 You know the Roman Empire took over the Roman Empire and the 16th century when we had the Reformation and Maybe the 20th century so but the reformation of the English Church I learned as a child, you know through much much of a religious lens, but from this book says that Performing the English Church was a political matter, right? It had no roots in popular protest All right, it wasn't the people were crying out for relief from the oppressive burden that's you know imposed by the Roman Catholic Church it wasn't driven by principles of you know Humanist reform, you know, no John Calvin or Martin Luther would have been permitted to flourish in England But Henry VIII and Elizabeth the first were highly discouraging of any forms of religious enthusiasm and the English have remained over the past five hundred years quite averse to Religious enthusiasm, so the reforming the English Church was entirely Conducted under the direction of the king and the queen so in Continental Europe those countries that espouse Protestantism they did away with rituals and customs of Catholicism There'd be no mass no Virgin Mary no court of the saints yet in Henry VIII, right? He was basically an Orthodox Catholic Except when it came to people sovereignty, so he destroyed some Monasteries he replaced the pope but the mass survived and those who supported the king's Reforming of the church were of a practical persuasion So just like the people who supported Hitler and the people who supported Stalin they did it for practical reasons so the Supporters of King Henry VIII they wanted the lands and the revenues of the Catholic Church for themselves They were lawyers and courtiers they were members of Parliament and they voted in accordance with the king's will so for only a very few Was the theology of the reformation? important So what you got in England was kind of a mishmash of contradictory elements that developed the name of Anglicanism All right Anglicanism is as alien to the pure spirit of Protestantism as it was to the doctrines of Rome It was just kind of a mix and match of old religion and new religion So England became Protestant by degrees By accommodation by subtle adjustment and the people went along So time forgetfulness apathy indifference Right that weakened the old religion beyond repair England became a Protestant nation and What that really meant is that England was no longer Catholic So the Protestant the passage of time accomplished what the will of man could not work And you see the enduring effects of the reformation in the emphasis on the individual in England rather than on the community Private prayer takes the place of public ritual Manuals addressed to the personal devotional life your personal work walk with Jesus right the abound Justification by faith alone becomes one of the cardinal tenets the new religion This is wholly private in character right the struggles of the individual conscience the constant awareness of sin This became the material of the religious pamphlets of that period and then this becomes Secularized into modern liberalism and leftism right the constant awareness of sin to become a secularized to constant awareness of bigotry constant, you know awareness of racism constant awareness of Old-fashioned views regarding sex and gender and marriage all sorts of things so This reforming impulse has become a secularized in the modern liberal left dominant perspective so The Protestant calendar in England became devoted to the celebration of the new national culture. You had the rise of nationalism You had a belief in divine providence that was Gradually changed to submission and obedience to the secular authorities So the monks in the church had once been responsible for taking care of the poor now this is overtaken by secular parish officers right you get work houses and You get secular solutions to social problems So the House of Commons takes over the former Royal Chapel of Saint Stevens in 1549 So the law of God gives way to the statutes of Parliament and you get the idea of good governance And the idea that the state should have the dominant role in social and economic policy this develops in 16th century England You have the demise of religious dramas, and you have the rise of secular dramas like those of William Shakespeare So you have an abandonment of public rituals in the streets You have increasing social fragmentation So Roman Catholic countries are socially cohesive generally speaking in a way that Protestant countries are not So you have the rich starting to increasingly think of themselves as a class apart You have seats that are reserved in churches for families of local stature and You have the number of pubs double in 50 years after 1580 so for the demise of the established church and The established religious pageants fraternities of guilds that had to be alternate Sources of refreshment and that this all became secularized into modern left liberalism as embodied here by Robert Wright talking with Mickey Mouse It was a it was a moving testimonial to the Indate urge of humans to be creative and You pissed all over it just because you were in a bad mood. I didn't piss all over it. Listen. Here's You said it's gonna lead to world war You're gonna explain to us now why it's gonna leave you promised you to explain why this is gonna lead to world war Speaking of piss Nathan Jackson writes I'm so pissed at you Bob the Alan Arkin speech was the best part of the episode and you selfishly ruined it We spend the majority of each episode listening to you opine on grand concepts and international relations quantum physics religion and natural selection Wouldn't kill you to let Mickey chime in on artistic or humanistic content occasionally If or humanist content occasionally if I only Bob if I only wanted conceptual material I go to the library and check out great courses to listen to while I mow I guess he mows along while listening to us. I like that I listen to podcast Yeah, I'm on the lawn, but I digress he says you're such an ass sometimes. We're back. He's talking about me again Hope you re listen to these from time to time to hear how dismissive you are of other people Also, nobody gives a shit about these Apple TV shows you keep blogging on that last point Mickey I just want to say some okay silo was suggested to us by a commenter and The and the Apple the other Apple show we talked about that I'm aware of severance was suggested to us by a commenter Okay, this is not Bob imposing as well. This is not being responsive to commenters, which is what I'm doing now By the way, you're ignoring them. Okay, so this is going to come to a point And it's going to be such a shattering point that you're gonna thank me for playing that Palava But first of all, there's a question in the chat What was the difference in religious beliefs between those who supported slavery and those who did not so? Those whose religion was more attuned to the status quo Well, you know less likely to call for change and those who are already on the margins of society We're more likely to call for change that you can rationalize that as You know more sophisticated, you know theological differences, but people generally speaking act, you know, what's in? Their self-interest. All right What do we have here a little breaking news do we from Fox a Desperate man hunt now underway for a homicide suspect on the loose Pilly pull have been locking their doors of their houses of their cars keeping watch on the parking lots and in their back lawns Living now on this Sunday on high alert Here's the suspect he escaped from the Warren County, Pennsylvania prison three days ago Police call him very dangerous that he has quote Survivorless skills that means he could live in the woods survive on the land eat wild animals and camouflage himself from the car Okay, why did I break for that? All right, so believe me There's a point a profound point a shattering point that's coming here in this discussion between Robert right and Mickey Kyle's and that guys may complain which is you pissed all over the Alan Arkham thing and you said it would lead to World War and now you're going to explain to us as promised by Alan Arkham's moving testimonial to the human spirit of creativity Is going to lead to world war? Take it away Bob. Well, first of all How did I ruin it so so it is did I ruin it just by saying something critical about it? I thought he meant I got in the way of you Okay, let's see if we can find that Alan Arkham speech here Is this it? No Right. I'm looking for his speech. Here we go. I Know you're not supposed to read but I would be totally in coherent if I didn't it's handwritten Okay, maybe it's not that speech. I'm not gonna take the chance you you were gonna continue to rhapsodize my eyes. We're gonna get moist Which was not I had a right so why? Here's the underlying philosophy behind this meandering discussion between Robert right and Mickey Kyle's So why would people are the liberal left? intelligentsia be suspicious of invoking natural Emotions whereby people's eyes get moist and why would they then connect that to some you know major world war? because In part of Protestantism right Protestantism the emergence of reform religion said the religion was not a matter of any particular place Nor a matter of any particular ritual that it was a matter of what's going on in your heart And so now that has become secularized. It's become the dominant liberal left perspective on life and so there is with it a great suspicion of The sacred right so Protestants spirituality said that there aren't you know sacred places There aren't sacred groups such as priests or popes or cardinals No, you know one area of life is more sacred than another area of life So Protestantism largely expelled the sacred from both worship and from social life It tends to drive out the enchantment and magic in the world Which progressively becomes voided of spirits and meaningful forces and now when it becomes secularized this this ethic wants to be unalert for the forces of bigotry and racism so The modern liberal left perspective is the buffered identity that we are self-possessed strategic agents And therefore we cannot afford to be overcome by these their traditional forms of emotion So it's not the subtraction narrative where humanity simply subtracted religion What happened is that the liberal left took on the religious impulses of religious reform meaning Protestantism and secularized it Right mutated it instead of subtracting it So think of the difference between the old knight Who was king of his castle and could belch and you know say and do pretty much what he wanted within his own property then The form of government change so that knights had to start spending more time at court, right? So they had to banish coarseness and vulgarity from life And that's what liberals in the left want to do They want to reduce the rain for coarseness of vulgarity from life. It might possibly be racist or homophobic So the court becomes a stock exchange in which the individual's value is continuously assessed so we can no longer afford the same freedoms and this is the modern world under the rule of The liberal left we're all in a stock exchange our own value is continuously assessed everything I say and do on this show may you know very well, you know trip me up or advance me in the you know different areas of my life So gone were the days in which joking leads to mockery and then to violent disagreement and violence in the span of a few minutes Gone are the days where you can leap from the most exuberant pleasures to the deepest despondency on the basis of slight impressions Right, I'm reading from Ronnie Goodman's conservative claims of cultural oppression What matters now in this new morality the court morality which really gets going at the same time the president reformation 16th century What matters now to this day is others impressions of us rather than our own impression of ourself And so the individual's foremost task in a liberal left environment is impression management Which means self-management, which means deep suspicious suspicion of Well up with emotion because once you well up with emotion you give in to emotion You may very well lose your skills at impression management and self-management You're dodging the issue. You're explaining there was something wrong with the anecdote that was gonna lead to war Yeah, I was kind of a half-baked thought but let me try to see if I can finish it off So what is the Alan Arkin speech again? The Alan Arkin speech is when you teach an acting class a standard Exercise you go through as you tell people to spend five or ten minutes. These are the people would be actors Being totally boring and they are unable to do it because the humans Instinct for creativity and not to be bored is so great that they can't avoid trying to do something interesting. Okay Right some good questions in the chat from sunny. How do I explain enlightenment and the age of reason? Well, it's a culmination of the age of self image management and self management And it's this idea that we are self-possessed strategic agents who lead buffered identities So that there are all sorts of things maybe going on around us, but we are strategic autonomous Buffered identities who can choose our own path in life while the more traditional understanding of life is that we are not Primarily individuals with certain inalienable rights that the reason is very weak that the things that primarily shape us One our genetics and two how we were socialized and compared to those two forces reason is very weak The age of enlightenment says that reason can direct our ship That we can set forth on the sea of life and allow reason to be our guide a traditional perspective is reading reason won't get it done because the forces of genetics or blood Inheritance and the forces of socialization are far more powerful than the forces of reason. So Robert right here is More modern than Mickey cows. So Mickey cows is less modern than than me and Right. I'm more medieval because I have a traditional religious perspective on life But the the more modern approach is that we we can be autonomous strategic self-possessed agents leading a buffered identity and We have to be continually Engaging in any image management and self-management to make sure that we don't fall in the esteems of the people who are Important to us. Hey, and his point was a egalitarian point This is true of all students even the dull ones the smart ones the good actors the bad actors They all want to try to do something interesting and that is sort of an innate Impulse affairs, okay sort of moving and egalitarian to be so first of all, I wasn't pissing on the speech My entire comment was about you saying you Almost had trouble talking about it without getting emotional. Okay, so I was talking about that But now I want you to tell me which part see and Robert right is Upset that Mickey cows was getting emotional because that frightens him So Robert right is more modern than Mickey cows is more liberal than Mickey cows so he has a greater belief in the necessity of Self-management and he fears when people become emotional that they will be more likely to engage in anti-social behavior So a more traditional person is a little more at ease with expressions of emotion Part of it. Is it that because maybe I understood what part makes you Emotional makes you choke up. Is it that everyone has this because that's okay. That's okay If that's what everyone else it's all those a spirit of creativity also makes me emotional right well see I Took it and it was I was kind of overreaching but all You know like I'm against what I mean what I think gets humankind in trouble is Well the most There there's a generic kind of Spirit of which like nationalism and tribalism are manifestations. Does that make sense like? So I took I took you to be getting choked up about how how great and Noble human striving is now. I don't take you even then it would be like You're saying it's speciesist I don't know what's the point what how does it happen with Here's the deal. There's a correlation between people who get teary-eyed about speeches about the nobility of human striving and the and the Exploring spirit and the conquering spirit whatever the fuck else. There's correlation between those and people who are prone to like nationalistic and tribalistic Inspiration that so Robert Wright is very frightened of people becoming tribal and and nationalistic, right? He's afraid of these traditional human emotions. All right. He's got this idea that people should be strategic self-possessed autonomous Agents, you know leading buffered lives while the traditional perspective is that we don't need buffered lives that we are Primarily not individuals but we are part of a tribe or a family or an extended family or or a nation and that what's going on with other people affects us and the power of our human reason to guide us is Largely a delusion because we are much more affected by our genetics and by our socialization and our reason tends to just be self-interested and rationalization and Is not really an effective tool on its own for navigating reality Compared to the power of aligning oneself with one's family extended family tribe and nation and Community and getting one's hero system from your community That's my conjecture. It's like There's a little bit of Wagner in that But this isn't being inspired by a nationalistic impulse is being inspired by universalistic human impulse So you're just doing this guilty by association because people are reclaimed about this good thing Also, the same people are reclaimed about this bad thing That's like the weakest argument I've ever heard Well, no, but I'm saying well first of all again if what if what was stirring you was that every all among us rich and poor Weak and strong have the same thing then that's different than I misunderstood. What did you think I would you think? What do you think I would say? Human spirit that's right that nobility of the human spirit and the and the aren't we great and what's so terrible about the Nobility human spirit universalistic. It's the human spirit. It's not the American spirit or the Russian spirit I understand that but I am Conjecturing and I admit that this is a highly Not obvious. No nobody's gonna understand what I mean. I am making the conjecture that There's some kind of correlation between that and the more nefarious Tribalistic manifestation. I'm saying like it's all done to the tune of Wagner Okay, you can't you can't admire the nobility of anything but but some people I'm saying I'm not an ability in a nationalistic way No, I didn't say can't admire nobility of anything I'm just saying I'm a little and I'm not even saying no I'm not even saying down on all the don't do the speech. I'm not even saying Don't do the speeches about you know to infinity and beyond Blah blah. Oh that reminds me. I watched this Apollo 11 documentary, but I'm not saying that I'm saying I'm a little suspicious of people get teary-eyed at that That's all It's like because I'm I I'm guessing you're like a top You're like a total killjoy. You can't can't get teary-eyed about anything because that makes you hit look now You can get teary-eyed about the about the weak and strong big and so here's like What what what if I got teary-eyed reading non-zero about our great how humanity is You know Has a there's a master plan in reality that's leading us to a tiard a shard and mind meld at the end of time I'm not allowed to get teary-eyed about that or does that make me hitler too? Let me try to set the context. Maybe maybe I'm being I'm hypersensitive about this and even after I said it I thought well, this is kind of a reach. It is a kind of a reach. I'm just throwing it out There's a conjecture but part of the context about of this is that like I'm just realizing um You know I'm pretty close to a fucking freak It's like nobody else cares about the new york times being almost nobody cares about the new york times being systematically biased About the ukraine war and most people hear me do it say oh, you're a putin apologist now mickey I think you'll agree. I used to make the same critique of coverage of trump Of the stuff being anti trump and I hate trump. I hate trump uh, and I just it's like and I'm just like looking around and I'm looking at 99 percent of americans process this The way I watch 99 percent of americans process the iraq war and I just want to grab them all and go You are the reason there is war. I know right see this. There's great suspicion of strong feelings traditional ties traditional attachments people who lack the disciplined autonomous self-management presentation management Of the modern liberal left elite. Oh, you think you're on the right side Putin's the bad guy fine. He is he invaded I I I agree with that part But the way you're so long as human beings process information the way you're processing it. We're fucked Right. We're we're effed if we you know, we don't learn to achieve this disembodied strategic autonomous buffered self-management Disciplined ideal of the liberal left cognitive elite Okay, 40 any thoughts on jubbiden 7th grandchild situation new york times opinion piece by my maureen dow caught him out for not meeting his granddaughter I don't think it has any significance So I can't can't be bothered to uh, anything was primarily determined by your abilities with the sword right now And social standing depended upon continuous reflection foresight calculation Self-control precise and articulate regulation of one's own affects knowledge of the whole terrain human and non-human in which one acts This becomes more more indispensable preconditions of social success And this is the current dispensation upon which we operate if you Take into consideration everything you do and say and how that might affect other people and how that affects your own social standing All right, you increasingly might notely manage your own life rather than just reacting Rather than just you know coming from your traditional impulses Then the more you are The more you are suited for success in today's world where the liberal left controls almost all of our Institution so the more modern the man the more he molds himself Deliberately to be this strategic autonomous Self-possessed agent who tries to steer his way through life on the basis of reason So the more modern you become the more disposed you become to observing yourself observing others and constantly Fine-tuning your own behavior So when you're at court or even online or moving in the world today All right It you have to consider the intertwining of all your activities with all your words how that's going to affect everybody else in your life So you're inevitably confronted and compelled to observe constant vigilance and to subject everything that you say and everything You do to minute scrutiny So this is when the western man becomes psychological Where he develops more precise observation of himself and other people In terms of motives and causal connections where he develops vigilant self control And perpetual observation of others these become the Building blocks of social self-preservation. So social status increasingly depends upon How well you wield words rather than swords How closely you adhere to stylistic conventions to the forms of social intercourse to how well you mold your emotions to the situation Do you develop a facility with courtesy? Do you understand the importance of good speech and conversation? And you are expected to develop good taste. This achieves new prestige value Members at court listen with growing sensitivity to nuances of rhythm tone and significance to the spoken and written word So polyvian expressions have to be eliminated replaced by a language that is courtly That it possesses good etiquette that is clear transparent Precisely regulated. So this is kind of the opposite of clinging to your guns and religion And this is the way the modern liberal left operates And if you want to succeed in the modern world it helps to have all these skills so With globalism with With technology, we're increasingly living in closer proximity virtually and realistically We are bound to one another in ever more complex relations of social and functional interdependence so Our chains of social dependency become lengthier and more elaborate Right and so as these chains become more strong and more elaborate then the more strenuous becomes demands on our drive control Until this control is instilled in the individual from his earliest years as an automatic thing As a self compulsion that he cannot resist even if he consciously wishes to so you get the Moderation of spontaneous emotion You get the extension of mental space beyond the moment into the past and the future You start connecting events in terms of cause and effect not as you know timeless You know eternal properties, but you get a specific transformation in the human makeup As the state develops a monopoly on physical violence and we become ever more socially interdependent So we get an ever-widening segment of the population from the top down that develops a strict continuous and uniform modes of control of our basic drives So you sometimes see with older people that they lose control of these basic drives They start speaking in inappropriate ways All right, they they break conventions so these Interventions were not you know at first implemented on the unwashed uneducated masses But they were first undertaken by the various elites to then assume responsibility for inculcating stricter control of impulses and emotions in their social inferiors And then this function was democratized throughout the bourgeois family So the order futile nobility fast in its open displays of contempt for the wretchedness of the lower orders But now The quintessential ambition of the modern elites is to make over the whole of society to change the lives of everyone to make Everyone could form better for these models which carry strong conviction among these elites So modern elites are more egalitarian. They are less openly arrogant But they are also more meddlesome more paternalistic and less tolerant They believe that they embody universal ideas They see themselves not so much as superior but more advanced more educated And so they feel a special responsibility to reform those who have not yet achieved this elevated state So we'll get uh play a little bit here from ns lions from his sub stack brought to you by audio dot ai I was in the middle of working on a rather different long essay when eventually I came to the conclusion that I had little choice, but to write this one defeated in the way Okay, so can't a culture both can't it both be individualist and have strong internal cohesion high social trust To some degree so australia is individualist the less individualist than america It has high social trust and high social cohesion the less social trust and less co cohesion than it had prior to The the 1970s So to some degree, but generally speaking autonomy and cohesion are at odds. So just read I read a good book guys Let me let me find This this book here came out in 2015 key concepts in political In politics and international relations. So this book does an excellent job of just Spelling out making explicit, you know The building blocks of political analysis. Most people can't form a coherent Uh political philosophy. They're not literate in the basics of political philosophy So there's an entry on about a hundred different parts of modern politics when entries on multiculturalism And it notes that one key source of multicultural thinking stems from the attempt to refashion liberal Police which came from Protestantism to take into account the importance of communal belonging So liberalism it's all about individuals being autonomous self-regulating and born with inalienable rights But this leaves people feeling isolated and disconnected and people are happier the more interconnected their lives All right, the c.s. Lewis put it the price of freedom is loneliness happiness comes from ties So with multiculturalism, it's really a form of group nationalism, right Because individuals are not primarily individuals, right? They are primarily embedded In a tribe a family an extended family or a nation, right? We derive our understanding of the world Our hero system meaning our framework of moral beliefs our sense of personal identity Largely from the community the culture the the people the family the tribe in which we live and develop So according to multiculturalism, this means that these different cultures need to be protected and strengthened Particularly when they belong to minority groups So this demands an emphasis on the politics of recognition, which many people on the alt-right wanted recognition for their type of politics and Self-determination All right, so multiculturalists generally endorse value pluralism says that people are bound to disagree about ultimate ends in life And therefore all beliefs are equally legitimate Now, how do we go back to? Monocultural nation states, right? That can only be done by enforced assimilation or expulsion of ethnic and cultural minorities The most common criticism of multiculturalism is that it is an enemy of social cohesion And it is right shared values in a common culture They're usually a necessary precondition for a stable and successful society And there's an entry on nationalism that talks about the cultural nation such as the greeks the germans the russians the english and the irish That have a national identity that is rooted in a common cultural heritage and language That long predates the achievement of statehood or even the quest for national independence Then you have political nations such as the british americans and south africans who are bound together primarily by shared citizenship And may encompass significant ethnic divisions. So a cultural nation an ethnically racially religiously tied nation is going to have a stronger sense of cohesion Than a political nation where people would simply share citizenship So the civic conception of nationhood is one that is generally supported by liberals and socialists Right, it places heavier emphasis on political allegiance than on cultural unity The organic concept of nationhood which is advanced by conservatives Is exclusive it gives priority to a common ethnic identity a shared history And a conservative overwhelming concern is order. So when you hear law and order At law is obvious order is the appropriate regulation of interactions in your society So nationalism is the most important most powerful political force of the past 200 years The nation state has become regarded as the most appropriate unit of political rule The international law is largely based on the assumption that nations like individuals have inviolable rights such as the right to political independence and self-determination So the world is divided into nation states and supporters of nationalism See nations generally as organic communities The humanity is naturally divided into a collection of nations each possessing a distinctive character and separate identity Right different nations different peoples have different gifts So nationalists argue a higher loyalty and deeper political significance attaches to the nation Than to any other social group or collective body is what we hold in common That's where you want to be as united and cohesive as possible So national ties seem to operate an instinctual even primordial non-rational level So for liberals and people on the left the nation state is largely fashioned out of civic loyalties and allegiances For conservatives and nationalists The nation state is based on ethnic racial and organic unity the nation state is Probably the only viable unit of political rule is the basic element in international politics The vast majority of modern states are nation states nation states offer the prospect of a cultural cohesion and political unity When people who share a common cultural and ethnic identity gain the right to self-government Then community and citizenship coincide Nation states are subject to centrifugal pressures meaning pressures to fall apart Which is generated by an upsurge in ethnic and regional politics So sometimes ethnicity and religion displaces nationality As the central organizing principle of political life So it used to be until the 1960s that it was considered unfathomable To publicly say out loud that you put the welfare of your particular group in america such as blacks or jews They're above the national welfare But since the 1960s since we become multicultural that's become increasingly Acceptable to the jews to primarily think in terms of what's good for the jews for blacks to think in terms of what's good for the blacks Hispanics to think you know what's good for the mexican-americans Right, this is a ns alliance west But elements of them survived and went underground The fundamental feature of these ideologies was that they were collectivist of economic class or ethnic nationality And by dispensing with the rights How would I explain finland asked the chat and their high levels of social cohesion and happiness While also having high levels of trust in public institutions and personal freedoms Okay, how would I explain finland? I would explain it by By assuming that finland is filled with fins And as I look at Wikipedia finland is 92 finns All right, it is overwhelmingly a coherent cohesive majority nation state Right, so minorities make up only about 8 percent of finland. So yeah, that's how I would explain the high level of cohesion cohesiveness social trust People in finland feel like the government is on their side People in america often feel like the government is working against them. So that's how I would explain finland success It's filled with fins if finland became filled with people who are not fins I suspect these virtues of finland would diminish What is the conservative solution to integrating? Minority groups in the u.s. That were imported at the start of the country I think a conservative perspective would be more at ease that segregation is The natural state of a multi ethnic Multi racial multi religious society So I think the more right wing you are the more at ease you are with the segregation And the chat says just enforce the law those who can make it will make it and those who won't will be in prison So also the more right wing you are the more skeptical you are about government having the power to assimilate people who over hundreds of years have not Generally speaking generally speaking proved assimilable So the sovereign individual they were also inevitably totalitarian Today a left-wing strain of these ideologies has reemerged as a form of neomarksism mutated by postmodern critical theories becoming the ideology of the new faith This ideology is fundamentally anti-liberal in origin and outlook It is also fundamentally collectivist Emphasizing the abstract rights of identitarian groups race gender Well individualism is not natural, right? We didn't survive through hundreds of thousands of evolution years of evolution individually, right collectivism group identity Is is far more powerful far more natural far more evolutionarily adaptive than individualism Now you can have greater or lesser levels of individualism that may still be adaptive in particular situations But generally speaking the normal natural and healthy thing is to have a primary identity That is not as an individual but as a member of a family an extended family a tribe or a nation So to the extent that the anti-liberal movement is prioritizing group Individual identity generally speaking that will be more adaptive more powerful will make people happier Right group strategies generally speaking out compete individualist strategies Sexuality etc over the individual Much as Marxism put class ahead of the individual with murderous results Now this revolutionary anti-liberal ideology is engaged in a struggle to overthrow and replace liberalism Okay, not every anti-liberal movement is is murderous All right putting group identity ahead of individual identity does not inevitably lead to genocide Threatening to return us to an age of either totalitarian oppression or primitive tribalism the polio liberals Poland and Hungary also filled with ethnic Poles and ethnic Hungarians They did not have anywhere the amount of social trust and cohesion that the finish have Yeah, there's something special about the finish And once you replace the finish with other groups Including the Poles and the Hungarians. It's not going to be as cohesive And successful a nation-state, right? The the Finns evolved in very harsh conditions And they created a very powerful effective cohesive people And you just can't replace them and maintain the great things that the Finns have accomplished The answer is based on this analysis fairly straightforward Liberalism must be reinforced by the renewal and reapplication of greater liberalism That is when the classical values of liberalism are restored to predominance in society Most importantly the preeminence of the individual over the collective Then the challenge to western liberalism will be defeated and liberal democratic civilization saved There is however another powerful frame through which to analyze the emergence of the revolution and its ideology As the inevitable product of liberalism itself This is the view of a philosophical camp of the counterrevolution that I will call the post liberals The post liberal argument was in recent years Perhaps best first articulated by Polish philosopher Richard Legatko in his 2016 book The Demon in Democracy Totalitarian Temptations in Free Society But it was most powerfully expressed in the English-speaking world by Patrick Deneen's 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed Simplified that argument goes like this Liberalism made the radical autonomy of the individual its greatest good and highest goal To achieve this total autonomy Right. Is there anything more important than the total autonomy of the individual? And I'd say yeah The success of your people your nation your tribe your community right that's generally speaking more important than The total autonomy of the individual Right the idea of total autonomy of the individual is incredibly maladaptive. We obviously did not evolve On on patterns of you know total autonomy of the individual Man had to be freed from all external limits On one hand liberalism unleashed the power of technology and the machine of consumer capitalism With a mission to conquer nature and free us from all the material limits and wants imposed by her in her cruelty On the other hand liberalism far more influenced by the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau than it would admit Set out to free man from all limits of inherited culture religion custom tradition hierarchy place behavioral norms associations and relationships All of which came to be seen as obstacles of oppression standing in the way of the full realization of individual desire and liberty As presumed to have once existed in a fantastical state of nature present before the corruption of history at its sins But there is a profound irony at the heart of liberalism as denine writes The more completely the sphere of autonomy is secured the more comprehensive the state must become The more individuals are liberated from associations and traditions The more there is a need to regulate behavior through the imposition of positive law Because the rights of individuals must be attained and guaranteed by something And the state is the only option Moreover as the authority of social norms dissipates, they are increasingly felt to be residual arbitrary and oppressive Motivating calls for the state to actively work toward their eradication This cycle is self-reinforcing as lighter and lighter burdens of obligation Responsibility and restriction on individual desire and self-expression are felt to be intolerable So from any traditional perspective the idea that you make is a pre-eminent value The individuals you know autonomy is Hard to fathom Right back to this book on Political concepts talked about those who criticize the nation state idea point out that a true nation state can be achieved only through a process of ethnic cleansing Or nation states are always primarily concerned with their own strategic and economic interests and therefore An inevitable source of conflict or tension in international affairs. Yes Nation states are an inevitable source of conflict or tension, but what's the alternative? The alternative is some kind of globalism So nationalism is a belief that the nation is the central principle of political organization That's the most powerful animating force in politics over the past 200 years nationalism is based on two core assumptions That humanity is naturally divided into distinct nations meaning distinct peoples And second the nation is a political community in the sense that it is the most appropriate and perhaps only legitimate unit of political rule So liberal nationalism assigns the nation a moral status similar to that of the individual So liberal nationalism assumes that nations have rights just as individuals have rights such as the right to self-determination So liberal nationalism holds that all nations are equal and that the nation state ideal is universally applicable conservative nationalism to which i subscribe is Concerned less with the principled nationalism self-determination more with the promise of social cohesion and public order embodied in the sentiment of national patriotism so A consciousness of nationhood is rooted in the idea of a shared past So nationalism becomes a defense of traditional values and institutions that have been endorsed by history so people on the right are much less likely to experiment with ways of organizing families and Relations between the sexes relations between adults and children relations within communities than people on the left So for 200 years nationalism has shaped the world making it the most successful of political creeds Fear of disorder and social instability, right? That's probably the number one fear for people on the right It's been a fundamental and abiding concern of western political philosophy order Attracts unqualified approval from political theorists, but there are deep differences regarding the most appropriate solutions to the problem of order So at one extreme you have thomas hobs arguing that absolute government is the only means of maintaining order Because the principle human inclination is a perpetual and restless desire for power ceases ceasing only in death I am a Hobbesian All right, I believe that without government life will generally be short nasty british Modern politics the conservative view of order is linked closely to law law and order a single fused concept Domestic order is best maintained through a fear of punishment And strict enforcement of law and stiff penalties and respect for traditional values. These are the moral bedrock of society That's what I subscribe to And then a little critique here of modernism, right the postmodern critique of modernism Is that it is impossible to establish objective truths and universal values? So the postmodernist has an incredulity towards meta narratives So postmodernism is the attitude that no one narrative. No one system Is sufficient to explain the complexity of reality. So to that extent I am postmodern Realism, right that is political theorizing That is realistic in the sense that it is hardheaded about human nature And devoid of wishful thinking and deluded moralizing so key early thinkers in this tradition include Nikolo, Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes So the realist international theory is primarily about power and self-interest We assume that states will try to be as powerful as they can that human nature Is characterized by selfishness and greed And that states exhibit the same Characteristics and as states operate in a context of anarchy, there's no higher authority to which one can Turn to to effectively arbitrate your dispute with another state States are forced to rely on self-help and so they must prioritize security and survival So realist theory can be summed up in this equation egoism Plus anarchy equals power politics The realism is probably the oldest theory of international politics It can be traced back to the Thucydides account of the Peloponnesian wars fought 431 to 404 BCE Into Sun Tzu's classic work on strategy the out of war written at roughly the same time in China The modern theory of international realism For international relations took shape in the 1930s as a critique of then dominant liberal internationalism Which is dismissed by realists as utopianism So after world war two and the onset of the cold war realism became the preeminent theory of international relations Because the cold war was dominated by superpower rivalry and a nuclear arms race Then liberal internationalism became dominant starting in the 1970s As far as international relations theory, okay Back to ns lions new rights are granted which require a new expansion of the state to facilitate Far from there being So Sonny says look, I asked you because you said Finland was filled with fins And that's why they've been successful of what makes the fins successful with their homogeneity and Poland not as successful It's not homogeneity. There are a lot of homogeneous states that are not successful as the fins What makes the fins successful is that they are filled with fins Right the fins are an incredible people right they Create a more cohesive more trustworthy Uh more efficient more prosperous society than the Poles and the Hungarians and almost any other people on earth I think They have evolved to survive very harsh winters and to deal with some very nasty neighbors And so the less intelligent and the less pro-social of them died out right they did not pass on their genes And so that's kind of my my called winters theory for why the fins are so incredibly successful An inherent conflict between the individual and the state As so much of modern political reporting would suggest Liberalism establishes a deep and profound connection It's ideal of liberty can be realized only through a powerful state If the expansion of freedom is secured by law Then the opposite also holds true in practice Increasing freedom requires the expansion of law Thus liberalism culminates in two ontological points the liberated individual and the controlling state Denine argues Hobbes's leviathan perfectly portrayed those realities The state consists solely of autonomous individuals and these individuals are contained by the state Thus this very liberation in turn generates liberalism's self-reinforcing circle Wherein the increasingly disembedded individual ends up strengthening the state that is its own author And simultaneously In this world gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a nearly universal pursuit of immediate gratification culture Rather than imparting wisdom and experience of the past so as to cultivate virtues of self-restraint and civility Become synonymous with hedonic titillation visceral crudeness and distraction All oriented toward promoting consumption appetite and detachment as a result superficially self-maximizing socially destructive behaviors begin to dominate society So in case I wasn't clear earlier. I'm sure they're 99 of relatively homogeneous states, right? States that at 90 plus of one ethnicity are not nearly as successful as the fins There's something special about the fins And I would assume that has something to do with how they evolved in a particularly harsh climate to build a cohesive nation This is almost the polar opposite of the classical and traditional christian conceptions of liberty Which did not mean being And poland gets pretty cold too. They also have very aggressive neighbors on all sides must be more than that. Yeah, so a people Culture is the combination of a particular sets of genetics combined with particular environment and so The combo of the fins genetics and environment has produced a super group of people Free to do whatever one wished in the pursuit of pleasure But being free from enslavement to one's base appetites A condition predicated on the cultivation of a just and discriminating self-rule Through which one could through the alignment of inner virtue with action and the fulfillment of duties and obligations Achieve over the course of one's life a lasting sense of meaning and happiness Instead in the end freed into a state of atomization by liquid liberal modernity We today find ourselves as individuals replete with rights and defined by our liberty buddy Right, that's not a recipe for happiness. All right, if you're all about your rights and your liberties and Your autonomous, you know pursuit of You know, whatever is important to you right that leads to loneliness fragmentation and dislocation and society and communities deteriorate if this is the dominant way of thinking So we seem to have reached perhaps an endpoint in liberalism With this veneration of the autonomy of the individual so much so that individuals now can choose their own sex Insecure powerless afraid and alone The result has been the emergence of totalitarian ideologies like the budding new faith with their characteristic politicization of everything but far from being outside forces assailing enlightenment liberalism There in this view ideological products inevitably generated by late stage liberalism's own internal contradictions Thus as denine puts it Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded As it becomes fully itself It generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce band aids and veils to cover them What we face today is not a set of discrete problems solvable by liberal tools But a systemic challenge arising from a pervasive invisible ideology The problem is not just in one. So this idea that people are primarily individuals with certain inalienable rights this is the dominant way of analyzing society of Propagating what is the good life? All right, you want freedom? You're an autonomous individual You've got all these rights. You can go out there and make of yourself what you will All right, this has become the dominant mode of social analysis of individual analysis and Is contrary to a traditional perspective which I hold that the most important thing about you is your family your extended family or The the family or tribe that you converted to right the people that you spend spend time with the people With whom you have the strongest attachments. That's the most important thing about you generally speaking rather than your individual nature and your so-called inalienable rights And I didn't see people primarily as individuals with inalienable rights But you're embedded in a community you're embedded in an extended family. You're embedded in a tribe or a nation And you have to be able to successfully, you know navigate That that family that tribe that that community that nation And you will get most of your meaning most of your happiness from your ties to your family and to your nation Right, if you suffer from a dearth of meaning and purpose in your life It's because you're disconnected from family extended family community and tribe Right the price of freedom as CS Lewis put it is lowliness and happiness comes from being tied down tied down to very explicit ties of family and community and tribal obligations Program or application, but in the operating system itself It is almost impossible for us to conceive that we are in the midst of a legitimation crisis In which our deepest systemic assumptions are subject to dissolution Taken to its logical conclusion Deneen argues Liberalism's end game is unsustainable in every respect It cannot perpetually enforce order upon a collection of autonomous individuals Increasingly shorn of constitutive social norms Nor can it provide endless material growth in a world of limit And the chat says you can't choose your own sex. Nobody says you can choose your own sex Perhaps you may have heard of the transsexual movement Which is suggesting commanding precisely that that individuals can change their sex So even though your sex is in your chromosomes, you can always mutilate yourself To accommodate some delusion you have about whether you're you know Truly a member of the opposite sex from which you were born And if I am right that the liberal project is ultimately self contradictory And that it culminates in the twin depletions of moral So Question from the chat Do I think individualism that conservatives in the us espouse such as objectivism a la ain rend is antithetical to conservative values? Yes I think liberal libertarianism is like a possibly right-wing form of the left I think it's delusional. It's dysfunctional It does not make for happiness or effectiveness that a group strategy almost always occupies an individualist strategy It to the extent that people believe it they will become less functional Less adapted to reality less happy less effective in life So what what is called right-wing in america is you know support for lower taxes and lower government regulation there's nothing inherently right-wing about Tax rates and government regulation, right? People who have strong You know ethnic attachments, right and not particularly concerned about tax rates, right with traditional understandings of right-wing means that you're Rooted with a particular people right you have strong ethnic ties and ties to tradition It's not about reducing government regulation and reducing tax rates. That's a that's a form of classical liberalism which is not a traditional right-wing movement, right classical liberalism emerged As a rejection of what is traditionally right-wing so people In australia in in england in america often confuse right-wing with being for lower taxes and For less government regulation but being right-wing that has virtually nothing to do with being right-wing That's that's some There's some development on classical liberal notions of you know, total freedom of the market right total, you know maximum freedom for the for the market, right? That's not That's not a right-wing value because right-wing values are about order and tradition And ties to your particular people Oral and material reservoirs upon which it has relied Then we face a choice. We can either elect a future of self-limitation born of the practice and experience of self-governance in local communities Or we can back inexorably into a future in which extreme license coexists with extreme oppression These are not completely new arguments, of course They in fact essentially mirror the message of alexander solzhenitsyn's in famous 1978 harvard commencement address a world split apart Delivered to rolled eyes in the west at the time In which he warned that society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence Because the defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals Okay, so let's go back to this andrew hayward book on political concepts And this is what he has to say about neoliberalism, right? It's sometimes called neoclassical liberalism It's an updated version of classical liberalism And classical political economy central theme is market fundamentalism and absolute faith in the free market The belief that the free market mechanisms offer solutions to all economic and social problems neoliberals argue That while unregulated market capitalism delivers efficiency growth and widespread prosperity the dead hand of the state SAP's initiative and discourages enterprise so that neoliberal philosophy is market good state bad This is not right wing It's understood as right wing in contemporary political discourse, but it doesn't have any ties to traditional right wing thought He it classical liberalism developed in part as a rejection of tradition He neoliberal policies include privatization low public spending deregulation tax cuts Particularly corporate and direct taxes and reduced welfare provisions Right. We've seen a rise of neoliberalism Since the 1970s from interventionist economic strategies to market based strategies You had neoliberalism occurring in chili following the cia backed military coup that overthrew the socialist salvador a yende in 1973 It's influence spread to brazil argentina elsewhere in south america during the 1980s neoliberalism Extended to the usa and the uk as well as canada australia and new zealand The seemingly irresistible advance that neoliberalism occurred during the 1990s through the influence of institutions of global economic governance and the growing impact of globalization World bank and the imf were converted to the washington consensus, which is neoliberalism It aligned with the economic genders of reagan and thatcher focused on free markets free trade liberalization of capital flexible exchange rates and balanced budgets So that's from andrew haywood's 2015 It is time in the west to defend not so much human rights as human obligations Solzhenitsyn had concluded that The mistake must be at the root at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries And that this is the prevailing western view of the world which was first born Oh, shoot. No, no, no, no. Oh, man Oh Come on nitsyn's argument in his harvard address In which he declared that the only solution to the totalitarian disasters created by the calamity of a Despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness Would necessarily exact from us a spiritual upsurge again for lack of a better term I'll call those with this view the spiritualists Yes, I know this is other connotations feel free to suggest a better name A second camp however would accept the first proposition But not the second the revolution is a dogmatic new religion But that is precisely the problem In this view the new faith can be seen as a pre-modern reactionary movement Postmodern roots or not and is in practice not that far removed from any other religious fundamentalist movement Like the islamist jihadists Bent on tearing down western modernity doing away with all the free thinking intellectuals Ending scientific advancement Science being labeled a product of colonial white supremacy culture with no more inherent validity than witchcraft And implementing an excruciatingly dull neotheocracy where there would Okay back to this andrew hayward book on political concepts Right left and right. Let's define them these are terms used as a shorthand method for describing political ideas and beliefs So on the far left you got communism then you move towards the center you got socialism and liberalism conservatism and on the far right you got fascism So left wing views tend to support intervention and collectivism right wing ones favorite the market and individualism This distinction reflects deeper if imperfectly defined ideological value differences So ideas such as freedom equality fraternity rights progress reform and internationalism Generally seen to have a left-wing character notions such as Authority hierarchy order duty tradition reaction nationalism generally seen as having a right-wing character So the modern terms of left and right go back of course to the french revolution And is that it? Yep, that's it Would be no further blasphemy including no music dancing or fun as it would presumably all be racist I will call these people the rationalists Scott alexander and the rationalists might be mad, but I suspect many of them are already in this camp anyway From this view the proper response to the predations of the new faith is first to reinforce norms and structures of secular pluralism Requiring someone to vocalize specific biology defying gender pronouns They don't believe in for example is wrong precisely because it forces a religious belief system on them that they don't hold to And this is just as much a problem for an atheist humanist as for a christian But moreover it is precisely their sort of disciplined rational thinking that will be necessary to inoculate people against the simplistic and irrational mental pathologies of the revolution Additionally this camp which I assume would include the new atheists Would argue that since it was precisely organized religion that they and so many others were trying to free themselves from in the first place And they have no desire to live under any say christian integralist polity Any more than under the new faith Trying to revive religion would also be a major tactical error More likely to push liberal minded people away Then draw them into solidarity with the counter revolution There is presumably a third camp that rejects the first premise that the new faith is a religion as well But I can't then know so there's a great book that came out in 2013 Predisposed liberals conservatives and the biology of political differences And it says that individual human genetic variation is substantial Many people are uncomfortable with this fact They believe it opens the possibility that various ethnic racial and gender groups are genetically different This concern is overblown within group variation usually dwarfs variation between groups That's not really an argument against the significance of group differences So they tried to make the claim that the humans are not particularly genetically distinct And the reality of individual level genetic variation fails to support the unsavory ideas of races And book quotes from population geneticists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending There is a tradition of caution that approaches self-censorship in discussions of human biological diversity But even if between group differences are as large as some apparently fear Normative preferences should not blinker us from empirical reality Genomic important differences exist across people and between peoples Oh, which way they'd lean on the second What is interesting on this question is that it isn't easy to divide members of the counter revolution Into spiritualist rationalist or other camps along the same lines as the paleo and post liberals In many cases their views seem to diverge in unpredictable ways But in any case how one answers this question is likely to lead to very different prescriptions of what will be necessary moving forward Three is the machine of technological capitalism sustainable And is it a blessing or a curse? Do we live in a world of limits? The answer to that question will have big consequences no matter how it is answered As argued by the post liberals discussed in question i The defining characteristic of liberalism is that it rejects all limits of self custom or nature Which is why ever since the era of francis bacon Liberals have worked tirelessly to master nature and thereby overcome natural constraints on liberty and want Whether via nitrogen fixation fertilizer combustion engine birth control pill or cross sex hormones Yet, there are some who argue that there are always eventually limits that must be observed And to attempt to pretend otherwise is only hubris and folly of the most dangerous kind If in the case of nature there is some maximum point of finitude in available resources And growth in consumption is proceeding exponentially Then they would point out by simple logic that growth cannot continue forever Therefore limits on consumption must be observed When it comes to natural limits such people tend to end up being called environmentalists But in another sense they could also be properly described as conservatives In that their observance of limits stands in direct contradiction to the liberal project It is interesting Here's a little bit more from this terrific 2013 book predisposed So the political left has been associated with support for equality and tolerance of departures from tradition Right, the right is more supportive of authority hierarchy and order The time-tested ways of organizing families and communities and nations Are usually superior to innovative ways And the authors of this book predisposed Liberals conservatives and the biology of political differences say that we should accept the political orientations are connected to Deep, physio-cognitive predispositions in a broadly predictable fashion And so they want to reject two widely accepted assertions The first is that all politics is culturally and historically idiosyncratic If that's true it becomes pointless to generalize about political divisions Second assertion is that though human physical traits vary we all share the same basic psychological, emotional and cognitive architecture Right, if human architecture is all the same it follows the differences in politics can it be more than skin deep And that physio-cognitive predispositions are irrelevant But these assertions are incorrect they have it backwards Right, politics is universal human nature varies Evolution is the process of species adapting to their environments because the environment itself is a moving target the process never ends But evolution is not a destination it is a temporary often lagging accommodation to environmental realities that exist at a certain time and place The environment shifts again evolution will move in a different direction So no genetically based political predisposition is rightly viewed as more or less evolved So when you lived in hunter-gatherer societies prior to the advent of mass agriculture life was short and filled with remarkable range of threats So selection pressures in such environments favored individuals with a higher degree of negativity bias tend to be people on the right People who approach novel situations with great caution people are loyal to their group and who are suspicious of outsiders These would be the individuals most likely to avoid danger So they'd be less likely to open themselves up to situations in which they would be vulnerable such individuals would be responsive and attentive to threats This would produce individuals who in a modern state would display conservative political predispositions Then there were environments where individuals who tried new things who opened themselves up to members of outgroups Right and had little negativity bias All right, there are many environments in which these people were rare because that was a losing long-term strategy But social units isolated from threat for a long period of time They're probably developed the They're permitted the development of proto liberals in the mix But most hunter-gatherer groups would have needed to keep a constant eye on the horizon And even the next hut. So these were conservative societies. They did not make big changes They went through life You know highly suspicious of outgroups But most people in the developed world today do not have the same constant life-threatening worries that existed in the distance past People today can expand their circle of social contacts and their ethical concerns beyond their family and tribe People far away and perhaps even to animals This produces People on the left liberalism the liberalism They will be an evolutionary luxury afforded by negative stimuli becoming less prevalent and less deadly But if our environment shifts back to a threat field atmosphere, then right wing is going to dominate And the environmental Evolutionary selection pressures will Evolutionary selection pressures will Favour those with you know more racist more suspicious views of outgroups Right so certain environments Produce a positive selection for conservative orientations and other environments produce a positive selections for liberal orientations So orientation towards outgroup openness to new experiences and heightened negativity bias You know fit more naturally with left and right divisions than economic issues right economic issues are secondary So people who are highly ethnocentric do not give a fig for individual rights And they can see the connection between conservatism and free market principles as a relatively recent development To observe that in the united states Mainstream conservatives and liberals tend to each represent one side of the single coin that is liberalism generally speaking Liberals approve of the abolition of limits on custom behavior and relationships But frown at the subjugation of nature in the pursuit of limitless consumption Conservatives meanwhile approve of the material bounty that comes from the overcoming of nature and her supposed limits But oppose the tearing down of limits of the social and moral variety The private jet flying globetrotting neoliberal Socially liberal but fiscally conservative multinational executive who occasionally makes concerned noises about climate change or human rights Over cocktails in dubai is probably closer to adopting his final form as a true liberal There are again two camps that tend to emerge here Fortunately this time someone else has already come up with some good names for them That someone was charles c man in his book the wizard and the prophet In which he examines two distinct philosophical orientations through the lives of two characteristic figures William foked and norman borlick Foked one of the founders of environmentalism was a prophet He spent his life warning repeatedly that the human population and its consumptive appetites were growing faster than the earth's carrying capacity could bear And that malthusian ruin would befall us all if we didn't cut back In other words, he was a prophet Okay, so Carl schmidt is becoming increasingly popular in china Supremacist ethnic policy a totally specifically ethnic han nationalism Han chinese make up around 92 of the population in broader china Behind the veil helping to drive this stuff is an increasingly dominant academic movement in china Sometimes referred to as the neo-authoritarians or neo-statists that draws on some rather curious influences for communists Most notably hitler's crown jurist nazi philosopher carl schmidt Interest in schmidt has taken off because his theories on the proper role of state power are quite conveniently fitting and appropriate for the new china Or so the leading man of this movement and top ccp philosopher wang huening whispers into shijing pings here Several of schmidt's theories are a particular interest in beijing The first is his positioning of sovereign authority at the apex of political decision-making While liberals consider the rule of law as having the final word when political values clash schmidt believes arbitrary commitments to law deprive state and politics of their specific meaning And thus argue sovereign executive power can and should act unhampered by legality when in a state of exception Otherwise it isn't really sovereign The sovereign decides when the situation constitutes a state of exception Naturally, this tends to go together well with one man rule Second in schmidt's view all politics is at essence about group power Indeed the only specific political distinction is that between friend and enemy That is the political existence of a group must be based on a specific identity that serves as the substance of a friend enemy distinction Therefore a state can only be legitimate if its legal boundaries also embody a clear friend enemy distinction This identitarianism And a question from the chat But this mean that right wingers would be incentivized to create more chaos in a modern stable system So they can get power for example high crime in conservative states. So they stay in power I'm not sure about that. Definitely high crime rates do mean more success for right wing Orientations even right wing orientations coming from democrats like democrats liberals lefties don't like high crime And so they're much more likely under periods of stress and threat to go for right wing solutions Even if they're right wing solutions coming from democrats or conservatives But yeah, there is a time and a place where creating Instability and chaos is going to be advantageous to your political fortunes Whether you're on the right or the left Dovetail Dovetails well with the ccp's leninist instincts Mao having labeled who are our enemies? who are our friends As the question of the first importance for the revolution Finally the friend enemy distinction necessitates that the sovereign promote the internal unity and homogeneity of the state Including the suppression or elimination of internal enemies who do not endorse or conform with that distinction It is this last idea that has had the greatest consequences in china After a series of violent anti-han riots broke out in china's western shing jong region in 2009 So china is about 92% han chinese and they have become quite strict with regard to Portions of the population that are not han chinese So china like india is increasingly governed for the benefit of its majority population And low social trust in china has become so acute That it leads to periodic bouts of anguished societal soul searching No, the seeds of deracinated individualism are definitely now planted deep in china With a growing contingent of chinese netizens describing existing in a state of nihilistic despair This has been encapsulated in the online slang term nejuan Involution which describes a turning inward by individuals and society due to as one popular post put it A prevalent sense of being stuck in a draining rat race where everyone loses See doomers of the west you aren't alone This despair has now manifested itself in a movement known as tanging or lying flat In which people attempt to escape the rat race by resolving to do the absolute bare minimum amount of work required to live Becoming modern aesthetics living off the relatively meager generosity of the chinese state So if unhappy chinese millennials now spend their time lying around alone in their absurdly overpriced rented studio apartments aimlessly browsing the internet listening to va va And complaining about the pressures of liquid modernity. It may be because the genie of liberalism never made it completely back into the bottle after all Socialism strikes back She's square deal and anti-liberal progressivism Xi Jinping slipped up and now he knows it He defined himself by his political anti-liberalism But it crept in through the back door. He'd left open for the tech brass and the goldman sacks bankers Now the kids are all mad and his socialism looks like a joke. What a mess Rapid onset decadence simply will not do for a rising empire So in recent months she has launched a revolutionary offensive to rectify this mistake and head off all the perils of economic and cultural liberalism The state has announced it has had quite enough of vulgar internet celebrities promoting their lascivious lifestyles And leading celebrities have begun disappearing Disgusted internet regulators have promised to resolve the problem of chaos. That is online fandom culture Miners have been banned from using the opium of the mind video games for more than three hours per week The government has vowed to resolutely put an end to sissy men That would be neon pow literally girly guns Epitomized by korean boy band stars appearing on the screens of impressionable chinese youth LGBT community groups have been erased from the internet and banned from messaging apps A viral nationalist blog post vigorously promoted across state media in august Helpfully explained that the liberal west was clearly increasing its efforts to launch a color revolution against china Through a titi tainment strategy And that if china let our young generation lose their toughness and virility then we will fall just like the soviet union did Fortunately it said she's profound revolution will ensure that the cultural market will no longer be a paradise for sissy stars And news and public opinion will no longer be in a position of worshiping western culture But fortifying the culture and whipping those no good tanging dropouts into viral productive patriots Is only a secondary objective The real priority as she declared in january is that we absolutely must not allow the gap between rich and poor to get wider All right, this is from ns lions here another essay And it's maritime periphery chip building program to produce aircraft carriers and their escorts The first the lianing was retrofitted from a former ukrainian scrapheap once called the variag and commissioned in 2012 But the second the shangdong launched in 2017 and commissioned in 2019 Was fully domestically produced if still well behind american counterparts The third nearing completion in a shanghai shipyard is expected to be considerably larger and more advanced Including with modern electromagnetic launch technology The keel has already been laid for a fourth Two more this time nuclear-powered are expected to be added eventually Bringing the number of carrier battle groups china aims to field by mid-century to six Now the most striking thing about this is that china has worked very hard over the last two decades To pioneer and mass produce a whole generation of cheap and deadly asymmetric Area denial weapons such as the df 21d carrier killer anti ship ballistic missile advanced sub and air launched cruise missiles and swarms of various drones All specifically designed to make the aircraft carrier obsolete as a weapon of modern high-intensity warfare The fact that china is still so interested in building them While knowing full well just how easily pure level foes will be able to sink them Therefore seems like a paradox Until that is one realizes that china knows these aircraft carriers Will still serve for decades to come as wonderfully big sticks with which to remind small countries that they are still small The u.s navy hasn't nicknamed them 90 000 tons of diplomacy for nothing after all Their very existence therefore makes it pretty clear that all refrains that china is by some virtue of civilizational history Different or does not carry aggressive or hegemonic traits in its genes as she has assured us And will never seek to project power beyond its borders should be viewed with some serious skepticism That an imperial projection will follow if china succeeds in its quest to move closer to center stage And create if not a chinese led world order Then at least a much more multipolar i less american one seems rather inevitable This is not because china is necessarily some kind of new and uniquely menacing entity But rather because it is in essence something so historically normal It is merely following consciously or unconsciously in the footsteps of so many others who have walked the path of empire Even if they blundered into it in a fit of absence of mind as some have tried to claim in the past And should be expected to default to behavior it about the same baseline that most others have in the same circumstances The truth is that the contours of power always remain roughly the same across time power What is china? The first way to answer that is to say that the rise of china is not something new at all But the return of something old empire. Yes But also of the simple unchanging realities of power that humanity had long understood And only recently seemed to forget When russia sent barely disguised troops into ukraine to seize Crimea and other portions of the country in 2014 A shock than u.s secretary of state john carrey exclaimed that you just don't in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country This was a rather revealing remark in a couple of ways First in its seemingly oblivious hypocrisy Coming from a country that had recently launched wars in libya iraq and afghanistan But more essentially in its assumption that international politics is somehow in any fundamental way different in the 21st century Than it was in the 19th As the citadies could have told him more than two millennia ago The nations of men will always behave in ways such as have occurred and always will occur As long as the nature of mankind remains the same Why might carrey have thought otherwise? Perhaps because he was still in the grip of a rather odd ideological phenomenon That seemed to seize much of the west in the unique period that followed the end of the cold war This was a period in which american hyper power became so all-encompassing That some living in the world that power had created seemed to forget that it even existed Like fish unaware of the water in which they swam Simultaneously the collapse of the soviet union seemed like proof that a triumphant liberalism was the ideological end of history So russia and china are much friendlier to realism as a foreign policy Than the united states so the united states much more into liberal internationalism And it's a luxury that the united states could engage in when they were the one sole superpower of the world As they pretty much were from 1990 until perhaps uh 2012 2015 So john mirshimer's thinking right his foreign policy realism Books and essays right far more highly regarded in china and i would assume in russia Compared to the united states so when john mirshimer goes to china He feels like he's at home because he's talking to other foreign policy realists so china and Russia they don't have the luxury of being liberal internationalists right they are in a difficult situation Right just like israel and so they have to be realist united states because it's been the dominant power It's been the world's number one economic power since about the 1880s And then became the world's number one military power during world war two And so with all that power has come some escape from responsibility and so americans have been much more predisposed to engage in Delusional thinking about liberal internationalism So china and russia and israel right these countries are very much more realistic in their policies because they have to be That's it for me. Take care. Bye. Bye