Carl Benjamin critiques the liberal order's collapse, citing an Atlantic article on reactionary rise and linking authoritarianism to failed universal rights. He argues feminism degrades women while science ignores metaphysics, advocating instead for traditionalist roots, natural law, and tribal dependency over individual autonomy. Ultimately, this shift signals a global rejection of modernity's untruths in favor of ancestral order and moral restoration. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Liberal Democracy's Self-Destruction00:12:04
So, we are slowly but surely starting to win some of the leftover to understanding what the actual right wing sort of traditionalist position is and why it's valuable.
This is a fascinating article on The Atlantic called History is Running Backwards Why Reactionaries Are Taking Over the World.
And they're starting to understand why we are making the points we're making and what validity these points have in relation to the way that modern life is.
So, this article begins with.
A bit of a take on Tehran, obviously.
But this is the important part where it begins.
Many of us thought that the world would get more democratic as it modernized, but for the past quarter century, we have seen a reversion to authoritarian strongmen.
Donald Trump, acting like some 16th century European prince, has made the presidency his own personal fiefdom.
Vladimir Putin borrows ideas from reactionary thinkers such as Alexander Dugan to justify his imperial conquest of Ukraine.
If you go on social media, you can see photos of trad wives baking cookies for their husband and five kids.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services and his followers don't trust those newfangled inventions, vaccines.
In 1999, it seemed that world affairs would be dominated by multilateral groups such as the European Union and the World Trade Organization, but now we are back to 19th century style great power rivalries between China and the United States, Russia and Europe, and Trump's national security strategy has even revived the Monroe Doctrine.
Right.
Interesting, isn't it?
Because the thing about all of these things is that they didn't just come about for no reason.
We haven't had a cyclical reaction backwards because everything was just going smooth as silk, and all of the problems, or at least the majority of the problems that people had, were being taken care of by the liberal order, by the system.
The reason the world is changing as it is changing is because the liberal order was fundamentally premised on a series of untruths.
And the problem with not believing things that are true is that when you are in contact with reality, but your beliefs are somewhere over there, miles away, there's a gap.
Between what you think is and what actually is, and you lie to yourselves about what actually is and why what actually is is in ways that don't solve the problem.
And a problem that goes unsolved is a problem that festers, is a problem that compounds, is a problem that gets worse.
And as things have been getting worse, as progress has advanced, it seems that we might have been progressing in the wrong direction, doesn't it?
You've got no one to blame for yourselves with any of these things.
I mean, there are just everything about this, right?
The world would get more democratic as it modernized.
Yeah, and it's fucking bad.
Actually, we don't need a vote on every single little thing.
What is more useful is to have a vote on one important thing and then let the person we choose to do that important thing just sort things out.
And that's what's happening with Donald Trump.
That's what's happening with Vladimir Putin, whether you agree with him or not, whether you like him or not.
And I don't agree with that.
I don't like him.
I think Putin is just the average Russian strongman.
But that's what they want.
And you go on social media, find the trad wives baking cookies.
Yeah.
Feminism was never actually what women wanted.
It's only for now, right?
Young women now, between 18 and 25, I think it was, are the first generation ever to have a majority that consider themselves feminist.
As I covered on the podcast today, 53% of women now consider themselves feminist.
That was never the case.
Never the case at all.
In previous generations, for the boomers, it was about 28%.
For Gen X, it was something like.
29%.
And for millennials, it was still only about 32%.
It's never been the case that most women didn't want the trad wife future, basically, and wanted the freedom from men future.
Most women didn't want that.
And yet, that's what was imposed on them anyway.
Did it solve their problems?
No.
It made them miserable.
It made them lonely.
It made them insecure and afraid and wonder why the world seemed scarier than it seemed when their grandmothers were around.
And their grandmothers lived through two world wars.
So, no, you.
What I'm saying is that all of these things are failures of modernity, failures of the liberal order, right?
The stuff on vaccines, I'm actually not hot on, but there are questions there, right?
There are unanswered questions.
Why is autism so prevalent now?
I don't know, but there are unanswered questions to be had there.
And the problem is, there are lots of people whose careers are predicated on not answering those questions.
And people are aware now that you cannot just blindly trust the science, because the science itself has an agenda.
And this whole thing seemed like world affairs would be dominated by multilateral groups such as the EU and the WTO.
Yeah, yeah.
It turns out that's just not how international powers sustain themselves.
And in fact, it was just the hegemonic power of the United States, backed up by Europe morally and in part militarily, that imposed this on the world.
Well, when that partnership becomes too weak to impose itself, It's revealed to be a great power style parochial imposition rather than a rationally agreed conclusion that all parties signed up for.
Because at the end of the day, whether you like Russia or Ukraine or Putin or whatever, he has his reasons.
And if you can't understand his reasons, again, you'd have to agree with them.
But if you can't understand the reasons, then you can't have a reasonable discussion about the thing.
I'm not, like I said, I don't support Putin.
I don't support the invasion of Ukraine, obviously.
But to pretend like it was incomprehensible is just liberal bias, frankly.
Anyway, let's carry on.
We used to have a clear idea of where modernity was heading towards greater autonomy and equality, secularism, stronger individual rights, cultural openness, and liberal democracy.
Progress was supposed to lead to the expansion of individual choice in sphere after sphere.
Science and reason would prosper while superstition and conspiracy mongering would wither away.
Turns out that was yesterday's vision of the future.
Yeah, and do you know why?
Do you know why that was yesterday's vision of the future?
That was yesterday's vision of the future because we arrived there and it was not everything it was meant to be cracked up to be.
We don't need autonomy.
No one actually has autonomy.
Autonomy is a total fiction.
Nobody's autonomous.
The only person who'd be autonomous would be a Robinson Crusoe washed up on a beach.
And all this 19th century ideology, as Karl Marx put it, designed to create socialized Robinson Crusos was actually a fucking terrible idea.
Actually, it's not good for us to be all alone living in a society where we have a social contract to dictate our behavior rather than just being normal humans, right?
That's not good.
Because as soon as some lunatic decides, I don't care about being rational, I'm breaking the social contract.
You're totally vulnerable.
This is what the attacks on trains are.
You see them in America where just some fucking lunatic starts out and everyone's just like, okay.
Like, there's a problem with that guy.
And yet he was just left to Roman society.
This, and again, there are so many things here.
Like, equality.
Who asked for this?
Like, who does the, like, the more equality you have, the greater the decline is.
Equality is a levelling philosophy.
And to get to the end goal of equality, where everyone has the same, means to get to a point where everything is at the lowest common denominator.
So the people who earn and the people who don't earn end up in the same position.
That's awful.
I mean, it looks like theft, doesn't it, frankly?
But it means that everything is degraded, it is a doctrine of degradation.
And it was understood to be in its own time.
And yet, oh no, we can't give up equality.
The precious fucking God.
Oh, not equality.
Okay, but how about good?
How about virtue?
How about separating the wheat from the chaff?
How about making the world a better place?
No, we want equality, which means making the world a worse place.
That's what that means.
Secularism, stronger individual rights, cultural openness, liberal democracy.
They're falling apart.
They're fucking falling apart.
Like, we have strong enough individual rights.
In fact, we're so pathological about this.
We're like, oh, what?
Foreign rapist who's arrived on our shores.
Well,.
I mean, what about his individual rights?
I don't care.
I don't care, and I didn't ask.
I don't want to be burdened with them.
The rights of people are parochial to those people and the cultural context in which they live, the country in which they live.
Rights are not abstract and universal.
Even in the liberal view, they reside within ourselves.
So, this whole thing where we've perversely made the rights that we were supposed to use.
Ourselves to protect against the government as a group, as a people, have been inverted upon us into which we've become atomized again, the autonomy equally atomized.
And the government has promised, hand on heart, I pledge to be the defender of your rights against me.
Now, this is demented.
The government is the abuser in the conversation about human rights.
What are we doing?
That's the bad person, and you're putting your faith in them in order to protect the things that protect you from them.
Mental.
It's wrong.
It's completely wrong headed.
And of course, little democracy.
Oh, we need universal suffrage, do we?
Oh, do we?
We need people who don't pay any tax whatsoever having exactly the same share in this country as the people who pay the tax and don't take the benefits.
Is that really what you think a sustainable society looks like?
Do you think those people who just take will vote according to conscience and be like, well, no, I mean, you know, I know I'm a person who just takes, but I mean, those people who just pay.
Well, they need to make sure the society is geared towards them so they can continue paying.
No, they just keep taking and taking and taking.
Until now, literally this, was it this week or was it last week, we found that actually the tax revenues were not equal to the benefits we pay.
And 53% of the country are on benefits and net beneficiaries rather than net taxpayers.
We have arrived in the sort of proto South Africa position where we are just in a failing state where it's just worth looting the treasury for as much as you can.
Before this whole thing collapses, your liberal democracy did this to itself with its own philosophies of individualism.
Oh, God, no one can possibly have a standard of living below X.
It's like, why?
If they don't do any goddamn work, what do they think is going to happen?
Oh, no, we've got a moral obligation to make sure that everyone.
So we just have to steal from the hardworking to give to the lazy.
I'm not saying there's not a place for people who are literally crippled and can't work to have some kind of government assistance or pensions or whatever.
But that's just not the case, considering in this country a quarter of people qualify for disability.
A quarter.
One in four people in Britain today is meant to be a cripple.
Bullshit.
What they are is a benefits cheat.
The Mechanical Universe Myth00:06:58
Bullshit.
Did we lose a war?
Do you see war veterans on their bloody crutches stumping around?
No.
We didn't lose a war.
This was just a system that was easy and incentivised people to take advantage of it.
And so they are.
And so now it's crippling us.
And so you're suddenly going, I can't believe modernity is something that people are becoming against.
Yeah, no, because it's fucked itself up.
Science and reason would prosper while superstition and conspiracy mongering would wither away.
Science and reason are themselves a superstition in the idea that men can be entirely rational and we can essentially ignore the animal part of ourselves.
That is a fucking superstition.
It is not true.
Man is the rational animal.
He has rational faculties attached to an animal body.
And the animal body gets to have its way.
The rational part gets to decide which direction occasionally.
We are not merely creatures of science and reason.
So, this superstition that these backwards old beliefs won't come to haunt us or anything like that in the future, no, that's what's happening now.
This weird deification of science in the face of actual time tested wisdom is just failing.
It is failing.
And so, it turns out that yesterday's vision, that was yesterday's vision of the future.
Yeah, no kidding.
No kidding.
And in this article, He explains how he's actually become quite sympathetic to some of the quite right wing authors, actually, like Gwenon, Evola, and a few others.
I can't remember who he's mentioned now.
There's Gwenon, Evola, there was a couple of others.
But these points are important because they are speaking about perennial truths about the animal side of the human being.
What traditionalism is, is a series of lessons that have been learned.
Difficultly through hardship, through trial and error, not through propositional reason, and that doesn't make them less correct, that doesn't make them less true.
And in fact, look at what he says here.
What do the traditionists offer?
First, they offer roots.
The master trend of modernity is freedom.
Well, it's really equality, but whatever.
You get to do what you want, you can go to college far away, move from the city to city, serve through different cultures and lifestyle options.
This traditionist charge leads to an aimless, ephemeral life.
Yeah, that's true, isn't it?
The modern person belongs to everywhere I know at once.
Go to any city in the world and go get yourself a McDonald's.
What's the point?
What is the point of any of this?
Modernity is spiritually dead.
I know I'm a product of it, and I'm not a spiritual man at all, and I don't want that to be the thing that we pass on.
Traditionalists offer stable attachments.
For the traditionalists, the primary unit of modern social life is not the sovereign, free chosen individual.
Again, total fiction, total superstition.
Nobody is a sovereign, free choosing individual.
Nobody is a Robinson Crusoe.
Everyone lives in a civilization where everyone is dependent on everyone else, and they always have and always will.
So, this fucking fiction can die.
Just die, as far as I'm concerned, right?
We are not born into the void.
We are born into particular families, particular neighborhoods, tribes, faiths.
Your life is connected via a great chain of bonds to your ancestors whom you honor and to future generations whom you serve.
That's a perfectly correct metaphysical statement.
You can't debate that.
That is just true, right?
And so, in the traditionalist imagining, people are planted in the spots of earth where the bones of their ancestors are like, no, you should be so lucky as to get that.
But it's not necessarily that it's prescriptive either.
It just is that way.
You are connected to your past, you are connected to your future.
And you are a part of this web of relationships, whether you like it or not.
Even if you try to break them and move away, you still are that thing.
Traditionalists offer enchantment.
Moderns, they believe, live within what Max Weber called the iron cage of rationalism and bureaucracy that is denuded of any enchantment.
Entirely true, right?
Modernity has created a mechanical universe.
I went into depth on this on my documentary, The Death of Man.
I'll leave a link in the description.
This was a lot of work, and I think you'll be very impressed with it if you haven't already watched it.
It, honestly, is best.
Probably the best thing I've ever made.
But I go into a lot of depth in this, in how the problem with the modern rationalistic mechanical universe is that it doesn't need God to be involved.
And if you get to the point where God is actually not involved in how you explain how things work, then the need for God goes away.
Now, whether this is true or false is kind of beside the point.
The point is, we have arrived at that point, and this is literally what the materialist disenchantment of the universe is.
And it's not good for us.
Actually, we are not supposed to think that there isn't anything special about the world.
And this is a problem that both Evola and C.S. Lewis were in conflict on.
I mean, Brave New World is about this, right?
When John the Savage goes out and he's beating himself, he's whipping himself with a stick in the face of the industrial sort of therapeutic modernity where everyone just has sex and takes soma and has no morals whatsoever.
And he just goes out and he's whipping himself and they come to watch.
Look at the Savage.
He's got.
He's got a view of the world that's informed by religion.
This guy's mad, right?
These are things that people saw coming down the pipeline, and now we're in them.
Everyone's depressed, everyone's like, God, this is terrible.
Our countries are going to shit.
Why is that?
It's because we don't see anything special about the universe around us.
And like I was saying, Evola and C.S. Lewis both were like, Look, we need a kind of science that is actually not against man, right?
What are you doing, princess?
I'm not playing dinosaur.
I'm not playing dinosaur.
I'm doing a video.
Look, you can see me.
You can see me up there.
Who's that?
And who is?
Is that you?
Can you see yourself?
You want to speak into the microphone?
Say hi.
Say, my name's Neymar Benjamin.
My name's Epson.
No, say it properly.
My name's Epson.
Right, mummy's calling for you.
Science Beyond Material Flesh00:03:37
We need a form of science that can respect the metaphysical aspect of a human being, that understands that a human being is not merely a material thing, that it is more than merely the flesh and blood that it appears to be, that science can register.
And these guys had no idea what that would look like.
And I don't think it can happen.
I think we have reached the limits of science.
I don't think that science can deal with anything that can't be measured.
And if you can't measure virtue or the concept of your own soul or whatever it is, then science is blind to it.
And therefore, we need to, in fact, stop deifying science and realize that science has an appropriate place in our lives.
And it's actually not dealing with a lot of the human things that we deal with on a day to day basis.
Anyway, link in the description.
Go and watch it.
I'm so proud of it, honestly.
So, anyway, the traditionalists are spiritual.
And from that, traditionalists offer moral order.
Good and evil are not matters of personal choice.
Well, the thing is, right, according to progressives, according to the sort of Kantian categorical imperative that they follow, good and evil aren't really matters of choice to them either.
For them, good and evil are axiomatic and can be discovered through maxims that any rational being can hold until they eventually get to the point where morality is just a serious.
They essentially try to look into the mind of God using maxims.
But the thing is, there are, of course, ways these tie themselves up in knots as well.
Or.
The natural law that is woven by God into the fabric of the universe, he says here.
What that means, from a secularist point of view, and C.S. Lewis has got a great way of putting this it is the Tao, right?
The Tao, however we pronounce it.
It is what the universe is objectively in relation to what we are objectively.
As in, a human being has certain form, function, limitations, and necessary inputs and outputs.
And in relation to what the universe is compared to what we are, there is a certain kind of thing that, depending on the kind of person you are, the kind of life path you should be leading, which he would call natural law.
And I think he's right about that.
I think generally, and the thing is as well, there are going to be people for whom the Tau is not precisely the same, or their interpretation of it, the way they follow it, whatever, is not going to be exactly the same.
But there definitely is a general telos to a human life that it's worth every person trying to pursue.
And the more people who pursue that, the happier they will be.
That is just obviously true.
And it's been demonstrated by the fact, again, the podcast today.
Modern women, they've never been more feminist.
They've never been more miserable, more alone, more isolated, more afraid of the future.
It's not normal.
It's not normal.
So, anyway, fourth thing is protection against the cultural depredations of modernity.
Modern progressives decry the evils of colonialism, but traditionalists.
Progressors themselves are colonialists.
Their educators determine what ideologies will be pumped into your kids' brain.
Their psychologists redefine how you should raise your family.
Their thought police determine what words can come out of your mouth.
So the traditionalist, professional experts, social workers are the stormtroopers of elite domination.
All true.
And nobody's happy with this.
All true.
And so, anyway, like I said, in here, he says, the reason I've dwelled at such length on the tenets of feature of traditionalism is I want my description to be accurate enough.
And I confess, I feel a modicum of sympathy for some of the traditionist arguments.
Aristotelian Lens on Tradition00:01:30
That's because there is something to them.
And these are the things that won me over when I was a liberal.
And I was like, okay, well, I'm not sure about liberalism.
It seems to be predicated on a series of foundations that just are not accurate, frankly.
I think this is just not correct.
So I looked into them and I was like, right, okay, these guys.
Although, from the position of being a liberal, they sounded quite nutty.
As soon as I realized my liberal priors weren't correct and I started to review these things through an Aristotelian lens, I realized there is something to all of this, actually.
Even if it sounds wishy-washy and difficult to comprehend, if you realize that you don't have to look at everything about human life through the lens of science and through the lens of a kind of innate human sense, then suddenly there is something to it, actually.
There is, and I'm not saying that every single thing that every traditionalist has ever written is true or correct or whatever, but there's something to it all.
Anyway, I'll leave it there.
Sorry I haven't uploaded on this channel for such a long time.
I've moved house, as you can see, I'm still not where I need to be to be able to record properly.
But I saw this, I was just like, okay, this is genuinely fascinating, genuinely interesting how we're starting to win them over.
Anyway, I'll leave a link in the description to my documentary.
Like I said, I'm incredibly proud of it.
I worked so hard on it.
The fact that I can just reel all of this stuff off, I think, shows that it's really sticking.