Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Debating Liberalism and the Woke Right with Sitch and Adam

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Nov. 30, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

01:18:15

Debating Liberalism and the Woke Right with Sitch and Adam

This was a very good conversation.

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	Trump 2028?
	I mean, I doubt it.
	Like, Trump's looking quite tired these days, man.
	Yeah.
	I saw this one.
	I saw this one interview on CNBC where the CNBC hosts were super serious.
	Obviously, CNBC here is the financial channel.
	All they do is talk about stocks and bonds and the market all day long.
	And Trump was on there.
	And one of the hosts put the thumbscrews to him about running in 2028.
	She did not like all this joking around about running.
	And Trump said, she asked point blank, are you planning on running in 2028?
	And he kind of laughed it off and said, probably not.
	And then after that, I just, after that, I just realized, oh, yeah, he's just trolling people.
	He's not serious about it.
	We're like, sold.
	Yeah.
	I mean, he's nearly fucking, isn't he like 79?
	He's probably.
	I don't know.
	I'm not sure how old he is, but look, he seems in good shape to me.
	Yeah, yeah, he's he's he's very like, you know, compass mentis for a chap his age.
	Don't get me wrong.
	But he's, he's fucking old.
	You know, I'm sure he's look at you, Aegis.
	Jeez.
	Yeah, I am pretty age.
	You've turned on Trump.
	I thought you were Trump's horrible.
	I'm obviously a supporter of Trump still, although, you know, he's not perfect, but like, you know, I do support Trump, but it's just one of those things.
	It's like, guys, can we not get someone of about 50?
	That would be ideal, right?
	Right, sure.
	No, I agree.
	I agree.
	We need someone young.
	Mamdani, right?
	He's young.
	Isn't he in his 40s?
	Is he 30s?
	He looks like he's in his 40s.
	I'm sure JD Vance is going to be running on the Republican side.
	How do you guys feel about JD Vance?
	I mean, I want to see him campaign.
	I'm not opposed to voting for JD Vance.
	Cool.
	John Mamdani's 34.
	He looks older, doesn't he?
	That's racist.
	Interesting.
	Interesting.
	We were going to watch your video on the woke is the problem.
	Or not, no, the woke is not the problem.
	It's the left that's the problem.
	That's the video that we were going to watch.
	Oh, right.
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, I agree with me.
	So now you've gone completely woke.
	You're saying woke is not even a problem now.
	Well, no, that's not what I say in the video.
	Well, lay it out.
	Lay out your argument.
	Since you're here, we have to watch it.
	Just tell us what the argument is.
	Sure.
	Well, woke is a lens.
	So it allows you to see things that you otherwise wouldn't have been paying attention to.
	But it's not itself a normative philosophy.
	It's a descriptive lens.
	So, you know, you can look at the world through the lens of woke, but if you don't have the liberal left types, the philosophy of them to inform what you're seeing, then you don't, I mean, frankly, a lot of the time, a lot of people just don't make head nor tails of it because they're not leftists, right?
	So a lot of people are like, well, so what?
	It requires the leftism to be the problem, to actually inform what ought to be done because that's the normative component of the woke left.
	And so really, it's the left part that is the problem, Like it always has been and always will be.
	And so, like, complaining, oh, the woke is the problem.
	No, that's you defending the left when it's actually the left that's the problem and always will be.
	Because the left is the section of politics that actually has a goal.
	We want to bring about a certain future in mind.
	I don't like any of the woke right framing, so I don't know if this keys into that.
	I'm assuming you're against the woke-right terminology as well, Carl.
	Um, I mean, I just think it's lazy.
	I spoke to James Lindsay at ARC last year, and he, you know, said to me, well, yeah, I know like a lot of people are being called woke right who aren't like anti-Israel or like, or not even like, they're not anti-you can be anti-Israel without being like, you know, a fucking online Nazi.
	Can you turn your mic up just a tad, Carl?
	I don't know if I can.
	I am, I am, I'm still painting as we talk, so I'll lean into it more.
	Nice doing the figures.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So he admitted to me that he knew that he was being cavalier with the way that he was describing people who are not like, you know, anti-Jewish Spergs online in this thing.
	Because really, what's being categorized here?
	I mean, it's just, you know, I don't want to sound mean, but online Nazis are not new.
	And that's all that James Lindsay is trying to identify.
	And fair enough, you know, I don't see a problem with trying to identify online Nazis.
	But suggesting that anyone who's not liberal falls into that camp, which is what James is doing with the woke right, well, I'm sorry, that's just wrong.
	And that forces people to kind of attack you on the grounds that, well, you're defending the left here now.
	And so James Lindsay is the, you know, forever the leftist infiltrator on the right, which is the problem the right has always had, frankly, allowing, you know, renegade leftists to come in and start telling people how right-wing thought ought to be.
	And shock and surprise, it ought to be liberal, guys.
	What a shock.
	Oh, my goodness.
	So are you saying someone can be woke right and not be a Nazi?
	Because doesn't he just mean woke right is a Nazi?
	Well, I mean, a Nazi is a Nazi.
	Like, they have a particular worldview.
	They have.
	No, I completely agree.
	Look, I don't like the terminology because we have a term.
	It's called Nazi, right?
	Yeah.
	And so James is actually being, and what it is, is the left has made calling people Nazis very unfashionable because, of course, they have applied that term to literally.
	I mean, like, Mandani is literally being like, you know, oh, I did call him a fascist, and Trump's like, yeah, yeah, you can call me a fascist.
	It's fine.
	Because everyone knows.
	Everyone knows he's not a fucking fascist.
	So like, you know, James is like, oh, well, you know, the woke right are actually the problem.
	It's like, well, no, they're just online Nazis, mate.
	You know, and actually, there is like James has never read a book by someone who would describe themselves as post-liberal and it shows because there's actually a huge amount of thought that's gone into these people.
	Like Patrick Dineen is excellent.
	There are a couple of others.
	I can't remember who they are, fan, but I've read I've listened to the audiobooks that they've written.
	And they're very good.
	And they're in a very similar sort of headspace to a lot of people where it's clear that it is liberalism itself that is incapable of actually solving any of the problems because it's the source of the issues.
	And so it's just one of those things where it's like James Sperging out because of his personal commitment to liberalism is just him calling people a bunch of Nazis under a new guise.
	It's like, okay, thanks, James.
	That's exactly what nobody wanted.
	So when you say, I was just trying to clarify, when you say James is saying he's calling everyone woke right, someone who's on the right, but is not a liberal, right?
	So someone who's not, when you say that, you mean someone who doesn't believe in liberalism.
	Correct.
	Right.
	Okay.
	So are you so is your are you arguing that there are no people on the right that believe in liberalism or there shouldn't be people on the right that believe in liberalism?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Liberalism is itself what the left is.
	Okay.
	Well, it's a lot of people in America would not agree with that at all.
	Yeah, they wouldn't, but they'd be wrong.
	Like 50, 50 years of Republican policies on the right would not republicanism itself is a liberal project.
	Well, yeah, you're, yes.
	I mean, both parties in America, since the beginning, were liberal parties.
	Yes.
	The United States itself is the great liberal experiment in governance.
	Right.
	So you're just to say that the right, what is actually right-wing is struggling not to be liberal is totally fine.
	It's just James Lindsay doesn't want to hear it.
	But the problems that we have are problems that stem from liberalism.
	So, you know, there's just no other governing philosophy that you could point the finger at, frankly, to put the blame on them.
	Right.
	Well, before we get into it, so before we get into that, what does how are you conceptualizing left versus right at all, I guess, nowadays?
	Well, these days, I think really the proper conceptualization between left and right is the amount of the amount of credence that reality has in a person's worldview is really what defines the left and the right.
	But the left and the right are explicitly liberal frames.
	It doesn't make sense to say there's like a left wing of Islamists or a right wing of Islamists.
	It's out of context and makes no sense whatsoever.
	Because the frames left and right come from the French Revolution, come from a liberal revolution.
	So the frame itself is a liberal frame.
	And so if you talk in terms of left and right, you are speaking in the terms of liberalism.
	And you've accepted that liberalism is the determinate creed of the conversation.
	Well, I think generally, I understand what you're saying, but I think generally like the term, like it means something.
	Like left and right mean something.
	Usually there's some kind of vibe of like tradition versus change or moderateness versus not being moderate or being more textualist or literalist, especially when it comes to religion.
	So if someone says like, oh, they, you know, they're more like a lefty, left-wing Islamic, generally people think like, oh, well, yeah, they believe in Islam, but you know, maybe they don't necessarily keep halal and they're probably not, you know, running around making people wear burqas.
	Like it means something.
	Well, you notice that we don't, we don't apply, we don't call them left-wing Muslims if they're just not very good Muslims.
	We call them moderate Muslims.
	Right.
	You know, we don't ascribe a point on the political compass to them because it doesn't make sense.
	It, you know, it's not, as we would define it, a left and right issue.
	It's one of personal conviction.
	Sure, sure.
	So it's just, okay, so left.
	Let me think of what you're saying here.
	So left and right is a liberal framing.
	But you understand what I'm saying, right?
	That people definitely do interpret left and right versus in that way.
	That it does mean something to people.
	Yeah.
	There is a concept there.
	It's not like illusory.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I'm not saying there's nothing relevant there.
	You know, there's a reason these terms persist, obviously.
	But the issue is The reason that liberalism came into existence is to oppose what I guess they would call like the true right, which is a non-ideological form of politics, right?
	So it's a form of politics that doesn't actually begin with a theory and has been actually begun with a practice.
	Whereas liberalism begins in a theory.
	What do you mean by beginning with a practice?
	Well, as in it's what it's the result of what people have just been doing naturally over time.
	Excuse me.
	So like monarchy is something that believes like you would say monarchy is something that exists as a practice, not an ideology.
	Oh yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, you have kings long before you have writing, right?
	You've got, you know, kingship is something intrinsic to human beings.
	And even now, like, I think there's a fairly good argument that Trump basically is the king of America.
	I think a lot of people do kind of...
	No, no, even if, like, not necessarily in a legal sense, but in, like, a spiritual sense.
	I know what you mean, yeah.
	Sure.
	Yeah.
	Like, he has.
	I mean, the thing with Mandami was amazing and actually really highlights the point.
	Like, it doesn't matter what you call me.
	I'm the guy in charge, you know, by divine right, essentially.
	You know, so, and his magnanimity, his magnanimity there to concede, you know, to let Mandami like essentially defend himself to his friends, you know, like, I know your guys are going to demand that you call me a fascist.
	Go ahead, it's fine.
	You know, I don't mind.
	You know, we'll carry on afterwards.
	I know what this is about.
	Like, that, that's, that's the kind of thing that would happen in a royal court, you know, and this whole thing, this whole visit from Mandani to Trump, has the, it's got like echoes of like feudal allegiance to it.
	You know, like, Trump doesn't.
	It's so British.
	It's so British.
	Well, it does.
	No, no, it really does.
	Americans do not see it that way.
	No, no, no.
	Well, I think you should look at it with fresh eyes, right?
	Try not to have an intrinsically American prejudice about it.
	And look at it with fresh eyes.
	Because like Mandani is, like, Trump is like a mafia boss in the way that he deals with his politics, right?
	He is concerned about loyalty, honor, and respect.
	And this, these are the primary things that you have to show Trump in order to make him like you.
	And the second that you do that, oh, he fucking loves you.
	And he thinks you're the bees knees.
	And, you know, no matter what the ideological differences between you are, he doesn't care.
	He thinks you're fine.
	Mandami understands this, clearly, because he has been respectful to his elders.
	He's been respectful to the president.
	And he's gone there and been on his best fucking behavior.
	It's really funny to see, Frank.
	Yeah, bend the knee, basically, is my chat point out.
	You're essentially bending the knee there.
	And that's fine.
	That's just what feudal politics is.
	It's the politics of relations.
	It's the politics of respecting the person who is superior to you.
	And there's no doubt that Trump is superior to Mandami.
	I mean, like, in what way could you argue that he's not?
	He's been more successful.
	He's richer.
	He's older.
	He's got a higher office, blah, blah, blah.
	You know, like in every way.
	Mandami's only 34 years old.
	He's in the beginning of his political career.
	He's actually playing it very smart, frankly, to concede all of this to Trump.
	And it's won him over completely.
	Trump's thrilled with the guy.
	I don't think that the respecting of the people more powerfully, I don't think that's, I think that's in almost every, if not every political hierarchical system.
	I don't think that's unique.
	Well, Well, that's something human, right?
	It's to respect people more powerfully.
	Well, it's just pragmatic.
	You got to respect the people above you if you want to keep moving up.
	Yeah.
	But the nature of pre-modern politics was based in relations.
	And so there was a political valence to the relationships.
	So it's important for political organization to have these kind of firm relationships.
	No, no, no.
	I appreciate that you're trying to universalize this, but it's not universalizable.
	It's not a given that actually there are accepted hierarchies in a political movement.
	I mean, there's a great example in Britain at the moment with a party called Your Party.
	It's a leftist alliance between a communist and an Ismist and Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana.
	And they've basically been fighting over seniority in the party.
	Excuse me.
	Jeremy Corbyn is probably in his 70s and he is a very famous communist grandee in this country, basically.
	Zara Sultana is probably about 28, 29, something like that.
	And she is doing the opposite of Mandani.
	She is not showing respect to the person who has accrued more than her.
	Because ideologically, actually, the words and the thinking and the logic doesn't require you to have any greater experience than anyone else.
	If you can articulate the proposition and derive the conclusion, the logical conclusion from it, then in any ideological thinking, you are actually the equal of someone else.
	I mean, that's, you know, anyone can do it as long as they're sufficient intelligence to be able to understand it.
	And so actually, there is a kind of politics.
	And usually we think of it as like family politics.
	Like you might know that your granddad is wrong about something, but because of his station in life, you have to just kind of bite your tongue and go, okay, granddad, I guess we'll see, won't we?
	And then when the computer breaks or whatever, because he didn't know what he was doing, you have to take over and just go through the experience.
	And it's that kind of politics that Trump is applying to the actual political world.
	That's interesting.
	Okay.
	I want to go back to what you're saying about the monarchy thing.
	So I understand what you're saying.
	Monarchy started as a practice.
	It's something that I assume naturally just kind of occurred out of people controlling land and kind of grew out of that.
	And then obviously there's an ideology afterwards that was sort of imposed upon it with Divine Rights of King and all this other, you know, different forms of monarchy.
	Right.
	And all this other stuff.
	So are you laying out the idea that like the right, anything that's like on the right is something that begins with practice and anything on the left is something that begins with an ideology?
	Yeah, I think so.
	I think that's the right way to look at it.
	Interesting.
	Okay.
	Because most rational thought is a description of what's already being done.
	Right.
	It's actually very hard to conceive of something that isn't real.
	Right.
	And even like you need, and this has been known for centuries.
	Sorry.
	I mean, like, Descartes is the one who really sort of, I think, first articulated this.
	And he was like, yeah, I can't think of anything that doesn't exist.
	And even things that don't exist are chimeras of things that do exist.
	Like a unicorn is a horse with a horn on it.
	You know, a horn is a thing, a horse is a thing, and someone's just smushed them together.
	You know?
	So we actually are completely bound by our sensory inputs when it comes to our imaginations.
	Sure, like democracy exists, but you could conceptualize it by rearranging things that do exist.
	Yeah, but you can't conceive of something that doesn't exist.
	Yeah, well, that's completely not even like nothing is completely 100% new.
	Yes.
	Right.
	Well, Nothing's new at all, actually, if you think about it.
	Like, think of something that doesn't exist.
	Well, you wouldn't know because you couldn't conceptualize it.
	Well, that's the point.
	You would, you would, and if you saw something, and this is this is like what the heart of Lovecraftian fiction is about.
	It's about trying to imply there is something that can't be conceived of because you've got no sensory experience from which to contextualize it.
	And so it drives you mad, right?
	And so the point being, this is what the problem with ideology is: is that it takes a series of ideas that are not directly drawn from the experience people have in the world and it imposes it on a political or social environment, whether it's useful or relevant or important or just or good or valid or not.
	And that's the problem with the left, part of the woke left.
	The woke part is just the ability to see where the application of leftism should be, which I mean, okay, don't get me wrong, not great.
	You don't want them applying leftism anywhere.
	But the real fundamental normative problem comes from the leftism itself, because that's the ideology that has descended from heaven to earth and is ruining things.
	Right.
	And when you say that, because what you're saying is the real problem is that people have a belief system that's based on an ideology as opposed to a belief system that's based on a practice, right?
	Yeah.
	Like when you, when you have a belief system that's based on a practice, you are located in a time and place, and there are real agents and events and resources, material, you know, whatever you want to say, like real, real things that you are speaking of in a node of rel of relationships.
	Each thing that you speak of is a node in a web of relationships that actually maps on to a real thing, like a community, like an actual community, rather than like a hypothetical categorical community.
	So you've got the, you know, if you would say, I'm, I'm important in local politics in my city.
	And so like you're a local councillor or something.
	So you, you know, the other councillors, you know, the regions of the city, you know, the particular like direct issues that the city has, whether it's, you know, potholes or sewage like overflows or something like that, you know, what seems to be deeply mundane things.
	It would be wholly inappropriate to take an external ideology that has already come to a series of conclusions in the abstract and apply it to that job, right?
	Like you don't, what possible use could that be?
	Especially if that ideology was created like 200 years ago by someone in a foreign country who had never personally been actually a politician themselves.
	You'd be like, why would I ever listen to you?
	It's like, well, he's making a really persuasive case.
	His logic is airtight.
	It's like, okay, but he knows literally nothing about this situation.
	He knows literally nothing about how these things, how these moving parts interact and how the wheels, the cogs like move each other.
	And he doesn't know like what our budgets are, what the people are going to vote for, what people get angry about, how that's going to affect how they move or don't move out of the town or city.
	So the tax revenue.
	He doesn't know any of these things.
	And so ideology becomes basically, in essence, a tool to program people who do not know what they're doing to do something that is destructive.
	Right.
	Well, I think in the example that you're laying out, I think, I mean, I would agree with you.
	I think almost everyone would agree with you that it's always better to have a person who's been in a situation that has experience with a situation.
	I mean, this is why we generally tend to give people whose opinion, we give people weight for their opinion if they've actually experienced whatever they're talking about.
	Not just in, I mean, forget politics, you know, you can be working any job anywhere, kind of what you're saying, and you have some you could have some new person come in and they could say a bunch of shit.
	It's like, okay, well, you don't really know how it works, you don't know how the permitting works, you don't know what the on-the-ground situation is, you know, blah, Right.
	So, like, in terms of that, like, I hundred percent agree.
	You need to understand the reality of a situation.
	You can't just run in there and say, okay, I have some idea in my mind I already come up with that I'm going to try to force on every situation because obviously that's not going to work.
	Um, I think we're, I don't know, where I disagree would be in sort of conceptualizing it along like a pure, like a, like a political level, that that that, like that, that's automatically good because it's.
	I feel like if you go down that track, you kind of get into sort of the naturalistic fallacy of well something, something came to be through a natural state, so therefore it's good.
	When that's not really the case, you can have lots of systems or lots of things in nature that are horrible, that we want to get rid of, I think.
	I think that's something of a straw man though right because, like it it's, it's very unlikely that anyone's actually ever going to take that position, right?
	I mean, you know, if you've got uh, a local council and you've got three people who take over the council and then start siphoning money out, no one's gonna be like well, I mean, you know they took over through natural processes, they got voted or whatever.
	Like we have different standards for other things, like corruption and just other standards to circumscribe the behavior that we take.
	You know you're going too far and people aren't happy.
	Then it doesn't matter what, like you know, ideology or appeal to a fallacy or whatever you make, if people aren't happy, you've got to do something.
	You've got to be personally responsive to that because of your position.
	So I don't think worrying about, like you know, an extreme hypothetical fallacy uh is actually a refutation of it.
	You know well, I don't know if it's a refutation, i'm just like, because a lot of your, your critique of liberalism, I would say, is you saying, okay, i've identified some sort of like base level of what like the, the base framework was for liberalism and every problem that comes from that we live in under a liberal society comes from this like deep down base thing.
	And I could see that the exact same thing if we lived in some sort of hypothetical other world where we were living under the sort of right-wing conceptualization that you're framing.
	You could make the same argument.
	Say well, at the base level of the philosophy, is this idea that as long as something is a practice first, then that's that elevates it morally when it shouldn't.
	You know what's interesting?
	That's exactly what liberalism did.
	That's that's exactly your argument, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	So you're not wrong at all, like you're exactly correct and i'm not.
	I'm not saying that we should have uh, no reflectiveness in uh, how we approach politics or society or anything like this right um the.
	The problem is is when you take a suite of ideas that begin Begin in the abstract, in a different time, in a different place, drawn from a different time, a different place, and you apply them.
	You're saddled with their faults as well as any benefits they provide.
	And just to be clear, I'm not saying there's no benefit to liberalism either.
	Obviously, liberalism has done actually done some tremendous good for people.
	The problem is now that because of liberalism's own success, it's becoming pathological.
	And so we are having trouble admitting where it's wrong.
	And the real problem with it is it's actually wrong in its fundamental constitution of what a man is.
	It believes fundamentally that men exist prior to society and aren't intrinsically formed by social bonds.
	And that's just factually inaccurate.
	And it was the thought experiment that created the state of nature that justified a lot of the attack on the heavily socialized politics of its own day.
	And when I say socialized, I don't mean socialism.
	I mean, the sort of personal politics like Trump is doing at the moment with Mandami, right?
	Right.
	And it was justified in its day because the society was a lot more oppressive than it is now.
	But the problem is that liberalism's success has been so runaway that it can't stop.
	And now it's doing real damage to society.
	Excuse me, this fucking cough is insufferable.
	I don't want real damage to society.
	You can go.
	I don't want to kill you on stream if you're dying.
	A cold or something.
	No, I've had it for a few days now.
	I don't feel bad or anything like that.
	I know.
	It's just that every now and again, I'll get a tickle in my throat, a really annoying ticket.
	And I just have to cough.
	And it's just a dry cough, as you can hear as well.
	So it's so, so insufferable.
	But otherwise, everything's fine.
	But yeah, so the issue is basically admitting when we need to stop being liberals and where we need to stop being liberals.
	And there are lots of real questions that are being raised here at the moment about the nature of a state, right?
	What is a civic polity?
	And the liberal position falls on the line of it's a social contract.
	Right.
	But I kind of want to hone in on this practice thing because it's because I mean, we've talked about this a lot.
	I think this is the first time either that you've mentioned it or maybe the first time I've realized it.
	So it seems like this is like a key element here is this like practice versus the ideology thing.
	Because I understand what you're saying.
	And I agree with this, like, you have a practice that comes into being.
	There's going to be benefits and there's going to be negatives to it.
	And it's going to be rooted, obviously, in the time period of where it was crafted.
	But I think that's sort of part of the difficulty of, or maybe even I'd say the downside, even conceptualizing politics in that way, because then you get in this kind of sticky situation where it's like, okay, you know, you're trying to get rid of slavery.
	The practice side of it is very much in favor of saying, well, you know, slavery was built on this long-standing tradition of things that evolved non-ideologically, rooted in human nature.
	And then you have some ideology come in, like liberalism or heck like Christianity comes in and says, hey, we should get rid of slavery because of this ideological reason.
	And so how do you actually abolish slavery if we're going to label the ideology as like the negative aspect?
	Well, this is what ideologies are actually good for is when there is an intolerable institution, an ideology provides the kind of intellectual justification to abolish it.
	Especially as in England in particular, there wasn't any slavery.
	It was William the Conqueror that outlawed slavery in, I think it was 1089 or something like that.
	I can't remember exactly the thing.
	He abolished the slave trade because he wanted to tax it, basically, as a revenue, a source of revenue.
	So it's not like he was doing it through personal moral means.
	Although, I can't remember the name of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was really against slavery, who was constantly banging on about this to William.
	So there may have been a moral component to it, but I would just assume there wasn't, right?
	Just for the sake of argument.
	But he did it anyway.
	And so for a thousand years, England, well, not a thousand years, 500 years, England and lots of other places in Europe didn't have slavery because of Christianity.
	And so when slavery begins in the new world, this is actually outside of our sphere of experience.
	You know, the English-speaking peoples, wherever they are in the world, aren't natural slave traders.
	And so for slavery to have persisted for such a long time is actually quite strange.
	But it's also one of those things that really could only have happened because it was so far away from the heartland.
	And when you have then, you know, huge black populations brought over from Africa and lots of people who are personally financially invested in the thing.
	And you had the same thing with the slave trade in Britain.
	It took a great effort of will to get it done.
	But there was also a huge amount of popular support for abolishing the slave trade here.
	So it was just one of those things where it's like, you are right that there is a use for ideology, but the time has come to understand where that use has overstepped its welcome and where it's actually doing harm rather than good, I think.
	So, because when you were talking about like the woke isn't the problem, the left is the problem.
	Like, the way that I was hearing it is that you were, it sounded like you were laying out that the left conceptually is not like not just the problem now, but seems like it's always the problem.
	And are you not saying that?
	Are you saying that's the problem?
	Oh, I'm definitely saying that.
	Okay, so if the left is always the problem, and then that translates to that means the ideology is always the problem.
	How do we, how do you have the ideology ever come in and get rid of these oppressive practices that you're talking about?
	Ideologies are actually drawn from times and places, but they're put into an abstract doctrine and then they're taken to other places, right?
	So, I mean, one of the reasons that the American Revolution didn't turn into the French Revolution is because American political practice had for a long time been informed by the ideas that end up crystallizing into liberalism.
	Like, for example, you didn't invent the concept of a Bill of Rights.
	You didn't invent the concept of constitutions.
	How fucking dare you?
	You inherited all of this from.
	How dare you?
	No, we did not.
	Americans created all of these amazing things.
	Okay.
	You guys didn't do shit.
	Sorry to burst that bubble, but how dare you?
	But that's the point, right?
	Like these, these ideas are from a time and a place.
	And so what happens essentially with the American Revolution is a bunch of Englishmen tell themselves English political philosophy makes sense to us.
	Why don't we enact it?
	And they do.
	But then when a bunch of Frenchmen are like, hey, these English guys seem to be on something.
	Why don't we enact this in France?
	Well, they don't have any of the social structures required to actually make it make sense.
	And so suddenly you have the, you've rendered the entire civilization essentially evil, right?
	The French revolutionaries essentially rendered their entire civilization to be evil because of English ideology.
	And this is one of those things where when it's outside of its time and place and jurisdiction, you realize how much damage an ideology can do.
	And it's the same thing with the Russian Revolution and the Mao's Chinese Revolution.
	It's all the same problem from what is the same ideology.
	Should the Americans have said, fuck ideology, we're gonna go, we're just gonna be our own monarchs?
	Like, would that have been the better alternative?
	I don't have an answer as to whether that would be better or worse, right?
	I mean, it's well, it sounds like that's what you're laying out.
	No, no, no.
	I'm not like, I'm not saying there isn't a use for ideology.
	There are times and places where ideologies can be useful.
	I mean, like, for example, in the abolition of slavery, that's, I think, I mean, obviously, as an Englishman, I think slavery is bad.
	So, you know, duh.
	But like, but wouldn't that be the left then being useful or good or necessary?
	Yeah, but I'm not saying that the left has never done anything useful or good, right?
	Oh, I thought, oh, that's what I actually said, you want to get you think the left is not just bad now, but like always bad.
	I thought you said yes.
	Um, well, okay, how to say it.
	What I mean when I say it's always bad is that it's always in every case trying to pull the civilization to the most ideological interpretation of its own philosophy, right?
	So the I, this is why like leftists sound like fucking lunatics because they're trying to get to that sort of final stage of whatever it is that the ideology is promised.
	Um, and a lot of the time, that's nonsense because, like, for example, liberalism itself, like it begins in some quite good ideas, actually, which is maybe we should have limited government, maybe that's that's good and normal for the English-speaking people, and it's what we personally accept.
	Um, and that ends up transmogrifying into uh children should be liberated from their parents and sold to gay guys or something like that, right?
	So, it's it, you know, it becomes really, really extreme because it it begins with the idea that the bonds between people are actually not valid at all, and in fact, are a form of slavery themselves.
	And it's in the conservatives that the resistance to that comes, and this is why the left is the problem in all times because they're constantly trying to pull to the most extreme interpretation of the ideology.
	I mean, it seems to me that you're always going to have you always have people who are always trying to pull to their extreme philosophy, which is usually a bad thing.
	Yeah, I mean, you're going to have extreme, even under your conceptualization of right-wing, you could, you're going to have some people for absolute monarchy or anything like that.
	Well, I know you're not.
	That's my, that's exactly my point, which would be the extreme of what I'm saying, you know, right?
	There are going to be people that are going to be pulling for absolute monarchy at all times, and that you know, society should be pushing against that, even if they're pro-limited monarchy, yeah, right?
	There's always going to be what we call, say, the left of any ideology, even if the ideology isn't liberalism, therefore, so the left and right doesn't mean that the people pulling for the absolute monarchy, you're going to say are on the left, too.
	Well, there'd be, I guess, you know, again, this is where the terms left and right don't.
	I know it gets that gets very confusing if you're going to, yeah, but we could say they're the sort of hardline extremists, right?
	Whereas the left are the hardline extremists of liberalism, and the right are those people who still pay credence to reality.
	Um, uh, whereas the left, frankly, it lives in denial of reality, as we all know.
	So, it's like I said, the terms left and right are not actually very useful when talking outside of liberalism.
	Um, but um, but yeah, it's essentially, I think you're spot on there, you know, like there are extremists in any way.
	But if you if you want to just have the most pure application of the ideology, regardless of the circumstances in reality, then you are what the left is to the right, yeah.
	Well, but that's why, I mean, regardless of whatever we call it, left or leap or whatever, like if we just call it extremists, I guess would be neutral.
	Yeah, this is why actually, you know what?
	I think I think actually literalism would be a better way of describing it because what they're doing is taking the ideology before it's the reality and they want to interpret it liberally literally, right?
	No, I like that.
	Yeah, because you, this reality is always messy.
	You can't, and you can't always have it be like this perfect system that's like literally written down somewhere.
	It always has to be give and compromise to some extent.
	But so I agree with all that.
	And I guess my issue then is because I feel like so much of your critique of liberalism is rooted in that there are these people that are the literalist as opposed to like, and that's why liberalism is bad, instead of just saying, well, okay, well, that's why that form of liberalism is bad, even if you look into it and say that at the root of something, there's something there, right?
	Because you could say the same thing about slavery or the root of any system is going to have some fucked up shit attached to it, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
	So the problem with, excuse me, the problem with liberalism at this point is that it's been, like I said, it's been too successful.
	And so now it's only got its own mythos and telos to work with.
	Prior to the modern era, like say prior to say sort of 1800, basically, there was always another non-liberal philosophy that had massive amounts of power in public and political intellectual life.
	And so there was always a bulwark there.
	But now liberalism only has its own two primary values, equality and liberty.
	And we really struggle to find an ideological position outside of that or an extant political practice from which to draw from.
	So when you have what is essentially a purely negative ideology in liberalism, you find that it just keeps destroying stuff.
	And this is a genuine problem.
	But moreover, it ends up looking like not a morality instead.
	It ends up looking like a kind of game theory or something like that, where you've got, well, if I don't break the social contract, you don't break the social contract, then we'll all live in peace.
	It's like, okay, now be a good person.
	Because, you know, a terrorist, right up until the point where he blows himself up, was a good person the day before by your standard because he hadn't blown anyone up.
	And he only becomes a bad person the second he blows himself up, right?
	And so, you know, a guy who goes, gets up at 6 a.m., goes down to the local charity, feeds the homeless, walks a bunch of, you know, like dogs for old people and all this sort of stuff, constant charity.
	He is morally no different to the jihadi the day before he blows himself up in that framework because it's just about adhering to the social contract and protecting a series of rights using rule-based morality, which actually doesn't really tell you if you're dealing with a good person or not.
	And so that's really the that's really the problem with liberalism on its own.
	I don't think people interpret it that way, though, personally, or even societally.
	But if you have like two people and neither of them are like doing crimes, they're not like interfering with other people's lives in any way.
	So they both be adhering to the sort of this liberal principle of non-intervention against people.
	You know, they're doing the nap or whatever.
	And one of those people is, as you're saying, you know, they spend all this time, they donate the charity, they help build homes for the homeless, doing all these good works.
	And the other person is like, I don't know, they're some, they're just making a bunch of online gambling and they're spending it all on OnlyFans and legal prostitute.
	It's in Las Vegas and they're just doing pot all day.
	And you're to ask people, like, okay, who's more moral here?
	Right.
	Everyone's going to say, well, the guy doing all the charity is more moral than the guy not, you know, just being completely self-indulgent.
	But they're not going to be applying a liberal lens to come to that conclusion.
	Well, they don't have to.
	That's the point.
	There is another lens that we actually should take into consideration.
	But isn't that, but isn't that good?
	I don't know if you really want society to be so have like one lens of interacting with each other morally that has to you know encompass all behaviors.
	But that's the problem with liberalism is that it has become the one lens that is used to judge all behaviors in society.
	Well, I think the problem is that liberalism seemed like it was a, it was supposed to be, and I think it for most of America, it was the, it was a personal, it was a lens that was like, okay, this is how like the government interacts with the people.
	And obviously there were elements that would then go into personal morality, like that individual people are worthy of individual rights and not being people being biased against them and all this other stuff.
	But I agree then on top of that, there was a deeper personal morality that went beyond that because a lot of people will always think and agree that there are behaviors that people consider moral, immoral, but don't feel like should be illegal.
	Sure.
	And there are lots of things that are wrong that shouldn't be illegal, obviously, because the question of legal and illegal is more about the relationship of the people to the government, right?
	The question of right and wrong on a personal moral level is more an issue of people living next to each other as neighbors.
	Right.
	But the problem that the liberal establishment has is that it's not willing to accept that there are other moralities outside of itself that are valid because it doesn't understand them or recognize them because they are themselves positive rather than negative.
	As in, they're not just rule following, as in you don't have a series of rules, and if you don't break the rules, then you're not a good person, which is what liberalism interpret interprets morality as being.
	Actually, it seems that the sort of morality that Trump and Mandani are displaying here is an affirmative morality, as in, if you didn't do something, you can't be a good person.
	So you get up, you make your children breakfast, and that's in itself a moral act that makes you a good person.
	And it's the persistent practice of these small moral acts that someone like Aristotle will call virtue.
	And this kind of virtue ethics is what liberalism has basically deliberately displaced.
	And they need to be returned, I think, to the public sphere.
	No, I don't, I don't even, I don't 100% disagree with what you're saying.
	I'm just.
	I hope not.
	I think I'm right.
	Well, that's good.
	That makes sense.
	But why should we not have a system where we go back to sort of the conceptualization we used to seem to have, where it was like, okay, this liberal framework is very important in terms of how an individual interacts with their government to prevent authoritarians from taking their rights away, from doing all these horrible things to them.
	But then also understand that we need a code of ethics of virtues that goes beyond the way that we interact with our government because we all agree there are behaviors that we would consider moral or immoral, but have nothing to do necessarily with whether it should be legal or not.
	Because you've got two conflicting codes of ethics that have to essentially decide between each other.
	One is discriminatory and one is non-discriminatory.
	And the non-discriminatory one is the one that we adhere to now, but that's not really sufficient for a comprehensive moral code.
	And it's being applied as if it's a comprehensive moral code.
	And we see this all the time with the random schizophrenic black guys murdering or burning women on the trains.
	Right.
	That's the problem of a negative code of ethics.
	It's where it's like, well, he hasn't actually killed anyone yet.
	So out back out into society, you go because you're an oppressed systemic loser or whatever.
	It's like, no, the affirmative thing to do would have been to put him in a mental asylum.
	Well, I think, I mean, like a lot of those guys, they were doing lots of crime that they had already violated the law and the morality of the society.
	But then there were these people that were even against that.
	I wouldn't even say from like a liberal perspective, where just they were bought up into the woke identity politics framing of, well, because they're minorities, say, you know, nothing else.
	But notice how that's an intrinsically negative perspective, right?
	As in, they couldn't help themselves because they aren't really agents.
	Yes.
	It's an entirely negative view of morality.
	So he's not bad because of a negative reason.
	Whereas the affirmative sort of virtue ethics perspective is he did something repeatedly.
	Therefore, he is culpable for what he did.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	No, that's fine.
	I like that.
	That's the other framework.
	Okay.
	And it's obviously true in some ways, right?
	Yes.
	But I don't think that, and maybe if you have one, you could tell me.
	I don't think that there is a moral framework that exists that we can say, okay, this moral framework works for your interaction with your parents, your children, your wife, your neighbors, your mayor, your president, and everything.
	Like, it seems like you do need different moral systems of how different systems interact with each other.
	And I think that the moral system where a government interacts with people is always going to be different than how I interact with my girlfriend or my parents.
	Well, not necessarily.
	In many, I mean, literally, feudal politics, it really wasn't.
	I mean, the rule of law is something that came relatively late to English civilization.
	I think Bingham puts it around 1500, right?
	That sort of time.
	So for literally thousands of years all over the world, all politics was personal.
	And so this is why...
	Let me put it in there.
	Hang on, hang on.
	This is...
	This is why you have to.
	I know that it existed, but I'm saying I don't think it'll exist well or good or sorry.
	Say again.
	I understand that, like, because your argument is that that one framework of morality of liberalism has dominated everything.
	So I understand that conceptually, those it does now.
	It didn't.
	Yeah.
	And I understand that conceptually, there was a time period where the more monarchical system existed on personal relationships too.
	What I'm saying is, so I understand it did exist.
	I'm saying I don't think it would be morally good to exist to have a moral system that encompasses both your family life and your interaction with the government.
	Sure.
	I mean, and that's an entirely debatable point, right?
	You could definitely advance that argument.
	And would you agree or disagree with that?
	Sorry?
	Would you agree or disagree with that?
	I mean, I obviously agree with that in that you don't want to have to be a supplicant of a bureaucrat, right?
	Right.
	You don't want to have to, and it's always, you know, a personal humiliation to place the bureaucrat or the official above yourself, especially if you hold the conceit that you live in a free society.
	You know, you've got to placate Sandra at the DMV or something, you know, she won't stamp the fucking thing that you need.
	Like, that's always a personal humiliation.
	Obviously, it'd be better to avoid that.
	So if there were a set of rules in place that she had to follow for her job, that would obviously be better.
	But it's not always been that like that in all times and places.
	In fact, that's a very recent invention.
	And one could argue that basically what we're doing is struggling to know where it is appropriate to have that.
	Because I do agree with you, obviously.
	But then it drives it back to the question of how do we circumscribe it?
	You know, it's good in that circumstance, but it's not good in every circumstance.
	So, how do we circumscribe that and teach it to learn its place?
	That's the hard part because people don't want to do that.
	They want the easy way to just kind of have a blanket lens that they can apply to everything.
	And I just, I don't think that ever works out in a good way for anybody.
	Well, no, exactly.
	And this is what, you know, the Ukrainian woman being stabbed on the train.
	That's basically the problem is what we're describing now.
	You know, that guy should have had some kind of affirmative intervention.
	It's not like there weren't enough chances.
	And yet, somehow, he's still on the street.
	He still sees a random white girl.
	And he's like, yeah, I'm going to murder her.
	I got that white girl.
	It's like, Jesus, man.
	That is a series of just systemic failures.
	And, but the failures are not just like in the law.
	In fact, a lot of the time, they're not to do with the law at all.
	They're to do with our moral code.
	And so we've got a real, we've really got to have a think about this.
	Otherwise, this sort of stuff is going to keep happening.
	Is the girl getting burned, 60% burns, whatever it was on the train the other day showed.
	You know, these are problems that are going to keep cropping up.
	And so we need to know.
	Sure.
	Sure.
	But then shouldn't your focus then be on the we need to have a personal or a familial moral system that exists outside of the government moral system as opposed to just saying the liberalism bad for everything?
	Not really.
	Liberalism is bad for everything.
	It's good for some things.
	Right.
	And like the personal code is bad for everything.
	It's good for some things.
	Right.
	Right.
	And it's this that is the issue.
	And so the liberal, I mean, what I think would be better is to approach these things in a non-ideological way.
	Right.
	We can actually at any time just stipulate, we like having the rule of law.
	We can just stipulate that.
	We don't have to make up a story that how mankind came to be and how government came to be to justify that, right?
	We can just say we like the effects of it.
	Don't you?
	Sorry?
	You kind of do, don't you?
	What do you mean?
	Under the idea that things have to come from practice, then you have to create the story of how the practice came into being.
	Sure, but the problem with things like the rule of law is that it doesn't come from a story of practice.
	It comes from a total fiction.
	I agree.
	That doesn't represent the world at all.
	I mean, I can say that, yes.
	If we want to draw from something, I mean, we absolutely can draw from the history of England and the constitutional battles that the English had against the monarchy to justify the rule of law.
	We absolutely can do that.
	But liberalism doesn't do that.
	Liberalism makes up a fiction because we like the idea and then just make you have a series of logical conclusions that must be drawn from the fiction.
	And I think that should be avoided.
	I don't see why we would do that.
	And that's the problem with this sort of propositional ideological approach to politics.
	We don't need to just derive from propositions.
	We can say, what do we think would be good for human flourishing?
	And actually, having the rule of law is a useful and good thing.
	Having a bunch of hyper-bureaucratic Karens in every HR department to make sure they're micromanaging microaggressions or whatever, that's not good.
	And we can actually divorce the two things by abandoning the ideology.
	Yeah, but if the framework or the idea is, okay, what would be good for human flourishing?
	Aren't you then straying into the left's version of ideology instead of practice?
	No, I don't think so.
	I mean, there are certain things, I mean, there are all sorts of things that we think are good.
	At no point is there going to be a political environment in which people don't have an idea of what they think will be good for man, right?
	And this is, you know, perfectly ancient and normal way of looking at politics, going back to Aristotle and before, right?
	So it's completely normal to have a conception of what human flourishing should be like.
	And we agree, basically, everyone agrees that's what politics should be actually for.
	You know, the left are like, yeah, give us money.
	They're just, you know, but they do it because of human flourishing.
	They want, they think that they'll get along, do better in the world if they have it.
	So that's all fine.
	We agree on that.
	The question is, what does that look like?
	And what is a reasonable compromise to be made?
	And this is why the ideology themselves itself is a bit of a problem because it doesn't broach compromise, actually.
	Whereas the relational politics is actually all about compromise.
	And so, like I said, I'm not saying that we can never have ideology and it doesn't have a place, but I think it probably should be secondary to the relational politics.
	I think Aristotle might be right on that.
	Sure.
	I mean, I think you can, I think you can, and I would argue, I guess you wouldn't agree.
	I would argue that one of the benefits, at least of like, of liberalism has, at least, American politics and American liberalism, was that the idea of compromise was baked into the ideology.
	I mean, they were optimistic about it.
	But I mean, like, in the Federalist Papers, it's actually really funny where they're like, yeah, there'll be all these little local parties and no one party will have this giant majority and everyone will have to work together.
	And then, you know, fast forward 250 years later, it's like, do you want blue or do you want red?
	Make your choice.
	It's like, for fuck's sake, man.
	Right, that's what always happened.
	Everything gets dumbed down just in the most low-resolution, simple way.
	Yeah.
	And I don't begrudge the founding fathers or anything.
	They're very smart men, and I think they did the best that they could in the circumstance.
	But I think we've got to admit that not that the experiments failed, but like that it wasn't capturing the sufficient.
	I mean, to be honest with you, right?
	Predicting the future or creating a system that can be predictive of the future for any amount of time is hard enough, right?
	Like thousands and thousands of businesses go bankrupt every year because they fail to predict the future.
	And so to get 250 years out of a republic without having, well, I mean, okay, the civil war you could argue is a major overhaul, but like not like and not necessarily in a foundational structural way.
	To get that out of it is actually very, very impressive.
	But I think we're at a point now where we have to admit that actually some kind of foundational changes need to be made.
	And that might be going back to a quite literal version of the Constitution in some ways, frankly, or it might be accepting that these were ideas from 300 years ago and that the world has changed.
	I think this concept of practice versus ideology is going to cause you way too much trouble in terms of.
	Well, I'm not worried about that.
	Well, okay.
	I mean, in terms of maybe then you shouldn't conceptualize things that way.
	Because as you said, everything is going to end up being rooted in ideology at some point.
	You kind of get into the problem of like, how long does a practice have to exist before when it like how long do we as a human society have to practice rule of law that it merges or evolves away from an ideology to a practice?
	Like it, I feel like it just makes things way the thing is the rule of law was a practice before it was an ideology.
	It just wasn't practice.
	It just wasn't practiced in America before it was an ideology.
	Because America didn't exist when it became no, but right, but that's what I'm saying.
	It's like, because then you had like rule of law in England and it had lasted for some extended period of time.
	But before it was put in place, it was in practice.
	It was some ideological consideration to say, well, we need this, you know, we need something new here so we can all survive without killing each other.
	Yeah, but you didn't have anything new in America.
	No, no, no, no.
	I'm not talking about America.
	I'm saying even with you guys, if you had rule of law for however many hundreds or thousands of years or whatever, it had to start from some ideological point.
	No, no, it started with.
	Law constraining the elites was like the big upgrade.
	Yeah.
	Because law, they had law long before they had law that constrained the elites.
	Obviously, the aristocracy could completely shun the law.
	Right, exactly.
	Exactly.
	But the thing is, it's actually kind of more ridiculous the more you think about it, right?
	So it begins essentially in the Magna Carta, but there are other developments along the way.
	But the idea of putting the king underneath the laws his sovereignty is responsible for is intellectually a bit silly, right?
	That doesn't make sense.
	He's the king.
	It makes sense.
	What do you mean?
	Well, he's the authority that gives the stamp to the law, that makes the law valid.
	Well, I guess it's like asking you to sign a contract that you couldn't personally change.
	If the conceptualization is that the king is the ultimate sovereign and everyone else is just their tool, I guess.
	Well, yes, that would make sense.
	They owe fealty to the king.
	Right, but like if he's viewed as like everything is for the sake of the king, including the existence of the laws or just to facilitate the king's wills, then I would agree with you.
	It doesn't make sense.
	But if it's more along the lines of like, well, no, there's a country or a people here and the king is just the sovereign who maintains it or keeps it going, then it does make sense that the king would be underneath the law.
	Yeah, that's the justification they give for imposing this on the king.
	That's correct.
	Well, there you go.
	They figured out long before I did.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, but the point, the point being is that it becomes a compromise, right?
	So we will, we will accept the authority of the king on the condition that the king is bound by his own laws, right?
	Yes.
	So what you have is an intellectual inconsistency because of these this practical compromise that comes out of the Barons' War with King John.
	It's not an intellectual consistency if you think of it in the way that I said.
	That makes complete sense.
	But it is an intellectual inconsistency because the king is the source of the authority for the law.
	So how could he be bound by it?
	If you view it, you can view people can view a situation in multiple ways.
	Yeah, but I mean, that's still the case now.
	It's still the crown court, right?
	It's still the king's law.
	We just have a lot of particular legal fiction.
	Well, I guess you guys, I don't know what to tell the Brits.
	Okay, I don't know.
	You guys are you guys have these fictions too, right?
	You just don't have a king.
	You have a president and a judiciary, the independent.
	But these are all fictions, right?
	And that's fine.
	It's not wrong that we have these stories or anything like that.
	Every society works on stories.
	The point being, though, is that this wasn't an ideology before it was put into practice, right?
	It was put into practice.
	No, isn't it an it must have been an ideology to say that the king should be subject to the laws?
	That's an ideological constraint, as you were saying.
	It didn't exist.
	No, no, because it didn't exist prior to the Civil War, right?
	So it's not like someone like Karl Marx had sat there thinking up something in 1840 or whatever that then in 1950 is applied in China, right?
	Like that's that's not what happens.
	Okay, so that's what an ideology is.
	A set of ideas that are drawn from another time and place, abstracted into a doctrine and then imposed externally from another one.
	It could be imposed internally, but you need the foreign ideology to be imposed upon the society in some way that then causes the society to essentially it's kind of a civil war that you end up invoking with ideologies.
	So this wasn't an idea that had come from elsewhere.
	It was just people were trying to find some kind of rationalization as to why the king couldn't keep tyrannizing them.
	And that you landed on exactly the rationalization they had.
	So, okay, so maybe so when you say ideology, what you mean is there is a person or a group of people that exist somewhere and they sit down and they think like, we don't like the way the government and the system or the moral structure works.
	So we're going to kind of like think about this and write down all of our thoughts and feelings and kind of create some framework, right?
	That's ideology.
	Yeah.
	An ideology is because remember, we talk about how all ideas are drawn from reality, right?
	So every idea has to have originally begun in sensory input that comes through a person's senses into their brain.
	And it's in a person's mind, the rational mind, where they can organize these into a set of interlinking propositions from which you can draw definite conclusions, right?
	Which is, you know, Marx being like, well, we need to abolish private property to restore equality.
	We need to, you know, whatever the ideology is, right?
	Hitler would need to kill all the Jews to save the German people.
	You know, whatever the ideology is, it exists as a series of logical propositions from which you have to derive definite conclusions if you believe the propositions, which is what makes people who are like possessed by ideology so mental.
	This is what Peterson is talking about when he talks about ideological possession.
	You can see it in their faces.
	They're not thinking.
	They're not being reasonable.
	They are following essentially the inferential commands that they've been given because they believe the propositions.
	Even if the propositions are for some other people somewhere else, and it wasn't even propositional when that happened.
	As in, you know, the rule of law and the Baron's revolt, right?
	This is actually a really great example of that.
	And so it's one of those things where you can see how this can be so destructive.
	Now, like we covered, it's not that it can't be really good either, right?
	Abolishing slavery is a product of an ideology and it's a good thing, right?
	So like, you know, making sure that the rule of law is a product of an ideology in America anyway, and elsewhere, you know, like across Europe, for example, and it's a good thing, right?
	So it's not that the only good thing is from the practice, because like you say, there can be unwholesome practices, obviously.
	Sure.
	Well, let's go back to the king civil war, just so I can like conceptualize this.
	Sure.
	So we have so like when there's a civil war in England, and they in order to end the war, the compromise is that the king now has to be subject to his own laws, essentially, right?
	And you're saying that that's not an ideological constraint or an idea, something that was created from ideology.
	You're saying that that's something that was created out of like a pragmatic compromise situation?
	Yeah, it was out of the personal desires of the people who defeated him and I mean, do you get into the problem with like, well, what they, even if no one sat there and thought, like, well, ideologically, I'm going to write out a moral system where the king is subject to his own laws.
	They're still, all those people that create that compromise, that the king is subject to his laws, they have some idea of how they want to live.
	And isn't that their ideology that's guiding their principles?
	I mean, it doesn't have to be propositional.
	It doesn't have to be rational.
	You've got like armies of barbarians who know how they want to live, but they're not people who can read or write, you know?
	And if you want, I mean, you could extend the idea of an ideology into any kind of conception or worldview, but I think that makes it really rather useless because it doesn't actually tell you anything about anyone then.
	Because if it means everything, then it doesn't really mean anything constructive.
	Okay, so what is, so I guess now, okay, now I'm lost in on the idea.
	How is an idea?
	So an ideology is something that is purely rational?
	It's purely propositional, right?
	It's a series of propositions.
	So this is why with all ideologies, they have manifestos.
	Yes.
	This is what an ideology is.
	It is presented to you in a manifesto because what it boils down to is a series of statements about reality that it proposes are true and then derives logical conclusions from these propositions.
	And you can, I'm sure you've read many a manifesto in your day.
	Like, you know, anyone who studies any of this has the communist manifesto, the fascist manifesto, blah, blah, blah.
	So is the argument or the feeling, maybe, because maybe this is very vibe-based, is that the problem is when you have these propositions, you write down very clearly X good, Y bad, you know, blah, And it can be too difficult to deviate from those things if the on-the-ground circumstances require you to deviate from them or to compromise from them.
	So you would prefer a moral system that doesn't have these very clear propositions in it, but it's more just a vibe base of someone who says like, well, I know on a vibe level, I want to be able to get married and have children and not have like the Lord fuck my wife.
	Like, I don't need to write that down proposition.
	It's just like a thing I feel.
	Well, I mean, I don't know if I'd say vibe-based.
	I would say more empirical, I suppose.
	I would think that if you have, I think it's more of a commitment to virtue, right?
	So if you have people who are practicing an affirmative morality, then that requires a good deal of judgment on their part every day, right?
	You've got to make judgments.
	And you've got to be the person who decides what right and wrong is in any given circumstance.
	And you're going to be held to your decision.
	So you practice the skill of prudence.
	And this is you bringing into existence a moral order slowly by each tiny decision.
	And so you are paying attention to the things around you and you are making your judgments based on what is real.
	And you have, you know, personal views of right and wrong.
	And you compare those to the relationships that you have with other people.
	So, for example, you might have a neighbor who there was fucking like Seinfeld or something where the guy wakes up every morning and his neighbor, you can see him across the street in his hotel, in his block of flats, singing in the shower or something, right?
	And so you get these sort of strange relationships that build up.
	So, you know, they might sing the same song or something.
	I don't know.
	But the point is, that works for that neighbor because they have that relationship.
	But if it was me, I'd be like, shut the fuck up.
	I don't like being up this early.
	Shut the fuck up.
	And so, you know, there's no one rule that answers every point.
	And so I guess the way that I'm looking at this is like, okay, we have our little spectrum here, which I know we hate, we hate spectrums, but I feel like we can never get away from them.
	And then that's fine.
	So like on the left side spectrum, we have our ideologies or things rooted in ideology.
	And then on the right side spectrum, we have our things that are rooted in practice.
	And I understand, like, I guess to me, I really do see the importance of what you're saying that if you just.
	you know, you have Karl Marx, you know, sits down and he writes his big fucking grand thesis of the world, but what does this fucking guy know?
	He was, yeah, you know, he didn't really have a real job or anything.
	He's not used to parasite.
	Right, exactly.
	And if you have, that's a lot of people.
	That's a lot of people like that.
	That's, you know, kind of what, you know, I'm always talking about with the overproduction of elites that all think they can solve every fucking problem in the world and yet they've never really lived in the world or lived in the situations that they're trying to fix and implement their fixes on.
	And yeah, if you write a bunch of bullshit, you never really been down in the mud, you know, it's going to probably not going to work and it's probably going to lead to a lot of bad situations and outcomes.
	And so there is a huge benefit.
	And I see there's a huge benefit in terms of like saying, okay, well, things need to be rooted in some form of practical experience.
	And that's important.
	But I don't think that ideology is like the great evil either, because you do need, there are lots of things that exist for very practical reasons, as you said, every or whatever, or at one point in time, the, you know, the king not living under the rule of law and all these other things.
	And you do need whether it comes about because people murder each other or whether it comes about because someone says, like, well, maybe it's better if we live this way to sort of combine those things and say, well, let's try to do things that are moral that we believe are virtuous, but also we have to merge them with the practical solutions that exist on the ground.
	Yeah, I mean, you don't, you can have moral injunctions that are not rational or propositional, right?
	So if you go into a like you're Indiana Jones and you end up in the Temple of Doom or whatever, and you're being held hostage by the weird Indian tribe, don't smash one of their idols.
	Like they're not, they're not going to give you a logical argument as to why they're about to flay you alive for doing that.
	They'll just respond on instinct.
	You violated something sacred and we don't like it.
	So it's not that you need an ideology to do something.
	Feelings and impulses are also an important thing that people do.
	And this is what fighting words were, right?
	You know, you used to, didn't America have it codified that you could respond physically to fighting words in certain states?
	I mean, I guess, I don't know.
	I would, because I'm thinking, and maybe we're just conceptualizing ideologically ideology differently, because I would assume that the tribe that has a very high feeling of sacredness and you smash some sacred idol, so they're going to kill you.
	Like, that's the ideology that they're living by.
	Well, it could be.
	I mean, it depends, but assume it could be a very primitive tribe that doesn't really have rational thought.
	Everyone's got rational thought to some degree.
	Well, I mean, there are definitely people who don't.
	Listen, there's a lot of NPCs out there.
	I guess that's fair.
	It's not just that.
	It's just like there is a bell curve of IQ and there are definitely people on the lower end of it.
	I'm saying if there's a tribe of people that can exist in the world without killing themselves, right?
	I think there has to be some sort of intelligence for that.
	Carl, you've got to give us a heads up before you want to leave because there's a bunch of super chats.
	People have questions.
	I am actually going to go because it's half 12 now.
	No, no, we got At least there's like a $50 super chat or something.
	Let's do the $50.
	I'll ask the $50 one.
	The Wooster for $50 says, Hey, Carl, now that Lol Cow, Pied Piper, and Dark Wizard wannabe academic agent is undergoing his center-left rebrand.
	Will you follow him off that cliff?
	Will the Schmidt friendemy distinction apply to him, or was it always a cynical tool to silence viable criticism?
	Oh, what the was the friend-enemy distinction a viable tool to silence reasonable criticism?
	Was that yes?
	Um, I mean, I'm sure it can be used that way, but I think that really the fair interpretation of it is that what okay, this is my interpretation.
	John, what were you saying?
	Go ahead, go ahead.
	So, I think that ideological politics, um, because it's not based in relationships, it's based on consensus.
	Uh, it's sorry, it's not even based on consensus, it's based on abstract agreement, right?
	As in, I agree with you on these five principles, and therefore, if you don't agree with these five principles, you're a dangerous enemy.
	Um, because technically speaking, yeah, you are a dangerous enemy, right?
	You are if voting in Trump is going to destroy human rights, then he is 100% an enemy.
	Uh, but you'll notice how Mandami isn't engaging in ideological politics with Trump.
	He's a great example.
	This is such a good example.
	I'm so glad it's come up.
	Um, he has actually declared Trump a friend because of his personal relationship rather than the ideology that he follows.
	But with ideological politics and the social contract, it's very easy to reduce politics to merely are these people in the constituency my ideology cares about or not, and therefore, and that means that basically the enemy group is perfectly ripe for exploitation.
	Why who cares?
	Why would I not exploit them, right?
	It would actually be kind of bonkers not to exploit these people because they're my enemies.
	Uh, and so and I think the 20th century really was the century of ideology.
	If you think about the great powers of the era, it was the end of the old feudal like relational powers, like the empires of Europe, and the rise of the Nazis, the fascists, the American liberals, the Soviets.
	Like, you've got purely ideological politics, great power politics, racking the world.
	And so, from Carl Schmidt's position in the ideological world, it does look like it's just, are you with me for ideological reasons or not?
	And it doesn't have to be that way, obviously.
	But I think in his time, it probably was like that.
	And I think it's something we should probably avoid.
	I mean, I'm very much against ideological politics.
	I'm very much against it because I think it is.
	I mean, in this time now, I'm not saying there can't be a time where we might need ideological politics, but right now, I think we're being destroyed by ideological politics.
	And I think we need a return to the relational politics.
	PFS for $20 says, Can't miss the chance to say hi and thank you to Carl.
	Been along for the Sargon ride since the OG Gamergate videos.
	Very grateful for you walking the philosophical path for all those starting with the same 90s precepts.
	My pleasure, man.
	It's been a long, long fucking journey.
	That's true.
	And Fondu for $20 says, Some very important questions while you have Sargon on.
	I've been having arguments with my playgroup about the DD enlightenment system.
	Are you for or against it?
	And why?
	And how do you conceptualize the grid?
	I mean, I don't mind it, but it demands a sort of objective universal morality that is.
	I mean, it's fine in DD, you know, if you want to be like, yeah, every goblin is chaotic evil and every paladin is lawful good.
	I can see why the left are like, well, it's quite rigid and constraining.
	Because, yeah, it is.
	It is rigid and constraining.
	But it also allows certain things that can't be done with a subjective morality.
	As in, it allows a truly pure and objectively good paladin to vanquish a truly pure and objectively evil demon, right?
	So that is actually not possible in a relativistic moral framework.
	So, you know, if you actually want a true hero that destroys a true villain, then you can have that.
	I think people should use the alignment system like as guidelines as guidelines, not really, you know, oh, you can never move outside of this framework.
	That's up to people's choices, isn't it?
	But I mean, I don't know.
	I'm kind of tired of relativistic morality at this point.
	You know, getting sick of it.
	There you go.

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