 Welcome to Modern Day Debate. My name is Karissa and I'm going to be your host for tonight. And today we are debating whether we, as a country, should have more or less democracy. We're really excited to have Brenton and the Distributist on today. We've had both of them on the channel before. So really happy to have them back. It's going to be a really fun debate tonight. So thank you all for joining. So we are a channel that hosts debate on science, religion, and politics. So if you do enjoy controversial debates, consider hitting the subscribe button as we have many more coming up. In fact, as you'll see on the bottom right of your screen right now, we have a Kickstarter going to cover the honorarium for a big debate with Michael Shermer and Mike Jones on whether Christianity is dangerous. If you'd like that debate to happen, it's only $3 and we'll make this debate go live. The link to pledge that Kickstarter campaign is in the description box below. And you can sign in with your Facebook account if you don't want to make a Kickstarter account. It's a lot, but it's a new idea, so we're trying to help explain the Kickstarter stuff to people in detail. So with that all out of the way, we're going to go ahead and give Brenton and the distributors a little bit of a chance to introduce themselves. Brenton, since you are going first, I'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about yourself. And also, if you like either or both of our speakers tonight, their descriptions, their bios are also in the description box below, so be sure to check those out. Brenton, tell us what we can find at your link. Great. So yeah, my name is Brenton Lengel. I am a playwright, a former radio personality and activist with Occupy Wall Street, and I'm a Ringo-nominated comic creator. I'm also a backer, by the way, of the modern day debate Kickstarter, and my own Kickstarter for Snow White Zombie Apocalypse, my Ringo-nominated comic series, is we just broke 20 grand and we have 57 hours to go. So if people are going on Kickstarter, please pledge to modern day debate and then come over and see if you can grab some comic swag and get in on the ground floor of this series. Wonderful. And Distributist, what can you tell the audience about your look? Well, I guess I could say that I'm a YouTuber. I've been a YouTuber for about four years, doing what I broadly consider to be distant right content, reactionary content. I talk about politics and the cultural war mainly, and some contemporary political issues as they come up. I mainly make video essays, and I used to make a lot more of them before my schedule got crazy, but I'm still chugging along. So if you're patient to please give me a sub. Wonderful. And actually, there is going to be one other little participant in our tonight's debate. My son decided to forego his nap, so he might be joining us for a part of it. I'll just run and get him during the openings and he will be muted. But you might see him. So, but that shouldn't interrupt anything. Without further ado, Brenton, I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to you. The topic tonight is democracy. And this is a subject that I think about quite a lot. Throughout my life, I have actually held a variety of positions on it. Everything from that insufferable twit in your English class who says, you know, we live in a republic, not a democracy. Yes, freshman year, Brent, we know that. Everyone knows that shut up your shoelaces untied to having argued for and managed successfully to having argued for and as a manager, successfully implemented a serviceable level of workplace democracy in my place of business, which for the record resulted in my team being one of the highest producing of any in the industry, coupled with some of the lowest turnover rates of any manager in my company. The point is, with the 2020 elections behind us, an election in which Donald Trump lost, not as spectacularly as I would have preferred, but still decisively, and you're a complete corn cob, if you think otherwise. A lot of people are talking about democracy. You don't have to look very far to find any number of opinions and pithy phrases about it. Usually running the gamut from frustratingly salient democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to unilaterally starving India. To the downright idiotic, democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. Seriously, with regard to that last one, what the hell? Why would wolves, literal apex predators, need to vote on whether or not they are going to eat some sheep? They're freaking wolves. No voting required. They just eat the sheep. There is no need to bring Robert's rules of orders into that equation. So what even is democracy? And why do utter dinguses hate it? Well, to understand that, we must understand the inverse, autocracy, which would be a dictatorship, commonly in the form of hereditary monarchy, a technocratic CEO, or a fascist strongman. And with respect to actual fascist leaders from history, please note that I am using the word strongman between two ginormous quotations. Seriously, have you even seen these people? Their absolute best example, Benino Mussolini, looks like Alistair Crowley's basic cousin, or Marlon Brando, after the poor guy let himself go. But I digress, autocracy is hierarchy, is authority, it is power, when none of those things have been properly justified. See, with very little exception, when someone's authority is justified, they don't have to use force. People follow them willingly, because they have judged for it to be in their best interest to do so. It's generally only when power becomes insecure and insane that force must be administered. Now, there are exceptions, of course, because humans are not always entirely rational beings. Thomas Jefferson famously said, if men were angels, there would be no need for government. Brenton Lengel responds to that mercury-addled slave-owning rapist, if men are devils, what's the point of selecting special devils and giving them funny hats and letting them rule over the others? That would seem to me to be a uniquely cruel and stupid thing to do, no matter how nice the hats are. Now, don't take what I'm saying too piously there. I am, of course, speaking broadly and making some fun of it. But I'm doing that for a very specific reason. Democracy, as the inverse of autocracy, is in essence the idea that all members of the society ought to have a say in its governance. And as all of us are members of our society, we all ought to have some power when it comes to how things are done. This is a painfully intuitive idea. But it is one that far too many average people reject. There are many reasons for this. But chief among them, I think, ironically, is a kind of internalized self-loathing. You want to give people power? How dare you? I'm one of those. I'm a people. And I'll have you know, sir, that I am a trash fire. Yes, yes, we're all a trash fire. We're all sinners. We're all untrustworthy. All salted with a certain level of unrespectability. That is why I said what I said about Churchill and Thomas Jefferson and any other hairless ape with delusions of grandeur. Because when all is said and done, to quote Shakespeare, for within the hallowed crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king keeps death his court, infusing him with self and vain conceit as if this flesh, which walls about our life were brass impregnable and humored thus come at last and with a little pin bores through his castle wall and farewell king. I am reminding you that these people who currently govern our world and who did govern our world are mortal, fallible, human, and every human has a dark side. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Evil is real and fear of evil is most often why people reject democracy. They rejected as mob rule or as the worship of the mediocre. That fear drives them to think that someone else is genuinely better than others. And really, even if you believe that you are that someone else, that's just you hating yourself with extra steps. That's why Donald Trump ran for president in the first place. He hates himself. He hates himself because his father didn't love him. And so he makes a big show about how great he is and does everything in his power to fill that hole with food and sex and significance and power. That is what a lifetime of insane privilege bored inside him. That is why he cannot accept his defeat. You look at the proud boys rioting in the street. You look at the Q and honors drifting further and further into fantasy. You look at all the people who would make Donald Trump a king. Those are all perfect examples of the extra steps that come with hating yourself. To grant others power grants the possibility of error. To be able to act is to be able to do evil. Yet there is no alternative. Because that's what freedom is. It's choice. And as tempting as it is to go down the road where we attempt to eliminate choice, to give over control of our lives to another or to a system, which is really just another as all systems are made of and administered and administrated by people. To anything that we imagine to be so much greater than ourselves, we turn to a road of dictatorship by degrees. Inevitably, we put a crown on a devil. And then that devil does what it is the devils do. So when I argue for democracy, I'm not selling you some air utopia. I'm not moralizing about how things ought to be. I am telling you. I am begging you to take a clear-eyed, hard-nosed look at reality and realize that despite our irreputable state or irreputable state, all of society nonetheless depends upon us trusting one another. To live with freedom requires faith. Not in the abject but real faith that you actually put into practice. It means trusting your neighbor. It means trusting your countrymen. It means trusting strangers that you've never met who may be in another city or another state or halfway around the world. And know that you are putting your faith in a process that has the backing of evolution. Synergy is what occurs in nature. From the root word, a synergous, meaning working together as in cooperation, giving rise to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. That is the policy. That is the human community. That is the reason we have survived on this planet for 250,000 years and has messed up as it is and constantly seems to be. There is an ancient Taoist saying that people who mistrust themselves in one another are doomed. That can't be solved by a strong man. That can't be solved by weapons or technology or rules because all of these things require human input to function. That can't be solved by rooting out corruption because we are all corrupt. The way to solve this problem, to solve this paradox at the center of the human condition is to trust ourselves, to govern our own communities and to trust that when we make mistakes, we will be, our mistakes will be restrained and mitigated by others. And that when those others fail, we and our fellows will be there to pick them up and put them back in line. We are our brother's keeper, as well as our sisters and everyone in between. We currently live in the most advanced and sophisticated society in human history and we desperately need to take the training wheels off society lest it tear itself apart. The way forward is not to try to gain or maintain power over society that will only continue to disturb it and worsen the social decay that we have already seen. The way forward is to trust it and know that when you're saying that to society and to others, you're also saying it to yourself because as I said, you're one of those, you're a society. And so you're saying, let's see what you're gonna do to others and to yourself. You govern a great state as you would cook a small fish which is to say carefully and as little as possible. The human species has been ready to fly for a long time. It's time to leave the nest. Thank you. Thank you so much, Brenton. Distributist, it is you, your turn. Okay, so 10 minutes? 10 minutes. All right, so thank you, Brenton, for your speech. I have to clarify, I'm kind of surprised that you're not debating against Donald Trump and Donald Trump's not like Monarch and Monarchy is not, in fact, a majority opinion among many Americans. As for most things in these sort of Oxford style debates were kind of trapped by the resolution. Believe it or not, I'm not really anti-democracy in an absolute sense whatsoever. For me, it's a tool. As it was for many of the ancient thinkers, some of them I think Brenton quoted. Oddly enough, these ancient thinkers from Aristotle to Shakespeare didn't have a uniformly positive view on democracy. Neither did the founding fathers who produced democracy. They thought it had a lot of disadvantages. And in the course of the 200 years or so, since the founding, we seem to have forgotten a lot of these disadvantages. And basically we've swallowed democracy's own propaganda back on itself, right? We've essentially internalized a lot of these problems and we think democracy works in a way that it really doesn't. The core problem with democracy is that we think that there are essentially three main human problems with social organization that are more or less eternally always with us. There's the problems of what we would call the iron law of oligarchy, which is that we always have rulers. There's the problem of politics, as I say, which is the classic phrase, key custodians, it's those custodians who watches the watchman. And then there's the problem, the second problem of politics, which is if you're gonna take from somebody, who are you gonna take from? Democracy, the main seductive problem of democracy is that it convinces us at all times that it is the solution to these three problems. It convinces us that somehow by the effort of voting, we are simultaneously the owners of society and also the people who are ruled over. This is a quote from Joseph de Maestra. He says, well, the people are sovereign, but sovereign over who? Themselves? This is frankly a nonsensical statement. The difficulty is that none of these problems are solved by democracy, they're only obscured by them. This doesn't mean that democracy is not a useful tool, but it doesn't really do the things that's supposed to do. There's no way that in a nation of 300 million people, you as a voter are really exercising any political power worth anything. This is not something that can actually occur. Furthermore, despite the fact that this is an informational grounds alone, the fact of the matter is there are going to be rulers. These rulers are going to have their interests, they're going to be expressed, and regardless of anything we do at the democratic level, these interests are going to take effect. Sort of the three main political problems still manifest. We have this notion, it's kind of ridiculous that democracy is this big deliberation, that democracy is some kind of conversation we're having with ourselves. Again, I don't know how familiar Brenton is with this sociology, but this is simply not the case. We know that people don't process detailed conversations and decisions at a large scale very well. You can change the inputs of a democracy and get different outputs. For instance, very classically, you can rephrase the same political policy over again and people will have entirely different opinions on it. Classic case, Medicare for all. Say, do you want Medicare for all? Everyone will say yes. If you say, if they understand that Medicare for all in almost all circumstances means that they lose their current medical plans, and now have to go onto one-size-fits-all system, most people reject it. That's an enormous swing and it just comes purely from phrasing. People respond to narrative constructions and linguistic constructions of how the issue is framed. And in a democracy of 300 million people, that's pretty much the entire game. Furthermore, we also know from sociology that things like demographics and heritability also have a huge input. We know, for instance, that we know, for instance, that people inherit their political beliefs. We know, for instance, that people's political beliefs largely depend on where they live. This is not because they've all cogitated and come to the same conclusion because they live in New York rather than Arkansas. It's because the culture and the values usually control the voting behavior. As such, we're essentially saying here is that the main inputs, the most predictable inputs of how a pollist behaves are essentially in the hands of the politicians. By tweaking the inputs of both the narrative and also the demographic composition of the country, you can get desired outputs. For instance, if we had had the immigration policy of the 1950s for the last four years since 1965, Democrats would have lost every single election hands down. Furthermore, if we had a completely open immigration policy, major political parties in India would probably overwhelm both the Democratic and Republican Party. So the politics completely changes based on demographics. And so I think there's this mythology going on that a country of 300 million people are actually having a conversation. Furthermore, and this is sort of another one of my points, democracy always means politicization. And this is something that I think people should do an exercise in their own minds. Whenever someone said they want to democratize something and this is not a group of 20 or less people, that means they want to politicize it. Pollics always plays a role inside democracy. And as such, what happens here is people have interests that are at war with each other. They go into a democratic system and then somehow through the process of voting, we come out with a conclusion that's supposed to be the process of all of us thinking together. This is never the case. What the conclusion is, is it's usually the decision of a specific set of leaders commanding a specific coterie of people that have designs on a specific purpose. Is this at all fair to the minority? Absolutely not, it rarely ever is. And both our bounding bothers and really everyone before the 20th century understood this. We still have to deal with the fact that we have to ask questions like who watches the watchers. We have to ask who our leaders are and we have to ask who their interests are. Democracy does not mean that we rule ourselves. And this kind of gets me to the question of where we are in the contemporary world. We have right now is we have an incredibly divided, we have a incredibly divided and politicized country. The source of this politicization is not a lack of democracy. You know, there's three things I think that might be substituted for democracy that I kind of saw forming in Bretton's arguments. There's three things that I'm absolutely for and that's subsidiarity, the practice of making sure that power is concentrated among more local institutions. There's the power of consensus, which is that if a political body uniformly wants something, that's usually a good idea. And then there's the general notion that a political or popular will can tear down somebody who's manifestly incompetent or is manifestly treacherous. This is the kind of democracy or founding fathers envisioned, where democracy isn't really a driver of policies, but a safeguard against absolute tyranny. But once we step away from that, we realize that the problem of politicization and cultural divides over values, the act of voting doesn't solve any of these problems. All it does is encourage the people inside the division to create coalitions with each other that are entirely cynical, get to 60% of the population and then brutally rule over the 40% that's left in the minority. And democracy will allow for that. Worse than that, and this is my real case here, the real problem of democracy is that it clouds what's actually going on. We are always ruled by oligarchs, regardless of whether they're democratically elected. We are always ruled by people that have their own interests at heart. And if those interests are far away from us and divorced in terms of culture, they are very, very, very not likely to have us as part of their affinity group. So those problems are maintained, but what is made worse by democracy is the fact that now those self-interested rulers can rule as if they were the population itself. They can rule in the name of the people. And this has been a classic tactic of democratic rulers. They essentially wield autocratic power. They essentially wield avaricious and sometimes tyrannical power. And then when we turn around and try to make them accountable to their own actions, they simply inform us that they're representatives of the people, they're representatives of your will itself. And so they can escape any kind of accountability for their actions. A king can't do that. A king is formally declared to be the ruler. He can't hide behind the people what democratic rulers do. I might close with this. Brenton said, you know, when he came across the adage that the democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on who to eat, he asked the question, well, why would the wolves vote with the sheep to eat it? The answer is simple. What if the wolves did not want to admit to the sheep that that's what's happening? That what's actually going on is a predatory relationship. And the voting the democracy element simply clouds that. It hides it behind a veneer so that you can convince everyone that when you eat the sheep, the sheep is in fact eating itself. Again, this doesn't solve the problem of democracy. Democracy is a tool, but it's a very poor tool. It's a tool that has had well understood flaws in it. You know, going back for thousands of years, these have been understood and only recently forgotten. And again, it kind of clouds a more mature understanding and a more mature conversation of what we're actually gonna do about these problems. I'm fine with democracy being part of the solution, but it has to be honest about what its disadvantages are and what it's actually doing, which in my estimation is not very much. It's simply repositioning the relations of power and not really challenging how they operate in any real way. And without, I guess we can get into the question and answer period or whatever comes next. All right, so what will come next is about an hour of open discussion. But if you do have a question, definitely put it into the super chat and we will get to it at the end of the stream. We have about 30 minutes allocated for question and answer. But with that, we can get into the open discussion. Great. So to take, there's a number of things that I wanted to jump into on here. And I'm glad that, you know, when looking through the opening statement, you found some spots where we can come together. And I think I can actually agree with you on what those positions are. The one thing that I wanted to bring up, so the iron law of oligarchy, and I figured you were going to bring this up. Well, yeah. Yeah. The problem with the iron law of oligarchy is it is true in a certain sense in that nothing is perfect and therefore there will be no such thing as a perfectly governless society. There will always be politics, there will always be leaders emerging. You can't avoid that. But also that implies something very different because then what we're talking about is matters of degrees. And also- I would say, no, we're asking ourselves, how do we make a leader's interests align with the people he's ruling over? Not the mechanism by which we give that leader power. And that's where I'd like to refocus it. As I would like to say, you know, a squire who lives next to you or a judge who's elected, who lives next to you is going to be more accountable than a democratic politician who you voted for, who lives thousands of miles away and for whom you are just one vote in a sea of 300 million. I guarantee you that that proximity and geography is going to matter more than that- I mean, I'm not going to disagree with you on that, but then we run into the problem that we do need to administrate a large society with, you know, how many people do we have on the planet right now, seven billion? Yeah, I guess I would ask you though, subsidiarity is the main way that we deal with tyranny. The democratic age of the 20th century has been one in which much of the subsidiarity of past ages has been destroyed, oftentimes destroyed in the name of democracy. So it's not that I don't think it's- Can you define what you mean by subsidiarity there? I'm not- Subsidiarity is the principle on Catholic social justice that says that power should be located as close in terms of affinity groups and in terms of geography to the place where it's executed as humanly possible. Okay. So subsidiarity, and this is sort of the Chestertonian, GK Chesterton, who's part of my- He was a big democracy advocate, but for himself in orthodoxy, he says that the main core principle of democracy, you know, he's using it in an opposite way you do. He says the main core position is that people should make their own decisions and it's not really voting. It's just sort of symbolic of that. So subsidiarity, the problem is, I think Chesterton was wrong about this, is that subsidiarity does not seem to be related to democracy. Democracy does not, in what we've seen in the 20th century, it makes subsidiarity more common. Sure. In some ways it makes it less. So I'm not gonna disagree with you too much on subsidiarity. I haven't used that term for it, but that actually sounds very similar to anarcho-communist ideas with how Ancoms would structure society, ideally with making smaller communities the focus, the central point of society, as opposed to these large nation-states. So- I mean, the ultimate of subsidiarity in the Buddhist mind would be property, right? And I think that's where we differ from Ancoms, right? Oh, it depends. Property is the, giving a family property is the fundamental form of subsidiarity, in which that property is destroyed by a larger authority. Well, a family-having property is perfectly fine in an anarcho-communist society. The anarchists typically, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, first person to do, to advance political anarchism, famously said, most famously, property is theft, but he also followed that up with property as liberty and property as impossible. And it was a series of three dialectical statements almost like Zenn Cohen's. Yeah, I appreciate that as an impossible riddle. But I don't think that that is, I rarely hear the other two legs. Yeah, well, it's because everybody pays attention to the property as theft, because that's the big sort of sticker thing. But when it comes to actual anarchist political philosophy, it's very different. So anarchists tend to be fine with property in the sense of occupation and use. So the idea essentially being, and I think we talked about this the time I was on your channel, was that property that can be taken and held by a single individual or single family or single community and is used by them is perfectly fine. The issue with property in this, I'm suddenly realizing is slightly off topic for the debate. Yeah, I guess. The thing is is when someone owns property that they themselves do neither possess nor use and that relationship only becomes possible when it is guaranteed by violence and the threat of violence. So the way this kind of comes back to it, if we do wanna talk specifically about property and the administration of, I guess, public policy is we're going to have to talk about like the role of the state and the role of violence within the political process. The only way I could see managing that is if there was a definitive authority, because the difficulty is that this use it or lose it attitude, it's incredibly subjective. It's the most objective thing imaginable. No one's gonna say that, is your car enough? I didn't use my, I could be on lockdown. I haven't used my car for six months. Can someone just take off with it? I mean, I would argue that- That would be like the logic of that. So unless you have someone like, so essentially the power of property is now dedicated to the judges who determine what use actually implies. And you return to the problem of politics. Kate, it custodate, it says custodate, right? So I understand the objection that you're raising there and I don't wanna get too far afield, but what I will say is that all property is entirely subjective. Property does not exist within like physical material reality. It is a human convention created by human law and created by force and the threat of force. So we like to think in the modern world that property is like a real thing in the same way that we like to think of like money as a real thing, but it's not real. It's just- I know, I mean, convention. Power and power is intimately related to power and property and violence or abstractions. But if social organization breaks down, you're going to feel those abstractions in a very real way, very quickly. And so I think this is sort of a get out of us. I mean, I had family members who lived through World War II and their notion of property was very real. It's what you have to sustain your life. Your life cannot be sustained without property. Without your disposal. The idea that this isn't abstractions, I feel it was a sort of like this cop out, like everything's a social construct. Therefore, we can just dismiss the problems that are obviously- It's not so much that we can dismiss the problems. It's that you can't object to one form of property because it's subjective while appealing to another form of property that is also equally subjective. No, no, no, no, but my objection was the idea that this could be maintained without a very powerful authority declaring and judging over what is use and what is not. If there was a system of judges or authoritarian aristocrats who went through the land pointing at objects and declaring it unused, that would work. But in that case, those judges were virtually be kings. Yeah, I think they probably just declared that everything was their property because it's what they did the first time. Sorry to interrupt, but if we could just wrap this around back to democracy. Sorry, yeah, we should do a property debate. The question is how to control these judges, these watchers, who watches the watchers? How do you control the people with power? You're always gonna have people with power and now you need to figure out how you're gonna control them. Yeah, I would argue you would control them by minimizing the amount of power that they have by empowering as many people as possible. It is even a form as possible. I've said this before, like traditionally since the rise of the state 6,000 years ago, humans have plugged power vacuums with several large boulders either in the form of monarchs or presidents or whatever, large concentrations of power wielded in very few hands. I say what you do is instead take those boulders and grind them to gravel or sand and then each grain of sand checks the other grain of sand and we function via, as I said earlier, synergy. Well, hold on, I mean, this is the thing. This is where we fundamentally disagree. Having different power relationships check each other, in my opinion, is an effective way at controlling power. That is real. There's two ways I think of controlling power. The first one is to make sure that the leaders, that their interests are as aligned as possible, that they have the same culture and the same values as the people that they rule over and also that their economic futures depend on the economic future and the prosperity of the people that they rule over. The second one is to have opposing people, essentially in opposition, the systems of balances, those two things I understand. The problem with democracy is as soon as you get that democracy above about 150 people, your ability for that democracy to control any amount of power is minuscule. It's a procedural speed bump at that point. I mean, that would depend on how strong power down a little bit, but it's not going to control the main problems that we see today. And what in your estimation are the main problems that we see today? The main problems we see today are the fact that the country is fundamentally culturally divided in terms of values. There is no way that blue America will respectfully rule over red America and probably the same vice versa. And there's no way that either of them won't be ruled over, ruled by each other's choice of rulers. I hope that's solved by democracy. What does it mean? If you get to 60% and then rule over red America with an iron fist over their objections? I think that's ridiculous. I don't even see the point in that, right? Yeah, well, I think that we agree on that in the sense that it's not a good idea, but I would say that that fundamentally is not a problem with democracy. That's a problem with a lack of democracy. But democracy encourages that, right? Because it's saying now, if you get to 60%, in the case of Joe Biden, 51% maybe, right? Like 51% maybe, and now you get how old- Significantly more than that. It was like 51% in terms of- It doesn't matter, it's not 60, right? And even 60 would be, in my mind, a great guess. But the notion, and I hear this echoed everywhere in progressives, is we got 60%, that means we rule you forever. I mean, come on, you would never accept that if the shoe was on the other foot, and nobody would. It's a ridiculous concept. At that point, it literally- I will agree with you on that, which is why I think we would need to fundamentally- Because I think we would need to fundamentally reorganize the way that America interacts with democracy. I think a lot of the anti-democratic checks and balances that were put in by the founding fathers, because they were slave-owning aristocrats with wooden teeth. Like, when they built these systems, they built them because they feared the common man. They feared their ability, and they wanted to set them themselves up, essentially, as nobility and all but name in the Americas. Now, that's granted a cynical view, and I don't think it's the whole view of what they did, because there are some brilliant things that have been put into the American system. It has endured for- I don't think that this problem derives so closely to George Washington. I think that this problem of cultural division is much more contemporary. Well, George Washington is the guy we asked to be king, and he said no. In my opinion, that makes him one of the- He might as well have said yes. I mean, he essentially, people don't know this, but essentially, the democratic government of America after the Revolution was taken over by a coup, and George Washington was put in place. The first president of the United States was not George Washington, and you can look that up if you want. I don't even remember what the guy's president was. I'll have to check that out. I was not aware of a coup. I would have figured that would have featured pretty prominently in a people's history of the United States. No, the first government of the United States was the Articles of Confederation. And after about, what, three years, basically the aristocrats just said, no, you're done. We're informing you that you're no longer the government, we're the government. Here's this guy we voted on, George Washington. Who happens to be the former general of the entire military, and who they're all more loyal to than you. You're done. I mean, there's a bit of real politic going on there, and I know that the story of the founding of America is not nearly the fairytale that we've been sold. It's one of the reasons why I'm very critical. I guess what I'm trying to convince you of is that democracy is not the fairytale you've been sold. These are some of the house. American democracy maybe, but I'm fairly, I would prefer American democracy to American oligarchy, and I would prefer it to a number of other, a number of other more despotic things, but I think it was a lot to design. But what do you think is going on in a vote? Like, because to me, what's going on is it's an informational war. It's a narrative war, and it's a demographic war. So if the demographics of this country, like I said, if the immigration rate were the same way it was in 1964, there wouldn't have been a functional election for the last 20 years. It would have been a Republican since Reagan, or since Carter. I think there's a problem right there with regard to assuming that current trends will always continue. That's sort of like the thinking that led people to conclude in the 80s that women would surpass men in race times, because women hadn't been allowed to run until like the late 70s, early 80s. So their records were going faster and faster. And then of course it hit a plateau. To put this into perspective, so are you saying that demographics don't have a large impact on how elections swing? I think demographics have a huge impact on how elections swing. The pollsters themselves are informing Democratic politicians about how they can game electoral Democrat. They're not like, how do we make the best argument in a debate? They're like, okay, how do we set up the environment of this country so that there's many of our guys here so that we can get to that precious 60% and then rule over enemies with zero input? Well, again, I wouldn't say it's quite as dire as you've painted. I will agree that there is definitely that attitude and it especially becomes available and shitty like around election time. You can see like, there's like memos that say just that. Well, yeah. Well, and also, you know, you gotta think what's the kind of person who becomes a politician. It's usually a horrible person. You know, it's the same thing. What's the kind of person that becomes a cop? Oftentimes it's a bully or a sociopath or a criminal. You know, awful people are driven to seek power, which is why I think we should pull back or minimize as many positions of power as possible and spread the power as evenly as possible among as many hands as possible. And there are ways to do it. I think the work of Yochai Bankler has been cited a number of times. Liquid democracy has had a number of proponents and I've been very intrigued with stuff like swarm technology. I don't see how runoffs are going to fix this problem. Right? It's not simply runoffs. But yeah, I would agree runoff's a number of times. Democracy, as I've been explained, is this fancy way of saying we're gonna have runoffs and it doesn't fix the problem because most people, the Greeks imagined that democracy would be like some kind of debate. We'd all be sitting around thinking these issues over and then somehow the wisdom of crowds and the laws of averages would come in and we get a good decision. People don't do that. They go, who's on my side? Who's team am I on? Who's gonna give my guys the most and who's gonna take the least from them? Oh, they're my team. I'm on their team and it's all about who's team is gonna come in. I mean, I'm not gonna disagree with you that people treat politics that way but that's also because we reward the heights of political power with ridiculous amounts of power and prestige and really funny hats. We incentivize that behavior by making it a competition for the chance to rule over other people as opposed to a means of creating and mediating public policy. Which again, I think is why what we need to do is we need to get rid of these thrones, essentially. We need to get rid of these positions and instead move towards a more localized form of politics where we still interact with each other. But I think that by giving people a real say in the running of their communities and then letting that build out to the macro level as opposed to doing sort of a top-down approach where we get together every four years and spend millions of dollars to fight over who gets to be the nation's special guy but also give that special guy the ability to launch a nuke, that seems insane. Okay, but we agree on subsidiarity. That's not the issue here. Yeah. The question is I don't understand how with the size of things, how they're gonna get rid of the thrones other than just radically localizing things. I mean, there's a number of strategies that someone could have. I, as an anarchist, I favor the abolition of the state which is the military and the police. If we can eliminate that institution, not saying we don't have any institution whatsoever, we build a new institution. You're not really eliminating them, you're renaming. Well, yeah, it's the problem of, and it's not so much renaming, but it's the problem of nothing's perfect. So- Well, I don't know. I mean, this is kind of a tangent, but you need to catch criminals, right? Yes, though I would also say- I mean, is that a maybe, maybe we don't? Well, it depends on what exactly the criminal is, what they did, and a lot of the time, it is more damaging to society to go after crime than to not go after crime. This is something I fundamentally disagree with. Think of, for instance, every crime against your order of property and power is an implicit claim to take over the government. And if you don't stop the crime or make it legal, that crime will grow into an alternative government and it will take you over. I mean, that's how all governments form, which again, like these, you look into the history of Europe, I mean, these are bandits that took over the country, like just in just about every single country. That's where all their monarchies came from. So I mean, what group of gangsters are you going to have ruling you? And we still kind of have it the same way. But yeah, but you're correct, but if we're ruled by gangsters, and there's a path from being a successful gangster to being a ruler, you don't see the importance of suppressing crime. I mean, I see the importance. So what I think is more important is seeing the reasons why crime happens and dealing with it. A lot of the time what you run into essentially is, is that when people are committing crimes for two reasons, one for rational reasons and one for irrational reasons. If people are committing crime for a rational reason, for instance, they need food, that guy has more food than he needs, I'm going to take that food or housing or anything like that. That is something that can be dealt with by making sure that people have what they need and that people are no longer competing with one another and we eliminate inequality as much as possible. A great example of this actually is Iceland. Iceland had one of the lowest crime rates, still does have a fairly low crime rate, but it had one of the lowest crime rates in the world until they enacted neoliberal economic reforms. This brought a lot of money into their country, but it also brought a lot of inequality. And last time I was there, somebody actually broke into the hut that I was staying at and stole some, like somebody's $6,000 camera. They stole a $6,000, hold on, but you get a little jump there. First, you portrayed it as if basic needs were driving crime and if everyone had their basic needs. Not just basic needs. In no way is a $6,000 camera a basic need. No, but you can sell a $6,000 camera for $3,000 and use that $3,000 to pay your rent and pay your medical bills. And I think that this is something that maybe this is just gonna be a disagreement. I am not for, I'm not against, I should say. I'm not against minimal social safety nets, but I think that we see no evidence historically that social safety nets or fulfillment of basic needs decreases crime, I mean, for instance, it'll give you a simple example. It's not simply a fulfillment of basic needs. It's also, there needs to not be inequality. Because again, humans have this natural drive and it's not just humans, other great apes too, have a natural drive for things to be fair and things to be equal and to keep up with other members of the society. So if you have an incredibly unequal society and there are people that are locked out of reaching the heights of that society or even the middle class of that society, those people are incentivized to steal. And as a result- How are you gonna have a radically diverse society with radically different lifestyles and radically different rules and different areas and have all of those differences obtain the exact same economic output? I mean, it wouldn't be the exact same, but the idea again is we're- Or even statistically the same, that seems odd to me. Yeah, again, what we're going to try to do is to make it as close as we possibly can in much the same way as we're trying to make leaders as accountable as we possibly can. There will still be leaders because nothing is perfect and there's no way to make everything exactly the same. And in the same way, there will be a certain level of inequality in any society. Anyone that tells you that there will never be any kind of inequality is selling you something. Well, here's the thing. To me, it seems that inequality, people are really sensitive to or power and status inequality, not property inequality. I mean, property- People will actually- People will actually tolerate a large amount of property like consumption inequality. What they're really sensitive to is the idea that is people really, really like getting power inequalities over their neighbor and status inequalities over their neighbor. And they really, really are sensitive to those powers of the inequalities being with their neighbors or even worse with rival nearby people who have different cultural values. Well, power and status inequalities absolutely do drive things. I think there was, back when Occupy Wall Street was coming out, there was a TED Talk that I saw where they had two monkeys and I forget the species of monkey, but they paid them in unequally. And so they would have the monkey perform a task and like you'd go up, press a button and they'd give each monkey a like a cucumber. And it wasn't a great- They introduced a grape and then that- The monkey freaked out and yeah, started throwing the rocks back. I've heard of experiment too. The difficulty here, and this is under one of my points here and I wasn't very eloquent when I said this in the intro because I was on low sleep. Democracy seems to magnify this problem more than simply having areas of competence to rule over. The systems that I've seen work the best are whenever one has like really small areas of competence and they just do their own thing and things are segregated. Things get really bad when poll centers in, when you have a big pot of money and people have to divide it up and they have to contest politically with each other for who gets the biggest slice. And this seems to be the actual process of these kind of like small democratic, I'd say that's inherent to literally all human interaction in every society and in every power corrupts and politics- No, not necessarily, right? Because for instance, a parent has an enormous amount of power over their child. Yet I would trust a parent's decision for their child more than I would trust the democratic will of that child's classroom. Yeah, well, I don't know if really power, I get what you're saying there, but I don't know if really when people say power corrupts, they're talking about the relationship between a parent and a child. Like there's certainly some abusive parents out there. We've come to a magic thing, right? We've come to a piece of power that somehow doesn't corrupt. Now, why doesn't a parent's power corrupt? Well, I would say it maybe might in certain instances and in others it wouldn't, but- It does in certain instances, but most of the time it doesn't. And the reason why is because the parent has skin in the game. It's because the parent's interest is so closely aligned to their child's. And that is really what people should be- Yeah, I will also- Trying to be pure. Yeah, also pure instinct as well. Like you're a fairly new father just like I am and I'll tell you my relationship with children like completely changed when my son was born. Biology and skin in the game are two things, right? So if we were trying to get leaders that have those qualities to them, biology and skin in the game probably would be a good rule of thumb for making sure communities were more cohesive, right? Well, I'm not sure what you mean by biology there. You said instinct, right? Absolutely, as in what's the word? So if we're looking for incentivizing and putting leaders to have the incentives to serve their communities and their people and society as a whole, that's a difficult line to walk, but it's a needle we could conceivably thread. I mean, as far as like biology, I was talking about a, I would say a more or less universal human reaction like in the brain. Is that what you meant by biology? Like we... Yeah, but the thing is it doesn't just stop at the parent-child relationship. We know that humans have affinity groups that extend throughout their genetic relations. And now it's an open debate how far this goes. Obviously it will taper out at some point, right? Okay, well where are you getting that from and are you, by genetic relations, do you mean race? Oh, I know, race is one type of gender. I was thinking more extended family groups. I guess hypothetically it could extend as far as race. We don't know that. Well, yeah, it wouldn't because race doesn't bear, it doesn't exist. I don't know if we know that or not, but that's not what I was saying. No, we know that beyond the shadow of a doubt. Oh really? What's your source for that? I had a debate with JF Garapay, neo-Nazi on this. I would recommend checking out that debate, but there's a, and I can send you my research from it, but the fact of the matter is, is that everyone on this planet right now, we are all the direct descendants of like Confucius. Like every single one of us. As we go back in, you know, lines, each person has two parents and the further generation you go back, the more overlap there is. Go back 20 generations, you know, you've got over a million. That itself, I mean, that is very nice, but that is does not directly bear on the opening question that I have no opinion on and maybe JF does, but. If we could just. That's not to me. I just want to make sure. That does not answer the question. Yeah. The thing is here is that we have, the thing is here is we've established some patterns and how humans keep their leaders aligned. And to me, these patterns don't really have anything to do with democracy. I mean, it's fine if you want to use democracy, but the last thing you want to do is have a bunch of people go into a room and have a big debate democratically over how to split up a bunch of money. If you ever do that, or if you're ever in a situation where that's done, and I have been in a situation where that's done, it is absolute chaos. Well, yeah. But again, I don't see how that would be solved by autocracy or any other form of government that we might have. It's- Because there's no debate. Say what? Because there's no debate. Well, that's only, yeah, but that's only if you want the one person whose job it is to do it, who has the right, you know. This is a little bit personal, but I'm going to go here anyway, right? So, in, you know, when my family a long time ago had property that was passed down, and one piece of property went directly to one of the four cousins, right? Another piece of property was divided up equally. It was one property was divided up equally with each person having a separate share. That divided custody of the property. You know, the one that got sold off and one that went directly to one person. No one ever thought about it that again, that was fine though, just how things were. The one that was divided up equally almost toward the family a part on several occasions. And this is, and I think this is a very common human reality. If you give people a big political disagreement over how wealth is divided up and they win by forming political coalitions against each other, they will form political coalitions against each other and they will invent all sorts of lies about each other to screw each other over. Sure, but that happens in literally every society and literally every form of government. That's not something that is specific to democracy. No, this is not true. If there is a ruler who just goes like, you get this, you get that, and that's the end of the conversation. And then you can have that, but then again, you've got a huge problem there in that you have only one person making that decision. Yeah, that is a problem. Absolutely no lie there, that's the problem, right? But it's a different problem. And these two problems have to be held. You know, this is, and I'm getting this from Aristotle and also the Founding Fathers. These two problems have to be held in tandem with each other. Democracy, you're not gonna replace a king by dividing property up by a vote and have that result in anything other than massive civil war. I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that the monarchies across Europe fell as a direct result of civil war anyway. So again, I don't see how that's a problem. There may or may not be a civil war that people may or may not come into conflict, but that's not a problem that is, that again is a problem that is endemic to the human condition. And you would have to show that like democracies cause more civil wars than monarchies would. And that's simply not the case. Well, I mean, I know that this is something that probably I might be curious if the 20th century, the century of democracy wasn't more violent than the 18th century, the century or the 17th century. Probably not per capita. I mean, in particular, like the early 20th century, we've got World War I, World War II, we've got the atomic bomb, but also we have an exploding population and exploding technology. If you wanna look at like one of the most peaceful periods in Europe, it was probably after the fall of the Roman Empire, because it was simply just, it was too difficult to raise large armies to go and fight each other. I think you mean, well, I think you probably mean 1,080 to 1,380 or 1,480. Something like that. Yeah, probably not right after the Roman Empire because that was incredibly violent. Yeah, not immediately after the fall, but give it a few years from there. And here's a good thing because what characterized 1,000 to 1,400, you had small communities, almost all of which were authoritarian, but the rulers lived very, very close to their subjects. They're very, very closely culturally related. They had a common set of religious norms to guide the decision-making process. And it was very, very clear who owned the power and who had the responsibility for that power. I mean, I would say that's on my list and it was accomplished without democracy, right? Yeah, but I don't doubt that it was accomplished without democracy because again, this was early feudalism, but also I don't think that's the reason for the relative peace. As I said before, the reason was that the Roman dinar was worthless. You could no longer pay large armies to field and feed them and they just weren't able to go and make war on each other like they had previously during the Roman Empire. So, I mean, what I would say is, let's say, let's go down this route. You have society that is functioning a little bit better because the rulers are more connected to their people. I definitely think that is something that we need to look at. But also- That's the heart of the red versus blue conflict that's turning our country of heart right now. I mean, I would agree. I would say that our- Red America does not rule by blue America. And you wouldn't want to either. If they got 53% or however much Joe Biden got, he would not be saying that they have the right to at that level either. I mean, I lived in New York City for 10 years and it was a solidly blue state. I had no problems. I don't even know a point you're making. Aren't you on the left? Me, I'm kind of my own thing. I tend to agree a little bit more with the left than the right these days, but it's also like, have you seen the right? You've got trust- I'm on the right, so- Yeah, I know. But like- Okay, but I guess I'm saying is the fundamental problem is not factual. And this is a lie that our leaders tell us. They tell us that the fundamental problem is informational and factual because they want to be able to control what is a fact and what is information. They want to justify their rulership over the information apparatuses of society. Yeah, I- So they're going to say that the problem, they're going to say that the problem is false facts. That's not the problem. The problem is different values. It's different values, not different facts. It's different values in the Jonathan Heights sense in the sense of core moral axioms, not in terms of, I think that this is happening versus I think that's happening. I don't know. See, I'm going to slightly disagree with you on that. I think the problem is sectarianism and you're totally right. People are breaking up into their tribal groups and their identities and it's all about my team. There was a debate, an informal debate I did on Dylan Burns channel and there was a proud boy on there who was saying basically like crowing about that one woman getting on the Supreme Court and how what he wanted to see was me, me, me, my politics. He wanted to see everything reflected that he had in the society. It was a frankly very disgusting and vapid way of approaching politics and one of the things that- I'm not so sure I even know who that is to be quite honest. He's just a streamer. It's not a big thing. Okay, cool. You know, the point is, is that politics is what we do so we don't have to fight, you know? And there are times that it goes and in fact, that was one of the things that somebody had said essentially which was politics is war in this. And I was like, no, no, war is politics continued by other means. Yeah, I meant both are true. Yeah, so, well, yeah, in a certain sense. But my point being is that what we need to be doing when we have this massive population is we need to find the best way to make sure that people feel represented, that they feel that they are being listened to, that they have some control over their life and that they have some skin in the game. And you know, one of the big things that was really effective for me as a manager, and this was again on a small level was when I gave people in my office control over the work they were doing, control over their workspace. When I let them have a small part of skin in the game of what we were doing. And when we did that, they excelled. Again, because they felt free because they were freeer than they would have been in other situations. Yeah, but let's say you're a manager and you've got like six groups, right? Yeah. By democracy, do you mean we're gonna let each of these six groups, you know, have more autonomy and then give them stock options? Or because democracy, the democracy I'm against is let's have all these six groups come into a big conference room and vote over who gets the bonuses this month. I mean- After democracy doesn't work. Every number of more autonomy is great. But to me, that's not, I mean, that's not really democracy. That's subsidiarity. I mean, we can call it whatever we want. I would say, you know, autonomy in the sense of like, like what I would say is, is that groups should have obviously as much control over matters that directly affect them. And politics really shouldn't come into play until of course you've got a conflict and we have to mediate that kind of conflict. And there's a lot of ways that we can do that level of mediation. But again, I think that what we need to do is we need to build our democratic system from the bottom up, not the top down. I also think it's a very bad idea to drop like a huge amount of praise and power on our leaders. I think that being a leader should be like being, you know, the head of your city's sanitation department. You go, you do your thing, you wear a suit, you don't get much more money than anybody else and you're not a big important person. You are just an administrator. Now, obviously part of that we can't control because a lot of power happens when you get into a leadership position. That's the problem. But we can mitigate it, which is- The danger of allowing them to be just administrators is the fact that they get to wield power without being recognized as wielders of power. For instance, hold on, let me give me this example. For instance, do you know how much power is wielded by international banks that are absensibly part of governments and are essentially making decisions for us? I mean, I was with Occupy Wall Street. So yes, yes I know. Yeah, if you talk to these guys, they justify their power by saying that they're stuards of the government, they're experts that are being put in place over these institutions. And they're just doing the job. You know, they're just like the local sanitation guy just doing a job and that's bullshit. They're essentially our kings. They're essentially making decisions. And I include NGOs in addition to bankers in this, that people from the world economic forum are essentially acting like kings. They're writing out policy that's being imposed on us and really the things that are being proposed by them aren't even being debated into democracy. They're not even in the narrative. Yeah. I'm not gonna disagree with you on that. Talk to them and they're just like, oh, I'm just a guy with a job, you know? And so I really wish, my wish is that for people who are wielding power to admit that they have power. And what the problem with democracy I have is that it obscures that relationship. I mean, again, it can in certain instances, but also I don't think that that's necessarily a endemic feature of democracy. It's more a feature of whichever particular democratic system you put into place. Now, for instance, what I would say is with the term of international bankers, Goldman Sachs, places of huge amounts of wealth and economic power, I definitely think that needs to be broken up as much as possible. And I think that it's one of the big problems in my opinion with capitalism as a system. Because what we have is we have an economy that is driven by speculative investment for profit. And when the profits don't come back in a larger amount, the economy crashes and they retreat to their bunkers and gated communities and wait it out for a better day while people lose their jobs and suicides happen. But what I'll point out is take a look at for instance, Vietnam. Vietnam has a lot of problems. It's definitely not my ideal country, but look at what happened with their response to COVID. This is one of the few economies in the world where profits are not in command. And as a result, they were able to respond to COVID in a sane way with a fraction of our resources. They've had maybe 1,500 cases of COVID in the whole country, a total of 35 deaths. Last, I remember them, they like immediately shut down their immigration rate, right? Well, they shut down the country. I don't know about immigration necessarily because people can still come into the- And they had a closed immigration policy to begin with. I can't, I mean, and I remember them basically just shutting it, right? I mean, again, I think it was more about travel than immigration necessarily. I have a good friend who lived in Vietnam. I can't say how you've immigrated without travel, but... Yeah, but like, let me ask you something because you have had this immigration issue come up and it's something I like to get a lot of issue with because, you know, quite frankly, I'm from a family of immigrants, you know? Well, it's never been, right? Yeah, well, it's the American thing. My great-grandmother, you know, I think she had my grandmother in a field in like Eastern Europe. My father, not my grandfather, was born in a farm in Eastern Europe. Oh, okay, great. So, you know, I am part of a very new set of immigrants. The pertinent immigration point to this set of the debate is it's very obvious to me the immigration rights are being used to essentially gain democracy. Where and how? Because if you bring more immigrants in, immigrants have predictable voting patterns. I mean, it would depend. A lot of immigrants are very conservative. So what, are the Republicans doing it? I've never, what immigration, what large immigrant group votes more Republican than Democrat in this country? Any? There's quite a few if I remember what it means. Well, not just the Cubans. There was, what was it? I'm trying to remember. There was a group of... You're having a hard time recalling it because it's so rare. No, it's just I didn't prepare for this because I didn't know we were gonna be having a debate on immigration. What I will say is... I'm sorry, if we can just put it back to actual democracy. And honestly, if we could wrap it up so we can get to the questions. Brenton, if you kind of wanted to make your closing point in the distributist, you can kind of end it off since Brenton started. Sure. So what I would say is this and I'll sort of try to tie this in to the whole issue of immigration. I don't see any logical reason to stop the free movement of peaceful people. And I would say if people wanna come here and be a part of our society by all means, let them, I don't have a problem with that. Could this be used by politicians to swing the vote? Absolutely, but also that's another reason why we need to reform our economic system. We've seen, you know, essentially like they did that with the Irish in New York. They did? This has been game of thrones. I don't know why this is under contestment. We can see this happening historically in the 19th century. I mean, the issue is not so much that it doesn't, that what you're describing, yeah. The issue is not so much. I don't even know why what I'm saying is controversial, frankly. I mean, it's controversial because it kind of sounds like you wanna keep the nation for like just one race and people. And a lot of people have a big problem with that. I would say that's probably what's gonna be cool. Well, I'll say this, what I want the nation to do is I want the nation to grow more from birth rate than it does from immigration. I mean, that will never happen in a, that will never happen in a first world country. Well, what happens, are you kidding me? It happens in any closed, you mean any country that has an open immigration rate? No, I'm talking about birth in a, as people get more money and as people's living conditions improve, birth rates drop. All of the first world countries were at birth rates drop. Except in Israel, yeah. I'm sorry, is there a way that this pertains to democracy? I mean, it's only tertiary, tertiary early. So we should probably talk about that. But let me just finish my statement. I think it's a really interesting topic. I think we should have another debate on that. Absolutely. Yeah, but my point is not about race. It's about skin in the game. And the problem is that if the demographic changes, you know, so much from immigration and the immigration's appalled to democratic politicians, you have essentially a feedback loop. I mean, assuming that's what happens necessarily, but again, when people are, things are more complicated than that. That was it. It was my debate with T-Jump, where he pointed out that all of these recent African immigrants were voting Republican and were out of step with the black community in the United States. I pointed out that was because they were immigrants, they were selected for, they were wealthy people. So, you know, again, it's simplistic. So I could look at the statistics on African immigrants and they had to- Yeah, recent African immigrants, yeah. African immigrants vote Republican. Yeah, well, according to T-Jump's data, they did. That was a point that I responded to. But anyway, my point being, and it was- I'll look into that. Yeah, but my point being is, is that even if we do this, I mean, again, whatever a society does, that's the consequence of people within that society, like having actual power. And you don't have skin in the game if you don't have actual power. And having a minority rule over you specifically removes skin from the game. So I think what we really need to see is we need to see, again, the heights of power that isolate leaders and put them out of the reach of the people and literally damage their brains. I mean, there's plenty of studies showing that power actually has the same effect on the brain as like a traumatic brain injury. That like, if we get rid of these huge heights of power, we bring politics more down to the local level and we grow our politics from the ground up. We're going to live in a more happy, peaceful, and prosperous society than we otherwise would. And until we find a better way of managing all of these different people's voices and needs and desires than democracy, I think that we need to go with democracy. And if we want to heal the rift in this country, what we need to do is stop making our politics about ruling over someone else. Well, it seems like everything here hinges on localization, not democracy. And that's why I'm kind of losing my kids. I might argue that they're close to one and the same. People understand with localization, like you said at the beginning of the debate, that like a person doesn't have, like their vote doesn't mean anything. And you're right in the sense of like a national election, it's such a small, you're turning on a ceiling fan and trying to command a hurricane. But that's not the only way or the only people that people vote for. People are voting in active in their communities and the smaller you go, the more powerful that vote is. And very famously, my co-host on Insurrection with Brent Lengel, the honorable George Martinez, official US ambassador of hip hop, famously said, and echoed the statement, all politics is local. So I think that- Okay, but there's been a move away from local politics in the last century and it's been driven by the really anti-local party has been the party that you've always support for at the beginning of this debate, the Democratic Party. I didn't, I do not support the Democratic Party. I hate the Republican Party slightly more than I hate. I hate the Republican Party slightly more than I hate the Democratic Party, but yeah, no, they're both a group of gangsters and I want them all thrown out windows. I don't see how- First four windows, Carissa. Unless there's a much more stable population. I mean, localism, the massive immigration rates disrupt local communities because people keep on moving around all the time. I mean, people don't like change, but change is inevitable. I mean, there are ways to mitigate that. But again, that's probably another conversation that we could have. It seems like it's out of place for this debate. If a family moves every two years, there's not going to be a local community. I mean, why would a family move every two years? Moving is incredibly- The jobs change every two years. Yeah, so- It's very not hypothetical for people in my situation here. Yeah, and I'm sorry to hear that. And I did go through a period where I was moving quite a bit as a result of the economic factors. And I think that's another reason why we need to move beyond a system that is as brutal to people as capitalism. It's like America- You don't see the connection between the economy that constantly demands people move and the economy that brings in mass levels of immigration. To me, they're just intimately connected. I mean, they are intimately connected in the sense that free flow of global capital will insist a free moving workforce. Yeah. You know, again, I think- And you want to pour gasoline on this fire? No, I want to destroy capitalism. But giving it what it wants. That's another debate. That is, if distributed, if you want to kind of make your closing statement when it comes to the democracy, that would be absolutely wonderful. Okay, I mean, I think we agree on a lot. The problem is I just don't see really where the democracy question enters into this. Most of the stuff that we're talking about is questions about distributing power and property to a more local level. It's not about whether a given leader needs to necessarily be elected or appointed, which is, you know, in the strictest sense what democracy actually means. There are many instances where appointed leaders are more appropriate. And I especially if that appointed leader is ruling over people that are very much like him and have the same values. And, you know, I don't really- I'll get in, I'll say this one more time. I don't really see democracy as a negative, but more or less as a red herring and an obscurrant to the problems that are actually going on, which have much more to do with the question of how we manage power and property. And the fact that neither of those two things are really destroyable in any real sense. Gotcha. Can I answer that? Am I allowed to answer that or am I not? Yeah, if you want- I don't care, go ahead. Okay, so I wanted to answer that in the sense that democracy is, in my view, one of the three ways that we handle these kinds of issues, because really what it all comes down to is public policy. How do we deal with property? How do we relate with our fellow man? And it seems to me that these ways of doing it within our society are, there's multiple ways of wielding power and of making policy happen. One is cultural, one is political in the sense of democracy, and one is economic. These three come together and it's through the conversation between the three of them that we come to overall public policy. So it's a way of selecting leaders and also a way of selecting rules and policies, as you pointed out with regard to high-level banking people. And you're right, there is much nobles and kings as presidents and anything else. So again, I think that this debate is structured to one third of that triangle, but I think all three points in that triangle need to essentially be reformed in order to promote the most peaceful, sane and prosperous society that we can. And I think that the two easiest and quickest ones to attack are economic and political. Culture is a little more nebulous, so it's a little harder to make direct change to. Gotcha. If both of you are okay with it, we can move into the questions. I'm fine, I'm great, yeah. All right, wonderful. The first question is from Lehmann. He says, the child won the debate. Never debate with children or animals, I agree. I think we're already grooming him to be a debater someday. Next question is from Nya Noir. They say, Brenton, can you debate Ryan Dawson? Ryan, no, because he's a Nazi. Yeah, Ryan Dawson is a Nazi and a Holocaust denier. I have no reason to talk to him and I never intend to. I thought you said Jeff was a Nazi and you debated him. I mean, yeah, he is, but he's the one that challenged me. I don't see a reason to, I mean, if Ryan's gonna challenge me, maybe, but yeah, I'm not just gonna go out of my way for that. Gotcha. All right, next one is from Black Omega. He says, hey, Brenton, how would we address social issues that target minority groups in a purely democratic anarchist society? Did you say that again one more time? How would we address social issues that target minority groups in a purely democratic anarchist society? So we actually have a good precedent on this, which is Occupy Wall Street. And one of the ways that minorities made their power known was through both the consensus process and through direct action. So the way anarchists work out policy is we have a GA, and the GA involves everyone within a particular community coming together to talk about what we should do as far as public policy, how we should handle problems. People with certain decisions require a simple majority. Some require a double majority. Some require, you know, a full consensus. And it is adapted to the particular community. So if a minority wants their voices known and represented, they have their chance to come in and speak at the GA. They have the ability to block motions when we're going for full consensus, which then prompts us to want to deal with them and to work through it. I'd say the very big difference. How big is the GA? I mean, the GA at Occupy, the one that ratified our declaration of the occupation was 700 to 1,000 people, I think. It's pretty impressive like what can be accomplished with these GA's like when they are working. There's a lot of problems, but you know, there's problems in any democratic position or really any decision-making process, period. Would you say that that's more or less the limit for consensus decision-making? No, definitely not. Especially not now that we have technology on our side. Like, you know, the GA, a physical GA is kind of limited by how many people can fit in the room and can be heard. But like now that we've got the internet, now that we've got swarm technology and there's a number of other really interesting technological things that we can use, the ability of General Assembly actually extends far beyond meat space, which is cool. Gotcha. I would consider dissent to be the bigger problem. The what? I would say I was thinking more of dissent as the more of the problem than communication limitations. Dissent, we can get into that. Let's answer some more questions if we've got time. Yeah, I didn't want to interrupt the question flow. No, you're good. There's actually only one more question. I'll have to refresh to see if any others came in. The next one is Con the Stoner Lynn and they say, it seems to me the problem is democracy is the will of the people not in fact, not fact of the matter. I'm sorry, let me restart. It seems to me the problem is democracy is a will of the people not fact of the matter. And it seems the academic community is an excellent example of fact-based consensus working well. What are your thoughts? I guess that's for Dave first. Do you want to? Well, I mean, I guess there's sort of two things here. First of all, the academic community does not work on democracy. I know this since someone who spent many years in the academy, the consensus is driven by an established set of evidence in the case of hard sciences and the case of soft sciences. And so far as I've really interact with that, it's driven by political power. And that political power is certainly not equally distributed. And if you think it is, maybe you need to spend more time in the academy. So I don't really know what that goes to. I guess the question I wanted to get to though, maybe I could just turn this around and ask Brenton a question here. The one thing I kind of brought up and I know I was really scattershot in my introduction, but isn't it the case and Mrs. does bear out with numerous sort of psychological, I mean, whatever you make with psychological research, but we can observe this, we can observe the fact that you can re-narrative, you can take similar policies, weave a different narrative around them and get to massively different poll results. If everything goes through a democratic system, it seems that it would best ultimate power and to the class of people that create the narrative. So you're talking essentially about manufacturing consent? Well, it seems like that naturally occurs and that naturally comes about, right? Because what you're saying is, like I said, the Medicare for all is a good example of this, right? Well, the Medicare for all, I mean, that seems to be less of a problem of information and more of a problem of people not being entirely rational. Like I would say I've gone through a number of different, what's it called, health plans, including some like top tier, hoity-toity, CBS employee health plans that like did ridiculous stuff like cover 20 acupuncture treatments a year. And those health plans were great and very inexpensive compared to most of them. But I've also been in situations when I've been on Medicaid and I'll tell you, Medicaid beat it hands down. But if you had somebody who had never experienced something like that, and Medicaid is not known as great insurance in the world, it's not as good as Medicare and it's not nearly as good as single payer that people have up in Europe and Canada. But what happened was that they phrased the question in a way of, we will take something from you. And people have, there's a severe emotional reaction that people have with regard to the fear of loss. Now, I guess I wanna, we're not addressing the question. I kind of contest that factually because that's not been my experience dealing with a variety of different health plans certainly. Definitely I've had the opposite experience, but that's not the point. The point is that regardless of what your opinions are on this particular issue, that wasn't the point. The point was that we can take an issue, we can rephrase it in order to basically point out certain things people like in a narrative and then people will vote for that policy with the amount of information that you typically get in one of these big groups of 900 people. You can essentially, people respond to narratives, not to facts. And so unless they're spending their lives pouring over dusty books of statistics, the people who decide how to narrativize those facts are going to be the ones that to a large degree set the agenda. I mean, I'm not going to disagree that storytellers are incredibly powerful being a storyteller myself. Yeah. I mean, I think that a lot of us have been sold a false bill of goods when we've been told we're simply entertainers because that's not our role within society and hasn't been in most things except for capitalism. But what I'll also say is is that there's lots of different storytellers and there's lots of people, there are good wizards to combat the evil wizards. So yes, people can be manipulated but also not everyone is malicious. And there are ways in which we can combat misinformation and manipulation of people. And also I feel like just people can be manipulated at any level and in any system. And the larger the group of people that are being manipulated, the less likely they're going to be manipulated in large enough numbers. Whereas if you only have to manipulate 10 nobles or one king, it's much easier than manipulating 900 people. But that's the opposite of what the user was just saying with science, right? I mean, science essentially has this nobility of Uber experts that kind of frames the consensus. We consider them better decision makers than say that tens of thousands of undergrads that are majoring in that topic. Well, yeah, well, they're the class of Brahmans. It's the same thing as like the freaking, the freaking Spanish Inquisition. But doesn't that go against the previous statement? I mean, to me, if you're trying to draw a consensus, you wanna get people who really stated the facts and who essentially can talk to each other. So you want a very small number of people to form a consensus like in the academic community. People can be, so the issue part of it is overcoming Dunbar's number with we can only recognize 150 or so individuals as actual people and then everybody else gets grouped into an abstract, but there are ways and strategies in which we can overcome that. We can also know that that's just our monkey brains getting confused by their limitations. So I just gotta flatly disagree with you here. The fact that, you know, 10 Uber experts in string theory would make a better decision about what the physics consensus is. Oh, I see what you're, I'm sorry. I misunderstood what you were talking about. I thought you were talking, so you're, okay. That's sort of both and, right? Like, you know, but the thing is, is that the reason why people conglomerate into elites to make decisions is informational. It's the fact that it requires specialization and focus and also investment. And that's not something that people who are voting can really exhibit. I mean, they can, you know, and in fact, there's other strategies. One of the interesting liquid democracy strategies besides simple run-offs that's been experimented with in certain instances is like your ability to give your vote to someone else. So there, everybody's voting on, say, something that has to do with string theory. I don't know anything about string theory, but my brother is, you know, an engineer that works with it. Like, I can give my vote to my brother and then my brother can decide. Yeah, okay, hold on a second here. Let's take a step back. Let's say that the nine experts in string theory have one opinion and the 10th one is like a complete heretic. And he has like this wacky idea, but the 10th guy spends all his time just campaigning. Like, he has connections in the storyteller community. He's a really good storyteller. And so because he tells a good story, all the people who have no idea what string theory is, they all give their vote to him. So then does he just get to decide over the other experts? Well, again, it's, I mean, it's the problem of propaganda and the fact that, you know, decisions are made, you know, when you're working within an institutional framework, we love to think that it's always the best idea that wins and that, you know, we've got the free market of ideas. But the fact of the matter is, is that organizing is much more complicated than complex than that. In the event that there was a problem like that, I would hope that the 10, that the nine other people can come together and find a way to stop that problem. But again, it's like I said in my opening statement, part of this is that, yes, by giving people power, actual power, you increase the chance that they will do something wrong or evil, but there's no other alternative because it's more likely that once you've concentrated power in fewer and fewer hands, those people will do something wrong or evil and those people who have the power in fewer and fewer hands tend to do more damage in the long run. A great example would be the Soviet scientist Lysenko. A lot of people talk about like the famines in China and Russia as if they were caused by the collectivization. They were not directly caused by the collectivization. There was this one scientist Lysenko who had anti-Darwinist views and believe really weird stuff like plants or comrades. So you can plant plants of the same species close together and they'll just work together and one plant will choose to die to help the other plant. And it wound up, he basically promised this huge crop yield. And that's because it's a material analysis rejected Darwinism at an early stage of communism because it emphasized competition. He was saying things that were convenient to those in power and they held him up and gave him a bunch of power. And much the same way Stephen Pinker says things that are convenient to those in power and he gets raised up. But the thing is, is that what wound up happening was was that the Soviets then his theories failed. The Soviets lied about it. The Chinese believed those lies. The Chinese put the end, you know, you have the famine with regard to the Great Leap Forward. It was because of an information problem. And there were issues with like the Soviet state's structure didn't let enough in. But the point being is that these, the problems that you're citing are worse when power is concentrated as opposed to when power is diffused. We're not arguing over whether power is concentrated over whether power is diffused. We're arguing over what keeps leaders accountable. And that's where I kind of, I think that leaders need to be kept accountable on the basis of the principles that I talked about previously. The fact that the leaders have to have a common set of morals and a common set of cultural norms. And they also have to have the interests of the other people at heart, right? I mean, that's all well and good that people are static. Like people change when someone has a certain set of morals and then gets raised to another position in society, their morals will change with that because they'll have new information. And much the same way that if I got put in prison, I would change and my morals would change as a result of being surrounded by prisoners. Well, if morals can change on the circumstances, then good luck holding anyone to account to a moral standard. Well, my answer to that, right? You'd be like, oh, my morals change now. In order to even have an understanding of accountability, we have to acknowledge some constant moral framework for recognizing bad behavior, bad actions, and bad aims for ends for the collective. If we don't have that, you don't have political unity. I would inherently disagree with that in the sense that what we've got here is a fallacious appeal to consequence. Man makes morals, man makes morals, morals don't make man, existence precedes essence. Now that said, that doesn't mean- I literally don't see how that logically follows. What the people are- What I'm saying, if you don't have a moral basis for judging leaders good or bad, you're not going to have a political unit. I mean, you have a more, people have a moral basis, it's just not a set or objective moral basis. It's going to change with society. Like- I think we're talking about different things here. We might be- Can I put a question to Brenton? Perhaps if there's no more questions from the chat. Yeah, I mean it myself. Go for it. So this was sort of something that occurred to me. So presumably Joe Biden's going to be president, right? Yeah. So there are areas of this country where virtually nobody voted for Joe Biden. Now if Joe Biden were king and one of these areas wanted to not be ruled by him, I think that would be, most people including anarchists would be very understanding of attempts to secede or to separate powers from that body. However, those same people, because Joe Biden is president now, and even in this Republican town where no one voted for Joe Biden. All of a sudden now, the fact that there was an election and no one in this area voted for him, now this can be used as a means of to justify Joe Biden's ruling over this area where he functionally has no moral support among the people who live there. How is that not just, to me that just seems like imperialism with more steps involved. I'd rather have it just called. I'd rather have it just be called imperialism at that stage. I mean, what I would say is first off, I'm not a fan of even having a president. I don't think it's an office that needs to be filled. I think we do fine if we eliminated the office entirely or like we could elect a special guy every few years, just don't give him any real power. But that said, I think there's a couple of issues here because again, Donald Trump was elected and I lived in New York and almost no one in New York voted for Donald Trump or supported Donald Trump. And we were pretty pissed about that but also it was just four years we had to put up with it. Now, if Donald Trump had been dictator for life, you have a much higher chance that people are going to risk insurrection against that leader than if the leader is going to simply be in for four to eight years. People aren't- But your problem with Donald Trump was not that, was not the person Donald Trump. The problem he had with Donald Trump was that he was the right American candidate. No, my problem- No, no, no. Finish this. Well, mark my words. Mark my words. The left was like, it's just Bush. It's not Republicans generally. Believe me in the next four years, your guys are going to be complaining about how the next red state candidate is the real Hitler this time. I mean, I'm sure there are people who are going to do that. I'm just not one of them. Trump was Hitler in 2016. Every four years we get this and it's so consistent. But the thing is, you can imagine scenarios where blue America could be permanently demographically overwhelmed and there might not be any end to red American rule. I mean- Which is how a lot of communities say in blue states literally have to function. What I would say is, I think that, first off, I think it's more likely, especially if we don't get rid of something like the electoral college that red America's going to be completely overwhelmed. They game fairly close to losing Texas in this slide. Like they didn't, they still kept it. If Texas goes and nothing else changes, mathematically it will be impossible to elect a Republican president. So what you have is you have a sizable regional cultural minority that does not want to be ruled by you. Yeah, I mean- And how does democracy fix this, I guess? I mean, the idea would be with democracy, again, are you asking me to describe the process in a liberal democracy or are you asking me to describe like an ideal anarchist democratic process? Well, I don't know. I mean, I guess my problem is that I'm not so sure liberal democracy has a solution for this. If Joe Biden were king, basically, or if blue America was king, red America would be recognized at that state as a vassal property. And as such, although the power relationship might be more stark, at least it would be more obvious and more easy to keep in account. My great fear is that blue America is going to rule red America and then use the modemocracy argument to essentially hide the fact that they're basically making pernicious decisions against the interests of the areas they're ruling over and then claiming that they had a hand in electing them and then really they were just a minority that was shouted over. I mean, I would say the, with regard to blue America ruling red America, I think that red America still has their own local leaders and their own, you know, like blue America is not going to come in and take over Kentucky anytime soon, you know. I'm having local power been eroding for the last 60 years. I mean, it may have been eroding and I think we should probably rebuild it, you know. Again, I don't like the centralization of power in the executive branch and I don't like the centralization of power in the federal government period. Like there's certain times that I prefer it to certain regional powers because of what I feel is often small-minded policies. But again, I think that people's autonomy is more important in the long run. And I also think that people need to feel represented by their government, whether they're the ones in power or not. I don't think getting to a point where it's the red tribe versus the blue tribe and we fight over who gets the crown, who gets to lord it over somebody for another four to eight years, I think it's a terrible game. And I think we should stop playing it and I think it's ultimately destructive and if we keep playing it, it's going to destroy the nation. I've seen a tendency for democratic systems to devolve into the coderies that wield power over each other just like this. I mean, they may, but also again, you have the same problem in just about every other, you know, system. There were huge power games going on in, you know, in monarchies. It's like fascism is literal, like actual fascism is one of the most backbitey and internally feuding systems that you can ever find. Fascism is essentially monarchy cross-bred with democracy. This is, it's a weird thing, but if you look to say a monarchy in that stable period you were talking about during the Renaissance, sort of the Hillar-Balachian time of distributism, right? And if you look at the survival state. I had to have to look back at that. I'm not exactly sure if it's quite the Renaissance because the Renaissance was a period where money began to have a lot more value and so. Sure. I mean, this is obviously a spectrum. The war machines had to ramp up. The point is, is that the kings would fight, but the people on the ground would never feel this. There would be subterfusion politics at court, but no one would be like disowning their grandmother because she voted for the wrong king. No, but people might be beheading their wife, like freaking out. I think that would be really strange actually. No, no, this was famously done. It was the guy in Braveheart, the prince. I forget the one who succeeded Edward the Longshank. His own wife led a revolt against him and had an active view, yeah. So like. He was a king though, right? Yeah, well, yeah. And there's a lot of brutal politics. I mean, freaking Oliver Cromwell. That's not a reality. What I'm saying here is that political reality that was consigned to this particularly small set of aristocrats has in the democratic age been extended to the population a whole. And I want to sort of trot this out to you, Brenton. There was an enormous number of conflicts across Eastern Europe in the, all throughout its history. But the only time where it turned ethnic cleansing was in the era where people were expected to have political allegiances that they voted on or supported. In Eastern Europe, the Ottomans would take the territory and then the Serbs would, then the Austro-Hungarians would, so on and so forth, back and forth, right? But it wasn't until Tito went, oh wait, the Germans were all like, they were all politically in support of Hitler or something like that, that the ethnic cleansings really became an important feature of that reality. Well, that's because the ethnic lines didn't exist before that. I mean, the, we'd like to think of... I really screwed you there. No, no, again, it's a fact. Just fly out. Now, there were peoples and there were nations. Yet the lines existed, but they weren't political. We can say, the fact of the matter is, is that modern nationalism is what you blame for ethnic cleansing because they're using these things as organizing principles underneath the society. And again, this would be another reason to check out my debate with JF because I go into the specifics of this and how these things are created as political realities that then escalate into violence. But it's sort of beyond the debate, the scope of this. I mean, I got Napoleonic nationalism, sure. I mean, I don't know, I mean, it seems to me that this is a common problem, right? The common problem is politicization, mass politicization. Oh yeah, I mean, it's sectarianism. What is it that they did that? There was a famous psychological thing. It might have been done by, I forget exactly the psychologists who did it, but they essentially took young children and put them in and gave them each a team with a shirt and they found that the kids immediately, when they encountered the other tribe, started making up stories and stealing from them and wanting to fight them and giving themselves names. This is a human tendency, but it was inflamed specifically by political nationalism in the late 1800s, early 1900s and led to some of the most horrific crimes against humanity. So what seems to make this process better is to get everyone really, really clear boundaries and really, really clear stable societies so that everyone knows like this territory is ours and that territory is yours and have clear controls and clear property and stability and to minimize circumstances where you all come in and try to argue over how to divide up a big pot of goodies. I mean, I really think I want to avoid is to have some kind of spoil and this is what I'm really afraid that the progressives are driving towards. They're driving towards a circumstances where we're gonna have a big national conversation about how to divide up a huge pot of wealth. And when that happens, everyone is going to grab, they're basically gonna treat politics like war and if they're on the losing side, they're gonna go straight to war. I mean, I would be very surprised if we did go to war. I think it's gonna be more individual acts of terrorism. I don't think the conditions in the United States are close enough to actual civil war just because I've studied like the Spanish civil war in depth and it was way crazier than what we have now. That said, Americans are nuts, so who knows maybe. But I think whether the liberals do that or not, I don't think it's gonna be Joe Biden who does it because like Joe Biden's whole thing is trying to be the moderate candidate that rules over everyone and doesn't put anyone first. Yeah, but isn't the danger though that I'm pointing to here? I mean, there's definitely a danger of that. I would say if the Democrats overplay their hand and if they behave cruelly, yeah, there could be a huge problem. I think also, you've got a lot of people who are essentially in a death cult, QAnon, is a good example. But wouldn't democracy incentivize that because all these people voted for them and now they wanna get paid back. I mean, wealth and power incentivize that. And so what's the incentive is to take the money from the people who didn't vote for you and give it to people who did vote for you? I mean, you would have a very difficult time doing that because the Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law. Oh, yeah, I forgot. That's why this never has happened in American history. Yeah, I mean, it's happened less in American history than other countries. I think that, you know, it's one of the few things that we have running with our system. But yeah, this is a longer thing and I don't wanna key, it's midnight so I don't wanna keep this up. This has been a surprisingly productive debate, so thank you. Oh, yeah, it's fun, it's fun. Sorry for me being a little bit badgery there, but I want my points a little bit more subtle than Brenton's. So I feel like I have to cut in at key moments otherwise I can't make it as sharp as I need it to be. Love you too. There's actually one more comment that we have from Gabriel Kaye and he does say, a republic if you can keep it will echo in the minds of future generations. And I think that might be a nice little closing remark to end the debate. But I do, I wanna thank both of you for coming on. I really appreciate it, you taking your time and also as well for the audience. Thank you for watching and definitely be sure to check out the links in the description and also the Kickstarter and the links for Brenton and Dave as well and check out their content. Also don't forget to subscribe and like the video that really helps us so please do that and keep on sorting, they're reasonable from the unreasonable and join us for future debates. I know when it's coming up here a little later this week. Be sure to join in, have a wonderful rest of your day.