the other.
In any case, manufacturing consent can only be carried out once a group is de facto in power.A group may achieve de jure power only to find that they cannot execute or manufacture consent because they have not achieved de facto power.
And realistically, de facto power is the only power that counts.
Right, and this helps us understand why, for many people, the Trump administration was such a crushing blow.It's like, hey, we memed him into power, right?He's the president of the United States.He's the executive of the global American empire.
Here we go, right?And then what a disappointment.Just, you know, we got nothing.
You know the the people who hope to get things from the trump administration essentially got nothing Um how because as we know he as a saying here He he did have the jury power.He was the president officially But he was stopped at every turn.
I mean, I remember this story about how he wanted to draw down troops in syria And essentially they just lied to him and didn't do it He said, well, let's get those troops out of Syria.And they just never left.There you go.That's power.
All right.Chapter two, the rulers and the ruled.Let's get into this.Gaetano Moscow's The Ruling Class was first published as Elementi de Scienza Politica in 1895.He then revised and massively expanded it in 1923.
It was translated into English in 1939 and retitled The Ruling Class.Mosca, then at the age of 80, gave his blessing to this version, which was based on the second edition.
I am starting with Mosca not only because this book comes first chronologically, but also because he provides us with the most basic conceptual units in our analysis of power and politics.He has two main thesis in The Ruling Class.
First, the rulers and the ruled, and second, political formulas. To these, we can add two sub-theses, the two strata of the ruling class and level of civilization and juridical defense.
For the remainder of this chapter, let us deal with each of these in turn.First, Moscow's central thesis, for which he is most famous, is the fact that human societies are always governed by minorities.He says,
Among the constant facts and tendencies that are to be found in all political organisms, one is so obvious that it is apparent to the most casual eye.
In all societies, from all societies that are very meagerly developed and have barely attained the dawnings of civilization down to the most advanced and powerful societies, two classes of people appear.A class that rules and a class that is ruled.
As Mosca says, this must seem obvious, so why must this be pointed out and insisted upon quite so emphatically?It is because Mosca rejected any notion of popular sovereignty.
Since there are always the rulers and the ruled, how can the people ever be sovereign?Power does not rest, nor will it ever rest, in the will of the people, but rather in the organized efforts of the ruling minority.
Right.And so why is this so important?Partially, it's just true.But the other is people who come to you talking about the will of the people are trying to sell you something.Right.It's a scam.I think that's part of why this is so important.
Somebody who comes to you talking this way is tricking you.They are telling you, we're going to do this for the people and the people will rule. No, they won't.
The guy who's telling you this is probably the one that's going to roll if you go with him.Right.He's just he's just playing a trick on you.
Yeah.All right.So power does not rest never, but rather in the organized.People in liberal or social democracies may tell themselves otherwise.
But as Moscow contends, in reality, the dominion of an organized minority obeying a single impulse over the unorganized majority is inevitable.
The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minority.
100 men acting uniformly in concert with a common understanding will triumph over 1,000 men who are not in accord and can therefore be dealt with one by one.
Meanwhile, it will be easier for the former to act in concert and have a mutual understanding simply because they are 100 and not 1,000.
It follows that the larger the political community, the smaller will the proportion of the governing minority to the governing majority be.
And the more difficult it will be for the majority to organize for reaction against the minority Um just to bring this home, uh this thing about um, the majority can be dealt with one by one think of Canceling that we've been seeing right?
Um, the people being canceled often are expressing things that are held by the majority their opinions are held by the majority But they still get picked off because the organized minority can take them out As we well know
We might call this Moscow's law, and much of his study is devoted to demonstrating this theory in practice using examples from history and in demystifying democratic claims which tried to get around this by appealing to the will of the people and other such formulations.
Even in the most charitable interpretation, representative democracy is simply elected oligarchy. It is worth stressing the point, as Gérard Appari does, that Mosca's thesis is more than simply saying that organized minorities always rule.
Quote, The elitist thesis does not merely assert that in a society the minority makes the decision and the majority obeys.This is an obvious truism with no power to explain political relationships.
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That fewer people issue laws, orders, and instructions than receive and obey them is a fact scarcely worth commenting upon.The elitist argument is a much stronger one.
It is that the dominant minority cannot be controlled by the majority wherever democratic mechanisms are used.
Where democracies are concerned, Mosca says that the assumption that the elected official is the mouthpiece of the majority of his electors is, as a rule, not consistent with the facts.
Quoting, what happens in other forms of government, namely that an unorganized minority imposes its will on the disorganized majority, happens also and to perfection whatever the appearances to the contrary under the representative system.
When we say the voters choose their representative, we are using a language that is very inexact.The truth is that the representative has himself has himself elected by the voters.
And if that phrase should seem too inflexible and too harsh to fit some cases, we might qualify it by saying that his friends have him elected.
In elections, as in all other manifestations of social life, those who have the will, and especially the moral, intellectual, and material means to force their will upon others, take the lead over the others and command them.
Elsewhere, he points out that these friends of the elected representative tend to be wealthy people who can afford to pay him to represent their minority interests over and above the interests of the majority.
Such wealthy people also have the resources necessary to control newspapers and other media, which in turn control the dissemination of information to the public and hence the formation of their individual opinions.
In any case, in most cases, the alternative candidate for election will similarly similarly have preselected by elites, have been preselected by elites whose campaigns are managed by organized minorities so that any result will favor their interests.
Right.And this makes me think of like what's a campaign finance reform, you know, limits on donations, all this crap.Right.Completely useless.
I mean, do you think that the defense industry is going to be stopped by whatever rules you put in place from influencing politicians?I mean, forget it.They will find a way, right?
I mean, what is it that the representatives and senators, they're all like going on trips, you know, really nice trips that somehow get funded by someone.
But, you know, even if on paper they're squeaky clean, the influence still comes through somehow. Right.And it's going to.
Yeah, always.There are two profound consequences of Moscow's law.First, because it is a permanent aspect of human society, the classical liberal notion that there is an antagonism between the state and society is rendered as utopian nonsense.
From our point of view, there can be no antagonism between state and society.The state is to be looked upon merely as that part of the society which performs the political function.
Considered in this light, all questions touching interference or non-interference by the state comes to assume a new aspect.
Instead of asking what the limits of state activity ought to be, we try to find out what the best type of political organization is.
Which type, in other words, enables all the elements that have a political significance in a given society to be best utilized and specialized, best subjected to reciprocal control, and to the principle of individual responsibility for the things that are done in their respective domains.
Moscow's ultimate answer to this is a kind of Machiavellian mixed republic in which there are competing power centers and in which different social types are part of the process of power.
Senators, for example, should not be elected, but rather men of distinction and social standing in other fields who serve as a duty and without a wage.And when I read that, I put right next to it, Hapa, because it's what Hapa talks about.
Right, the natural elite, the natural elite.Yeah.
In this respect, his vision of a balanced system is not that far removed from the original vision of the American Founding Fathers.
With that said, he is highly skeptical and critical of written constitutions and prefers as his model the more organic British system in which the wisdom of the ruling class has facilitated change without violent revolution.
However, Moscow's positive prescriptions are less important than his clear-eyed diagnosis of reality, which brings us to the second consequence of Moscow's law.
He is highly critical of Herbert Spencer's notion that there is any real distinction between military states founded on force and coercion and liberal states founded on voluntary association and trade.He argues, quoting,
Any political organization is both voluntary and coercive at one and the same time.
Voluntary because it arises from the very nature of man, as was long ago noted by Aristotle, and coercive because it is a necessary fact, the human being finding himself unable to live otherwise.
It is natural, therefore, and at the same time indispensable, that where there are men, there should automatically be a society, and that when there is a society, there should also be a state.
That is to say, a minority that rules and a majority that is ruled by the ruling minority.
Thus, we must bear in mind that when Mosca is described as a liberal, it is not in the sense of being a small-state classical liberal or what is today called a libertarian.
He was liberal only in the sense that he opposed absolutism and generally supported separation of powers and their distribution across social types.
We will return to this theme when we consider Carl Schmitt and Bertrand de Juvenal, who independently came to understand the separation of powers is a myth seldom, if ever, realized in practice.
Yeah, I think, you know, we are trying to stick mostly to the realist analysis, but just in terms of principles that could be potentially used, when he talks about, Mosca talks about the principle of individual responsibility, that seems to me pretty appealing, because as people may know, I call myself a medieval anarchist, and I look back to the Middle Ages, and
what you see is there's personal responsibility.You know who's doing this to you, right?Whereas now, who the heck is in charge of the United States government?One thing we know for sure is that it's not Joe Biden, right?
All right.Now we must ask a question.Why did the majority assent to the role of the minority? According to Mosca, it is because they, at least tacitly, subscribe to the political formula of the ruling class.
The political formula, or principle of sovereignty, is defined as the legal and moral basis or principle on which the power of the political class rests.
The two chief examples Moscow provides are those political formulas that are based on supernatural beliefs, for example, the divine right of kings, and those based on the notion of popular sovereignty or the will of the people.
However, these myths are not necessarily to be taken as cynical lies told by the rulers to hoodwink the masses, but are necessary for the smooth operation of the whole society.
George Sorrell called the myths called the myths Karl Mannheim and later the Marxist author Louis Althusser called them ideologies.
Indeed, Moscow recognizes that a moral unity between the rulers and the rule can create almost miraculous situations in which they may overcome materially stronger external powers in war.
Today we might think of the Vietnamese against the Americans or the Afghani Taliban against the Americans.
Moscow's examples include the Spanish against the French in 1808 and various so-called barbarian groups such as the Franks against the Romans at the fall of the empire. However, it is not enough for the ruled majority alone to have this moral unity.
They could show great courage, but will still likely fail if they are not met by an equal moral unity in the ruling class.
Mosca gives the example of the Kingdom of Naples against the French in 1799, where the people were united, but they were betrayed by the pro-French sympathies of their ruling class.
Treason, therefore, and more than treason, the unending suspicion of treason, paralyzed all resistance, disorganized the regular army, and diminished the effectiveness of a spontaneous popular resistance which might have triumphed.
The inverse is also true. A ruling class who show moral unity will likely fail if the rule do not share their convictions.Again, we might think of the American foreign escapades since World War II.
No ruling class can survive without an effective political formula.Ruling classes may fail to adapt their formula to the changed demands of society, or ruling classes may renew themselves or be renewed.
In the first case, failure to renew the formula may signal the end of the ruling class.In the second case, the formula might be retained.The British Crown would be a good example.
A new ruling class can arise out of the people with a new political formula.The ruled mass remain the hummus out of which grow leading groups.
But if this is the case, and if a political formula can be so powerful as an animating spirit as to be, in Moscow's own terms, quasi miraculous, then why is he so adamant that the political formula of popular sovereignty should be demystified and debunked as factually fraudulent?
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First, remember that Moscow's goal was not to instruct rulers in the art of politics, but rather to outline a science of politics, which sees things in the cold light of day.
Second, Moscow saw the political formula of the French Revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity as being entirely destructive because it is impossible to put into practice. The democratic principle is simply one wrong-headed offshoot of this.
Mosca points out that the will of the people and the notion of divine right are both, in practice, taken on faith and are beyond reason.
But the will of the people, unlike divine right, is the product of Enlightenment rationalism and is demonstrably false.This falsity has practical and often violent consequences which supernatural beliefs do not.
Moscow argued that the democracy was inherently bad and that the desire to rectify these problems via reforms aimed at instituting true democracy were totally misconceived. They would only make matters worse.
The cold reality that the people are not and can never be sovereign will continually rear its head.So it is quite ineffective as a source of moral unity.
In other words, it acts as a constant source of class resentment so that the unity of ruler and ruled, which can be so powerful, never fully comes about.
Right, so this idea that no ruling class can survive without an effective political formula, just want to return to maybe because it happened during my lifetime, the collapse of the Soviet Union.
For 70 years, they had a pitch, which is that they were leading, you know, they were a revolutionary state, right?They were leading the Soviet people and ideally the world in a progressive direction towards, you know, something more just.
And this political formula collapsed underneath them.My sense of it is that by 1980s, no one believed this.The Soviet peoples didn't believe it.And even the Soviet leadership, the nomenklatura and so forth, they didn't really buy it either.
They didn't think they were leading anybody anywhere.They were just grifting off the system.
Um, and you know people will go to some end to some ends to protect their grift But it's not quite the same as buying into a political formula I think it's not going to keep your regime going just because you got a good grift going Moscow rejected any monistic view of history That is a theory of history which holds that there is one single cause that accounts for everything that happens in society
The political formula is important, but it is not the sole driver in history.Hence, Moscow's theory of regime change, the replacement of one ruling class with another, is quite dynamic.
He states, As soon as there is a shift in the balance of political forces, then the manner in which the ruling class is constituted changes also.
If a new source of wealth develops in a society, if a practical importance of knowledge grows, if an old religion declines or a new one is born, if a new current of ideas spreads, then, simultaneously, far-reaching dislocations occur in the ruling class.
This contrasts with Karl Marx, for whom the sole driver of history is always economic, and in contrast with Pareto, who, as we shall see in the next chapter, put the circulation of elites down to psychology.
Moscow's conception may seem less neat in comparison, but as a student of history, he knew that history is often messy and complex, and does not fit easily into any abstract scheme.He rejected the single-factor fallacy.
For him, the prime movers in history were disturbances to social forces, which can be brought about through changes in economic conditions or technology, or brought about by new ideas.
By social forces, H. Stuart Hughes explains, he meant the major public interests constituted by businessmen and agriculturalists, intellectuals, and the military.
the ruling class must adapt to the new conditions or else they will be replaced with a new, a new one more apt to rule in the new circumstances.
Yeah.So one thing I struggle with a bit is that on the one hand, there's the populist illusion, right?The idea that people power is real.We'll just rise up and things will change.But here it is acknowledging that the, the ruling right?
The, you know, the mood has shifted, right?The regimes that last a long time, like the British monarchy, the example you used, they detect those shifts in mood and they kind of tack with the wind, right?
And they retain power in part by being adaptable and flexible.So to say that there's a populist illusion doesn't seem to be the same thing as saying that what the people think doesn't matter at all, right?Because that's what he's saying.
What Moscow is saying here is that there is a tension there that has to be kept from getting too out of alignment between the rulers and the ruled.The masses don't have political sovereignty.They don't have political authority.
They don't just rise up and put themselves in place easily.There's not direct control, right?But there is a sort of indirect pressure, I guess, on the elite or on the rulers.The rulers, like I said, they can't completely ignore what's going on.
They can lose their perch if they're not a little bit sensitive to the mood of the times, right?
And at that point, new elites will take their place.
Yeah, that's exactly the way I was understanding it, Peter, that the way to understand it is not that, you know, let's say the mood shifts, and that doesn't mean that instantly now the people, you know, assert their sovereignty and become in charge or something.
No, it's that it opens up an opportunity for hesitate to use the word, but entrepreneurial type, shall we say.
It opens up the opportunity for people who are alert to the shifting wind to see an opportunity to get in and go, okay, these guys don't clue what's going on.We do. We are organized, and we are clued in to what's sort of the temper of the times.
So we can take advantage of this opportunity, and we can have a circulation of elites.
So in other words, the shift, you know, that disjunction between where the rulers are and where the ruled are, it doesn't create an instant replacement of the rulers, but it creates an opportunity for an organized elite to make a replacement, right?
Yep.Sounds good.All right.Let us move on to the third important idea in Moscow.The idea that the ruling class has two distinct strata.
No man rules alone, as they say, and any governing body is going to need an apparatus of people who fulfill the day-to-day functions of running the place, as well as arguably even more important function, that of propagating the political formula.
The first strata of the ruling class are simply those people who hold the positions of high office.It could be the king and his court of high ranking nobles or the prime minister, his cabinet, his party.But we can visibly see who is in charge.
This is the highest stratum of the ruling class.But as Moscow outlines late in the second edition of the ruling class in Chapter 15, quoting,
Below the highest stratum in the ruling class there is always, even in autocratic systems, another that is much more numerous and comprises all the capacities for leadership in the country.
Without such a class, any sort of social organization would be impossible.The higher stratum would not in itself be sufficient or leading in directing the activities of the masses.
In the last analysis, therefore, the stability of any political organism depends on the level of morality, intelligence, and activity that the second stratum has attained.
Any intellectual or moral deficiencies in the second stratum accordingly represent a graver danger to the political structure and one that is harder to repair than the presence of similar deficiencies in the few dozen persons who control the workings of the state machine.
We shall note that Vilfredo Pareto also has these two categories, which he calls the governing elite and the non-governing elite.Pareto's treatise was published in 1916.
This section from Mosca comes in the second part of the elementi, which was added in 1923.Mosca acknowledges Pareto briefly in the introduction to this second part, which is significant as the two men were known not to get on.
He also acknowledged him again in the final chapter of his History of Modern Political Doctrines, published in 1933.
The distinction between the two strata of the ruling class is one of the few places where we can trace the direct influence of Pareto on Moscow's thinking.
So Austrian thinkers, Austrian economists, the Austrian School of Economics thinkers actually are pretty strong on this point, the non-governing elite.Hayek talks about them as the second-hand dealers in ideas, for example.Rothbard also writes about
that at one time, in the past, there'd be a priestly class who would sort of teach everybody to go along with the political formula, to use the term here.But now we have so-called intellectuals.
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And they serve that same function, you know, journalists, academics, so on and so forth.So, you know, it's funny, we get frustrated, right?
I think a lot of us get frustrated when we see, you know, the blue check marks, right, on Twitter, for example, just repeating whatever the line is. whatever the political line is of the day.
But in a way, we can maybe reserve a little bit of judgment, just recognize that's just what they do.That's just what they're there for.You know, they're literally just doing their function.
And as I said earlier, if the regime changes, then we'll have them or someone who serves that same function, similar people doing the same thing, explaining to us why this new regime is just the best thing since sliced bread.Right.
The Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci was unhappy with the apparent vagueness in defining the ruling class this broadly, since the non-governing elite appears to encompass a broad section of society, if not the entire middle class.
He declared that Moscow's political class is nothing but the intellectual section of the ruling group. Here, we must be careful.
It seems to me that Moscow has in mind principally civil servants, bureaucrats, and other people responsible for the day-to-day management of the state. To use James Burnham's later phrase, he is thinking of the managerial class.
Gramsci seems to have in mind the intelligentsia, those people responsible for disseminating and controlling the flow of information and ideas, opinion shapers, myth makers, ideologists, upholders, and justifiers of the political formula, or if you prefer, a priest class.
While this is certainly implied in the emphasis Mosca gives to the political formula, he does not explicitly stress these ideological functions of the non-governing elite, which were central to Gramsci's work.
In fact, Gramsci's own theory of intellectuals is supposed to represent an improvement on Mosca's theory of the political class.
Moscow rather stresses the political considerations and deals with churches and religions in a separate chapter and seemingly in isolation.He argues that at certain times, ideologies can be mere pretexts to justify conflict.
However, he acknowledges that universal religions such as Christianity or Islam can constitute a very close bond between most disparate peoples who differ widely in race and language, but by the same token, also act as estranging forces of great potency between populations that cherish different beliefs.
Thus, religious sentiments, in Moscow's view, can either be skin-deep or post-talk rationalized or deeply held or either a force for uniting disparate people or sowing division within an otherwise homogenous group.
Such doctrines may or may not be utilized as part of a political formula, but it seems that Moscow sees religions functioning somewhat independently of the ruling class, and he gives special treatment to priests as a ruling class in theocratic states.
I think it would be fair to say that the role of official state ideologue, which is to say that people responsible for propagating the political formula and ensuring it to be believed by the masses, is somewhat underdeveloped in Moscow.
Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, I think it is, I think I said Althusser earlier, I can't remember, took this a lot further.
And the so-called long march through the institutions of the left is largely a testament to their thinking.
In the canon of elite theory, the understanding of the role of intellectuals in the ruling class is greatly expanded by James Burnham and his protege Samuel T. Francis, whom we will consider in later chapters.
Yeah, so just one more thought developing what I said earlier.
If we take a more neutral view as sort of what the function is of the bureaucracy and intellectuals, then maybe we can expunge a bit of the anti-intellectualism that we see in the right, for example, Peter, you know, which is basically these intellectuals are driving me crazy.
And so the problem is that they're intellectuals, whereas I think what this points us to is the problem isn't that they're intellectuals, is that they are part of a political formula that you disagree with.
If they were your intellectuals, you know, then you probably you'd probably be fine with them.Right.
Right.Yeah.That's the the whole rights.They want to call everybody else a hypocrite until their hypocrisy gets exposed and then They apologize for it and the left doesn't.
A fourth distinctive feature of Mosca's analysis is his concept of level of civilization.In his introduction to the English version of the ruling class, Arthur Livingstone provides a description of what Mosca means by this.
It is a criterion that is definable to a high grade of approximation as multiplicity of activities, grade or quality of achievement in each, size and stability of social cohesion and, therefore, offensive and defensive power, standard of living and distribution of wealth, control of narrative and utilization of that control, and so on.
So on even to the higher things themselves. Let's dig into that a little bit.
In material economic terms, we might say that when Mosca talks about a high level of civilization, he is describing a very complex society with advanced division of labor, which affords both material prosperity and technological progress.
However, as societies advance to higher levels, a robust bureaucracy becomes a raw practical necessity simply to manage the administration of so many people. Thus, Moscow identifies two key forms of social system, feudal and bureaucratic.
In a feudal state, there are no separation of powers.The economic, the judicial, the administrative, the military functions of the ruling class are exercised simultaneously by the same individuals.
These powers are vested in a local lord and a decentralized system of hierarchical patronage headed by a king.This has the advantage of a high level of social cohesion at the local level.
Mosca points out that lords and their vassals were close in sentiment and manners.Quote, the baron knew his vassals personally.He thought and felt as they did.He had the same superstitions, the same habits, the same language.
He was a man who they understood perfectly, with whom they sometimes got drunk.Unquote. However, feudal states are inefficient at quickly mobilizing men for military campaigns and are subject to internal quarrels between rival lords.
In contrast, the bureaucratic state, which has succeeded in centralizing taxation, has greater specialization of the key functions of government and can maintain a standing army.
Moscow says, quote, the greater the number of officials who perform public duties and receive their salaries from the central government or from its local agencies, the more bureaucratic the state, unquote.
The key marker of a bureaucratic state is not the fact of centralization, since many of these functions could be performed by private enterprise, but rather that they are performed by salaried employees and separated out into specialisms
In this respect, 1930s USA, the UK of the same era, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, the USSR were all equally bureaucratic states.
Okay, so there's what I see as an error early here in the beginning of this paragraph from Mosca.In general, and I'd love to get this spelled out better in my own writing, but I think that technology as a driver
is way overplayed, especially by the right wing, but that Marx, right, also thought that, you know, in the book here it's talked about it being the economic, but Marx thought the economic flowed from the technological, you know, that when the means of production changed, then everything else changed.
I think this is all like way overdone, and I am a technologist, by the way, in my day job, but I don't think it, quite has the social significance that people give to it.
So it says that with more material prosperity and technological progress, a robust bureaucracy becomes a raw practical necessity simply to manage the administration of so many people. Well, I don't think that's right.
I think that a decentralized system can result in material prosperity and technological progress.And I'm not just speaking theoretically, because one of my favorite shows that I've done is on the Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages.
So back in this decentralized, with these decentralized polities that I like to look back to, the, you know, so-called medieval anarchy, they actually had an industrial revolution.
Of course, it's been buried because, you know, the Middle Ages have been systematically pictured as being, you know, dark ages and full of superstition and all this bad stuff, right?Along with the many other attacks on our European heritage.
So we don't remember this, but a thousand years ago, they were harnessing mechanical energy. and doing what could recognizably be called an industrial revolution without a massive centralized bureaucracy.
So I do not think that technological progress, for example, and massive bureaucracy have to go together.Massive bureaucracy is a feature of the modern.
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Centralized nation state, in my view.
Right.And then somebody may ask, is it possible with where we've where we've arrived to decentralize back down and keep the level of technology and that we have going forward?
Right.Yeah.I mean, let's imagine that, you know, the 50 states of the United States suddenly became like real sovereigns again.Right.Like the federal level just fell apart or something.
And now we have these 50 states that are actually the level of governance.You think we'd like not be able to make cars anymore?I mean, you know, our computers.I mean, I just don't see that.It doesn't make sense to me.
Yeah.All right.However, in Moscow's estimation, a further ethical criterion must be considered when judging the level of civilization, juridical defense.
He explains in a highly developed civilization, not only do moral instincts and for that matter, selfish passions become more refined, more conscious, more perfect.
In a society in which political organization has made great process, moral discipline is itself unquestionably greater, and the two selfish acts that are inhibited or obstructed by the reciprocal surveillance and restraint of the individuals who compose the society are more numerous and more clearly defined.
This is somewhat different from saying that the more bureaucratic a society becomes, the higher its level, since one might easily imagine a bureaucratic state that has poor juridical defense.
Moscow has in mind an independent and fair judiciary backed by strong rule of law, which will, in turn, help to maintain a morally upstanding and law-abiding citizenry.
If the ruling class keep political prisoners and act in an arbitrary manner, do not give the ruled the right to a fair trial, do not prosecute serious crimes and let criminals loose in the streets and so on, then it is evidence of a lack of juridical defense.
Samuel T. Francis coined the phrase a narco tyranny in 2004 to describe the situation in which a highly bureaucratic and modern system such as the USA or the UK today could fail in meeting the basic standards of juridical defense.
Juridical defense could only be maintained, according to Mosca, if there were independent competing power centers in society that were kept from converging.
In effect, inter-elite competition, which could keep the central institutions more honest, which is easier said than done, as we shall see when we come to consider later thinkers.
Mosca's The Ruling Class is a book with many fascinating insights and nuggets of political wisdom from its author as he navigates his way through many moments in history.He is almost, quote, impressionistic.
What he lost in logical rigor was amply compensated for by the flexibility and richness of his analysis of political life, unquote. For us today, it is an invaluable guide for two chief reasons.
First, it punctures absolutely what I would call the populist delusion that if conditions get bad enough, if the plebeians become too disgruntled with their leaders, then the people will rise up and overthrow them.
This, as Moscow shows, has never happened in history, not even once.
This brings us to the second key practical use of his work, that if people want change, even at a time of popular and widespread resentment of the ruling class, they can only hope to achieve that change by becoming a tightly knit and organized minority themselves and, in effect, displacing the old ruling class.
This, of course, is no easy process, and Mosca was not in the business of outlining what needed to be done.He was the detached political scientist, not Vladimir Lenin.
He is also vague as to precise mechanisms that might lead to the replacement of one ruling class with another.How can a new ruling class propagate a political formula more apt to the circumstances than the old one, for example?
Moscow's analysis is pitched at a panoramic level of remove, and so the business of political change seems almost automatic.It will be up to some other thinkers whom I will be considering in this book to fill in some of the gaps.
Yeah, now this bit about they can only hope to achieve change by becoming a tightly knit and organized minority, not by people power or whatever.Here's the funny thing, right?I think of people power as like a left wing slogan, right?
But if you actually pay attention to leftist activists, they actually don't act like that.They act much more clued in to the points being made in this book.That is, they don't just wait on spontaneous uprisings.
they organize, they get their people in positions, key positions of influence and power, et cetera, et cetera, right?
They act like they know the lessons of this book, and it's more the right, and I guess libertarians too, who tend to be weak on this.
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Organ, we we've got to become very very tightly organized like a military unit, you know Like that's not the kind of thing you hear from like conservatives, you know right well Honestly, you know and thomas talks about this, you know when when he talks about the nuremberg regime Is that when right-wingers do start talking like that and do start doing that then all of a sudden they're?
a racist militia, and they're fascists, and all this stuff, and they've been trained to not do what I do when someone calls me a fascist, and go, and?
They're trained to start apologizing, and to start making excuses, and it's like, oh, well, no, no, we just want freedom, we just want liberty, we just want to live how we want.
Well, your enemy does things a little bit differently, and they seem to be very successful.
Yeah, I was just watching the Andrew Torba versus Jonathan Greenblatt, which has been quite entertaining.Jonathan Greenblatt is the head of the Anti-Defamation League.
Andrew Torba is the head of GAP and has been pushing this Christian nationalism, right?So I'm watching Greenblatt being interviewed by Andrea Mitchell, and he starts out by talking about how they're Christian nationalists.
And then he just without even explaining it, he just switches to using the term fascism.And then he switches to white supremacists and then finally Nazi sympathizers.
So he starts with here's some Christians getting organized politically and ends with they're basically Nazis.
Well, I mean, I would I'm I'm not even going to give the ADL the time of day if they you know, it's like getting interviewed by the corporate press.
Why would you take them seriously?You get on the interview and you say, you people are responsible.You have blood on your hands.You're the responsible for the wars.You've been cheerleaders for all the wars.
Why would you even, why would you show these people respect?
The same people who brought us the invasion of Iraq.I'm supposed to trust them.Yeah.
They're going to, they're going to call me pejoratives.Who have, who have I ever killed?Who have I ever heard?
Much blood is on my hands.Yeah.
Yeah Sorry, you know, that's like the whole thing with a with a lot of what Papa calls a lot of libertarians Who think that you have to be nice to these people?
No No, I don't know there's you know, and then they'll be more specific Why would we grant them the moral high ground because that's implicitly what they claim in those kind of rhetorical maneuvers, right that they have the moral high ground, but they don't and if you think they do you need more revisionist history to get your brain straightened out and
Right.Moving lightly to Schilling, I'll mention that we are started on a series on my channel, which is Radical Liberation, of course, on left-wing terror. And I'll tell ya, I had to recover for a little bit after the last episode.
I mean, the things that they don't tell you about.The last one was about the mass murder in the Vendee, sorry, in the Vendee by the French Revolution. just horrifying stuff that was done basically to Christians who were resistant to the revolution.
Christian commoners who were resistant to the revolution, just horrifying, cruel.But they didn't just put it down, they put it down with cruelty. with malice and torture.Yeah, yeah, yeah.Yeah.Just horrifying.
And we're going to be seeing much more of this as we go through the Bolshevik revolution and so forth.
So the inheritors of that tradition, you know, the ones who killed those people in the Vandy, the ones who forced Orthodox priests and nuns to Russian Orthodox priests and nuns to perform the Black Mass in the early Soviet Union.
They're going to they're going to put themselves up above me morally.I mean, come on.
It's not it's not happening.
I've talked a lot about the the Spanish Civil War and the sides on that.You know, you had the fascist side who just wanted to kill communists and you had the communists who wanted to torture and mutilate everyone they came across.
There wasn't a communist like, OK, I mean, we're talking about We're talking about priests, nuns, civilians, children, everyone.
Everyone.I remember watching a movie, a fairly modern movie about the Spanish Civil War.And I remember they show them killing a priest and then
it's portrayed sympathetically and they show them like explaining why they did it and everything, you know?So I was like, wow, there it is.
Like even to this day, they will happily show them doing this horrible stuff and show it in a sympathetic light because they're the same people.You know, it'll ideologically, right?
Any more showing you want to do?
Oh, just, um, I would say this about my show.I have a regular show.I have two things, three things, but two things. One is my regular weekly show on Thursdays on the Radical Liberation Channel.And we alternate.It's kind of a schizophrenic.
One week, we do current events and financial markets and stuff like that.But that's been amazing because I've got this Canadian called Black Horse who's been helping me.
And so we were able to explain why the ruble was not reduced to rubble, as Biden claimed it would be, and why, in fact, we expected it to do very well.We did that analysis within three weeks of the war starting.
and our analysis has completely been borne out.And we do this, like, every other week.We make points, and then later we're proven right, you know.
And then on the alternate weeks, we do, like what I said, right now we're doing a series on the left-wing terror.
We did a four-part series on the rise of the American empire, the road to empire, that started with the real reasons for the war between the states and ended with 1898 as the empire went international.
You know, so it's more, it's economic theory, it's political theory, it's history, stuff like that.
I like to surprise people, like with the Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, you know, that I was very proud of that episode, Peter, because academic agent himself, like I said, a real scholar, he said, I really learned something from that episode.
I had no idea, you know, so that's, those are my shining moments when I can really turn something over that's been forgotten.
And then the other thing I'll mention is that it's much more much less frequent But my wife and I who goes by mrs. Rad live on the channel Are doing stuff where we're dealing more with what do you call it, like family life and things like that.
We've done homeschooling.We talked about courtship.We talked about sex in our last episode.And so we're addressing things, I guess, on a more personal level.And my wife is wiser and kinder than me.
So I'm just glad to feature her and bring her insight on that.And so that's about once a month.And that's the Mrs. Radliff series.And I mention it because I think some people who would be like,
Economics and politics history what they would they might love the mrs. Radleb series, even if they don't like my weekly show So that hopefully there's something kind of for everybody Awesome.
Awesome.Well what a has really been pumping my My episodes with Thomas and I really appreciate that.Yeah, definitely It's been very interesting.
Yeah, I love hating Churchill even more than I did already and You know thomas is helping me on that.What is it?Um, you know give into your anger.It will give you power Yeah, i'm feeling it, you know All right, radley.
I appreciate it.Thank you Thank you I want to welcome everyone back to the pete quinones show.I'm here with oran mcintyre.How you doing oran?Hey pete.
Thanks for having me again Tell everybody a little bit about yourself if this is their first time hearing you
Sure.Sure.Uh, if you want to find my stuff, I have a YouTube channel, uh, or in McIntyre also Twitter, which is where most people know me.Uh, you can follow my Twitter account and then I have a Odyssey and rumble, uh, channels as well.
If you want to follow me on all tech and, and, uh, gab.So, uh, you can check out all my different things there.I mainly discuss, uh, political theory, uh, cultural, uh, events, that kind of thing.
And you've been on some, uh, pretty decent sized shows lately, haven't you?
Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's been kind of wild.It's been been over at the Blaze and just did Jesse Kelly's show.And I've got another one that's that's in the tank with it with another host.
So I don't know when they're releasing that one, but but we'll see.But yeah, no, it's it's been been pretty interesting right here lately.
Cool.Well, we are here to read chapter three of A's academic agent Nima Parvini. his book, The Populist Illusion, and I read Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 with Steven Carson, which was the introduction and Anga-Tanamaska.
Chapter 3 is gonna be, you're gonna be talking about Pareto and the circulation of the elites, and I'll tell everybody I've already recorded Chapter 4 with the author, Robert Michels, so they'll be hearing this one first, and then they'll hear Chapter 4, but like I did with Carson,
Just going to put it up on the screen, start reading it.And Orin has free reign to interrupt me at any time because we are going to comment on this.So ready?
Hey, folks, I'm John Rich.Just as wokeness and censorship have subverted the music industry, they've also crushed free expression on social media.
Censors have suspended social media users, canceled entire news channels, obliterated online discussion platforms and even banished a sitting American president from big tech platforms.
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Yep, absolutely.Oh, before we begin, I just want to say, like so many people who are probably involved in this and kind of surround this community, A.A.was one of those people that really helped me out when no one knew who I was.
He had me on his channel when, you know, I was getting maybe 800 views on my videos and I had like 2000 Twitter followers or something.So like many of us, you know, A.A.was a big, big help in making things happen.And I really appreciate it.
He's written an excellent book here.So happy to be involved in reading this.
Yeah, he's very generous and I mean, just I don't say enough nice about him.What you hear when he's on his streams, that's exactly who he is when he's off the stream.So.All right. So we've got, cool.
I think that's big enough for everyone to read along.So I'm gonna start.Chapter three, The Circulation of Elites.D'Alfredo Pareto published his mammoth four-volume Treatise on General Sociology in 1916.
It was translated into English and published as The Mind and Society in 1935 by the same editor, Arthur Livingstone, who brought out Moscow's The Ruling Class four years later.
Given the sheer size of this text, which runs to over 2,000 pages and 2 million words, I have relied on the abridged version, the Compendium of General Sociology, which Pareto approved.This version still runs to over 450 pages.
It was published in Italy in 1920 and finally received an English version in 1980.
However, for the sake of convenience and consistency, I have referenced the full version of The Mind and Society throughout because it is customary to refer to Pareto's numbered paragraphs, and these differ in the compendium.
Unlike Mosca, who rooted his analysis in history, Pareto devised an entire system of sociology driven by his recognition of the limitations of economics.
His goal was to describe what society is like and to discover some general laws in terms of which society operates without expressing any ideal of what society and government ought to be.
This marks a second contrast to Mosca whose analysis, as we saw in the last chapter, contained positive and morally normative elements such as the notion of juridical defense.
Pareto's analysis is wholly cast in the neutral and amoral mode of scientific analysis.
For our purposes, we are interested in his famous concept of the circulation of elites, but in order to understand this, it is necessary at least to have some knowledge of his entire sociological system.
I will first outline Pareto's concepts of sentiments, residues, and derivations before turning to his notion of the circulation of the elites.Anything you want to comment on?
Yeah, so a couple things there.First, for those who aren't familiar with reading Pareto, it is a daunting task, even in the abridged version.The 500 page miniature abridged volume is still rather large.
And it also, interesting thing about Pareto, he writes in formal logic a lot of times. So reading him is kind of like trying to solve word problems in the middle of your sociology.So it's a very interesting challenge.
But he's right that Pareto is very different because he actually dedicates a good chunk of a chapter to explaining in that book that basically you have to watch out for experts who are trying to like shape
a narrative about why we arise, or why certain phenomenons arise inside society.And he really does his best, as AA points out, to try to make it as neutral as possible.
I don't think true neutrality is possible, but he does his best to kind of basically assume brute facts about humanity. and then go from there rather than trying to infer why all these different impulses developed over time.
And I think that that's kind of what gives him a lot of the strength in his analysis is he's not trying to mold these things into a narrative.He's he's saying these are things that we can consistently observe about humanity and society across time.
Why do they keep showing up?What do they what do they drive?What behaviors do they drive?Not trying to, you know,
create some kind of narrative about why these different behaviors exist and what they mean about humanity's greater purpose or anything like that.
Okay, cool.Yeah, I have the 125 page hardcover, The Rise and Fall of the Elites.And yes, even that 125 pages is your, there are pages where you read them more than once.
All right.Pareto argued that most human action is non-logical, that is non-animated by conscious beliefs, but rather by instincts, which he called sentiments manifested as residues.It is introduction to the compendium, Joseph Lepriado,
provides a good summary of what this means.
Instead of saying that belief B is the cause of action A, it may be more informative, more theoretically fundamental, to hypothesize that both A and B are rooted in the third factor, X. The theory of residues is the result of Pareto's search for the human X.
Sentiments, then, are the ultimate determinant of human thought and action, X. They manifest in the real world as observable residues, A. But since humans also feel a need for logic, they post-talk rationalize these residues by generating arguments, B, which Pareto called derivations.
Pareto's thinking bears some resemblance to Adam Smith's theory of sentiments and David Hume's famous maxim that reason is and ought to be the only slave of the passions.
This insight has since been underlined by studies in modern psychology such as Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow or Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. Intuition comes first.
Reasoning follows as a justification for what one has already felt at a gut level.At a societal level, these justifications manifest as ideologies, theologies, doctrines of all sorts, and these specific manifestations are derivations.
However, the root of any given derivation will be a more general residue, which in turn has been generated by a sentiment. Humans seem to have a deeply felt need for a sense of purification, which is the sentiment.
Thus they have the general idea of purification, which is the residue.But any specific manifestation of this, such as the Christian ritual of baptism, for example, is a derivation.
So interestingly there, I read I came to Jonathan Haidt's work really late.I'd heard about it, of course.A lot of people, you know, talking about it.
I'd heard Jonathan Haidt talk about it many times, but I actually read the book until actually right after I read Pareto's book. And so I kind of also kind of drew that, you know, that connection.
I'd be interested in hearing from Haidt what he thinks about his overlap between his moral tastes and the idea of different residues.But another theory there that AA doesn't mention, but I think also fits in kind of that outlook, is Spangler.
Spengler has the different animating kind of metaphysical drives of civilizations.
And I think, you know, he and Spengler also talks about how reason and kind of the scribes come at the end of the civilization and they explain the thing that has already happened.
They kind of write down and put into, set into stone the thing that was once alive and happening.They're simply recording kind of the end of the animating spirit rather than explaining what drove it to begin with.
And so I think that's another case where you have another guy who came at it from a slightly different direction, but came to very similar conclusion about kind of the connection between the things that actually drive human behavior and reason kind of being post hoc after that.
Proto lists over 40 residues, which correspond to about 20 sentiments.He then groups these residues into six classes.This classification takes up the entirety of volume 2 of the full treatise, which is mostly cut out of the compendium.
Most accounts only consider the first two, but in the interest of providing a glimpse of a fuller picture, let us list all six of them.Class 1, instinct for combinations.Class 2, persistence of aggregates.
Class 3, need for expressing sentiments by external acts.Class 4, residues connected with society. How the hell do you pronounce that word?
ALICE Yeah, sociality, probably?
JUSTIN Sociality?Yeah.ALICE That would be my guess.JUSTIN Yeah.Class 5, integrity of the individual and his appre- and his appretent- appre-tenances.What the hell?
ALICE I'm gonna help you with that one.JUSTIN Yeah, I'm sorry, yeah.
Class 6, the sex residue. None of these classes are mutually exclusive, and all people will possess the residues they comprise, but in varying degrees of strength.Under each class, Pareto lists specific residues.
Since Class I and II are the only ones relevant to his analysis of the elites, a summary of them by Lopriado will suffice.
The combinations, class 1, are responsible for bringing about new ideas, new cognitive and moral systems, new technologies, new social and cultural forms, and so forth.They are, in short, the endogenous factors of sociocultural evolution.
The persistences, class 2, are the judge in the final instance of what shall be programmed into the social order.
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frugal in their economic habits, inclined toward the use of force and confrontation in political matters, adept at deferring gratification.Conversely, persons strung in combinations, class one, are cultural relativists.
They value change as an end itself.They are hedonistic, rationalistic, individualistic, dedicated to spending and entrepreneurship.They are also inclined towards ruse, deception, and diplomacy in political matters.
So these are the two classes that I obviously, like you said, these are the ones that matter most for kind of political analysis, even though there's a far more complicated and deep version of this in the actual the mind and society.
But I usually just default to Machiavelli's description of these which is the lion and the fox, just because that's easier for for people to grasp in general, but this is a really important concept it's really essential to understand kind of the different ways that were ruled and why we see kind of this tension between
you know, the craftiness of the class ones, the foxes, and kind of the stalwartness and conservativeness of the class twos, the lions, and why our society looks so much the way it does is because we are currently dominated by foxes.
This is why all of the by stealing their bank accounts rather than really sending police to go hit them with truncheons, right?Like there's some police involved, but the big mechanisms, it's all sleight of hand.
It's all financial manipulation and cultural manipulation, very little direct force in the majority of kind of Western countries under the rule of these class one residues.
These two forces, which we might easily recognize today as liberal and conservative, combine to create a social equilibrium.If class two predominates, the rate of innovation and change slows.If class one predominates, it speeds up.
However, I would exercise caution in using class one and class two as proxies for liberal and conservative or left and right, because in any given society, the class two types could be maintaining the persistence of liberal values
or indeed the class one types, could be agitating for a radical change towards conservative values.A man like Joseph Stalin, one of the most famous communists in history, identifiably had stronger class two tendencies.Do you agree with that?
Yeah, no, I think he's right to be careful with just assigning them liberal and conservative.We'll see.He'll get a little more into into why here.But I think that's a big mistake that can easily be made there.
Obviously, the combinations and openness of a class one will make you think more liberal and in kind of today's society.But I don't think that's always the case.OK.
Nonetheless, given the dynamic of the relationship between classes 1 and 2, we might recognize over time a certain ratcheting effect whereby class 2 continually institute the ideas of class 1, programming them into the social order, such that history would trend in a class 1 direction.
This may well have been what Curtis Yarvin had in mind when he said that Cthulhu may swim slowly, but he always swims left.
However, again, I should caution against seeing Class I and II in terms of left and right since, in a given set of circumstances, Class I tendencies could pull in a right-wing direction.
In any case, the terms left and right are rendered somewhat meaningless by elite theory. Besides, you want to say something?
I was just going to say right there, I think he again is largely correct.I would take a small issue with the characterization of kind of Cthulhu swims left there.He's partially right in that ratchet effect.I think that's true.
That's part of how the dialectic works.But I think there's also the issue of a big focus of that specifically is with democracy. Especially that becomes very clear in in Land's Dark Enlightenment when he discusses the topic.
So I think that the class one class two interaction is kind is is to some extent part of Cthulhu swimming left.But I think there's also a larger issue with the mechanism of democracy.
But obviously he's you know, that that one sentence is not going to explain all of that.OK.
Besides, Pareto rejected the idea that history had a direction or shape as such.
He was extremely critical of cyclical theorists like Plato's and Vico's, and argued that history does not repeat itself, but rather there are certain underlying forces, the residues, that are constantly at work in wave-like fashion.
At the same time, he maintained that there were no linear rules of social evolution.Instead, one encounters ceaseless fluctuations and eternal return of periodic oscillations.He also rejected any theory of progress, quoting,
Once experience is admitted, it matters little how, within the theological edifice, the ladder begins to crumble.Such portion of it, of course, as stands within the experimental domain, for the other wings are safe from any attack by experience.
So years, centuries go by, peoples, governments, manners, and systems of living pass away, and all along new theologies, new systems of metaphysics keep replacing the old, and each new one is reputed more true or much better than its predecessors.
And in certain cases, they may really be better, if by better we mean more helpful to society, but more true, no, if by the term we mean accord with experimental reality.
One faith cannot be more scientific than another, and experimental reality is equally overreached by polytheism, Islamism, and Christianity, whether Catholic, Protestant, liberal, modernist, or any other variety, by the innumerable metaphysical sects, including the Kantian, the Hegelian,
the Bergsonian, and not excluding the positivistic sects of Comte and Spencer and other eminent writers too numerous to mention, by the faiths of solidarists, humanitarians, anti-clericals, and worshippers of progress, and by as many faiths as have existed, exist, or can be imagined.
Unlike Mosca who admitted that historical change was driven by some combination of material changes, technological changes, and the influence of new ideas, Pareto's system reduces such changes to second-order effects of the primary real cause of change, residues driven by underlying instinctual sentiments.
Historical change has no direct, no direction or purpose.It does not repeat.It has no shape.It simply convulses in response to those deeply felt non-logical human needs.
So the interesting thing here is that, you know, it seems like Pareto and AA is kind of explaining that Pareto basically treats all these other, you know, things like technological advances or new ideas
as just kind of a substrate that's placed over the interactions of kind of the different residues and the different passions that the society has.
So it's very interesting that shatters all left-wing and many right-wing kind of versions of the understanding of history and progress, to be sure.
Pareto then characterizes derivations into four main classes.Class 1.Assertion.Simply maxims constantly repeated to become accepted truths.Class 2.Authority.Whether an individual, a group of individuals, a deity, or tradition. Class 3.
Accords with sentiment or principles.Sentiments converted into abstractions and declarations of universal laws.Very similar to Moscow's political formulas.Class 4.Verbal proofs.
Logical sophistry designed to affirm sentiments with which the speaker and listener already agree. His analysis of these four classes of derivations take up most of volume three of The Mind and Society.
Pareto takes his value-free analysis to a logical extreme point in this section and essentially concludes that all moral philosophies in human history have been a form of delusion designed to justify the more instinctual residues.
We have already glimpsed in his rejection of theories of history an almost nihilistic tendency in Pareto to dismiss all ideas as being meaningless second-order effects which have no other effect than to justify what humans already feel.
This is a radically skeptical position that many people instinctually seek to reject.
But Pareto would predict this reaction because humans have a deeply felt sentiment to believe in certain theories that are experimentally false, but which nonetheless have a social unity.
Quoting, so great is the need of such things which human beings feel that if one structure happens to collapse, another is straightway reared of the same material.
Since society cannot do without the thing A, some of the defenders of the old faith P will merely replace it with a new faith Q, no less discordant with experience.
There's so much truth in that, especially when you look back at the history of like, um, sex of Christianity and sex that have fallen away.And I mean, and then splinters all sorts of splinters.
Yeah, it's certainly, like you said, a very pessimistic view of ideas.I think that one thing to be careful of here is just that simply because something is necessary does not make it untrue, right?And that is a trap to fall into.
It's like, well, because that's the very
a trap that Pareto warns against, and again in his chapter leading up to things, is not to look at the necessity of something or look at the way you want a narrative to fit together and then let it kind of fall, you know, let it lead you to your conclusions about something.
So just something to keep in mind when you're looking at that.
Hey folks, I'm John Rich.Just as wokeness and censorship have subverted the music industry, they've also crushed free expression on social media.
Censors have suspended social media users, canceled entire news channels, obliterated online discussion platforms, and even banished a sitting American president from big tech platforms.
Well, I'm here to say there's a place for you, a place where patriots can speak freely without fearing some unknown, unseen speech enforcer that wants to shut you down.
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But it is that quote of his does show.Society in a nutshell, and it does point to
fear, weakness, and superstition, a lot of the things in history that, a lot of the human condition that leads people to want rulers, need authority, need a hierarchy, which I think are all natural anyway, but it is something that actually, I guess that's their justification.
Yeah, I think it's absolutely true that the human condition is real, right?It's very much the case.There are certain things that you cannot escape.
And oftentimes, as he's pointing out here, our idea of progress is simply the rearranging and of justifications for kind of those needs.
which is a lot of what AA does here as he strips away the populist illusion, right, as he's showing these different things that we want to be true so that they kind of obfuscate the human condition that's kind of still operating behind the scenes.
Truth value and social utility do not necessarily coincide.Since most of us have some positive belief in a faith, doctrine, or political formula, to use Mosca's phrase, we will not wish to admit that we
that what we believe are simply delusions or beautiful lies.One thing surely no one can deny, however, is that in the absence of an old faith, the void will be filled by new ones.
Recent experience has shown us that Christianity gave way to rationalism, which gave way to positivism, and finally to scientism.Feudalism gave way to liberalism, which gave way to socialism and notions of social justice.
Divine right gave way to parliament, parliamentarism and democracy and so on.In Pareto's eyes, there is no difference at all between belief in a classless society and the belief in angels and devils.
The end purpose is different, but not the nature of the belief, not the method of argumentation.
All that the various arguments and justifications for what are always in the final analysis, non-logical faiths, show is that human beings have an inclination toward rationality, not the fact of being rational.
Pareto maintains that while this is objectively true, humans will never admit it of themselves.
One might object that knowledge of this fact has no use in terms of making society better for us, but let us recall that Pareto, again unlike Mosca, did not wish to give any positive prescriptions on what ought to be whatsoever.
The true Machiavellian considers only what is. His project amounts to saying you may not like it, but this is what human beings are when stripped of all ideological baggage.Do with that knowledge what you will.
This is another time where I think Spengler serves as an interesting counterpoint to Pareto, because Spengler also observes that kind of the metaphysical explanation has to be replaced.Right.But he thinks it happens inside great civilizations.
and that they kind of live through this lifespan, they go through this morphological cycle and then kind of die.
So rather than saying that each one is a succession of replacements, he says that this is kind of the metaphysical animating spirit petering out, which is why we see most of these things begin in myth, and then move into kind of this expansive phase.
But then as the civilizations kind of come to what we might think of as their high point, but Spengler really sees this kind of their end point where they start building the great cities and kind of becoming very calcified and rigid.
He says that this is where we see the metaphysical justification shift to rational justifications.And they often keep similar values.They keep kind of the same structure of values roughly, but they discard the metaphysical aspect.
And this kind of brings people into kind of this final rational stage where they become too constricted by fact, too constricted by rationality.And eventually they try to break out of that by returning back to religiosity.
So I think, again, it's an interesting thing that they're both observing kind of a process, but have different understandings of how societies go through it and kind of what the continuity of that process is.
Yeah.Thinking about the last few years.Yes.
Well, that's the that's the amazing thing about Spengler is he specifically predicts the abandonment of science by the West.And he says the way that you'll abandon science is that your greatest minds will simply stop investing in science.
We think of science as something that like once you figured it out, once you've learned about it, it's like solved.Right.And it's there for all time.But he says, actually, science is just a culture artifact.
And if people stop practicing it, and they start stop having the skills that are necessarily cultivated to have, you know, these, this kind of highly rigid rationalism, that eventually just fades away.
And so I think that that's an interesting, again, kind of kind of counter thing to juxtapose with Pareto's approach.
However, this opens the door to the most common criticism of Pareto by scholars of all stripes, namely, how can he escape his own system?H. Stuart Hughes accuses him of certain arbitrariness.
Tom Bottomore says he makes no attempt to show the residues on which he places so much emphasis actually exist. Now, AA told me how to pronounce this guy's name, because apparently this guy's Welsh, and it's like Geront.
I mean, I thought I was pronouncing Hebrew.It's like Geront Perry argues that Pareto offers no satisfactory reasons for accepting his view that residues as the constants are more significant historically than the ideologies they give rise to.
Richard Bellamy contends that far from providing a neutral description of human behavior, Pareto merely endowed his own ideological leanings with a spurious scientific status. These criticisms cannot go unaddressed here.
First, the methodological objections are valid, but as I have already noted, studies in modern psychology have provided much empirical evidence for Pareto's claims.
Many behavioral and evolutionary scholars have accepted the view that intuition comes first and reasoning follows.Second, the wider point that Pareto's work is in some sense the product of his own residues
is often predicated on the fact that Pareto died having apparent sympathies for fascism and justified his preference for the use of force or violence.The extent of Pareto's actual support for fascism is widely disputed.
It seems to me partly a product of motivated Moscow scholars who sought to make a comparison which cast Pareto in an unfavorable light.
Such debates are quite beyond my scope here, but the idea that Pareto's justification of human violence was somehow morally normative and a preference rather than a simple statement of a constant fact of history relies itself on a morally normative view that pieces the norm in constant from what violence diverges and must be justified.
Surely the fact that humans are prone to the use of force and violence is non-controversial. Third, there is the more penetrating critique that his argument is self-refuting, namely that his whole edifice is simply what he already feels.
This would not refute the correctness or validity of Pareto's project, since if the theory of the sentiments and residues is true, then the fruits of Pareto's own instinctual feelings simply tell us profound truths about human nature itself in the manner that one might expect of, say, a William Shakespeare.
In other words, that the ideas may have their root in some non-logical aspect of Pareto's thinking and feeling is not significant.Pareto does not say that all derivations based on residues and sentiments are delusional.
He says it is delusional to believe that there might be derivations that are somehow not rooted in residues and sentiments.
since almost all other derivations, i.e., all those other than his, do not acknowledge this fact, they are therefore delusional.
However, even with these caveats, I am not sure that Pareto can escape the charge that his absolute adherence to this view itself amounts to a faith position.
Yeah, and I think all three of those are really fair, because like you said, the first part about, you know, the methodological sense, I think, again, sorry, I'm just going to keep, you know, throwing Spengler in here.
But this is the same charge you see with him as well.It's like, well, you're just asserting these things.And to be fair, I think that's that's kind of refreshing.I think that's actually often necessary to truly escape
you know, to kind of escape a rigid structure, especially an academic structure, you have to be willing to kind of assert those things and move forward with your theory.
As much as everyone, including maybe AA, might hate it, sociology, politics, these are not sciences.
We can apply the tools of science as much as we like, and they might be very useful up to a point, but it's a fool's error to treat them as hard sciences.They aren't.Which is both Pareto's strength and his weakness.He is himself trying to do that.
Second, yes, I think any any attempt to smear Pareto's theory simply by saying, well, he likes violence or something.That's kind of immaterial to the point, right?Either the thing he's saying is true or isn't.
And as A points out, it's very clear that beyond Pareto's background or whatever, wherever his sympathies might have lied,
It's very clear that the use of violence is pretty central to human existence and political structures and has been pretty much from the beginning of time up until now as much as people like to pretend otherwise.
So I don't think that holds any water.
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And then, but I do think that it is fair of him then in the third point to agree, though, that at the end, it's kind of hard for Pareto to escape kind of his own conclusions, asserting that he might just be a motive himself.
This is kind of always the danger of kind of that purely cynical kind of viewpoint, because at the end of the day, you're saying, well, the things I my rationality is also subject to these forces and could be just as arbitrary.
You have to be saying that in order to be consistent.
And then, of course, it's just the. the ad hominem kind of thing.Oh, well, he was he had sympathies to fascism.
And it's like, well, that's just that just has to be passed on, because in that case, you can just look through everyone's personal life and find something to dismiss them by.
I mean, at this point, if you're to the right of Mao, then, you know, some kind of sympathies with fascism, right?That's basically the current line.I understand historically that's maybe a little more fair of Pareto, but yeah.
Now that we have some idea of the core of Pareto's thinking, let us come back to the circulation of elites.Recall the class I and II residues outlined above.
Pareto maintained that changes in history were chiefly down to alternations within the proportions of class I and class II residues among the elites.In one of his most famous and most quoted phrases, history is a graveyard of aristocracies.
Class I residues correspond to Machiavelli's foxes.Class II residues correspond to Machiavelli's lions.
Foxes are adept at manipulation and manufacturing consent, specialists on persuasion, while lions are adept at the use of force and specialists on coercion.
Although he does not refer to them specifically, Pareto seems to take for granted Moscow's arguments that the rulers, the ruled, and the minority organization, always and everywhere, overcome the disorganized masses.
He also maintains a distinction between the higher and lower strata of the ruling class, which he calls governing elite and non-governing elite.
Still, however, it is the underlying residues that drive change, while arguments generated by elites are ephemera, post-hoc rationalizations that do not affect the outcome of anything.
Quoting, in politics, all ruling classes have at all times identified their own interests with the interests of the country.I'm going to say that again.
In politics, all ruling classes have at all times identified their own interests with the interests of the country.
When politicians are afraid of a too rapid increase in the number of proletarians, they are for birth control and show that Malthusianism is to the interest of public and country.
If, instead, they are afraid a population may prove inadequate for their designs, they are against birth control and show just as conclusively that their interest is the interest of public and country.
And all that is accepted as long as residues remain favorable. The situation changes as residues change, never in view of arguments pro or contra.You got anything you want me to keep going?
No, it's just that that is very essential to understand.And this is why I think it's so important when we talk about kind of how to fix one of the big problems we're in is the need to align the interests of elites with the good of the people.
The problem that, as you know, points out all throughout this book is with the populist illusion is the idea that at some point it will be the will of the people that rules.
and we will have people in charge who will adopt the ideas of the people and the values of the people, and that's kind of what will drive society.But of course, that never happens.
And so what you want is instead of what we have now, which is kind of this deracinated globalist elite that don't care about the individual particular good of any group of people, but can draw power from any
from kind of any of their subjects across cultures and borders and tribes.Instead, you want leaders who are oriented on the good of a specific group, because that is the people from whom their power actually derives.
We're never going to escape the need for rulers.We're never going to escape the existence of elites.What we want is our elites that are directly tied to the good of the people, because the people's good is what generates additional power for them.
The character of society Pareto holds is above all the character of its elite.Its accomplishments are the accomplishments of its elites.Its history is properly understood as the history of its elite.
Successful predictions about the future are based upon evidence drawn from the study of the composition and structure of its elite. At any given time, the composition of elites will shift more towards foxes or to lions.
The cunning foxes retain power for some time by their cleverness in forming and reforming coalitions, but force is also essential in the exercise of government.
Eventually, the more forceful counter-elite of lions, willing to use coercion and violence, capture power from the faint-hearted foxes and impose order and discipline.
In time, however, the intellectual incompetence and inflexibility of the lions leads to their gradual decline and infiltration by the more imaginative foxes.
While both Class I and Class II residues predominate among elites, the non-elite, which is to say the ruled, are always overwhelmingly of the Class II type.
Thus, if class one dominates for too long, and especially if they have become enraptured with doctrines of universal humanitarianism, a counter-elite will form from the non-elite, one way or the other, which includes violent revolution.
Let us dwell briefly on this final point Pareto returns to it himself later in The Mind and Society.In what follows when Pareto says the subject class, he means the ruled majority, quoting, As regards to subject class, we get the following relations.
When the subject class contains a number of individuals disposed to use force and with capable leaders to guide them, the governing class is, in many cases, overthrown and another takes its place.
That is easily the case where governing classes are inspired by humanitarian sentiments primarily, and very easily if they do not find ways to assimilate the exceptional individuals who come to the front in the subject classes.
A humanitarian aristocracy that is closed or stiffly exclusive represents the maximum of insecurity.
It is, two, it is far more difficult to overthrow a governing class that is adept in the shrewd use of chicanery, fraud, corruption, and in the highest degree, difficult to overthrow such a class when it successfully assimilates most of the individuals in the subject class who show those same talents, are adept in those same arts, and might therefore become the leaders of such plebeians as are disposed to use violence.
thus left without leadership, without talent, disorganized, the subject class is almost always powerless to set up any lasting regime.Three, so the combination residues, class one, become to some extent enfeebled in the subject class.
So I think we can actually see this with the function of universities, particularly in America.
right, the function of universities is basically to glean high IQ people out of kind of your middle America and pull them into urban centers to kind of serve the structures of the ruling class.
And this ensures that they're not sitting around in the middle of Iowa, figuring out how to like, you know,
create power for themselves, right, because all the status and all the money, all the material rewards are concentrated in kind of these elite boot camps that we call universities.And so we can see that a good
elite is integrating a lot of these people, like he says here, to make sure that their power is not challenged.
But if you create a scenario, like we're seeing now, where many people who otherwise would have been assimilated into the ruling class by this mechanism are being selected out because people are being selected for, say,
loyalty or maybe having a particular trait, you know, that the university is preferring, then instead those people are left to kind of smolder.And guess what?
They start thinking about things like, how can I build alternative institutions or other ways to kind of secure an entry into the ruling class or create a new ruling class?
Here, Pareto's analysis bears many similarities with Mosca's in terms of the fact that the elite are constantly replenished by exceptional individuals from the lower classes and risk overthrow if they are too exclusive.
However, if foxes manage to create a situation where the elite hover up all the foxes in a society, the lions will find it difficult to organize.
One might argue that this was the case in the liberal democracies of the USA and Europe since 1945, in which foxes have overwhelmingly predominated in the elite and the non-governing elite has greatly expanded to encompass practically all of the class one type individuals in society.
Only recently have we seen the elites of Western nations starting to deliberately exclude exceptional Class I type individuals from its ranks in the name of its humanitarian doctrines.
If Pareto is correct, this would suggest a shift back to a predominance of lions in the coming years once there is a critical mass of excluded Class I types to lead them.
However, as in Moscow, this process is seen from afar in Pareto, and it would be up to Robert Michels, whom we will consider in the next chapter, to bring the analysis down to the level of individual organization.
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Pareto's The Mind and Society, even taken in an abridged form, remains a formidable challenge for any reader today.Monstrous remains an apt description.We do not have to accept his entire sociology to see the value in his insights.
For example, it strikes me that in his zeal to strip down his own worldview of any metaphysical content, Pareto too readily dismissed ideologies as second-order effects and seems to overlook their tremendous animating spirit.
On this score, Mosca, less wedded to the totality of a system, was a much shrewder observer of history.
Myths are not simply beautiful lies used to hoodwink the masses, but also extremely powerful motivators of human action, which Pareto reduces to be minor or, for the most part, indirect.
Even in the most charitable interpretation, where the power of myth to motivate is admitted but then attributed to the strength of an underlying sentiment, Pareto must still explain a way war is fought over clashes of belief to some other cause.
Still, he has the insight that humans have a deep need for such myths, that there will never be a time
when they are not generated, but they are justified because humans also have a need for rationalization, and at the same time, because they are simply needs, what is generated and justified is seldom, if ever, rational.
This we can accept without denying myths as a major causal factor in historical change.
While we may quibble about primary causal factors, the fundamental notion of the circulation of elites, the categories of foxes and lions, and idea of elite composition, including the exclusivity or inclusivity of that elite, remains of great value to the student of politics and history.
Yeah, here at the end we see a brings in a lot of the kind of criticism that I was I was kind of pointing to with Pareto where he kind of the the need for that all encompassing system that grand unifying theory can kind of.
cause him to be a little blind or to be a little dismissive of forces that aren't going to fit directly kind of into his worldview.And so that's kind of why I think, you know, Mosca says in particular that
political formulas, it's kind of essential, especially early on, that the elites believe in them in a kind of fundamental way, that they share a true belief in them, that their power actually comes from the fact that they aren't wholly cynical formulas.
They can become that over time, especially as the elites, especially our foxes, learn to manipulate them. right?
They learn to maximize and minimize different aspects of that political formula to generate the outcomes they want, but they never really see the cost that's going to follow, right?
Because they don't truly believe or they don't truly see the value in them.That's why the lions are the stalwart defenders, right?That's why they're the more naturally patriotic.
They're less willing to compromise the story, the political formula for the sake of political expediency. as where foxes are willing to do that on a very regular basis.
And so I think Musk is right that as especially we see the foxes twist and turn and pull those political formulas in different directions for expediency and advantage, we see those things quickly start to break down.
And so that's another danger of the rule by foxes.
Can you give an analysis using foxes and lions of what you see today?
Sure.Like I said, I think it's pretty much all around us.Again, we can see this in the way that so many of our Western governments are now dealing with kind of opposition to the regime.Like we said, with in Canada with the trucker incident.
We see that it's not sending in a bunch of troops.You're not having a big conflict physically.It's manipulation of financial systems.It's manipulation of the social system.We ban people.We ostracize them.
That's actually a really interesting thing that people have a problem with kind of noticing the totalitarianism that creeps in to our Western systems is because our totalitarianism is soft because it's the totalitarianism of foxes.
They say, well, no one's in a gulag yet, right?Like no one's being put into a train car.So no, we don't have that.It's all voluntary.And this is why so often people of the libertarian persuasion are kind of weak to this argument, right?
They fall for this argument because they say, well, look, if the coercive force of the government isn't being used, then there is no totalitarianism.But of course, if we're ruled by foxes, we shouldn't expect the coercive force of the government.
we should expect these manipulations, and we should expect the clever ability to move across things like the public-private distinction, which are kind of a construct that sounds good in theory and sounds like a good justification for our own system, but actually, when we look in reality, doesn't really provide the barrier to power that we want it to, that many people who kind of came up on the liberal system expect it to.
And so we can see that the foxes are very hesitant to actually use physical force.And we can see why, right?Because who are the foxes putting in positions that were once filled with lions?They're doing leninism, right?
They're replacing it with nothing but these people who are wholly on board with the regime, whose power and status is entirely tied to their loyalty to the regime.And that's great.
if what you're trying to do is control every aspect of society, every force in society.But it's terrible if you plan to actually ever use these forces, because now your police forces and your military are full of sycophants.
They're not full of people who are good at fighting wars or policing the people. they can't actually physically apply the force necessary.And so that's why we see them hesitant to apply it.
And it's also that we see when they do apply this force, it's ugly, right?It's sloppy, it's ineffective, they have to use more of it, and it's poorly targeted.We see them doing things like
you know, threatening to target, you know, parents who are protesting at school board meetings, right?Because it's just, it's clumsy.They don't know how to really apply these kinds of things correctly.
They're so incapable and so out of practice with applying force, and the people they put in positions to apply force are so inept at doing so, that they can't use it when it would otherwise be, you know, kind of be the right thing to do.
And so I think that's why we're going to continue to see things head the direction they're heading, because we just don't have people, we don't have any lions in our government.We don't have any people who are competent
with force or the application of it, they don't understand its ramifications when it is applied, and they're willing to kind of sub, to trade away the functionality of their police forces and their armed forces for the, you know, political, again, the short-term political advantages that they get by manipulating certain parts of the political formula.
Does that point to basically what happened in 2020 where they allow violence in the streets as long as it's violence by people who would be on there? doing their bidding.
I mean, even Ted Kaczynski had a 2005 article called The System's Neatest Trick, where he talked about how the system would use these people.
I mean, basically predicts Antifa in it and saying that, and he almost anthropomorphizes everything in doing it, even the state where he's saying like a person is actually using these people as they're like foot soldiers, as they're
But to me, it doesn't seem like that points more towards a group that would not want to appear to be heavy handed by sending their own uniformed troops out there.
We'll just let these people who are actually wearing a uniform, but they're seen as heroes to some in my former group.
Yeah, there's a couple different aspects of that.So the last part that you pointed out is exactly correct, right?These people have built their ruling myth on the idea that they don't apply force, right?
The myth of liberalism is that there is no force. government compulsion.There is no monopoly on violence that justifies the rule of the government.It's all soft power, right?
And so when the force needs to be applied, it sure is helpful if the people applying it are not directly attached to the ruling class, right?If you can provide some layer of deniability, again,
that public-private distinction doing all the work, right?And so as long as these people aren't, you know, they haven't been deputized by the government, they don't have an official badge or a seal or anything, then they're not agents of the state.
And so therefore, their application of violence doesn't shatter the ruling myth the same way.But I think it's also a big part of San Francisco's anarcho-tyranny, right?Because the
One of the big aspects of anarcho-tyranny is the state has lost the ability to police many groups, right?
The state has, and especially in America, we've traded the ability to police certain groups in certain neighborhoods for kind of political advantage.And so now those groups can no longer be policed, they can only be directed. right?
You can only aim them as a weapon towards your political opponents.And this is how mob violence always works, right?This is why it's always dangerous, because you always start in charge of the mob, but eventually you always end up chasing it.
And so the government can no longer apply the rules to everyone. So it only applies the rules to its political opponents.
So in some ways, it has to allow this mob violence, even though it is also politically useful, because it becomes kind of this blow off valve where they can kind of aim the people they can no longer control at the people that they would like to see, you know, kind of put in their place.
What do you see coming for?What do you see the Lions doing?What's your prediction of how the Lions fight back against this?
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Well, Pareto is pretty explicit on how he thinks that elites will rotate.He will see the circulation of elites when kind of tanks are in Harvard Yard.He pretty much says that's exactly how it has to happen eventually.
The people can no longer the rule of the foxes breaks down the ability of the foxes to keep opposition out falls apart we see their ability to actually operate society kind of comes apart the seams because people no longer.
are following all the incentives that they've laid out through their soft power, and eventually lions come back into control because they're the only ones that kind of break through this system of soft manipulation.
So for Pareto, that is how the elites will circulate in a scenario like our own.It's not the only way that elites circulate, but it's the one he predicts in situations like ours.
Great, well, I really appreciate your time.Remind everybody where they can find you.
Yeah, again, you can find me on YouTube and Twitter, Oren McIntyre, Odyssey.Oh, also my Substack.I didn't mention the Substack.I've been slowly releasing book chapters over there.
And also I do different periodically, I do different articles and all of my podcasts and things.The audio only version is there for people who want to listen to it when they're, you know, working out or mowing the lawn or whatever.
So you can find all that on my Substack, Oren McIntyre as well.
I appreciate it, Oren.Thank you very much.
No, absolutely, man.Thanks for having me.
I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Quinonez Show.I am here with Academic Agent.How are you doing, AA?
I'm very good.Thanks for having me, Pete.And also, thank you very much for doing this whole series.I feel very honored that you're taking the time to read my book.
I think it's a very important book and also, as a content creator, I want my fellow content creators to make money.So if we can sell some books, that'd be great too.I mean, I think that this is a vital read, especially in 2022.
I think you did amazing work with this.Let's just start off with this and tell people this is part two, because we already tried recording and something went wrong.So what was your point in writing the book?
Uh, well, really it was to, uh, slay the populist illusion as the title says.Um, because when, if you remember back in the, back in the halcyon days of 2016, 2017, there used to be this line that used to go around.
Oh, if only you could red pill enough people, they'll come a tipping point and then like, we'll be unstoppable.Just not true.Not even playing the right game. basically.
So I wanted to basically ensure that people actually know what the right game to play is in the first place, which is the game of organized minority elites, not the game of marches and getting hundreds of thousands of likes on Twitter or being the ... All of those things are
things that play into this bottom-up myth of history that the liberal order likes to tell itself.So I wanted to correct that.
Well, I think it does a really good job of explaining that.
So, um, what we're going to do is we've already, I've already done one and two, read one and two with Steven Carson, Radical Liberation, part three with, uh, chapter three with Oren McIntyre.Uh, we're going to do chapter four on Robert Michels.
Uh, can you give a little explanation and introduction to Robert?
I'll just say very quickly that if this is the first time you're tuning into Pete's series here, I recommend stopping this now and going back to listen to the first two episodes with Radlib and Phil Collins himself there, because Michels takes the teachings of Mosca and Pareto as a given, and he doesn't really take any time to explain them in political parties.
He just assumes that you know what they are. And I do as well, because it's chapter four.
So I'm assuming that the person has already built up this knowledge, so that parts of this won't make sense unless you've consumed those first couple of chapters.
Alright, well I'm going to jump right in, since we've already done about 20 minutes that went into the ether.Chapter 4, The Iron Law of Oligarchy and Organizational Structure.
Robert Michels published Political Parties in 1911, which was translated into English in 1915.
He also had personal and professional relationships with both Pareto and Mosca, which forms the actual, as well as theoretical, link between the three thinkers for them to be classed as the Italian school of elitism.
He knew Pareto from his time in Paris, and through correspondence about George Sorrel,
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for whom they had held a mutual admiration.Michels knew Mosca from his time in Turin, where he studied and taught in the first decade of the 1900s.
In fact, Mosca seems to have taken Michels, 18 years his junior, under his wing, to the extent that he was described as a mentor-like figure to him.Michels had even been described straightforwardly as Mosca's pupil or Mosca's disciple.
It is well known that Moscow and Pareto did not like each other The chief source of the animosity is that Moscow believed he should have been recognized as the originator of the theory of the elites Which Pareto did not acknowledge.
Yeah, sorry, sorry to interrupt you Pete but One of the little times I chuckled to myself while researching this book was seeing the history of the animosity between Moscow and Pareto because I There's nothing more fun than scholarly fisticuffs.
And Moscow was just furious that Pareto wouldn't acknowledge him as the originator of elite theory.And Pareto just shrugged and said, what?The rule isn't the rule.Everybody knows that.What you on about, mate?On your bike.
And then he childishly took out all the footnotes to Moscow. So he, he didn't just not acknowledge him.He, you know, got rid of him from all the footnotes.So this, this started quite a bitter, bitter feud between the two of them.
Um, so yeah, I found that quite amusing when I was, uh, you know, some things never change.Of course, people always want, uh, people always want credit for things.
There's a, there's a guy who I used to be friendly with, uh, who I think you've on the show, Pete. When I started saying culture is downstream from law, he wanted credit for it.
It's just kind of funny that the original elite theorists had this sort of beef as well.
Therefore, to come to be regarded by both as a kind of disciple was no mean feat. Michels found himself in a difficult position when he tried to give credit to both men, whom he liked and respected as intellectual mentors.
Perhaps because he acknowledged his intellectual debts, Michels has often been seen as a considerable synthesizer of the ideas of others, and as the least original of the trio of the neo-Machiavellians.
In truth, originality is not and should not be seen as a criteria by which to judge elite theorists, but rather the degree to which their works describe reality.
In any case, in putting forward a detailed mechanism through which law operates, Michels does make an important advance on the work of Mosca and Pareto.
Yeah, I just think it's worth emphasizing that novelty, originality, you know, innovation, these aren't necessarily like great things when it comes to political theory or any sort of theory.
And, but yet they have great purchase on the left, because the left is all about trying to imagine some utopian world that's never existed.We, on our side of things, are about describing reality.
So really, if you're quote unquote derivative, or you're saying something that somebody else has recognized, that's not a problem.
That actually means you're on target, that somebody else has seen the same thing that you have seen, some aspect of reality that maybe they've come to independently.
So I think that's something worth bearing in mind, because we take this concept of originality, but it's one of the many insidious ways that leftist assumptions creep into the way that we think.
It's actually a good thing if people in the past have recognized what you have recognized, because it means it's true.
All right, I'm going to move forward.In political parties, Robert Mischel's largely takes for granted the lessons of Moscow and Pareto, especially as they pertain to the impossibility of democracy.
For the will of the people is not transferable, nor even the will of the single individual, argues Mischel's, drawing on Moscow directly.In actual fact, directly, sick, the election is finished.The power of the mass over the delegate comes to an end.
Hence not only is direct democracy impossible, but also representative democracy is necessarily a fiction and all the republicans start crying um Yeah, I mean, I mean we're currently living through in this country a direct example of that because the tory party Uh were elected Under boris johnson if you remember on a mandate to do all sorts of things They got into power.
They did absolutely none of it the regime has stitched up the so-called people's favorite, Boris Johnson, who was no good if you ask me, but at least he was well-liked by people up north and things.
So they basically did the exact opposite of what they were elected to do.They have been even worse.I mean, I remember sitting, laughing at the labor manifesto and the Tory party have Basically, he's done like that and then some.
And now, of course, we're in the middle of having a Tory leadership election in which both candidates, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, are promising us everything under the sun again. And for a moment, you allow yourself to dream.
Liz Truss was talking about abolishing inheritance tax the other day, Pete.I was like, oh, maybe some good will come of this.And of course, everybody replied saying, keep dreaming.She'll say that.And then as soon as she's in power, she won't do it.
Because what I'm saying is, it's easy to forget how true these things are.And we see them every single day.We see manifestations of these things that Michels was pointing out in 1911 in everyday politics on an everyday basis.So.
To represent in this sense comes to mean that the purely individual desire masquerades and is accepted as the will of the mass.
The rank and file are manipulated into accepting policies with which they would not otherwise agree and which are not in their interests, or at least are primarily in the interests of the leadership group.
However, what is new in Michel's is the fact that he applies this analysis not simply at the level of the state, but to all organizations, large families, totems, tribes, cities, nations, empires, churches, economic classes, clubs, parties, which are an altogether universal feature of human life.
Since people invariably organize themselves into groups, and since none but the smallest groups are truly democratic in the sense of truly representing the interests of their members, quote, organization implies a tendency to oligarchy.
In every organization, whether it be a political party, a professional union, or any other association of any kind, the aristocratic tendency manifests itself very clearly.
As a result of organization every party or professional union becomes divided divided into a minority of directors and a majority of directed Yeah, yeah, I mean if you can't see the move this is just applying mosca who Does his analysis at the state level?
And michelle's is just chunking it down.He's saying.Yep.What goes for the nation as a whole goes for these smaller groups You know, it's all the way down to your, as Stephen said in episode one, into your local chess club.
Thus one could gain institutional control simply by capturing the directorship of the organization.Change would flow top down as against the individual wills of the disorganized majority. This is Michelle's famous iron law of oligarchy.
Geraint Parry gives a succinct formulation of the law.In any organization of any size, leadership becomes necessary to its success and survival.
The nature of... Sorry to interrupt, Pete.I believe that is a Welshman, that scholar, and it's Geraint.Geraint Parry.Yes, it's a Welsh name.Are the Welsh going to attack me?
I'll also mention really quickly, notice by the way, what a mockery Michelle's is making of what I would call methodological individualism as a unit of analysis already.It's like, okay, individualism, but what are you going to do now?
Because you're, you know, you cannot use the individual as the smallest unit of analysis in this case, because we're already dealing with groups and we're already dealing with this iron law of oligarchy and the individual
if he just stands on his own, in this sort of scenario, is basically buggered.So that's something worth bearing in mind for those who want to hold on to the libertarian frame.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking.They think, well, the answer to this is just to stop collectivism.Well, I mean, if there's two words, I've said this recently, that I could take out of the
Basically, political lexicon is collective and individual.Because they turn them into pejoratives, and they're just descriptors.And really, when it comes to politics, individual, I don't see a place for it.Especially when you're talking about power.
So, yeah.Alright, so, this Welshman, you say Garant Perry?
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Okay, so garen't perry gives a succinct formulation of the law in any organization of any size leadership In any organization of any size leadership becomes necessary to its success and survival The nature of organization is such that it gives power and advantages to the group of leaders Who cannot then be checked or held accountable by their followers?
Michels himself puts it even more succinctly, who says organization, says oligarchy.
What does Michelle got?You should stick that on a T-shirt, Pete.So yeah, so so as a T-shirt.
I mean, that's it's beautiful because anyone who starts an organization or takes over an organization will find that out really quick, especially the the ones who are the most the most principled ones, the ones who are.Yeah.
If we can sell Robert Michel's merch in 2022, that would be a dream.I don't think he ever had merch.
What does Michels mean by organization, what does he mean by oligarchy?C.W.Cassinelli, did I get that right?Okay, was keen to strip the iron law of any ambiguity and so sought to define these terms more tightly.
An organization is a group of human activities ordered by a system of specialization of function. A subgroup of these activities has at its goal the maintenance of this order or of an order very similar to it.He also defines oligarchy as follows.
An oligarchy is an organization characterized by the fact that part of the activities of which it consists is
The activities having the highest degree of authority, which have been called leadership or executive activities, are free from control by any of the remainder of the organizational activities.
This concept leads to a generalization which might be called a theory of irresponsible leadership.This does not mean that the leadership can simply ignore the mass.They must anticipate the reactions of the lead.
But rather, that given the limitations of raw materials which they have to work, they have free reign to do whatever they want.This next part really starts explaining it.
Incidentally, the Iron Law of Oligarchy explains, at a stroke, why the long march of the left through the institution since 1945 in both America and across Europe has been so effective.
They never needed to persuade most people in the populace or even at an organizational level of their view.They simply needed to capture the leadership positions to impose their will.A typical student at a university is not an activist.
They are mostly disinterested.
As Michelle says of young trade union members, they are heedless, their thoughts run in erotic channels, they are always hoping some miracle will deliver them from the need of passing their whole lives as simple wage earners.
But the leadership of the student union is not.In every university, therefore, the will of the student union leadership will prevail on campus.
If that will is to enforce a quasi-Marxist progressive hegemony, then that will be the case, too, on every campus.And so we might see how society might wake up one day to find that it has sleepwalked into a quasi-Marxist progressive hegemony.
The hard check on this is that the mass will not tolerate intrusive interventions into their everyday lives.Let us imagine the leadership of the Student Union sought to ban meat on campus in the name of their political agenda.
In such circumstances, one might imagine a rapid and organized response from outraged students who do not wish to have vegetarianism imposed on them. and the student union would likely experience its own circulation of elites.
However, the leadership would know this limitation and likely not push so far as to deprive themselves of power.In other words, if they are canny, the leaders will take what they can get away with and no more.
Yeah, and without wishing to jump ahead too much, Pete, what's interesting is that since I wrote this, they have been. pushing for their span on meat ever more, ever more nakedly and ever more.
Um, I mean, it feels like the elites are trying to, you know, they're testing the waters to see what exactly they can get away with.
Um, but what's interesting in this current moment is I don't really see them backing off as they, as they usually have. Um, and that could lead to some very interesting places in the near future.So yeah All right.
There are a few features of michelle's analysis that should be stressed He identifies five factors that prove his iron law two psychological and three practical Let us deal with the two psychological factors first Much like pareto michelle's does not ignore psychology.
In fact, he considers both the psychology of the masses and and the leaders
As regards the former, in an analysis which chiefly seems to be derived from Gustave Le Bon, he notes the psychological need for leadership felt by the masses, their predisposition to hero worship, and their tendency to excessive gratitude.
People en masse are subject to waves of emotion which spread like a contagious disease, and they are readily manipulated by leaders skilled in demagogy and knowledge in the workings of the collective psyche.
Yeah, and I think it's worth pausing there, because many people, I think, prior to the pandemic, may have bristled at that claim from Le Bon, and this kind of idea that the mass is kind of feminine and passive, and that have this kind of excessive need to be led
But I don't think anybody now in 2022 would argue that the mass isn't exactly as described after living through what happened with COVID is what I'm saying.
Famously, I think I had read that Le Bon's The Crowd was read by, they said Hitler read it, Mussolini read it, Franco read it, all of these people read that book.
And it just seems now that it's probably just made its, it doesn't even have to be taught anymore to the people who are just studying what happened in the last century, because it's so obvious to them. that the masses want to be led.
They want to be told what to do.And there's so many implications that come with that, especially if you are looking for some kind of change, and if you are looking to raise your own elites.
I also wouldn't let the regime get away with, oh, Hitler and Mussolini read it.I'll tell you who else read it. Edward Bernays read it.What's the name of his friend who I talk about later on?
There's another one as well, who wrote explicitly kind of anti-democratic books in the 20s and the 30s.Oh, what's his name?It'll come to me.But what I'm saying is that this material was, you know, well disseminated in liberal democracy as well.
And one of the things I wanted to try to show in this book is that in many ways, liberal democracy, the fascism and so-called Soviet communism were really three creatures of the same stripe.This is something that James Burnham talked about as well.
And so I wouldn't want people to think that these lessons only apply to quote unquote totalitarian regimes because our regime is just as totalitarian and it uses all of the same principles.
The person I was thinking of, by the way, is Walter Lippmann.He was Edward Mays' friend.
you know, they're well aware of all of this stuff and, you know, if they're not, you know, if our leaders truly don't believe in these things, then they should start answering some questions like, why is there a need for a nudge unit in every government?
Why are they trying to engineer the population to, you know, coming back to a previous passage to, you know, uh, eat plant-based burgers, uh, by 2030.
I mean, these are all, you know, this is all, um, uh, the manufacturing of consent, which is something I talk about later in the book.
Well, you wouldn't do all of those things unless you, in some way, uh, believe that the masses could be manipulated, that the masses do have this psychological need for leadership, that the masses, you know, basically, if you tell them what to do, they'll be told.
Uh, and at some level our elites understand that as well.And they do people, we've watched it in the, in the past week, Pete, they redefined what, um, they redefined what recession means.
And I have watched blue check marks in the space of a week, make a tweet saying that we're in recession and then walk it back.
I mean, it is remarkable to watch in action.Anyway.
It's blunt and very sloppy on their part.It's blunt and sloppy.
When you were talking about how the Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy and the United States were no different, I think it's a Mises quote where he says, all these governments are just different pews in the same church.
Yeah.That's exactly right.Exactly right.
As regards the psychology of the leaders, however, we get something approaching Lord Acton's maxim that absolute power corrupts absolutely.The consciousness of power always produces vanity and undue belief in personal greatness.
The desire to dominate, for good or for evil, is universal. These are elementary psychological facts.
In the leader, the consciousness of his personal worth, and of the need which the mass feels for guidance, combine to induce in his mind a recognition of his own superiority, real or supposed, and awake, in addition, that spirit of command which exists in the germ of every man and woman.
We see from this that every human power seeks to enlarge its prerogatives.
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Download the truth social app or visit truth social.com He who has acquired power will almost always endeavor to consolidate it and to extend it To multiply the ramparts which defends his position and to withdraw himself from the control of the masses Thus once oh, yeah, you want to do you want to say something?
I mean, I would just say really quickly.Um You can actually see that that once people have a taste of power, they don't want to give it up Um, I mean, we mentioned Boris Johnson.
He literally said, you'll have to, um, you'll have to take me bleeding or some nonsense before, uh, before he finally stepped down.And he's still talking about how he's going to be prime minister again within a year.
He's had a taste of it and he doesn't want to give it up.Or, um, somebody I talk about a lot, Tony Blair, you know, many people think of him as the former prime minister of the UK.
but some of us who pay attention know of Tony Blair as a much, much more powerful person than whoever the prime minister happens to be.He's something like the permanent dictator of this country, and he's just intoxicated by power.
Margaret Thatcher famously, when she had to resign, was in tears, and she was never the same again.Lots of people basically get addicted to power, and these are just British examples.You can fill in your own, I'm sure.
But AA, if we get rid of that power, if we destroy power, everything will be great.
Yeah, unfortunately there is no throwing the ring into my doom.The ring will always be there, friends. All we can hope for is that the person who wields the ring doesn't count us as enemies.That's literally the best we can hope for.
You want your friend in power.
Thus, once a leader has attained power in the first place, they are driven by something like a Nietzschean will to power.They are intoxicated by it and want more of it.It is significant that it is power that is motivation and not merely money.
All too often, naive analyses of elites imagine they are motivated by profits.This is almost never the case.The prospect of control is a far greater motivator than greed.I've been saying that for over a decade.
Yeah, well look at some of the people.Everybody knows, for example, that I call him William Fence for algorithmic purposes, Peter, but you know, the erstwhile Microsoft Windows salesman, let's just call him.
I mean, he's already one of the richest men in the world.He's not motivated by making more money.It's clear that something else is motivating these people.
So, yeah, I do think that people, the left especially, you know, follow the money, follow the money all the time.Doesn't really tell the whole story.
All right, okay.Let us turn now to the three factors of practicality which ensure the iron law of oligarchy.
The problem is not simply one of psychology, which is to say the selfishness of the leaders in pursuing their own interests instead of those of the masses, but also one of practical necessity.
It is, as Samuel T. Francis might put it, a problem of mass and scale.
Large organizationally complex associations, compared with small simple associations, for mechanical, technical, and tactical reasons, must succumb to the organizational and therefore the oligarchical principle.
First, the mechanical reason is that, when dealing with organizations that number in the thousands or even hundreds of thousands or millions, you physically cannot get all the people in the same room at the same time.
Even voting mechanisms are frustrated by the fact that, when dealing with that many people, you need to narrow their choices down to just a few of the most sensible suggestions.
Even then, most people simply lacked the time and interest to partake in constant referenda.
From his time seeing the Social Democratic Party of Germany in practice, Michel saw that committees set up to organize the day-to-day running of the party were systematically unattended.
Because of this, the democratic principle must give way to the oligarchical principle purely on mechanical grounds.
However, let us pretend that there was a way, perhaps using modern technology and some crowdsourcing algorithm, to overcome the mechanical issue.There remains the technical one.
There are innumerable bureaucratic details that must be seen to if the organization is to be kept alive.There are financial, administrative, diplomatic problems to be settled.
A political party campaigning for power needs to organize its vote, canvas supporters, supply information for speakers, raise contributions, attend to the party's financial structure and its legal standing.
It needs to establish a coordinated policy line for the sake of consistency and solidarity. However, there is yet a third reason that the organizational principle prevails even beyond the technical requirements, which is tactical.
The masses simply will not and cannot organize. At times, Michel seems to write as if the masses possess some pathological need to be led.
For example, he writes, the most striking proof of the organic weakness of the mass is furnished by the way in which, when deprived of the leaders in time of action, they abandon the feel of battle and disordered flight, they seem to have no power of instinctive reorganization, and are useless until new captains arise capable of replacing those that have been lost.
Want to say something or you want me to keep going?
Uh, yeah, i'll let you get to the end of this and then i've got quite a lot to say about this.
All right A crowd without organized leadership will simply devolve into a rabble It is difficult not to think of the so-called storming of the capital on january on 6th of january 2021 Donald trump having gathered his masses in washington dc simply abandoned them and they devolved to a disorganized mob with no direction or purpose
Once inside the Capitol building, all the individuals involved could think to do was innately take pictures of themselves with their mobile phones.There was no plan, no coordination, no leadership.
Michels would have predicted that it would have turned out as it did.And this is the tactical reason for the Iron Law.
Right.I mean, there's quite a lot there in his three kind of practical reasons for the Iron Law. Just on the committee thing at the start, uh, trying to organize things through committee rather than having a really strict hierarchy.
Um, I'm a really big pro wrestling fan.As some people know, Pete, um, and there's a very good real life example in the 1990s.Okay.Where the world wrestling federation under Vince McMahon had a very clear organizational structure and hierarchy.
with one decision maker, Vince McMahon, who everybody knew the bottom line stopped with him, who had a vision for what he wanted to do, versus the opposition, who was basically a shitshow.They ran by committee.
There were all sorts of different people to consult, and they weren't all on the same page.They gave the guys, the wrestlers at the time, creative control over certain things.
Obviously you had situations where, you know, oh, well, Hulco, Hulco goodness doesn't want to lose this week.So what are you going to do now?
Oh, you know, so you, so you get this problem where there's a, you know, there's too many different people trying to make a decision and it ends up being incoherent.
And despite having literally millions and millions of dollars at their disposal, despite having an audience of millions, despite having
Um, pretty much all the best known people in the world, they went bankrupt and it was the other, it was the WWF who ended up, uh, you know, taking over and being the only company that left in wrestling.
And you see that so many times, uh, that's just one example, but you know, have you ever tried to run anything by committee?It's just, it's just not, you need to have a clear decision-making structure.Um, so that's the first thing.
The second thing is actually the genesis of what Burnham calls the managerialism.Because just through necessity, you need specialists who can do some of these things.So for example, Pete, let's just say me and you decided to start a political party.
God forbid, I'm a scholar, not an organizer, but let's just pretend we did. Can you, can you imagine if we needed to keep abreast of, you know, or we need to do the legal stuff.We need to do the finances.
We need to, um, we need to think about where we're going to rally.We need to think about, I mean, there's too many, there's too many things.
So, uh, even though we could have a really good hierarchy like Vince McMahon, and you know, I'm the guy you're making the decisions. Well, we're still going to need people to practically do all those specialist functions underneath.Right.
And the, the, the problem is the reason that this is an iron law of oligarchy is because as soon as we take that step, now we have to bring in an outside lawyer. Now we have to bring in an accountant.Now we have to bring in a PR guy.
Now we have to bring in some Washington wonk who is going to tell us, well, they care about these issues in Ohio and these issues.
And all of a sudden, the thing that kept us, the thing that we were really interested in starting a political party about, I don't know, legalizing weed, let's pretend we're the libertarians or whatever.All of a sudden, the things that we cared about
are now subordinated to all of these bloody consultant management types who are coming in to do these jobs who we can't actually operate without. And this is why it's not, this is why it's an iron law, because...
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You can actually see real life examples of this.So Le Pen in France is a very good example of it.Okay. She needed to try to win elections.She wanted to become president of France.
Well, to do that, they needed to invite in all of these people, get the PR people in.Eventually, they were big enough, they needed a HR department.
And lo and behold, by the time you get to 2020, poo, even though the newspapers are still going to call Le Pen, quote unquote, far right, to anybody who actually pays attention.She's like, well, Le Pen is pretty milquetoast now.
She's pretty much part of the system.And this is the iron law of oligarchy.In American politics, you've seen it happen to so many people.Bernie Sanders is a fantastic example.
I mean, no matter what Bernie says, he's been around for long enough that he is basically part of the oligarchy.You don't get to be a senator for 40 years or whatever without being creature like this.
So it's just worth bearing in mind the longer implications of those things that Michelle's points out.Anyway, carry on, sorry.
No, no, we need that.We need the commentary.
Since there is no escaping the iron law of oligarchy in any political party, power accrues to the bureaucrats who manage these things and tend to be concerned more with practical techniques than with principle.
One might think of the power of political Svengalis such as Aleister Campbell in the British New Labour administration, or more recently Dominic Cummings,
Secondarily, power accrues to the elected representatives whose source of power lies outside the party itself in the voter base.We therefore see again the two strata of elites identified by Moss Gun Parado.
We might call the former the bureaucracy of the party, the non-governing elite, and the latter the actual politicians, the governing elite.
Sometimes we might see someone with the skills of the former transition to becoming one of the latter, as was the case with Peter Mendelsohn when he became elected as an MP for Labor in 1992 after being their Director of Communications.
Still, Mendelsohn's skills as an organizer were utilized even once he became an MP.
A testament to this fact is that even after having stepped down as an MP in 2008, Prime Minister Gordon Brown so required Mendelsohn's technical skills that he made him a lord and brought him back into the cabinet.
One of the consequences of this power that accrues to the leaders is that it manifests in what James Burnham called customary right.
Quoting Burnham, Formally, a new election for an office may be held every year or two, but in practice, the mere fact that an individual has held the office in the past is thought by him
and by the members to give him a moral claim on it for the future, or, if not on the same office, then on some other leadership post in the organization.
It becomes almost unthinkable that those who have served the organization so well, or even not so well, in the past should be thrown aside.
If the vagaries of elections by chance turn out wrong, then a niche is found in an embassy, or bureau, or post office, or at the end in the pension list.
Yeah, can I just say that people implicitly, even though this is quite a complicated thing Bernie was talking about, at election time in America, people implicitly understand this.
Next time the midterms are coming up, when you're watching the coverage on MSN, not that any of your audience would be, but let's just pretend you do, you know, when you're watching NBC analysis or whatever, notice how many times the commentator will point out, oh, well, this person's standing down here,
that person is retiring over there, they know that when the incumbent is retiring, therefore not standing again, the seat opens up again, right?
It's not just a given that this seat that has been Democrat for the past 20 years or whatever is definitely going to go to another person like them.
I mean, obviously it depends on the region, but I'm saying that this principle is understood enough that it's really significant when somebody doesn't run again, um, which is probably why there are so many 80 year olds in the Democrat party, right?
Cause they don't want to, they don't want to give up their, uh, their permanent customary rights on their seats.But anyway, carry on.
Yeah.And I remember the Virginia governor's election last year.And I forget what the name of the guy who got, it doesn't matter.The fact that the Democrats were running Terry McAuliffe who was, like, head of the DNC and, like, stepped down in 2002.
It just shows they're—it also goes into bio-Leninism, where it's like, well, we know this guy is loyal to us, so let's just throw him in there.
And then, of course, the Republican that they run against him just happens to be a former lobbyist for the military-industrial complex, and he wins, but he's better because he doesn't like critical race theory, so.
I mean, dude, Joe Biden, it's a president.Anything's possible.
Oh, man, that he's still around.All right.This is partly what Michelle's means when he says power is always conservative.
The interest of the leaders turns from any principled political stand they might have held to the business of maintaining positions of power. to become stable and irremovable.
He points to the leadership of the supposedly anti-war, anti-patriotic Social Democrat Party of Germany magically becoming pro-war and pro-patriotic on the eve of World War I. We might think of other more recent examples.
In Britain, the Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg campaigned to abolish university tuition fees only to form a coalition with the Conservatives. Then, as part of the coalition government, they raised tuition fees from £3,290 to £9,000 per year.
It's just so brilliant.You can change this by voting.Or you can change this with anarchy.What the hell.
While voters did not forget the betrayal, a study of the personal fortunes of liberal Democrat leaders from the era would be instructive in proving Michel's point.
Nick Clegg went on to be Vice President for Global Affairs and Communications of Facebook, Inc. Vince Cable became the new party leader before retiring.Menzies Campbell was made a lord.
David Laws became the chief executive of the Education Policy Institute.Simon Hughes was knighted and made chancellor of London South Bank University along with at least seven other senior advisory or directorial roles.
British politicians have a remarkable capacity to fail upwards.These politicians may have been voted out of their seats, but they remain part of the ruling class and enlarge the scope of their political power.You want me to keep going?
Yeah, I mean, it really, it really just is remarkable.And I mean, I was thinking of a few more recent examples of this, right?How many libertarian think tanks
um basically just bent over backwards for the fact of the mandatory vaccines and the lockdowns and you know I mean I'm I meant to be a member of the uh IEA I think that's I think I still sit on their advisory committee or whatever but I was just like just to watch every single one of them just be like yeah we're a libertarian we're libertarian but we have no problem with this so you know it's an emergency all right all right then
Yeah.Oh, and Cato as well.Oh, and, uh, all of them.In fact, it was just remarkable to watch, you know?Um, so yeah, you, you see examples of it everywhere of this, you know, the, the magically becoming pro war on the eve of world war one.
It's like, well, you know, how many, uh, you know, we saw that with the, with the lockdown stuff and then, you know, again, the same people who were meant to be.
Anti-war don't forget libertarian, but suddenly, you know, let's get behind the boys in Ukraine as well.
So yeah Yeah, it was um, and then Thomas talks about how on the on the eve of of the National Socialists taken over in 1933 how many people who were wearing, you know, KDP just switched like overnight and
Oh yeah, absolutely.I mean the one that always interests me is the Vichy regime in France, where you get the same people under three different governments.But anyway, let's carry on.That's great.
The leaders of political parties maintain power, according to Michels, by virtue of the practicalities of organization.Hugo, how do you pronounce that? I just say Drakon.Okay, Hugo Drakon summarizes what these are.
Quoting, there are three different resources that, according to Michels, ensure the leaders keep control of their party.They are as follows.
A. Officials have superior knowledge in that they are privy to much information that can be used to secure assent for their program. B. They control the formal means of communication because they dominate the organization's press.
Parties still had their own newspapers at the time.And as full-time salaried officials, they can travel from place to place, presenting their case at the organization's expense, where their position enables them to command an audience.
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Download the truth social app or visit truth social.com and see They have skills in the art of politics and that they are far more adept than non-professionals in making speeches writing articles and organizing group activities
Political leaders therefore enjoy an advantage in knowledge, communication methods, and political skills over the mass in whom, as we have already seen, Michel considers all three resources to be totally lacking.
This offers a great advance over Marxist analysis, which posits that leaders only enjoy their positions by virtue of ownership of the means of production.
Michels is suggesting that it is the abilities of the leaders to organize through these three resources that justifies and maintains their position.
This will become significant when we come to consider James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution, because in this are the seeds for the takeover of managers and bureaucrats.
If organizational ability, rather than land or business ownership, is the criterion by which leaders are chosen, then it stands to reason that the managers would come to challenge and displace the power of the bourgeoisie, just as the bourgeoisie displaced the old aristocracies.
However, in both Mosca and Michel's, the role of the rich is somewhat hazy.
It is certainly the case that wealth can be used to buy influence and power, but it is not clear whether the fact of ownership can trump the practical realities of organization.
When michels broaches this topic he talks mainly about the extent to which old leaders are distrustful of and often unwilling to cede power to new upstarts Which frequently leads to censorship and curbing of free speech Again, it seems that organization is the decisive factor Even if wealth can grant great certain can grant certain advantages And i'll just say that later in the book.
Um when I get to burnham and when I talk, um in the chapter on Francis as well, I think it is, if memory serves.
In those two chapters, I talk more about the severance of ownership and control, where you can actually get really, really powerful people, like Henry Ford, as an example, or Walt Disney, or various other people in history, who, despite being rich and powerful, basically watch, or shortly after their death,
you know, the resources they get built up basically fall into the hands of their enemies.
I mean, if Henry Ford were alive, he'd probably have a stroke if he could see, and die again, if he could see what was done with the Henry Ford Foundation and what has been done to his company, you know, so.
Yeah.Um, one thing when I was reading this, I was, you know, you just come to the conclusion that the poor can't organize because they're poor.So what do they have to do?
They have to go and look for money if they want to organize and who are they getting money from?
They're getting money from people who have an agenda and you, and then what happens like in the, like BLM, say for example, you go from this upstart, this upstart thing that say,
You know you they want to organize so they need to get they need to get resources they get resources They become mainstream they get ten billion dollars worth of Worth of funds in one year.
They don't give any of it to their people on the ground and then the founders of it are buying three and four houses
Yeah, I mean, the BLM founders did the iron law of oligarchy speed run, didn't they?They just became part of the system in record time.
I think it's worth mentioning, by the way, that quotation that you just read up above talked about how newspapers were once just the kind of arm, like each party had its own newspaper.
I think that was still the case in Weimar, Germany as well, where the National Socialists had their own, like Goebbels ran a newspaper.
I think that's something that people should bear in mind because it used to be formalized and then they kind of obscured it by saying, oh, well, you know, it's not it's not that the Daily Telegraph is run by the Tory party.Oh, no.
But I mean, let's face it, everybody knows that certain newspapers are tame and have sides.And if, for example, For example, let's just pretend Mitch McConnell, right, as a political operator in the American system.
If Mitch McConnell wanted to get a story out in the press, or write a newspaper article, say, or have, I don't know, something quote unquote leaked, you know that he could do it, and you know that there'd be certain, I mean, with Mitch McConnell, where would he leak it to?
The Hill, somewhere like that?You know, there are, kind of Republican tame, you know, or National Review or something like this.Everybody knows this.And it's just like we have to pretend that the press is a free and independent press.But it's not.
They're completely in each other's arms and always have been.So that is something that people like Oswald Spengler and others continually pointed out.That, oh, you're teaching all these people to read in order so that you can
better propagandize them from your own newspapers.So, you know, this idea that the press or the media is independent in some way is a kind of It's a layer in the delusion, if that makes any sense.
It's just a layer of obscuring the truth of the matter.Yes.
All right.Issues of wealth aside, the tactics of old leaders against young aspirants are interesting in and of themselves.
Michels notes that the old leaders have many tactical advantages over the young aspirants, such as the fact that they have responsibilities of which the aspirants are free and therefore can always call them irresponsible.
He also notes that the old leaders will style themselves as the sensible people, the adults in the room against extremists, who they can paint as naively idealistic or as demagogues, and in this they can rely on the natural conservatism of the masses and the party membership, who distrust newcomers, to enlist support.
They will then point to this support to enforce discipline and subordination on the upstarts. In the early 2020s, one might think of the ancient leaders of the U.S.
Democratic Party, such as Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Elizabeth Warren, fending off young aspirants in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar, collectively known as the Squad.
The Democrat old guard have to date employed virtually every trick that Michels describes against young aspirants. In this chapter, Michelle's adds a lot of color and detail to Pareto's circulation of elites.In Mosca and Pareto... You got something?
I was just gonna say that, you know, someone like the AOC comes in as this kind of literally wide-eyed, bright, bushy-tailed young Hope, and she thinks she will change the system, but everybody knows that after years of being disciplined by
by old Nancy and Chuck and friends.She will, the system will change her.She won't change the system.And that is the iron law in a nutshell.
In Mosca and Pareto, the analysis is often zoomed out at a level of remove.But in Michel's, we see the human faces.This is because he is looking at smaller units of organization than the state.
But let us not forget the mass organization is merely a state in miniature. The value of Michel's is in his many insights into practical on-the-ground politics and the realities of organization.
His chief contribution is to see that what Mosca and Pareto had said on the level of whole countries is also true at the level of large organizations.
However, because his analysis is focused on individual organizations and microcosm, he does not give us, crucially, the relationships between organizations or how leaders in one organization respond to leaders in external organizations who are no direct threat to them.
Is the tendency of elites in disparate organizations to diverge in rivalrous competition or to converge as people with largely similar interests and goals?Recall, for example, Nick Clegg leaving the Liberal Democrat Party to join Facebook.
Are the interests of the Liberal Democrats and Facebook aligned or in competition?These questions would be left for James Burnham and Samuel T. Francis to flesh out, and we can return to them later.
For now, I will say, in passing, that Moscow gives us the categories of feudal and bureaucratic with which to think about this problem on a state level.
If large institutions in disparate fields, for example a political party and a corporation, become more rivalrous, it is a sign of feudalization, which is to say competing power centers.
If they are on the opposite trajectory towards convergence, we might say it is a sign of bureaucratization, or even, in Moscow's phrase, over-bureaucratization.
Michels provides a whole chapter himself on this topic called Bureaucracy, Centralizing and Decentralizing Tendencies, but this offers no significant advance on Moscow and finds itself too bogged down in the minutiae of the contemporary German socialist scene of 1911.
He does complain entertainingly, however, about the problem of bureaucratic specialization leading to mundane, career-seeking, obsequious men who know nothing of bigger ideas or principles.
Bureaucratization suppresses individuality and gives to the society in which employees predominate a narrow, petty bourgeois and Philistine stamp.The bureaucratic spirit corrupts character and engenders moral poverty.
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I just find it funny that Michelle's every once in a while gets on his soapbox and he just, I mean of all of them, he hates the manager, the middle manager type.He just, it pours out of him, you know.
I'll just mention there, by the way, that there is an example of society becoming a little bit more, quote, feudal in Florida, where
I've noticed that Ron DeSantis is, at least on the face of things, passing legislation that puts the state of Florida as a body, as a rival against massive corporations, i.e.
there's a genuine, you know, they're not on the same page for the first time, I don't know, maybe in our lifetimes.Now I have my own suspicions as to how genuine DeSantis is, which I've talked about elsewhere.
But let's just give him the benefit of the doubt for a second.What does it mean that the state of Florida and the Walt Disney Company aren't on the same page?
To me, like to Moscow, to James Burnham, and to Michels, and to a lot of the elite theorists, freedom is actually in these little spaces between elites fighting each other.So it's actually good for all of us
if the government and the corporations aren't on the same page.
The problem is, as you'll get onto in later chapters when you get to Schmitt and you get to Juvenel, is that it does appear that their tendency is actually to converge, as we've seen, right?
So, you know, I don't know if in this book I was a bit too dismissive of this idea of the rival the kind of rival feudal powers, if that makes any sense.
It may well be that it's always a short one thing, just a window 20, 30 years where they're fighting each other.
But in that 20 or 30 years, all of us who are living underneath these morons get to enjoy some modicum of freedom between the gaps, if that makes any sense.
So one part of realist as opposed to a utopian thinking is maybe just to accept these kind of second best kind of states where You know, Burnham calls it, get the managers managing each other, basically, so they're not managing us.
So, you know, even if we can get a little bit of that in the short term, it's better than nothing.So, yeah, I don't want to completely write off the, because I know in chapter one I said it's the myth of the separation of powers, right?
That is not to say, though, you cannot have moments where they're separate.Over time, they'll try to converge again. you can still get pockets of elite civil war.Anyway, carry on.
That reminds me of Saul Newman's post-anarchism, where he says that you're never going to have anarchism in reality.You're just going to experience it at times.
Yeah, exactly, yes.And it may well be that we really have to lower our expectations to really.I mean, I've said it before.I mean, I've said it so many times, I'd probably just
I just take like a 1980s fucking Reagan government at this point, honestly.I'm so fed up.You know, just anyone vaguely sensible would be an upgrade of what we've got at the minute.
Well, anyone who seems like a serious individual, I'll take Nixon back in a heartbeat.
Yeah All right thus within bureaucratization is a degenerative principle Degenerative in the general quality of the personnel who form the non-governing elite that could sow the seeds of a move towards Decentralization by generating disaffected but more visionary types who advocate who agitate for change We can see in this something of Pareto's circulation of elites This also has the seed of an idea that would be dubbed bioleninism by the blogger spandrel
Is it Spandrel or Spandrel?I never even figured it out.
Spandrel, yeah.I will just say, and I realize you do have Yavin on later in the series, but for my money, I would say Spandrel is the most underrated of the NRX thinkers.
I think that his contributions, even though they were smaller than the other guys, every single one he made was a kind of keeper.
his bio-Leninism series and his one on the base draft, if you read that as well, are very rooted in this sort of thinking.
So I think Spandrel, if you ignore his China simping and all of that, and his kind of rank punditry takes, I think he has some good lasting kind of bits of applied elite theory that are still of use to us in 2022.
Alright, cool.This also has the seed of an idea that would be dubbed Bio-Leninism by the blogger Spandrel in 2018, whereby these key bureaucratic roles are filled based more on loyalty to the party than for their actual skills.
In Michel's terms, what is really happening is that they are weakening one of the key pillars on which the Iron Law depends, the practical abilities of the leaders to organize.
If too many mundane specialists become toadying sycophants, then the advantage of the leaders is lost.The great strength of Michel's analysis at the level of the organization is that it is never monocausal.
He always stresses both the psychological and practical factors which combine to make his law iron. Much of the secondary scholarship on Michel seems irritated that his theory is not neater and confused by the fact that he calls it iron.
It is iron because there is no escape from it.Even if you resolve the psychological factors, you would still have to deal with the practical factors and vice versa.
They are also mutually reinforcing, which is to say that the practical factors compound the psychological factors and vice versa.
The more a person stays in power, the more knowledge and practical skills they gain, the more they want to stay in power.
By the same token, the more a person remains a mere plebeian, the less knowledge and experience of practical organization they gain, and the more reliant, both practically and psychologically, they become on the leaders.
As we have seen, the law is iron also in the sense that the psychological factors are twofold, both the leaders and the masses.Even if you solve the problem of selfish leaders, you still have the problem of the helpless masses.
The practical factors are even more robust.Mechanical, technical, and tactical, underlined and maintained by the leader's resources of knowledge, communication methods, and political skills.
The mass thus must overcome at least six near-insurmountable hurdles to overturn the Iron Law, which is practically impossible.
The only method by which it is possible to displace the leadership within a party is to form a new leadership and outmaneuver the old one in these six categories.Still no easy task, since they have every motivation to stop you, but at least possible.
Now, can you see why Robert Michels turned from being a social democrat to being a fascist in the early 20s?Yeah.
When he came to that conclusion, because it's like, well, you know, he is somebody who came to his positions through just blackmailing himself, basically.But yeah, I mean, the extent to which the iron law is truly iron,
It is quite remarkable, I think.And one of my favorite things when I was researching that chapter, Pete, was finding all of the cope arguments that liberal scholars try to come up with against the iron law.And it was just,
You know, they're nowhere, they're flailing basically, you know.
Oh, yeah, the libertarian ones are the best.
Yeah, well, there we go.Good chapter.
Yeah, it's like one that I bring up all the time is conquest second law.And I've heard I've heard people say, well, we're going to be the people who defeat that.OK, all right, good luck.There's a reason they're called laws, but do you have to run?
No, no, no at all.I was just I was just thinking I quite like that author.
I agreed with it almost everything they had to say But the so You're why don't you talk a little bit about the just the theory of clearing them out and Which is really what most of us who when you really start digging down deep into this It's the only way that change is really gonna be made.
Well, I believe that the current ruling class, the global elite, are one of the most entrenched, powerful, and almost kind of like they've really burrowed in very far into the inner reaches of people's everyday psyches.
People imagining that we're gonna overturn this with a couple of elections are in dream world.They need to be rooted out of our institutions and overthrown using force.Otherwise, they will continue to rule indefinitely.I truly believe this.
And I do think that a lot of people, they only scratch the surface.They have no idea how deep the problem goes. how deep set the rot is, if it makes any sense, and how enormous the challenge would be to actually clearing them out.
I have been saying clear them out, but I'm under no illusions as to doing that within our lifetimes.First of all, we have to get everybody to agree that that's what they want to do, which remains impossible,
And I'll tell you why it remains impossible because mark my words, all of the people watching this show, as soon as the Donald is back on the scene and does a couple of rallies or so, they'll be there back again in 2024, wearing the red hats again, waving the waving the American flag again.
Woo.It's just, I mean, the system has so many ways of, of getting people back in.Um, I mean, one of the things I've talked about, uh, before is how
The system is able to use single issues in order to contain, first of all, contain resistance to itself.And then they'll get a second issue to, you know, wrestling, they'd call it a swerve.They'll swerve you again and again.
And all throughout the pandemic, I was telling people, don't make COVID your only thing.They'll swerve you, I swear.They'll pull some bullshit out.And lo and behold, the thing you've built up
is now geared up to fight this fight, and now there's this fight over here going on.And lo and behold, what happened?Ukraine.And all of those people who were dissidents for five minutes over COVID, now they're flying the Ukraine flag.
I'm not saying all of them, but I'm just saying that these are the so many ways the system can pull you back in.And that's why I insist on clear them out as the uncompromising message of the true dissident. Whatever they want, we're against it.
Because we want them out of power, specifically those people there right now.And that's not a party, that's not an individual politician, it's an entire rooting class.The governing elites and the non-governing elites underneath them.
The permanent civil service, the journalist class, the academics, the, you know, Aron McIntyre, what did he say? It doesn't end before there's tanks on Harvard lawn and he's right when he says that Yeah, well, what do you think?
I assume when you know, Yarvin gets a lot of crap for saying that you know, like little You know Little battles that are won like in the state of Florida or in the state of Texas or out west or something That's just really showing your hand and it's really giving power to the people.
I understand him correctly and I think I do because we did we actually did an episode where he talked about this of basically, you're working behind the scenes and you do not act you act like a you know, like a basically like a dissident in a in occupied territory and you're planning behind the scenes you're planning behind the scenes and you don't act you don't celebrate anything until you're ready to go and you know that you can Achieve your goal
He's certainly right that when the change comes, it has to happen fast and it has to happen all at once.
How you practically do that, I don't know, because one of the advantages that the regime has over all kind of previous empires or power structures that I can think of is that it's global in nature.
So, you know, like let's say the Dutch farmers who have been protesting in the Netherlands, Let's just pretend they overthrow the government of the Netherlands.Well, that on its own, they'll be crushed by everybody else.
So it needs to be all the governments at once, all at the same time, which is going to take a level of coordination that is unheard of in human history.And that's going to be extremely difficult to pull off, I think.
I mean, it could be that there's other ways of thinking about it.
If you see Europe as part of an American empire, or maybe if there's a serious circulation of elites in America, maybe then Europe can have a chance of sorting itself out without the American lesbian stiletto on its forehead.
But again, that could be wishful thinking. because these people are powerful, really, really powerful.They have basically unlimited resources.
You know, I made a tweet just before we came on Airpeat about how, you know, Visa was trying to, you know, Visa cracking down on Andrew Torber for running GAAB, but at the same time giving legal help to somebody who was helping groom underage, you know, somebody who was under the age of 18.
And I just tweeted out, Boycott Visa.Oh, that's right.You can't.You can't.You've got MasterCard and Visa.They control basically the world's financial transactions.You can't set up a rival to those.Impossible.
You might be able to do it if you're like, I don't know, the state of Russia or something like that.But you or I living in the West, there's just no chance.There's the regulatory burden to get over, to start one of those.
Just start your own multinational credit card transaction service.It's just not possible.So yeah, the challenges are really, really significant. I tend to agree with mold bug that when it happens, it has to happen all at once.
I also tend to agree with mold bug that you shouldn't over invest in like short term reaction stuff.Um, you know, I, I've talked about ride the tiger quite a lot, which is a concept taken from, from Julius Evola.
Um, ride the tiger basically means like trying not to get too invested in these kind of little week to week storylines. Um, now the question is, well, where do you draw the line on that?Um, and.
You know, I, I realized that Moberg had a lot of his, uh, controversy over the Roe versus Wade issue.Right.Well, I mean, that's not a small week to week storyline.That's like a, that was a bit, that was quite a big one.Right.
And it was foundational to who, to who many people on the right wing believe they are.So, um,
yeah it's it's easier said than done to complete the ride the tiger but um i can give you a much more anodyne example than roe versus way because i would have said it would basically be impossible for people not to comment on that um recently this week the um the women's football team uh won the euro championships in football okay the england women's football team okay now
This is a bullshit thing.Nobody watches women's sports, as you know, right?The regime has been pushing it relentlessly.They wanted to get people on board with this, okay?
And I watched so many people, Nigel Farage tweeting out how, you know, our girls have shown the boys how it's done and, you know, PJW tweeting out about it. You know, people who frankly should know better not to react to every single thing.
Now, every single tweet you do about the women's football team, positive or negative, whichever is fuel for their machine.And this is the sort of stuff I'm talking, like try not to fall into their dialectical traps.
Really what we need to be doing is setting the dialectic.They react to us, we don't react to them.There's a lot of power in that.I got a video somewhere called Uh, dialectics and no dialogue.We don't, we don't want to dialogue with them.
We set the, we're setting the agenda and they have to react to us.And that when they have to react to us, they're, they're weak.Um, you know, in fact, Tucker has been playing a good game on that.
Tucker Carlson made the entire system react to talk with the great replacement a couple of weeks ago.Um, what happened, everybody was talking about that.That was the top line issue.
Now, now every blue check Mark is making a fool of themselves, trying to pretend there hasn't been demographic replacement in the USA.That was good dialectical play by Tucker.Um, so he, so he's someone who plays that game very well.
Um, but as, you know, as long as we're reacting to their stuff, we're losing basically.Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.Well, this has been great, and again, thank you for writing this book.
I've done other books where I've read through the whole thing on my show, and as soon as I read this, as soon as I scanned it, I knew that this was gonna be a good one, because it's...
You know one of the coming out of libertarianism and having a libertarian and cat podcast for so long Once you start really seeing how the world works You really want everyone else to see it even if they hold on to their their beliefs that they can you know whatever they can get to at least know how the real world works and Know what you're up against because I mean as you just described I
It's basically insurmountable to think that you're going to change out the system.
At this point, the only thing I think that you can do is maybe use the HAPA strategy and do some things locally, where I think actually in very small locations you can get these people out and you can take over, and then you just have to- Yeah.
One thing I want people to understand before we finish up is that even though the book is called The Populist Delusion, it doesn't mean I'm against the populist, quote unquote.
And I do think something interesting has been happening in America where actually there is signs of an organized minority elite on the right.You say what you want about Steve Bannon and Alex Jones and these people.
You know, they're being persecuted as we, as we speak, you know, uh, and they are, well, they bankrupted Alex Jones now.And, um, Steve Bannon was like literally being, uh, what was he like interrogated by the FBI?
Oh, he was charged.He was charged.
I mean, he's convicted found guilty by, you know, Nuremberg show trial two or whatever.Um, and, uh, yet they're still there presenting their show day after day.I was like.
know, interrogated by the FBI in the morning, presenting the war room in the afternoon.
And if you have a look, in state after state after state, the GOP, the populist or the Trumpian faction, are primarying rhinos down to local state legislatures and they're literally clearing out these rhinos and replacing them with
proper populist across the board.That is an elite minority organization.And I'll give credit where it's due.I've been so critical of Trump and I've been so critical of populism, but there's something happening there.
And in fact, Roe versus Wade is another one, right? Roe versus Wade was not a populist issue.It was an elite minority issue.And the reason that they got where they were was through decades of hard work of proper organization.
So, you know, that's something else that maybe people can, you know, people I've seen like Richard Spencer talking about how Roe v. Wade is a populist issue.No, it's not.
Roe v. Wade was an elite minority issue who just through sheer persistence of getting those judges, federalist society and all the rest of it, they have managed to push.In fact, it's a perfect case study in elite theory in action.
Every single part of that, but from the original ruling by the Supreme Court down to the overturning that we've seen in the past couple of months. So, yeah.
Oh, yeah.You can watch me on YouTube, The Academic Agent, obviously by The Populist Illusion, if you haven't already.
I run a site selling courses called The Academic Agency, where you can do the Trivium and many other, you know, I run a course on economics, on politics.I have other people running courses on there.
And this is my one, it's the main way that I earn a living these days.And secondly, everybody talks about the need to redress the terrible education that kids get in schools and in universities.
And you know, by doing things like the Trivium, you can learn what kids were learning at the age of 12 1,000 years ago.In fact, you'll very quickly see that what is called an education today is not really an education.
I wonder why they don't teach the trivium anymore.If they taught kids grammar, logic, and rhetoric in school, then maybe these politicians wouldn't have such an easy time of it.
Yeah.Well, I appreciate it.And until the next time. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingetta show.Returning, a listener favorite, Buck Johnson.How are you doing, Buck?I'm good.A listener favorite.Well, that's nice to hear.Good to be here.
People love you.People love when you're on.And remember, you jumped on that live stream with me once, and people went crazy.They loved it.Yeah, yeah.We started just talking about heavy metal, I think.Yeah, talking about drummers and stuff like that.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.That was fun.But tell everybody a little bit about what you do.
Well, that's multifaceted at this point.I can add something to that list, but I run the CounterFlow podcast and I'm running for city council here in my small hometown of Lockhart, Texas.
I've added a whole new level of responsibility and scheduling to my already busy schedule, but we'll see if it's worth it.I hope so. Yeah.
Mises Mayor is approved, formerly Mises GOP, and we're doing fundraising for you right now.And that would be the election November of this year?That's right.Yes, sir.Awesome.Awesome.All right.Well, I'm doing this series.
We are up to chapter five in The Populist Delusion by Nima Parvini.It goes by AA. Nima had some funny things to say we he and I actually recorded twice we started recording and then
It just his audio was going in and out and everything, so we had to switch over to Skype and we had like all this.
We had like a couple good jokes in the beginning and then when we went over to Skype, it's just like alright, we need to get this done, so we're just going to run through and everything.So he was making fun of his like real name.
He's like who is that guy?I don't know.He sounds like an Italian porn star or something.It does, yeah, but academic agent wrote this book.I think after reading it I.
was like, I have to do this just like I did state revolution by Lenin, like I did the, um, industrial society and its future by Ted Kaczynski and needed to be read in its entirety.
Um, I'm happy to be able to have different people come on and, um, people who are smart.A lot of people, a lot of people smarter than I am to comment on this, but, um, we're just going to start reading this chapter.
This chapter is called sovereignty, friends, and enemies. and anyone who knows their 20th century political theory and writers in particular will recognize that this chapter is about Carl Schmitt.So when did Carl Schmitt come on your radar?
Because of Curtis Yarvin, honestly, I would say that must have been now, maybe two years ago.
But through reading the Menchus mold bug stuff and then hearing him, I thought, well, this guy is blowing my mind, so I need to start reading some of the people in the books that he keeps talking about.
And so that's when Carl Schmitt came on my radar, as well as James Not James Burnham so much, but the Machiavellians specifically.All right.
Well, if people have seen what I've done with this already, I just start reading and then Buck's going to stop me for commentary or I'll stop for commentary.
And this one's going to be great because Carl Schmitt is, I actually did a sub stack yesterday and it was just a short one and it was just, it was more than half of it was just me quoting Carl Schmitt.So, all right, let's get this shared up.
And here we go.Chapter five of the Populist Delusion by academic agent Neema Bhargavi.Sovereignty, friends, and enemies. Carl Schmitt is arguably the most important political and legal theorist of the 20th century.
He produced a large body of work, and the secondary literature that has been produced on Schmitt could fill a small library.
If you want to find out, just search Carl Schmitt, Paul Gottfried, and see that Paul Gottfried has written books on Schmittian theory.
Let me interrupt right there then, because now that you've refreshed my memory just by saying Paul Gottfried, I have to say there's an article that you and I discussed, not an article, a write-up from David Gordon, kind of reviewing Paul Gottfried's book on Carl Schmitt.
I got the, what book was that in, the Austrian, I can't remember, but I ordered a book from the Mises Institute, maybe, now that's been probably four or five years ago, specifically just to have that write-up from David Gordon.So I was wrong.
Carl Schmitt, I guess, was on my radar about five years ago because of David Gordon's review of Paul Gottfried's book.Awesome, awesome.Yeah.
David Gordon, Paul Gottfried, how can you go wrong?Right. Much like the elite theorists, his analysis of power in politics was above all else realist, describing things as they are and not how they ought to be.
Here I will focus only on his two most famous ideas, sovereign is he who decides on the exception, and the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.
I want to interrupt real quick.I feel almost awkward interrupting you like that, but you said I can.I think people have thrown you and me and some of our friends into a group that they were at some point calling post-libertarians.
Even kind of getting away from that descriptor at this point, I think one of the things that we were in discussions between ourselves and tweets and appearances on podcasts, we were trying to explain looking at power structures and government the way it is in reality versus, as you like to say, in Kapustan in someone's head.
So, I think kind of the friction that initially happened between us and some of our friends was us looking at power and government as it is in reality, not how we theorize about it, not how we'd like it to be.
But I found almost a freedom in being able to recognize how it really works despite what we want.
Right.And also, if you start looking at it and you're as is described here, a realist about it.You're just describing what is.Well, then you have to look within reality, in the reality of politics now, and say, okay, how would we solve this problem?
typically when you look at a lot of the things that happened in the last two and a half years, there was no libertarian solution to go right in and stop and solve a problem.It had to be done in realist political terms.
It had to be done in a way that, okay, this needs to be stopped now, no matter what.And unfortunately saying, you know, well, and, and government schools, um, disband the military, disband the government.Those aren't answers, right?
That was the biggest problem is that we're like, all right, well, these answers that we've talked about in the past that we've blurted out at people on social media or whatever on podcasts, these aren't real answers.So what are real answers?
And then once you get out of Ankapistan in your head and you start putting out real answers to, okay, this is how we would solve this.We're going to have to use power and this power may be heavy handed.And that's when you become a statist.
You become, well, no, it's just, I'm a realist.If you want to call me a statist, that's fine.It doesn't mean anything anymore.To me, statist is like racist.It just doesn't mean anything anymore.It's just been thrown around too much.
Right.And I think that those of us who have what one of my podcast guests recently called 2020 vision, referencing what went on in 2020 and 2021, talk about Carl Schmitt.
I think the friend enemy distinction became quite clear as far as who wants us dead or locked up and who doesn't.They don't have to agree with me
As far as what political party they're a part of or whatnot, it was the friend-enemy distinction became the most important and obvious thing at that point, I believe.
Well, and also when you start recognizing who your friends and your enemies are, you can also look at people who look like friends, but they're actually dupes or useful idiots for your enemies.All right, onward.
These are found in his two booklets, Political Theory 1922 and The Concept of the Political 1932, which were his fourth and twelfth major publication, respectively.
I will be using the standard scholarly editions of these works, but they have been helpfully collected in the Sovereign Collection by Antelope Hill, which makes a virtue of its lack of commentary or apologia.
While many of the thinkers we have considered thus far have been controversial, Carl Schmitt is held responsible by some as providing the legal justification for the Nazi regime.
This is beyond our scope, but it is worth noting that in the 1970s, scholars such as George Schwab made great efforts of denazifying Schmitt, and by the late 1980s, the journal Telos had become and remains the house publication for Schmitt's scholarship.
By the end of the 1990s, far-left scholars were publishing their own book-length collections of essays on Schmitt.
It is a testament to the power of Schmitt's clarity and the penetration of his analysis that we could overcome the ultimate stigma and be rehabilitated by mainstream scholarship in this way.
That part's amazing to me because he still has that stigma.I've heard throughout the last couple of years when his name comes up, oh, but the Nazi stuff.
But it is amazing that for the most part, I mean, that is still to this day kind of the one, the career ender, kind of.If you get labeled with that, you can, it's kind of when you really, more so than any other word, basically.
And somehow he managed to escape that label for the most part. But I think that shows you how impactful and thought-provoking, at least, that his work is if leftists can write about him in terms other than saying, oh my God, he's a Nazi.
Well, a lot of people have tried to cancel Nietzsche and that ain't happening.
Much influenced by Thomas Hobbes, Schmitt saw the central role of government authority as one of maintaining order and stability.
As we saw in Moscow, every ruling class must lean on a political formula to which the ruled subscribe to gain legitimacy.
Even though every political formula will be rooted in claims that do not stand the test of empirical reality, as Pareto maintained, people irrationally believe them in any case despite the facts, almost as quasi-religious myths.
Schmitt recognized something similar and called it political theology.He argued, quoting,
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, not only because of their historical development, in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver, but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these topics.
The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology.Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the late centuries.
So when people make the claim that statists have their own religion, their religion is the state.
And then if you say that to somebody who is a, you know, somebody who thinks we need a state, that we need it for order, we need it for whatever to provide for us.It's, it's not far off.I mean, it's, or it's actually exact, you can trace it.
And Carl Schmitt did a good, did a good job of tracing that.
Yeah, I mean, you've got, if you're talking theology, you've got the Trinity.And oddly enough, the three branches of government in the United States is its own Trinity.And I think we've seen this, like pop culture makes this even more obvious.
There's those Catholic style candles now with Obama's picture or what's her name that passed away from the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Yeah, I mean, they are literally held up as religious figures.
It's not even really a disguise at this point by a lot of people.And on the other side, we've seen Trump as kind of a godlike figure in certain paintings and things like that.
And they're horrifically boomer, but they're funny at the same time, but we do see it. Whenever I see those, I have to assume that they're a troll.
I don't want to meet the person who takes those seriously.Oh, man.If you do, have them on the show, please.Oh, I will try.All right.
Perhaps this is why it rang so true when Herbert Spencer referred derisively to the divine right of parliaments in 1884.
but we must separate the issue of legitimacy, which concerns consent of the ruled and the right of the rulers to rule, from that of sovereignty, which concerns who has functional authority in the state.
In terms of sovereignty, Schmitt shows that there is substantially no difference between systems of absolute monarchy, such as those supported by throne and altar reactionaries such as Joseph de Maistre, and modern parliamentary systems with their supposed separation of powers.
This will likely appear absurd to some.How could an absolute monarch bear any relation to, for example, the U.S.
government with its careful system of checks and balances, its separation of the executive from the legislature and the judiciary, and so on?
The answer lies in the fact that Schmitt saw it fit to judge any political system, not by its norms, but when it was under crisis.And that is the genius of Carl Schmitt.
Yes.Yep.Little did he know.Well, he probably did know.But I mean, reading this, think about when he wrote these things.And we've now seen this happen in the United States of America multiple times in our lifetimes.Yeah.
That is, if you want to know what our government is, look what it did after 9-11, and look what it did, COVID, January 6th, the Summer of Love, all of those things.
Yes.I love when you call it the Summer of George as a Seinfeld fan that I am.
But it's, it's long periods where the government does nothing punctuated by, by rare, these rare moments, unfortunately not so rare anymore, but I think at the time he was thinking rare moments of extreme action whenever something quote unquote needs to get done, boom, there, that's, that's what your government is, that they can do that right then and there.
It's like a serial killer with lower time preference.They don't kill all the time.They pick their chances.When the opportunity presents itself, that's when they do it.All right, so Newt, moving on.
This was not a new move in the history of political theory.
For example, in an inquiry concerning the principles of morals, David Hume asked, is it any crime after a shipwreck to seize whatever means or instrument of safety one can lay hold of, without regard to the former limitations of property?
Hume imagines a city under siege whose inhabitants were in danger of perishing with hunger or a civil war.In such conditions, we expect the normal laws of justice to be suspended because they no longer serve any purpose.
It is here Schmitt would interject with his two favorite questions.Who decides?Who interprets?And hence his famous dictum, sovereign is he who decides on the exception.He says,
Precisely a philosophy of concrete life must not withdraw from the exception and the extreme case, but must be interested in it to the highest degree.
The exception can be more important to it than the rule, not because of a romantic irony for the paradox, but because the seriousness of an insight goes deeper than the clear generalizations inferred from what ordinarily repeats itself.
The exception is more interesting than the rule.The rule proves nothing.The exception proves everything.It confirms not only the rule, but also its existence, which derives only from the exception.
In the exception, the power of life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.
There's a, um, in the leadership world, there's, I think it's a, a book called what you tolerate is what you get.
And that that's, um, I was thinking of that reading, um, that little quote, but also it's, it's so obvious if you think of it in terms, maybe even outside of government.So say I'm married to Brittany here.Uh, and she knows that.
If she does, does a certain action or says a certain thing to me, I'm going to hit her. Well, I'm a wife beater then.
It's not, they don't, they would look at me, she would look at me as the exception to the, if most of the year I'm nice to her and three times a year I hit her, I'm a wife beater.I'm not the nice guy.
That was a terrible analogy, but it made sense in my head.As long as you put it on yourself, so that's good.Well, I like when he talks about the exception here.I think of debate.
So I think of debates on abortion and how almost immediately it goes to rape, which is 1% of abortions.
And I guess if you were to follow schmidt if you were to try to take schmidt's logic here You would look at that debate and you would have to base the the debate basically around the exception and That's what everybody does when they when they go into a debate like that Is it if they are for abortion if they think that abortion?
You know is if they're pro-choice they run right to the exception.Yes where the um, where the person who is not the person who's more
I would say conservative is going to be like, well, there's 99% here, even more than 99% that we should be concentrating on.
Yes.Our government right now, the push towards equality has moved on to a group of people that's less than 1% of the population in the trans community.
And that's what everyone, that's what the government and the regime, and that's what they're focused on right now as we're speaking, basically.They're focused on the exception, not the rule.Yeah.Yeah.
And people have to walk on eggshells for less than 1% and sign and watch videos that have been put together by HR departments that have these people in them.
Yes, and have pronouns in their emails and businesses now, like serious people that don't want to do that are still having to do it.It's nuts, but that's it's for the exception.Kamala Harris wearing a blue suit sitting down.
Yeah.All right.We may consider, for example, the issue of the U.S.election of 2020, which was disputed by its official loser, Donald Trump, who alleged that his opponent, Joe Biden, had engaged in wide scale fraud.
This showed an amazed global audience the U.S.system under crisis.The Supreme Court would hear no cases and officially would review no evidence.It ruled that Texas and 17 other states had no standing.
Over 7,000 sworn affidavits alleging fraud were effectively ignored by the American legal system.And that was in Michigan alone.We need only entertain a counterfactual.What if the charges had been the other way around?
In fact, we glimpsed what they may have looked like in the Russiagate fiasco, which dogged Trump's presidency and mired it in legal challenges, indictments, FBI special investigations, and so on for nearly his entire team.
The chief claims of Russiagate, which were loudly amplified by the media, were subsequently proven to have been fabricated during an investigation by FBI Special Counsel John Durham with two indictments to date at the time of writing.
However, by this time, after the fact, neither the media nor the public cared.A Schmittian analysis of these details would show us three things.First, Donald Trump, despite holding the office of US president, never had sovereignty.
I've said, I've made that point over and over again.Yeah.For two and a half years now.
Second, whoever is sovereign in the United States, which one suspects is neither Joe Biden nor the Supreme Court, did not like Donald Trump very much and sought to make him an exception.
Third, there is no sovereignty in the people whatsoever, and the preamble of the U.S.Constitution, We the People, is an empty slogan.
And I don't know that anybody who, I mean, some people who are listening to this, who are still holding on for dear life, you know, for like some kind of vast, I mean, huge, like an overarching libertarian ideology.
I don't, the only thing that I think that they would argue with here is some of them are like, I just hate Donald Trump. Mm-hmm, but none of this is everything here is true.
Yeah, I mean and especially this last part I mean, how can they not agree with there is no sovereignty in the people whatsoever and the preamble the u.s Constitution we the people is an empty slogan I don't.
Open your eyes.Yeah, it's it sucks.You know, it kind of hurts to.I mean, that's why people say, well, you're black pilled if you think that it's like, well, I'm I'm not black pilled.I'm reality pilled.Yes, it's I wish it wasn't this way, but why?
Why pretend that it is?It's just silly.
All I ever wanted to do when I was a kid was play in a Stanley Cup final and lift the cup.But I never got a chance to do it.I guess I should be black pilled because the reality was I wasn't good enough.
In reality, there was no way that I was going to be able to do it.You must not believe in equality.Yeah.
While the elite theorists sought chiefly to attack democracy as a sham, Schmitt's main target was liberalism which he believed constantly sought to obscure and obfuscate power behind legal fictions.
And before we go any further, whenever you see liberalism in this book, you can tack a classic in front of it. This is not attacking left liberalism that you see today.
This is attacking Enlightenment era, what came out of the Enlightenment era, and even the Protestant Revolt, classical liberalism.For Schmitt, the sovereign authority not only was bound to the normally valid legal order, but also transcended it.
His sovereign slumbers in normal times, but suddenly awakes when a normal situation threatens to become an exception.In this critical moment, sovereign power reveals itself in its purest form."I just thought of, what was his name?
Barack Obama's guy, Emanuel... What was his... Rahm Emanuel.Yeah. Never let a crisis go to waste.They wait for the crisis and that's when you see who the government is, what your government is.
It stands to reason then that because the sovereign decides the exception, he is not subject to the law. In fact, the sovereign not only decides the exception, but also decides when order and stability are restored.
It may surprise some people to learn that the United States has been in a near continuous state of national emergency since 1917.Emergency executive orders dating back to the Jimmy Carter administration are still active.
Powers invoked by George W. Bush to fight his war on terror were never rescinded.
In the UK, the Coronavirus Act 2020 granted the government sweeping and unprecedented emergency powers over its subjects in a remit that extended far beyond the treatment of people infected with COVID-19, which includes powers to detain potentially infectious persons, powers to prevent mass gatherings, mass surveillance powers, and the imposition of criminal sanctions for disease transmission.
I don't know, how would you prove that?
The initial indictment of Julian Assange in 2018 rested on the authority of Executive Order 13526 issued by President Barack Obama in 2009, which defined what counts as a secret, although he was later charged with 17 further charges, each of which carry a 10-year sentence.
Viewed in this way, it is easier to understand Schmitt's insistence on looking at the exception rather than the theoretical norm. In theory, there is a legal norm, but in practice, we are nearly constantly in the exception.
As Schmitt put it, all law is situational law.The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality.He has the monopoly over this last decision.
Therein resides the essence of the state's sovereignty, which must be juristically defined correctly, not as the monopoly to coerce or to rule, but as the monopoly to decide. It really simplifies it, right?
I mean, when you, when you, you know, someone may have made a documentary called the Monopoly on Violence, where you went through all, went through all these people trying to describe exactly what the nature of the state is.
And Schmidt basically does it in less than a paragraph.And it is who decides.When something happens, who decides. All right, let's go on a little bit here.This is the basis for Schmitt's doctrine of decisionism.
To better understand this, let us consider a lengthy passage in which he compares Demeistra to various anarchists.Quoting, Demeistra spoke with particular fondness of sovereignty, which essentially meant decision.
To him, the relevance of the state rested on the fact that it provided a decision, the relevance of the church on its rendering of the last decision that could not be appealed.
Infallibility was for him the essence of the decision that cannot be appealed, and the infallibility of the spiritual order was of the same nature as the sovereignty of the state order.
The two words, infallibility and sovereignty, were perfectly synonymous.
To him, every sovereignty acted as if it were infallible, every government was absolute, a sentence that an anarchist could pronounce verbatim, even if his intention was an entirely different one.
In this sentence, there lies the clearest antithesis to the entire history of political ideas.
All the anarchist theories from Babouf to Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Otto Gross revolve around the one axiom, the people are good, but the magistrate is corruptible.
Demystros asserted the exact opposite, namely, that the authority as such is good once it exists.
Any government is good once it is established, the reason being that a decision is inherent in the mere existence of a governmental authority, and the decision as such is in turn valuable precisely because, as far as the most essential issues are concerned, making a decision is more important than how a decision is made.
It is definitely not in our interest that a question be decided in one way or another, but that it be decided without delay and without appeal.In practice, not to be subject to error and not to be accused of error were for him the same.
The important point was that no higher authority could review the decision. I just go back to the beginning of COVID.People were begging for somebody to make a decision there.Oh, that's what they want.
The people in mass, all of these people, and I still have sympathies to anarchism, all of these people who are anarchists, who are screaming, and the government, and the government, need to look around and realize the majority of people are, when something goes wrong,
They do not go to the anarchists for an answer.They go to the state.They go to what they see as the authority.They go to see who they look at as the decision maker, as the leader, whatever you want to call these people.
Just understand when something goes wrong, they do not run to the libertarians.They, as a matter of fact, as soon as something goes wrong, people out there start making fun of libertarianism and saying that this is the death of libertarianism.
And why is it the death of libertarianism?Because no one is going to libertarians for answers.
Yeah, well, there's people that were willing to basically be free workers for the state during COVID that they were, they wanted people locked up.
I knew a guy that actually said he wanted drones flying over the streets of Austin, Texas, to show anyone who was out and about and make sure that the cops found them and arrested them just for walking in the streets.
People want, I mean, it was supply and demand, unfortunately.
Yeah. It goes back to what Andrew's talking about.Why is there a state?It's because people want it.
Yeah.There's a market demand.
Yeah.People will argue, well, is there a market demand because it's inherent or because 12 years of public schooling?It doesn't matter at this point.It doesn't matter at this point.
You have to figure out what you're doing now to figure out what the answer is.All right. This may make it sound as if de Maistre and Schmitt are putting the sovereign beyond criticism or reproach.
However, they simply mean that in practice, sovereignty rests on decisionism.Not that this thinking is also President Pareto's man of action.
If the sovereign is arbitrary or corrupt or tyrannical, he will fail to uphold his key obligation which is to uphold order and stability and therefore be illegitimate.The sovereign who cannot protect, who has no right to demand obedience.
George Schwab formalized Schmitt's theory in the following diagram.
This is one of those points where looking at the video instead of listening to this is, or if you have the book, open up to, I don't have the book in front of me, I don't know what page it is.PWJ Page 65.CB.Page 65.Yeah.So they explain the diagram.
To explain this, Jesus Christ is the political formula.This can be replaced with liberty fraternity Equality the will of the people or any other empty slogan.Yes, we can yes.Yes, we can or Make America great again.
Yeah, we we interpret to beat her I'm so bad at friggin Latin is Who interprets the slogan? Octoritus non veritus means authority, not truth, makes law.Protestus directa non indirecta means the direct power rather than indirect power has authority.
When he's talking about indirect power, he's talking about you.He's talking about the people. And this is the axis on which legitimate sovereignty must turn.
The individual who is at the bottom of the diagram exchanges his obedience for protection from the sovereign.Schmitt thus showed that all power has this essentially theological and decisionist character.Now, I mean, when you, again, it's hard
to not see religion and hierarchies in government that come directly from the history of what we know of the church and mostly probably the Catholic church and the Orthodox church.Protestantism doesn't have anything.I'm sorry.
I went to a Protestant seminary.Once you do that, you Half the people lose faith.All right.Schmitt's thinking has profound and far-reaching consequences for the myths of liberalism.Let me name five of them.
One, the illusion of equality under the rule of law.As soon as we admit the exception, all pretenses of such equality must be dropped.Two, the state itself is nothing but law.
The opponents that Schmitt stalks in the first two chapters of political theology are the proponents who advance the thesis that the state can be reduced to law, that the state is nothing but law, and that law is a total, seamless, exhaustive hole.
The state is, as soon as the state goes into crisis, the law goes out the window.For them, right.Yeah, for them, yeah. that the judiciary is neutral and impartial and somehow separate from politics.
This self-evidently can never be the case, especially as the judiciary are subject to the sovereign who, by necessity, always stands above them. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the few U.S.
presidents who achieved sovereignty, not only attempted to pack the courts and pass mandatory retirement ages for justices in a bid to discipline the Supreme Court after it ruled eight of his New Deal measures unconstitutional, but also broke with convention and ran for third and fourth terms.
Even if Roosevelt did not get his own way on every score, the machinations of Chief Justice Charles Evans, Charles Evans Hughes, himself a presidential candidate in 1916, demonstrate that the concept of a neutral apolitical judiciary is nonsense.
We know that I mean he already talked about how the supreme court just refused to hear anything in um in the 2020 election Not that they let's dispel this myth.
Yes, not that they looked at the evidence that was presented They refused to look at the evidence that was presented Yeah
I heard so many leftists that I know saying, see, that's how you know it was bullshit.They reviewed it and deemed that it wasn't even worthy of looking at.And it's like, no, no, no.
They knew what the situation was and they said, we're not even going to look at it at all.Dismissed.
therefore five that no state institutions or institutions which rely on the state for their continued existence can be agnostic to the official state the only time that we have seen the government basically state the state apparatus departments go against the state and go against especially the president
is really was clearest under Trump.Yeah, for sure.Lying to him about the amount of troops that were in Syria, saying that they were pulling them out and not doing it.Yep.Yeah.
And I wanted to go back to one here because I didn't comment on this, but it's important.So the illusion of equality under the rule of law soon as we admit the exception, all pretenses to such equality must be dropped."Yeah, of course.
If you take Schmitz, the exception, he who makes the exception, as soon as the exception is made, there's no equality under the law because there's someone there who makes an exception.And that person is also, I think all the time,
a fellow citizen who should be subject to the law.So, yeah, I mean, that one to me is simple.
Yeah, I don't think the folks that are sitting in prison right now that were at the Capitol on January 6th see that there's a lot of equality under the law for them.They're on the wrong side of the fight, of the friend-enemy distinction.
Yeah, especially when they look back on the summer of George and they realize, how many of those people went to jail?
Not only that, but the vice presidential candidate, who's now vice president, was helping fund them to make sure that they didn't go to jail and that they could get legal representation.How about that?Bio-Leninism.
All right. and also that leads to Ted Kaczynski's The System's Neatest Trick, about how the system will use those lowest people, but they're on their side, and use them as their foot soldiers.Yep.Antifa.Yep.Ted called it in 2005.
This leads naturally to Schmitt's second famous thesis, the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political. The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.
Schmitt himself saw tremendous significance in the first of these statements, which open the concept of the political as a Copernican moment in state theory. What did Schmidt overturn?
In short, most theories of the state supposed that politics is something that takes place within the state, while Schmidt maintained that politics comes both prior to and separate from the state.
Thus, politics has a potential to destabilize the state.If a state has
If a state has genuine pretenses to neutrality, as did the Weimar Republic in which he was writing, then it would be liable not only to contain great political animosity, but also find itself dislodged by a political force that had no such pretenses.
Thus, the state cannot be neutral and must itself become political, which then necessitates recognizing the friend-enemy distinction.
By friend and enemy, Schmitt was not talking about animosity on a personal and private level, but rather on a public one.
Quoting, even the precept, love your enemies, from Matthew 5, 544, clearly refers to the private enemy, inimicus, and not the public one, hostus.
Public enmity, according to Schmitt, is not a private matter, but in our epoch, exclusively a concern of the political unit, the national sovereign state. The extreme end state of a public enemy is war.Let me say that again.
The extreme end state of a public enemy is war.At the most modest level, it might be a disagreement over a tax rate.
Conflicts over minor disagreements of policy do not attain the status of the political until they increase in intensity and become irreconcilable. The non-neutrality of the state might be understood more readily by the following table.
Okay, so I'm gonna explain this table since it's really not that hard.There's three columns, political theology, and it says communism, liberalism, and fascism.So under communism, your friends are communists.Your enemies are fascists and liberals.
The political theology of liberalism, your friends are liberals.Fascists and communists are your enemy.Political theology, fascism.Your friends are fascists.Your enemies are communists and liberals.
The only one of those I would take umbrage with is liberalism, which has done a really good job of using communists to their advantage.Yeah. In practice, those within a political community will struggle to distinguish their enemies.
Hence, it has been the practice of communists to label all their opponents fascists, which also increasingly became the modus operandi of social democrats, liberal democrats, and so-called neoconservatives, many of whom were former Trotskyites after World War II.
the political theology of communism it is necessary to paint fascism as liberal as liberalism in a decayed state fighting a rear guard action in the interests of capital."Anti-Stalin.You want to say something about that?It's really amazing.
that communists, that they do that, that they actually do that, that they actually paint fascists as liberals in a decayed state fighting a rear guard.I've heard some libertarians do that too.
Anti-Stalinist leftists, anarchists, left communists, and social democrats in the 1920s and 30s coined the phrase red fascism to describe Stalin's doctrine of socialism in one country.
the political theology of liberalism, it was necessary to tie together communism and fascism, completely effacing their substantive differences by viewing them as two sides of the same totalitarian and anti-semitic coin.
That's libertarianism right there.I spoke with a mutual friend of ours recently, and I was talking to him about fascism, and I was talking to him about how
Basically, what was going on in the 1930s in Europe was that the communists were infiltrating Europe and the fascists in all countries were fighting against them.And he said, it's just two different totalitarianisms fighting against each other.
Yeah.Two sides of the same authoritarian coin, I suppose.
Sure.Later it was necessary even to paint fundamentalist Islam as Islamofascism, which was retroactively applied as a decades-long struggle. One neoconservative writer even attempted to coin the absurd title liberal fascism.Fuck you, Jonah Goldberg.
I will say that over and over again until I die.Fuck you, Jonah Goldberg.
You leftist infiltrating the frigging right, pretending to be right. In the final analysis within a liberal democracy, it is fascism that becomes the decisive and ultimate enemy rather than totalitarianism or communism.Hey!
What someone might call the Nuremberg regime.
The experiences of Joseph McCarthy and his vilification by liberal history demonstrate that even during the Cold War, the enemy was not communism per se, but rather the Soviet bloc as a counter-hegemon and stand-in Hitler.
From the fascist point of view, liberals and communists allied against them in World War II.Well, that's actually true.Yeah, that's reality.
Although debates will range about whether Francisco Franco was a fascist, his enemies in the Civil War, the Republican Alliance, consisted of internationally backed liberals, socialists, and communists, while Mussolini and Hitler lent the Nationalist Alliance their support.
I think that even fascists argue over whether Franco was a fascist.And I love that the Salazar in Portugal hated the term fascist or communist, and that then you look at every election that he ever won, he won by 100%.Yeah.Yeah.Interesting.
All right from the realist perspective of schmidt There is no structural difference between the liberal state the communist state and the fascist state or indeed any other state The only difference is the extent to which a regime may obscure the nature of its power or else genuinely buy into myths of neutrality Yes That's that's key.
That's a lot right there.
It is.Yeah, because I don't believe that Schmitt liked liberalism, but there's part of me that wants to look at this as he's not giving his personal opinion on whether he liked it or not, but he's telling you what it is.
He's basically saying post-Enlightenment liberalism is just a facade of pre-Enlightenment governance.
You still have authoritarianism, but you're painting it with this rosy, pretty picture and this fake thing that we all, all the grassroots people get to decide.And that's, it's got these separations of powers.
And again, when it really comes down to it, when they don't want to have the separations of power, when an emergency happens, you see what it really is.And it's just, it's not too different than a lot of the pre-enlightenment government.
Yeah torn down to its basics.Um, we're basically right now at feudalism with air conditioning and mcmansions.
Yeah Yeah, really where we are Viewed in this way a state wedded to liberal democracy is as totalitarian as any other since by its very nature It will be unable to tolerate any leaders who are not always are who are not always already liberal democrats
Should such leaders rise, the stalwarts of liberal democracy will perceive them as populists, fascists, threats to democracy, and so on.I just saw that from Reid Cooley now, one of the coolest people around.
funny about his name, running the Libertarian Party National account, tweeted out talking about a James Lindsay quote where he's praising McCarthy, that McCarthy basically didn't go far enough, but he was right.And what did somebody say under that?
Quotes like that are a threat to our democracy. And I'm like, if quotes like that and that kind of thinking will destroy democracy, I'm for that.
Yeah, exactly.And me too.Yeah, you see that and it's like, you want to put the meme under it?Yes.
Yes.I like the Chad one that somebody did of the drawing of Ted Kaczynski in court, because he looks like the Chad.Yeah. All right, the extent of free speech free inquiry free thought and so on is a liberal delusion.
Yes, in fact, yeah, of course In fact, the range of allowable opinion is always exceedingly narrow and the liberal democratic state is marked by its intolerance and spectacular inability to imagine any worldview that is not its own.
Back when Chomsky was somebody to be, you could actually listen to and learn from and not throw up because he was talking about mandatory vaccinations and putting people in camps.The dominance of liberal political theology is total.
Schmitt would not have disagreed with Oswald Spengler, who wrote In the Decline of the West.Is this going to get us taken off of YouTube?
England, too, discovered the ideal of a free press and discovered along with it that the press serves him who owns it.It does not spread free opinion.It generates it. Without the readers observing it, the paper, and himself with it, changes masters.
Here also money triumphs and forces the free spirits into its service.No tamer has his animals more under his power.
Unleash the people as reader mass, and it will storm the streets and hurl itself upon the target indicated, terrifying and breaking windows, a hint to the press staff, and it will become quiet and go home.
The press today is an army with carefully organized arms and branches with journalists as officers and readers as soldiers."Did he write this in 1918?Right.Yeah.I was just funny.I was just going to look at when he wrote this as you asked that.
But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly and war aims and operations plans change without its knowledge.The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purpose for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play.
A more appalling character of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formally, a man did not dare to think freely.Now he dares, but cannot.His will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and that is what he feels as his liberty.
Yeah, just before you read that quote, you, I don't know, you actually said, are we going to get kicked off YouTube?Just the thought that you would have that thought based in reality and experience proves exactly what this is talking about.
Look at 2020. those people did not go out to riot on their own.And, and as was clearly stated in the Molly Ball article in Time.Yeah.
If on election Eve, they didn't know who won, there were people scheduled to go out to riot and someone called them off.All right.All right.
Do we want to name some of the people who were marching alongside and going to Black Lives Matter rallies in 2020?I can think of a couple that we know.Yeah, in our circles.Yeah, that now get to be on cable news shows.Yeah.
And people wonder why you don't want to be called, why so many people are like, don't call me a libertarian anymore.Yes, correct.Well put.Yeah, yeah.
Addis Edward Bernays would go on to say, these are the invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions.In some department of our daily lives in which we imagine ourselves as free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power.
The point is that viewed from the outside, liberal democracy looks just as totalitarian as any other regime, even if it relies more on subtle persuasion, nudge techniques, and other psychological tricks than coercion to obtain its results.
Just my own little chime in here.That's worse to me.For everyone listening, think about that.Would you rather have
a government that's quite upfront and honest about what they're doing, or this sham that we have now where we get to pretend that we all have our say and we get to pretend our votes are equal.
But again, they're basically relying on Bernaysian tactics, subtle persuasion, nudge techniques, other psychological tricks, as a lot of us call them PSYOPs, we see these all the time.What's worse?Think about that.
know, say what you will about Lenin, but he was not trying to hide what his goals were.Then you look at this, and there are people still who hold to what academic agent calls the boomer truth regime.All these naive
silly, civic, civic national promises that just aren't manifested in reality.And if they were ever were, it's probably pre-Civil War.So in Pareto's terms, liberal democracy leads to rule by foxes as opposed to lions.
Liberal democracy rules, as Schmitt was later to call it, by a tyranny of values in which anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-materialist thinking is beyond the pale and banished from polite society.
Some have been quick to point out Schmitt's cynical hypocrisy for complaining when the boot was on the other foot, so to speak, but it is perfectly consistent with his friend-enemy distinction.
When friends are in power and imposing their values, that is good.When enemies are in power and imposing theirs, that is bad. I mean, what the people who were screaming in the streets and doing the 2016 performative art in 2016.
Yeah, went out now think that we're in the best economy ever.
Yeah, I actually that's funny.I had 2016 written off to the side on that exact paragraph.That's exactly what it reminded me of too.Yeah.Yeah.And and now to to the left.Ooh, the Supreme Court is
They're using terms that we in the libertarian world used for so long.It's illegitimate.That's an illegitimate institution.Oh, because the shoe's on the other foot, I suppose, at this point.
And it makes me, even people like you and I that have long held that it was illegitimate, but it's making me wonder now, not that it's in its legitimacy or not, but is there some kind of, what's going on behind the scenes?
Because the people pulling the strings that allow certain things to happen, It is interesting what's going on with the Supreme Court, but maybe that's a whole other discussion.
Yeah.I've, I've talked about that recently that, um, you wonder if there is a war going on amongst elites when, you know, Dobbs, when Dobbs is reconsidered.
And, um, I forget what the, uh, I never remember the name of the, uh, the one about gun guns and carry that, that, that those can be overturned.And it seems like the States are, taking more, being more sovereign amongst themselves.
So it's like, is there a war going on?Are things getting better?The black pilled out there will just say, no, this is all a ruse.It's to lull you to sleep and everything like that.
And it's like, I hate to call them black pill because I get accused of being black pilled all the time.But people who's see everything as a conspiracy.Everything is a conspiracy.
And most everything is a couple of people coming together to make decisions, but it's like, in whose interests?When you look at something like Dobbs, Roe being overturned, that was in my favor.That's according to my values.
I haven't gotten many wins in my life when it comes to my values.
Yeah, I disagreed.I believe you might have too, but I love Yarvin, and I like his opinion, and I value his opinions.
I disagreed with him on that paper that he wrote soon after where he was... I forgot that he was using terminology from a movie or a show that I don't watch.So part of my annoyance... He was using Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings.
Yeah, and I have zero interest in Lord of the Rings.So part of my annoyance was using that terminology, but the general message of what he was putting out Personally, I disagreed with on that too.Yeah, I disagreed with him as well.
And I made that public, I know.And Carlos made sure that that was public, I know.Yeah, that's right.Love you, Carlos.That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah.Yeah, yeah.This is politics, war by another name.
As Paul Gottfried argues, Schmitt wishes us to know that no amount of neutralization can render human relations apolitical. However, earnestly, we strive for a programmed and peaceful society.
However, however earnestly we strive for a program, the peaceful society, the political as friend enemy distinction continues to resurface.Yes.Let me not ask you, Buck, let me ask you a hypothetical.
So have you knew somebody who was running for office? would you, and he was, that person, he or she was looking to institute programs that were, that you thought would be helpful.I mean, that would be to me, to you, that would be a friend, right?
Yeah.Yeah.And you would probably be a friend to them as, you know, as a voter, as somebody who may donate money or something like that.And that person may look to reward you in some way. That's just, that's life.Yeah, that's exactly right.Yeah.Yeah.
It's life.I mean, if you own a store, say you want a grocery store and friends of yours come in, your close friends come and shop there.If you're, it's your grocery store, you own it.Private owner.
You might let them slide on some, you know, grab, grab that beer.Right.Grab, grab that 12 pack of beer.Don't worry about it.It's on me.
Yeah.Yeah.You know, you know this from playing and playing music.How many times you, Hey, want to put me on the guest list?Um, all the time.Yeah.Can we open for you?Right.Yes.Yeah.Yeah, exactly.Uh, yeah.
I think it's Andrew that says if politicians are for sale, why not buy them?Yeah.I think that was, um, actually I think that was, um, Matt.
Yeah.That was Matt.Yeah.All right.All right.Final paragraph. Carl Schmitt is a thoroughly realist thinker who sees through every liberal and democratic delusion.
He cuts through all myths to see plainly and without embellishment the essence of power in practice, in actu, as opposed to in theory and in laws which are no better than sheets of inert paper. That's tough.That's rough.
Think of Burnham when we read that Sam Francis' take on suicide of the West by Burnham.And I mean, he was just destroying ideology throughout that whole thing, theory and that whole thing.
These are lessons that, much like those of the elite theorists, people are often unwilling to admit either to themselves or to others.But as Schmitt would surely recognize with Pareto, people often seek refuge in their delusions.
I'm going to say that again.But as Schmitt would surely recognize with Pareto, people often seek refuge in their delusions.
Critiques that accuse Schmidt himself of being an authoritarian seem to miss the fact that he is suggesting that all successful states, including liberal democratic ones, function in the same way.
Sovereign power rests in the person or persons who decide the exception and who interpret the mantras of the official political theology.Politics rests on the friend-enemy distinction, and the state must itself be political and define its enemies.
Yeah.I'm not knocking libertarianism in general or even specific people, but I think sometimes I did.And as a libertarian, you can have blinders on and you might read this paragraph and say, well, not if we ran the government.
You're thinking of like Democrats and Republicans and the friend-enemy distinction.We would just have a small minarchy or ANCAP situation.But Again, that's looking at stuff as you'd like it to be in your head, not as it really is.
I think that's why sometimes some libertarians had a problem.They would certainly have a problem with this last paragraph.They had a problem with Burnham and the Machiavellians. There's, I think people often seek refuge in their delusions.
And again, I'm not knocking all libertarians, but I was one of these people.And I know we know that they still exist.That's an issue.
Yeah.You know, since the Mises Caucus took over the Libertarian Party, I don't seek to criticize them anymore.They have it, but try to make the best of it.Do what you can with it.But one thing I always admired about the Mises Caucus was,
It was top down.They had a board, I think it was five people, and they made the decisions. They weren't taking a vote in the frigging Facebook group.They made the decision.That pissed a lot of people off.
And it just goes to show exactly how many people are libertarians, want to think that everything should be a democracy.
It's like anyone who's talked to normal people or it's like if you go out, I mean, come on, when you have 12,000 people in your Facebook group, how many of them are going to be legitimate thinkers and smart?
Most of them are just going to be, some of them might not even have internal monologue.They're doing things by instinct instead of really examining a situation.And so many people would complain about that.People would complain about that in a group.
And I'm like, I think that's the best thing I like about this.Is that it's like, fuck you.We're in charge.We're going to make the decisions.Come along.
And I know our mutual friend, Scott, he didn't love the verbiage of the takeover.I know he wasn't a fan of that.I kind of like it because, I mean, look who was in charge.Why would you not want to take over from those people? I like it.Yeah.
I mean, it's like I still have problems with the libertarian party because I, it's, it's a bureaucracy and we're reading a book about bureaucracy right now.
Bureaucracy is something that comes up all the time and bureaucracies always go to shit, especially political bureaucracies.But, um, unless you take a top down approach and it's like, okay, we're the ones who make the decisions.Fuck you.
But it's kind of hard to do that in a, political situation where you're having, you have to take votes every two years or every year at conventions and things like that.So that's, I'd rather it be a, be a pure monarchy than anything else, you know?
So, and, and be upfront about what you want.I mean, that's what I, that's what I like about reading this chapter is that this, this facade that democracy and liberalism is rooted in this, it's almost evil because it's a lie.
And it's, you know, it's a facade and it gives these people, these idiots, this illusion like, oh, well, no, my vote counts.And if we can just get 51%, you know.
But again, that 51% thing, democracy also shows the friend-enemy distinction that Schmidt wrote about. Because I guarantee you right now there's people that say they like democracy that if they could have Obama as a actual monarchy monarch dictator
uh and have people like you and me silenced of course they'd go for that of course they would and there's people I would I wish we had a DeSantis style dictator in Texas that would just be king of Texas and let us secede and uh and and do and if I like what he wants and and was about of course I'd be for it and make life miserable for his enemies yep because that's what politics is yeah there's no getting around that I mean even when you read Hoppe
and his plans, what a Hoppian society would look like, what covenant communities would look like. is basically top down.Yeah.No, I mean, it's, he wouldn't talk about elites, natural elites if it weren't, you know?
So, you know, I mean, people just need to get over this, over this idea that, um, even if somehow they're, even if somehow, I don't know how it would happen.You get to anarchy in some, in some way.I mean, I still think locally you can get things.
I think there are things out there right now that actually, uh, do quite represent, represent it.Um,
closer to hopper than what we have now, but um These people there are people who actually think that they're going to like have That it's gonna be like complete radically individual and everybody's gonna have a say and it's like no first of all as Ryan McMakin said you people come together so for safety safety and numbers and you agree on some things and when you agree on certain things and
there are other things that you may have to give up the whole idea of liberty on.You know, it's like, um, maybe a covenant community is like, I only want people who are Christian or are sympathetic to Christianity.Yes.
And then at that point you would be, if you're in a, if you're in, you would basically have to realize that people are going to be Christian around you and they're going to be, you're,
you're not going to be able to escape from hearing that and run to a predominantly white country in the Nordics, but you don't hear about Christianity being talked about very much.It's not going to a private city.
A private law society is going to have leaders, is going to have people.And Why the fuck would you want a vote?Why would you want right?Correct.Why would you want people you see what people voting gets you?Yeah.Why would you want voting?
Yeah.Yeah.If there was a family with say eight kids, they were all in their under Or 12, 13, 14.Do you think the dad just goes, well, I'll let you guys vote on what we're going to do this year as far as finances go?
And no one thinks about, well, put that out into a democracy and kind of think about what that entails in society. You know, it's almost, I'll see people at the store, masked up still to this day, and I always think, dang, that person votes.
It's depressing.If you think about it on some level, it's not good.
Not only do they vote, but there is a pretty good chance that if you drill down, they probably hate you.Yeah. You know, and that's who you're sharing a society with.That's why it's like, you know, the whole physical removal thing.
And did you see the headline from Zero Hedge?Yes.That was awesome.DeSantis getting, having a frigging Soros, a Soros elected DA removed.
And, and, and, and, you know, Zero Hedge put physically removed in there on purpose because, you know, they're, they're, they were drawn out of the Ron, Ron Paul days.I mean, there's some opinions there and it was just like, well, yeah, this is what,
Dude, I saw that.That's the first thing I saw when I woke up this morning.And I was just like, it's going to be a good day.How is it not going to be a good day?
You know, a Soros DA is removed by the only guy in this country who realizes how you have to reign in a quote unquote democracy as an autocrat.You're going to have to be an autocrat and be like, out.
Yep.And his enemies, of course, will call him fascist and a threat to democracy.
And that's when you go and give your plugs again, we'll get out of here.
Counterflow podcast is the show.Go subscribe to our YouTube channel.You can find all my links at counterflowpodcast.com.Follow me on Twitter at Buck Rebel.And I just want to say leaving here that academic agent Nima Parvini wrote a very good book.
I like it.And the artwork, if you're into cool aesthetics, the artwork is just chef's kiss.I love it so much.And Pete, thank you for having me as part of this series.I feel like I don't belong with these names.
You've got Pedro Gonzalez, Paul Gottfried, Curtis Yarvin, academic agent.
Paul Gottfried is not gonna be- He's not gonna do it.
But still.Pedro's gonna do Paul's part.
Okay.But this list of names, Oren McIntyre, it's really incredible.So I'm honored to be even included in this list of names.So thank you, Pete.
No problem at all.And Buck is running for city council in Lockhart and we are going to, we are looking to implement the HAPA strategy.MisesGOP.org forward slash Pete.
If you want to do a monthly or a, just a one-time donation, go there and help Buck out.
Yeah, I'm running against so far two people and they're long time Lockhart folks.They're entrenched in this city.So that's a bit of an uphill battle for me.So I've got to get some funds raised to have a little fun with these people out here.
Let's get it done.Thank you, Bob.Appreciate it.
I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Kenyanya Show.Returning is The Prudentialist.How are you, sir?I'm doing great.How are you, Pete?I'm doing very well.Thank you for joining me for this reading of Chapter 6 of The Populist Delusion.
Is there anything you want to, like an introduction or anything you want to say about what we're going to read in the chapter?
Well, I thought that this was probably my, I've only picked it up recently to read through it.Right before you had sent me the DM for the invitation, I was like, Oh, good.I just bought the book.So I can I can read through it.
And I know I do juvenile out of all of what we would consider the elite theorists is the most interesting for the exact same reason, you know, academic agent talks about him being interesting, because he talks about how things change and where revolutions come from.
And so There's a lot in this chapter that we'll read through today that I think is very, very applicable as he notes in the book to what we're currently seeing today.
Well, I am going to pull it up and I'm going to start reading.And as I told you, I told you before, jump in any time.Sounds great.Chapter six, the high, low, middle mechanism.
Bertrand, the juvenile wrote many works over a long career, but I wish to concentrate on his most famous work on power first published in 1945.
Although he should justly be ranked alongside Carl Schmitt as one of the greatest political thinkers of the 20th century, his work was strangely neglected by Anglo-American political scientists, even as he was showered with honors in his native France.
This is partly because he was dismissed as an eccentric amateur who lacked empirical rigor, and partly because, like the elite theorists, Juvenel was a severe critic of democracy and this was unfashionable after World War II.
Unlike the elite theorists who had American champions in Arthur Livingstone and James Burnham, Juvenel seemed to fall between the cracks and his idiosyncrasies did not align him very easily with either liberals or conservatives.
For example, Roy Pierce complained that in Juvenel's analysis, the real and significant differences between political systems are dissolved, and that he draws a false analogy between the New Deal in the United States and the Nazi regime in Germany.
Pierce does not explain this and assumes it is self-evident as to why Juvenel was wrong.It is not self-evident.
Yeah, kicking in with moral equivalency is going to be a very easy way to dismiss a lot of critics that would illustrate why FDR and Adolf Hitler are similar in a lot of ways.
uh we do have a lot of focus in america on james burnham although arthur livingston i don't think gets enough attention these days unless you're really big into the abbeyville institute but uh yeah he doesn't get enough attention i think out of everyone i think on the right that we've seen here these days too much attention i think i think sometimes even robert filmer gets more attention than birchland juvenile but on powers required reading i think for sure and i'm glad that he put a whole chapter to him yeah
And the the New Deal and Nazi, I think it was on episode 500 of my podcast.And Yarvin read what's his name?FDR's 1933 inaugural speech.
No, he did the last few paragraphs.Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And yeah, it's very it's very hard to tell the difference between the two, especially if you're very familiar with the style of speech that Hitler would deliver and also his rhetoric.So.
Well, yeah, and I mean, if you were to take a minute to just like read Garrett Garrett's The Revolution Was and explain it with basically how FDR took power or based on promises, it's just sounds very, very similar to sort of the rise of the NSDAP in Germany.
Alright, like the elite theorists, Juvenel rejected the notion that society could ever be separated from the state.Power, by which he means central sovereign authority, is a constant in human affairs.
In addition, breaking with the classical liberal tradition, he rejected the idea that the economy could ever exist free of politics. save in a Robinson Crusoe situation.
Political action as he defines it is an essential and prior concomitant of economic activity and he explicitly rejects the supposed division between sociology and politics.
This insistence that there is no escape from politics also echoes Schmitt, although I should note that Juvenel does not quote him or any of the elite theorists.
He was touching on many of the same truths, though, and it is at times remarkable how similar his conclusions are to those of Mosca, Pareto, Michels, or indeed of Schmitt. Ciampini spotted this.
For example, in Juvenile, it seems that the voters do not choose the politicians, but on the contrary, that the latter are imposed on voters.
By referring to political ideologies, the leadership of a party can impose on voters their political orientation and push them to elect candidates who do not deserve to be elected. As we will recall, this point exactly is made in Moscow.
The truth is that the representative has himself elected by the voters.
There is more than a hint of Mischel's when Juvenal says, there is no need to suppose that the persons chosen to govern are not in general perfectly representative men, exactly resembling their subjects.
But when once they have been summoned to exercise of sovereign authority, their wills take on a new character and different force.While it is not, you got something?
Yeah, no, I mean, he's right there.And we're later on in this chapter, he talks about how the representatives select who elects them.You know, we see that most prominent today in our form of, you know, districting and how we can select our voters.
One of the things that I find interesting is, is that Both the earlier comment that we can't separate sociology and politics the same way we can't separate the economy and politics except in a Robinson Crusoe fashion.
All aspects of our modern day political economy and also our real economy are based on political decisions and the ability to cater to individuals to signal that you're part of the central authority and what they may be a part of ideologically imposing on others is evident.
I mean, even what's been memed and touted about with, you know, beyond meat and Cracker Barrel as of late, right?I mean, everyone has made their, their political decisions there.
But it's also a very adamant political decision to signal that you're willing to cater to this crowd, even though they would probably vehemently oppose it doesn't represent the people that would typically, you know, consume
or spend their money to have transactions there.And it's very demonstrative that you can't separate these things at all.
And I mean, as the chapter later will tell us, I mean, 2020 and the summer of riots that came with it are no, no clear proof of it.
While it is not clear if he ever read them, I am confident in asserting that Juvenel had instinctively absorbed the core tenets of elite theory.
Moscow's Law of the Rulers and the Ruled, Pareto's Circulation of the Elites, and Michel's Iron Law of Oligarchy.Juvenel's critique of democracy is rooted in two facts.First, he says that Montesquieu's separation of powers is a myth.
Juvenal argues that the principle of separation of powers is actually unrealized.The government should be autonomous from the parliament if it wants to enjoy any substantial autonomy.
The executive, which should be an expression of the popular will, is in fact directed by parties' leaders supporting it in parliament.
Second, he says that democratic political systems are not immune to the secular trend in the growth of central governmental power. In fact, de Juvenel argues, they provide the biggest highway to tyranny that has ever existed.
On this score, he laments the French Revolution.The power of the people was but a fiction in a regime which was for practical purposes, a parliamentary sovereignty.
But the fiction justified the blotting out of liberty on a scale never known before in Europe.His critique is virtually identical with that found in J.L.Talman.
Quoting, the real people, or rather their leadership, once triumphant in their insurrection, become Rousseau's legislator, who surveys clearly the whole panorama without being swayed by partial interests and passions, and shapes the young nation with the help of laws derived from his superior wisdom.
He prepares it to will the general will.First comes the elimination of men and influences, not of the people, and not identified with the general will embodied in the new established social contract of the revolution.
Then the re-education of the young nation to will the general will.
Yep.I mean, we saw that in the National Assembly.I mean, the violence came through really the will of Rousseau in the Jacobins.
There's no separation of powers that we've seen in any sort of liberal tradition or democratic tradition here in the United States.It's very clear with that.
We claim a separation of powers, but you open up any civics high school textbook about the presidency.He's the chief executive, but he's also the leader of the party he represents.
So even the parliamentarians, or in our case, congressional representatives, their will is still being expressed through the executive action.
And we see this even now bleed through about where power is really unrealized is, you know, how with the Supreme Court, even though it's meant to be this final judiciary arbiter, there's a lot of claim to accelerate and have it abolished because it is a potential in waiting as a body that can say no to where the central authority lies here in the country.
Note here that the structure of power conforms exactly to Schmitt's model, who decides, who interprets, and like Schmitt, Juvenal did not see democracy itself as different informal terms from any previous power structures.
Before outlining Juvenal's famous high-low middle mechanism, it is worth noting that he always maintained that he was kind of liberal, insomuch as he was concerned throughout his work with liberty and the limiting of tyrannical power.At one point,
and on power.For example, he defends the liberty, he defends the tradition, small business owning bourgeois against centralizing power and a strategic use of inflation to drain the savings of the middle class.
Tyrannies made their appearance in step with the inflation which destroyed the independence and security of middle class liberalism. However, he was also a severe critic of liberalism.
In certain of his works which have not been translated into English, he condemns his generation, including himself, for its simplistic view of man as an individualistic and materialistic consumer who can be made completely happy by rationalization of the economic system and the prevention of further wars.
That is something that when you go back and read books from that era, Yaki brings that up.Everyone brings that up back then.They could see how individualism and materialism were, how they were being used to basically enslave not only
the minds of the people, but also just how their lives were, how they were going to become what Yaki called how they were going to become economized.
Yeah, basically, I mean, we see that as the logical conclusion today of these sort of post hoc rationalizations for power that are individualistic and economized, where we're trying to create trends to get people on to the elite will as the general will with, you know, bugs, everything that we've memed about bugs pod owning nothing and being happy, these things of economizing and making minimalism sexy and appealing is part of that.
And I mean, even if we go back to before Juvenile wrote on power.
We also had seen this a lot in America, too, from the South about George Fitzhugh and the sociology of the South, where the big concern is that this laissez-faire open market system, which even Juvenile has criticized, will do lead to some form
Of feudalistic slavery wherein you know, of course fitzhugh's offering a defense of the southern policy of slavery at the time but even then he's arguing that like the alternative is a new form of slavery that is arguably worse and I think we're kind of seeing that in full force today in a much more globalized system As carl slevin tells us juvenile was acutely aware of the problem of corporateocracy and liberalism's tendency to facilitate it quoting
Liberalism and its degenerate and anarchic form involving periodic crises and unemployment, as in the USA, implies even greater subjection of the individual to economic forces than does communism.
In addition, liberalism is no longer sufficient in satisfying consumer demands through competition, for out of the struggle to survive have emerged gigantic corporations and trusts which can effectively distort the market for their own ends.
In opposition to the fundamental tenets of liberalism,
Enterprises threatened by the periodic depressions have called on the state for assistance, with great success, thereby making the consumer, in his guise as taxpayer, subsidize a system which offers no benefits in return.
This is what Austrian economists have been talking about for over 100 years now.
Yeah, and I mean, on the point about inflation, too, I mean, it's a this chapter, I'll talk about it at the end when he refers to like the current new enemies of the regime, but also has how FDR took power, you know, to take back from Garrett Garrett.
I mean, the one of the things that we really took advantage of was devaluing the savings when it came to silver currency, when FDR took office.And
you know, the middle class business owning individuals that were still surviving and doing pretty well in the midst of the Great Depression were more or less had their savings and capital liquidated in the face of him taking power.
We will return to Juvenal's view of capitalism and its relationship to power shortly.
But for now, it is enough to say that although he was very far from being a doctrinaire free market libertarian, he maintained that the scope for liberty rested in the middle class, people of independent means who did not have to rely on the state.
Those are the people who basically this regime is at war with right now.And most of those people are white. So when you hear people talking about a war on white people, this is what he's talking about.
Just the people that don't, they don't have a need for the state as much as everyone else.So the state has to go to war with them because the state needs everyone on their side, needs everyone to be relying upon them.
So he had this in common with Samuel T. Francis, whom we will consider later. Let us turn now to outline Juvenal's model.As I have said, it is often called the high-low-middle mechanism and sometimes the patron theory of power.
The idea at its most basic is that the high, the central power, makes an appeal of liberation and guarantee of security to the low who are being oppressed by the middle.
By patronizing the low, the high thus starts to drain away the power of the middle, thus accruing more power to itself.
The clearest explication of this model is not found in On Power, where it emerges as a pattern throughout many historical episodes of the book and sitters, but in C.A.Bond's Nemesis, which does much to strip down the model to its core elements.
Juvenile tends to use the terms power, aristocracy, and the common people to define his three categories.
However, the situation is somewhat more complicated than this, since he also seems to treat the independent middle class as being separate from the aristocracy, with whom it might ally should power become tyrannical.
Yeah, and I mean, we see this a lot, right, when it comes to this model being played out today.I mean, Bond does the best interpretation of it in his book.But I mean, this is basically where the blogger Spandrel gets his concept of bio-Leninism.
He does put a more racial ethnic lens to it, obviously, where you create a patron class of sort of the low dregs of your society, the fresh off the boat people, the
ones that need affirmative action and so on to go forth, and you are now creating a coalition high-low against the middle, which is typically the independent middle-class whites that are now being actively discriminated against by law because these people don't need the assistance and dependency of the state.
Bond prefers to use the terms center, subsidiary, and periphery.For this last group, periphery, Curtis Yarvin prefers clients.Marx's proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and or dependent.
I think clients is a useful way to visualize the relationship of patronage between the high and the low.However, Bond's periphery captures something of the passive helplessness of the low.
Without this alliance between a power center and the periphery, the periphery itself is basically irrelevant.
While the high and low categories can be easily understood, the high is the central sovereign power, the low are the lowest strata of the great mass of people, the middle requires further elaboration.
Here there are some complications and nuances that are not readily understood.We cannot confuse the middle simply with the middle class.
While Yarvin's term clients is useful to think about below, his use of the term commoners, borrowed from Orwell, will not do for the middle.Juvenal consistently writes about the middle as an aristocracy which has its own centers of power or castes.
Bond describes subsidiaries as follows. These subsidiary centers can be seen as delegates of the center and act in its name and under its authority.Juvenal termed the elements that comprise this category, social authorities.
And by this, he meant such entities as the nobility, families, corporations, trade unions, and any other institution within an order, which can demand the obedience and allegiance of those within that order in conjunction with the central governing apparatus or power.
I'm going to start again.The key point to grasp is that to count as aristocratic or subsidiary, power must perceive a cell as a rival. Juvenile describes power as having an almost psychotic need to snuff out any challenge to its monopoly of control.
This is the inner essence of power, which is the inevitable assailant of the social authorities and sucks their very lifeblood.And the more vigorous a particular power is, the more virile it is in the role of the vampire. Yeah, our has got to go.
Oh, yeah.No, I the thing, though, I think that today maybe it would be an interesting I'd have to read Nemesis again.
It's been a while, but I juvenile does make a distinction between the aristocracy and perhaps his middle in his writings and on power.But I mean, we see this today, too.And I know the chapter will talk about sort of the corporate power here.
But my mind kind of drifts off to like selector theory, because you do want
that dependent aristocracy base to help, you know, as long as you can keep them happy, you really can't screw over like the average voter, which we do see a lot in contemporary democratic politics in America.
But I mean, your sort of core voter base, right, or that base and selector theory, of course, is going to be what we would consider to be aristocracy.
people who can write a very large campaign check or donation or get you the necessary guys that they can command to make sure that ballots are harvested or that you know doors are being knocked and canvassed and so on and whereas sometimes there are very much outsiders to that system which are often targeted which again are usually the the rabble-rousing populist side of things in American politics but even then
a lot of what becomes populist ink that people derive.I mean, that just becomes what Michels would call an organized minority and oligarchy.
Power has a power, has a jealousy of any and every command, however small, which was not its which was not its own power, could not tolerate such independence for juvenile.
This is a constant fact of human history and can be observed from the earliest tribal cultures right through to the present. He discusses variously the clan cell, the baronyl, how do you pronounce that?I'm not sure.
I mean, because he's referring to barons, but it seems to pronounce it baronyl seems weird.I've got the book in front of me, hold on.
There you go, so everyone knows that I did read this.
um yeah i'm not too sure that's a weird one so i'll just do it the best i can he discusses variously the clan cell the baronial cell baron baron i don't know baron i'll okay baron i'll sell and the capitalistic cell which divides into the industrial cell and the financial cell but no matter the period and specifics of the case the structure remains the same
Power seeks to destroy the rival powers and the subsidiaries by patronizing clients.Power is the great leveler that sets out to curtail or eliminate every social authority that mediates between the individual and the state.
However, there are two groups that Juvenal discusses that are missing in this tripartite model, the middle class in general, and a group we might call newly elevated bureaucrats.
I am afraid that here I will have to introduce some complexity by mapping Juvenal's model onto the categories inherited from Mosca and Pareto, the governing elite, the non-governing elite, and the governed.
The middle class in general, who include people that are independently wealthy enough not to need the state, but who do not command power sufficient to be an aristocrat, form the upper part of the governed.
We might call this class the petty bourgeois, or we might call them kulaks. They can ally with power, or they can ally with the subsidiaries.Should they ally with the latter, they too will become the target of power, which won't brook no dissent.
The newly elevated bureaucrats, meanwhile, become the lower stratum of the ruling class as non-governing elites.Let us take an example from Juvenal, quoting,
With a boldness born of obscurity, they encroached progressively on the taxing rights of the barons and transferred to the royal treasury the incomes of the great. As their invasions grew, the financial machine grew larger and more complicated.
There might be new posts for their relations.They discovered new duties so that whole families take the ease in a bureaucracy that grew continually in numbers and authority, spawning a whole hierarchy of underlings, deputies, clerks, registrars.
So it was that everywhere the service of the state became the roads of distinction, advancement, and authority for the common people.
What a sight it is, the rise of the clerks, the swarming of busy bees who gradually devour the feudal splendor and leave it with nothing but its pomp and titles.
Does it not leap to the eye that the state has made the fortunes of all these common people just as they have made the states?
You know, one of the things that I know he mentions it with, um, with the English monarchy, but, uh, maybe he mentions it now with the French aristocracy earlier, but the, the state always is going to look for ways to assert power.
And we noticed this in the French revolution.We noticed this for the Bolshevik revolution, that that is going to include the church.So, uh, we, we saw this a lot with a lot of the people that were, um,
both executed in the French Revolution or fled as expatriates or nobles in exile, were mainly French Catholics.
And in the same way that the, you know, eventual commissars of the, you know, communist revolution that would come under, you know, Lenin would be those to target the Orthodox church.
That's one avenue of power that can sway sort of the client classes away from them.And they couldn't have that.
Juvenile share. Juvenal shared with Michels, it seems, an absolute distaste for the career bureaucrat.It is important to note, however, that these bureaucrats are not the low or peripheries or clients.
They are a key part of power itself on its march towards ever greater centralization.
Should any of the institutions of these bureaucrats begin to develop power independently from the central power, then they become aristocrats, feudal nodes who will in time draw the eye of Sauron.
Let us examine a few of Juvenal's historical examples that showcase his model in action.So in England, when the greed of Henry VIII had fallen on the ecclesiastical authorities to get from their wealth
the wherewithal to carry out his policies, the greater part of the monastic spoils stuck to the fingers of hands which had been held out to receive them.These spoils founded the fortunes of the nascent English capitalism.
In these way, new hives are forever being built in which lie a new sort of energies.These will in time inspire the state of fresh orgies of covetousness.He's almost preaching there.
I mean, basically, I mean, again, a big part of the Protestant Reformation is ways of seizing power from the Catholic Church.And again, power nodes are going to be areas of competition.We see this a lot.
I mean, it's mainly a more traditionalist Catholic lens, but it's a very realistic view of power that Juvenal is highlighting here, both with the English form of the Protestant Reformation and the formation of the Church of England,
by associating the church with the head of state.That's what the monarch is a part of, is the head of the Church of England.
And we see that a lot also within the various revolutions that came there and inside Europe, both in the French Revolution, the end of 1815, 1848, was the continued centralization of state power.
We saw this as states begun to become more unified as nations, and the overall effective polity of the church had been almost withered away entirely.
Here power, as vested in the king, Henry VIII, who let us not forget, was aided by skilled administrators such as Thomas Cromwell, crushes a subsidiary power, the Catholic Church, as a simple raid on its wealth.
But in the process, he could not help but raise up a new group of people who would themselves later become aristocrats.
This is why Juvenal described the state as a permanent revolution, since power's ceaseless quest to eliminate its rivals invariably must create new potential rivals in the process.
Juvenal later considers the same pattern taking place after the Industrial Revolution.
The industrialists had become powerful by the end of the 19th century and thus represented a futile threat to power, which had to respond by stripping it of that power either by co-opting it or else outright seizure of assets.
He maintains that this has nothing whatsoever to do with ideology, but is a pure function of power.Quoting,
In the end, calling it socialization or nationalization, the state strives to make its own all the great castles of the economic feudal system, the railway companies, the electricity distributing companies, and so on.
Only those who know nothing of any time but their own, who are completely in the dark as to the manner of powers behaving through thousands of years, would regard these proceedings as the fruit of a particular set of doctrines.
They are in fact the normal manifestations of power, and differ not at all in the nature from Henry VIII's confiscation of wealth of the monasteries.The same principle is at work.
The hunger for authority, the thirst for authorities, and in all these operations the same characteristics are present, including the rapid elevation of the dividers of the spoils.
Whether it is socialist or whether it is not, power must always be at war with the capitalist authorities and to spoil the capitalists of their accumulated wealth.In doing so, it obeys the law of nature.
Juvenile did not only have in mind the USSR and Nazi Germany, but also the USA from Thomas Roosevelt to Franklin D Roosevelt.Capitalists had to be tamed and disciplined by power.
By the end of World War II, it had been almost entirely successful in this, but at a cost.By heavily regulating hitherto
private companies, power had created massive companies, which were, as Bond emphasizes, total creations of the law, entirely dependent on the state for their existence.
Juvenile called this... Yeah, and a lot of the state... and that's the consequence of doing that, though, is that you've created, in very much the same way, a way to control them.
You've also enabled their existence and power to be... it now becomes give or take, right?Where now... Those are now going to one day i think the nodes in such a way that can be.
Very real threats to the government and i mean this something that i also find interesting that were in this point in time with a much more globalized international system is that you know it is the beginning of the chapter states like powers never separated from the state.
Well, we're now in a time and place where many powerful entities are involved in the affairs of countries all over the world.I mean, BlackRock doesn't just have holdings, for instance, inside the United States.
There are plenty of people that have their companies located in Ireland or in various states across the world in order for tax benefits and evasions, which you might seem, which some may say, well, that's just their way of avoiding the penalties or the ire of the state.
Yes, but it's also a way for them to act as an alternative means of power.
And they have certainly grown in their power to where a lot of the individuals or those that run it have power and influence that are equal to many legislatures or judiciary officials.
Juvenal called the state of affairs syndicalist feudalism, which had grown to such gargantuan proportions that it presented power with a problem.
Will political power, after beating capitalist feudalism with the help of syndicalist feudalism, now round on its ally?
If it does not, it will be the syndicalist feudalism, and not itself, which will exercise the vast power committed to it by individuals.And the state then will be the public thing of the syndicalist feudalisms.
It seems to me this time has come to pass at the time of writing when Joe Biden is president of the United States.It strikes me that he is the public thing of much larger entities that have effective power.
Yep. I mean, that's where that's where we're at.I mean, I don't think anyone would look at Biden to be anything more than the official man in front of the curtain, rather than those that are running it behind.
And we do know that people like Larry Fink, I mean, when Biden came on to the White House, there were numerous articles that indicated that BlackRock was an essential point of guiding any kind of economic recovery.
I mean, there are gentlemen out there that does sort of White House spokesperson for economic affairs.Steve Deese is or Brian Deese, one of the two, I can't remember his name off the top of my head, but he's he's former BlackRock employee.
You know, he's telling Americans that, you know, sometimes they're just going to have to deal with it.This is actually good.We have to endure the pain for this liberal world order.
And again, it's a way to melt away through either inflation, high gas prices, increased consumer purchasing, or decreased consumer purchasing power, to make sure that that doesn't stay with the middle class, as Kulaks, as the book indicates.
We're at a position now where the White House may be the official spokesperson for things as the central authority, but it is widely decentralized in various power nodes, whether it is BlackRock, whether it is Amazon, whether it is Google control of social media.
And this is what's made, I think, a lot of this power in the 21st century so difficult to map or coming up with its own model for it.Even the author of this book has tried his best to create an own alternative model to Yarvin's idea of the cathedral.
It illustrates how difficult it is to say where is power in a time where it is far more decentralized but ever more powerful due to these syndicalist nodes.
Yeah, people say we need decentralization to solve this and but we need the right kind of decentralization.
Yeah Yeah, that's right.We're we're decentralized but not in the way that I think any one would ever want Correct
Syndicalist feudalisms have, in many respects, not only merged with the state, but also usurped it as the central node of authority.The investment firms BlackRock and Vanguard have over $9 trillion and $7 trillion in assets, respectively.
The most well-known corporate brand leaders typically enjoy over 70% market share in their specialist product lines, with the second biggest brand taking the bulk of the rest of the pie, creating effective duopolies in many markets.
These corporate machines in turn fund massive and extremely influential non-governmental organizations and lobby groups as well as exercising a near total dominance of the media.
It is quite clear that the democratic political leaders are today merely showmen and that effective sovereignty, in Schmitt's terms, lies in the syndicalist nexus. them.
Since the power has become unmistakably corporate and globalist, unmoored from any national state, it becomes ravenous in its search for independent rival powers and demands obedience, becoming distinctly totalitarian.
And I think that's a good contrast between, say, the economic debates over the West and the East, is that we have a syndicalist nexus, whereas within, officially, right, because there is nexuses of power inside the Chinese Communist Party that have been
fighting internally within the, you know, party apparatus itself for years, but theirs is on paper state-owned enterprises, SOEs, whereas here in the U.S.they are more sovereign in that regard.
I mean, they're subservient in ways to say the tax laws and whatnot, but clearly they can get kit packs and whatnot.We've seen that for years.
Any time to reveal it, right, you get the Panama Papers or anything like that, people are conveniently disappeared or, you know, they,
they're conveniently just have miraculously decided to end their life, even though they're in sane, healthy states of mind.
But I mean, within there, right, we see this from articles all the time reported in the West, that they'll just execute billionaires when necessary.They know how that syndicalist form of nexus of power can be challenging to the state.
And that was the difference between the two.The juvenile model of high, low versus middle here,
of trying to weaken out the middle and potentially get any sort of dissident aristocrats out of the way has been, I think, really actualized in the Chinese state as we see it today in the People's Republic of China.
At the time of writing, we have been suffering the COVID-19 pandemic for almost two years.Scarcely any media organizations will speak out against harsh governmental restrictions.The media does the bidding of power without question.
Corporations walk in lockstep carrying the same message, actively censoring countervailing voices. We are experiencing the greatest wealth transfer from the middle class to elites in history.
From the start of the pandemic to April 2021, Amazon's profits increased by 220% as many small and medium firms closed and the public experienced record inflation.
The failure of power to check syndicalist feudalisms has come to pass and now the tail wags the dog. Where will it end?In the destruction of all other command for the benefit of one alone, that of the State.
In each man's absolute freedom from every family and social authority, a freedom the price of which is complete submission to the State.
in the complete equality as between themselves as all citizens, paid for by their equal abasement before the power of their absolute master, the State, in the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the State, and in the denial of every pre-eminence 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 their common bondage to the state.The extremes of individualism and socialism meet.
That was their predestined course.
Yep, and I mean, that's where we're at, right, is that man has become so completely atomized that even though it's more of a secular worldview, I mean, it is to a point now where man's common bonds through hyper-individuation and sort of this now social
made a combination of individualism and socialism has come to fruition where there is sort of a state monopoly on various goods and services the state is continued to declare various things human rights or that they deserve access to these things we see this more in europe where the european union is far more centralized in declaring things like internet uh... is a human rights such work here the u s uh... government is still struggling to get their get access to these things but
Through these hyper individuation and the socialist control both from corporate syndicalism, but just the state itself man is atomized to a point where They would really do anything And could do anything because their common bond really is consumption at this point about the culture is a culture of consumption it is a culture of meaning can only be identified through these sort of
pseudo-religious rationalizations to serve the state for power.I mean, there's a reason why I think we see a lot more of the focus on transgender discourse, primarily on the middle class, primarily on children.
It's the same reason why you could ask yourself, why do they not do drag queen story hours in black neighborhoods?There's a reason for that, because that's not who they need to target.
So, in a way, they've taken the middle-class version of, you know, being independent and church-going, and have turned their own version of salvation theology through the state by consumption, transitioning, finding meaning by being part of the regime, finding influence amongst it, and that's where we're at now.
And the question becomes, where does that power go from here?And that's the interesting thing that AA talks about towards the end of this chapter, which we're getting close to. is that now the question becomes the future of power lies where?
Is it going to lie within various aspects of NGOs, or have we finally reached that neo-feudalism state that both many anti-consumer leftists have talked about, but also many people of the more esoteric or more well-read right wing have been worrying and warned about?
Because where are we to go from here as the government continues to become seemingly incompetent, which is scary when the world order is based on nation states, not necessarily widespread corporatized areas of individuals prescribing or ascribing to certain products or modes of influence.
And that, I think, is what's going to be very interesting in the world ahead, is how do you maintain borders, geopolitical interests, especially in America, right, where things are far more corporate than other places, in the midst of more centralized powers that have more of a central government nexus than a corporate one.
If we are not there, I mean, it's what am I going to?I can't comment on that.There's nothing to say.It's it's black telling enough.
I got that comment from someone.Someone said someone was listening to me and Steven do the part one and two and they're like. Yeah, Pete's talking about elitist theory is just like a complete black pill.And I'm like, eh, I don't think so.
I don't think I'm completely black-pilled.I think this is very black-pilling, but I think there are things we can do.
Jarvan calls it a clear pill but for me like the more you keep reading into this stuff the less black pilled I become because there's the epiphany of knowing how things work that you're like okay now I know how things are being played and that you know is the old G.I.
Joe meme goes you know knowing it's half the battle and so like that's a good start.
Well yeah and Also, it helps you to see when the cracks start presenting themselves.And I think we're seeing cracks.All right. If we are not there yet, it certainly feels that way.
Historically, if power is seen as rotten to the core, revolution beckons.Juvenal devotes an entire chapter to revolutions.
He argues that historians typically misunderstand revolutions because they are violent and therefore treated as in some way exceptional.He maintains, however, that revolutions too conform to his model.
He remarks on the fact that most revolutions result in a system with a stronger central power than before. Quoting, Before the Rapids, there was a rule of Charles I, a Louis XVI, and Nicholas II.After them, that of a Cromwell, a Napoleon, a Stalin.
The Cromwells and Stalins are no fortuitous consequence, no accidental happening of the revolutionary tempest. Rather, they are its predestined goal, towards which the entire upheaval was moving inevitably.
The cycle began with the downfall of an inadequate power, only to close with the consolidation of a more absolute power."And I think that's where we're going.
Yeah, uh, and that's the interesting thing is is that where we're going I think remains kind of unknown Which is why I think that I can't find this as black pilling as others.
Um, you know, I I did not too long ago a Second i've done two streams on oswald spangler's decline of the west And one of the big debates that always circles around it is is that you know, he says that caesarism
comes usually when there's this form of second religiousness, where they're trying to reinvent the religion of old of the culture and society, which in turn brings people about that.
We see second religiousness a lot when it came to Napoleon rising, right?The Napoleonic Code took the religion of the revolution, but it centralized authority, and thus he becomes a Caesarian figure.
And a lot of people said that was the same case when it came with FDR, but I'm not so sure.And I think that's what makes us to be in a very interesting time to live in.
For Juvenel, the revolution is the consequence of a weakness in power which is liquidated by a stronger one.
The incumbent power will become weary and skeptical, worn out, inspiring modest respect, and with no more than a faded authority left to it, what Juvenel calls a nerveless scarecrow.How does a revolution happen?
It is typically, and this has more to do with an echo of Pareto's Foxes and Lions about it, a refusal to use force on the part of power. Did the people rise against Louis XIV?
No, but against the good-natured Louis XVI, who had not even the nerve to let his Swiss guards open fire.Against Peter the Great?No, but against the weakling Nicholas II, who did not dare avenge his beloved Rasputin.
Against the old Bluebeard, Henry VIII?No, but against Charles I, who, after a few pitiful attempts at governing, had resigned himself to living in a small way and was no danger to anyone.
The moment of truth for any regime will come at the moment in which ideological soft power is stripped away and it must use repressive force to crush its opposition.
Hesitancy on the part of power at the hour of decision, whether through a failure of nerve in the leadership or a failure in confidence on the part of their generals, will seal their fate if rival aristocrats exploit popular discontent.
And that becomes the question of who those might be, those aristocrats, because, I mean, we're at a point where ideological soft power, I think, is at a point where a lot of people recognize that it's sort of fake and gay.
I mean, I'm trying not to use so much internet parlance, but like when it came to like the definition of recession or the fact that I'm supposed to look at, you know, the trans Admiral Rachel Levine with a fake rank and a fake woman now treating long COVID for President Biden, who probably doesn't have the world's most, you know, probably as a fake disease.
I mean, it just, to me, it illustrates a lot of what we're dealing with is that
The ideological soft power is finally coming to a head, and more and more Americans, both on the left and the right, do feel like something bad is coming, whether that's a second civil war or some kind of violent opposition to the state.
The question becomes, are they willing to give the order to start firing upon themselves?And that's the reason why I think we've seen a lot of increase court battles to make the, you know, mandates for the vaccine to stay for the military.
Because if your guys are loyal to you, willing to take something that more and more people are recognizing and more and more health authorities are recognizing has a problem, then, you know, what are you going to do?
You've got that army there that are going to serve you and are subservient to you for ideological reasons. So that now sort of draws the battle line, so to speak, politically.And we live in interesting times, unfortunately.
Well, did you see the pictures that were uncovered of the judge in the Alex Jones case?
Oh yeah, I saw what Ben Braddock was posting, and I mean like, we're already at Soviet show trials, right?
Where it's just like, what you believe isn't true, or what... It almost felt like BAP's, you know, bit in Bronze Age mindset about the future camps of tomorrow are going to be harpied by girl boss individuals, you know, with, you know, side shave haircuts and things like that.
Like, the My Truth people are now running the things.And again, that's the low, right?That's the... The high-low versus middle in action, that's bioleninism in action.
Literally, Juvenal's model is being shown right here with that court case and also with January 6th defendants.
Yep.Alright.I think we're getting to the end here.Alright. What is the benefit of reading Juvenel?What can he give us that we cannot find in the elite theorists or in Schmitt?
I believe he gives us a dynamic model of change that is somewhat taken for granted in the other thinkers.
Maske discusses the tendency towards feudalism or towards bureaucratization, but does not explain how a society transitions from one state to the next, or indeed, why.Juvenel does.
Pareto outlines the circulation of elites and the predominance of foxes or lions in the ruling class, but he does not give us the exact mechanism through which this happens.Juvenal does.
Schmitt states that every sovereign must declare its friends and enemies, but Juvenile provides a rationale for who might be the sovereign's enemy at any given point.For example, in 2021, the U.S.
federal government, the public face of the aforementioned syndicalist nexus of finance corporations and NGOs, has declared that white supremacists constitute the highest terroristic threat in the country.
Former President George W Bush even argued they belong in the same breath as ISIS and that in a statement as Schmidian as any ever uttered Bigotry and white supremacy are blasphemy against the American creed The media daily propagandizes against white privilege explains why white people are the problem But why would power focus so heavily on this group white people white people?
It is because it comprises people who are independent of the state, would-be aristocrats, subsidiaries in potential, and even a few truly independent institutions, and therefore represents the largest threat to its hegemony.
This was embodied in the hated figure of Donald Trump, but since he was banished from the airwaves and social media, now it must take the form of a direct attack on the disobedient people themselves, especially if they have refused a vaccination against the pandemic, which is a very convenient proxy marker of friend or enemy to power.
Juvenile as a guide would tell us two things.First, one way or the other, the hour of decision will come.Second, whatever order exists after this hour of decision will grant no more liberty than what it became before.The game stays the same.
Yep, and that's where we're at.And you can tell, however, that that friend-enemy distinction is, you know, he says, you know, with George W. Bush's statement, but I mean, we saw this in the 2020 election, too.
Like, as soon as they started seeing the exit polling, what was the first thing that the Washington Post cooked an article up against?
It was this idea of multiracial whiteness, so the Asian and Latino drift, especially in Texas and the Rio Grande Valley.I mean, They're even doing it now with Maya Flores, who is sort of milquetoast as she is as a politician.
They're painting her out as to be the far-right Latina that can be against what the regime's interests are.And we're beginning to see the Republican Party, for better or for worse, move its way to be this sort of multi-ethnic coalition.
And that may be some form of, you know, ways to keep on playing the game.But at the same time, right, the aspect of whiteness in America has been the prominent target for it, both ideologically, this is why I think there's a lot more focus.
I mean, this is the same thing I've been talking about for a while on my channel, it's just been, what is the progressive role model for a straight white male? There isn't one.There isn't a positive healthy role model for a straight white male.
And then when the, you know, New Yorker does its comic about like boyfriends that are not, you know, that aren't toxic men, it's like, well, you just, you have an emasculated guy, you know, who follows the rules driving his car in Grand Theft Auto.
And that's something that comes about it, is that you have to liquidate them in some form or fashion.You have to make them ideologically toxic.
This is why if you ally with them, multiracial whiteness, this is why you have to make sure that they're on board with the regime.That's why a lot of the 1619 project is there.
And then at the same time, you also have to make them unable to have access to fitness training or armaments, so gun control laws, access to not being in the military, and making sure that they get, you know, groomed in public school.
This is prominent throughout the players that do not want them to be in a potential avenue of power.
This is why there's a push to call Donald Trump an insurrectionist, so they can use that clause in the 14th Amendment to prevent him from running for president again.This model illustrates to us how revolutions change.
or how revolutions come about and how players change.And I think that we're in the midst of watching that happen.
I mean, Joe Biden, when he came into office, when he was talking to people like Al Sharpton and whatnot, he did make it very clear in one of his talks with them in front of the press.
He's like, hey, white people aren't going to be a minority or not going to be a majority.We're not always going to be in charge.You need to keep in mind how you're going to play nice with others, because not everyone else has white guilt, you know.
The reason why I find this chapter to be one of the most important ones in The Populist Delusion is because it illustrates how the players change and how revolutions come about.
And the real question, I think, that will come here is that will the state use authority, you know, or will it be like Louis XVI and not fire with the Swiss Guards?And that'll be the question of the day.
But we're also in a very transformative part of political power because Juvenel does write this.
in a time where all authority is invested inside the state, international capital is not nearly as strong as it is, transnational organizations, the George Soros's of the world are not nearly as powerful as they were back then.
And now we're at a time where power is not necessarily linked to the state, where
you know, we can have rich and powerful people work in cooperation with non-governmental organizations to ensure that one nation acts one way to another and that can cause problems, which then in turn creates an issue for the state.
And we see this a lot with, you know, for instance, the president of Mexico about the decision of popular sovereignty over say the USMCA trade agreement that he'll take national sovereignty every time, which makes him a threat really to this international syndical order.
What is your opinion when people say, I mean, you just talked about how, and talking about in the chapter, how corporations and NGOs can become more powerful than the state, or actually guiding the state.
What do you say to people who say the reason these corporations have this power in the first place is because of the state?If the state didn't exist, then these corporations wouldn't have that kind of power.I mean,
The question really about whether or not the corporations can exceed the power of the state will come down to the use of force.And I think that they know when to back down in that regard.
I mean, there's a great video by Morgoth about the elephant and the whale that sort of talks about this, where he has this hypothetical question about, well, what if Google or Amazon decided to declare war on a sovereign territory, right?
Say France is his example.
Um, the question would be just like, well, if you key hits to, you know, servers and they wouldn't really have much of a power to do much, but then at the same time, they're a corporate entity, then would be directly attacking the United States.
And it's an interesting thought experiment to play out.Um, the question becomes is. has the state lost all power over these authorities or not?
At the end of the day, you know, like as Robert Heinlein and numerous other political writers and thinkers have talked about, you know, violence still kind of is the supreme authority or the, you know, supreme authority in which all authority derives, right, from starship troopers.
And that's something that we haven't, you know, the libertarian argument from a lot of things, right, is that all government action is done with the force of the gun, right?
And I don't know how much we have seen yet with that in relationship to say corporate entities So far their willingness not to do so and their compliance with rather which rich and powerful Financiers, I mean people like Bernie Madoff get off easy Or like they go to prison.
They're not like executed and things are liquidated I mean or more other individuals like Jeffrey Epstein and so on I mean The state is responsible for the rise of their power, yes.
The question is, has the state lost in this sort of power competition to do so?Because right now, so far, we're still at least procedurally beholden to the state. there hasn't been a real big move by Google or Amazon to provide the alternative.
I mean, that doesn't mean that they don't have their own aristocrats or people that are subservient to them.
I mean, there are campuses in San Francisco, and we're all Silicon Valley, is there where these people are basically housed and fed and taken care of with health care, right?
I mean, that's really going to be the great power competition, I think, for the 21st century internally, not geopolitically, is between corporate power and state power.
I know that doesn't really answer the question, I just think that we're in the midst of watching that unfold.
Yeah, I just think that jumping, the idea that you jump to, well, these corporations couldn't have the power they have now unless the state existed, I don't think there's any evidence for that, first of all, because you can't empirically prove that, because corporations have never existed without a state.
Yeah, so yeah, so and I mean somebody can say well, there's a kingdom, right, you know Yeah, yeah, so I mean the state's always been a part of it the that that's yes That would be the direct counterclaim.
I mean the state's always been the reason to facilitate it because I mean The central authority, the sovereign, is also the one that levies taxes.And at one point in time, you would levy your taxes by tithing to the Catholic Church.
That obviously decreased as the power of the nation-state rose, and in turn, they became the sovereign.And now, I mean, I'm not paying taxes to Amazon or whatnot.
This is really the big discourse in international relations, is what makes a state a state?
And it's usually brought down into five broad categories, like territory, citizens, a tax base, or the ability to levy taxes, well-established borders, and capable means of national defense.
The Google doesn't have that that's still within the military and They don't levy taxes on anybody.
I'm not paying it a tax to Google I'm there's a difference between say paying for a service like YouTube premium or something compared to you know I owe my like taxes of property to the state or something, you know two different things and
I think about 2020 and the vaccine debate, and I look at that and I'm like, okay, so Pfizer is in the running with this vaccine and everything.
And is the state, are members of the state wanting the vaccine, or did they go to the experts, Pfizer, and did the Pfizer, the experts come to them and say, this is what's going to solve the problem?
If Pfizer is the one who initiates that, comes forward and says, this is all about vaccines, and then you have people in the FDA who formerly worked for Pfizer, people at the CDC who formerly worked for Pfizer, they all have worked together, it's hard to, I think it's pretty easy to look and say, in 2020, Pfizer may have been the most powerful entity on the planet.
Yeah, but I, and that would be the thing though is that this, the counter to that might be like from the managerial perspective, you know, the, these ex Pfizer guys that work for the FDA know that they can have a better advantage or to, they would have a better.
Relationship with the state if their guy got in, Joe Biden, that's why the big bombshell document post 2020 was that Pfizer didn't release the vaccine availability until after the election.Right?
So like, he wouldn't get the Trump wouldn't get his October surprise. Um, and I mean their relationship, of course, I mean they've made you know an insane amount of money buku box, right but um From that perspective like having your guys inside.
Yes, but I mean, why do you want your guys inside?Because the state still legislates and regulates over you.
All right cool.All right, give your plugs and end
Oh, sure.So you can find me as The Prudentialist on YouTube, Telegram, Substack, Odyssey.You can find all of my links on findmyfriends.net slash theprudentialist.I cover international relations and cultural commentary.And every Sunday at 4 p.m.
Eastern, that's what we talk about is international relations, geopolitics, and theory to keep you informed about what on earth is going on in the world.And Pete, thank you so much for having me on once again.
I appreciate it.Thank you very much.Thank you.
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