RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - The Lost Decade and the Silent Civil War

Dec. 24, 2019 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

01:26:38

The Lost Decade and the Silent Civil War

On this Christmas edition of The McSpencer Group, Richard is joined by Keith Woods and Edward Dutton. Foregoing the predictable Trump and Brexit retrospectives, the panel engages in reckless speculation about what is happening to post-European nations and what we can expect in the coming 10 years. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	It's Tuesday, December 24th, 2019, Christmas Eve, and welcome back to a special holiday edition of The McSpencer Group.
	In an effort to expand racial diversity, I've invited Irishman Keith Woods onto the panel, and joining me, as always, is perfidious Albion incarnate Edward Dutton.
	This week, we forgo the predictable Trump and Brexit retrospectives and instead engage in reckless and all but incomprehensible metaphysical speculation about the past and the future.
	Well, everyone, welcome back to the holiday edition of the McSpencer Group.
	And I am very pleased to have two special guests along with me.
	Eternal Anglo, Ed Dutton.
	Ed, how are you?
	Okay, good.
	Good.
	I'm still celebrating.
	I appreciate the holiday cravat that you've chosen.
	Yeah.
	We're all very excited about that.
	Alongside us, we have the most articulate teenager in the alt-right.
	That is Keith Woods.
	How are you doing, Keith?
	Yeah, not too bad.
	I feel like I'm here to bring some balance, you know, the Anglo-empiricism.
	I'm going to bring in some national idealism from Ireland, you know?
	That's good.
	No, I actually do appreciate that.
	We were joking about that online.
	And also, you should take my crude criticisms as a compliment.
	Very young guy.
	It's always good to see young people entering the movement.
	So, how are you all?
	Are you ready for Christmas?
	Yes, we went down the other day.
	I've got my Christmas ham.
	It's ham they have up here.
	The various larticos they have up here.
	Maxalartico, which is liver and swede casserole.
	It's actually quite nice.
	I've actually got used to it.
	I actually prefer it now.
	To English Christmas food.
	It's taken me a while, but I actually prefer it.
	So, yeah.
	That's excellent.
	Do you have turkey in Ireland?
	Yes, we have turkeys in Ireland.
	Besides the people.
	He was referring to the animals.
	I actually thought it was funny this year, the Christmas season.
	There were some people on YouTube that were really white-pilled and excited and thought it was a big victory for us.
	Some of the supermarkets in Britain, you know, Tesco and Sainsbury's that do these multicultural ads every year.
	This year, they didn't do, like, full global homo multiculturalism.
	Everyone thought that was, like, a big victory.
	The advertisements aren't full of brown people.
	It's, like, such a small little victory.
	Last year, they had Muslim women in headscarves celebrating Christmas and giving each other presents.
	I forget which one that was.
	It was Tesco.
	Eating halal turkey or whatever.
	It was absolutely ridiculous.
	And of course they got feedback that it was ludicrous.
	So perhaps they've toned it down this year, although I haven't actually watched any of them, I have to say.
	That's good news, anyway.
	Well, later on today, I'm going to go actually visit Santa Claus, so that should be fun.
	And you get to sit on his lap, and he'll give you a present and ask you what you want this year.
	And I might even take my kids this time.
	All right, I try humor here.
	Okay.
	That sounds kind of cringe, Richard.
	Well, we'll get into cringe later.
	Being that this is the holiday edition, I wanted to take a step back and not only reflect on 2019, but really reflect on the past four years of craziness in the right.
	This has been a period...
	Really like no other that I've at least experienced in my lifetime where we felt like we were winning.
	We were on the right side of history.
	All these things were coming into place.
	And then I think that after that, there was a lot of disillusionment and maybe depression.
	I think it's been quite a time, but at least you could say it has been an interesting time to be alive on the right.
	So I wanted to talk about the two big things that occurred, that is Trump and Brexit, and basically look at all of it.
	And I know, Keith, you did a very interesting video.
	I watch most of your videos.
	I find them very insightful.
	I can't watch Ed's content.
	It's basically completely unbearable.
	But yours is actually quite good.
	But you did a good video on the kind of postmodernism of Trump.
	And we could start out with Trump.
	Maybe we'll just mix in Trump and Brexit together, because they are certainly related phenomena.
	But this postmodern aspect of Trump and the way in which he's this, he's kind of like Diet Coke, you could say.
	There's actually no calories.
	There's no there there, but it actually really does get you excited and it feels like the real thing.
	It's even better than the real thing, as U2 has declared.
	And so I think basically, I mean...
	We can criticize Trump from a lot of different levels.
	He's a tool of global homo.
	He's a tool of Zog or whatever.
	He's just a conservative.
	He does Paul Ryan's agenda.
	All of these are solid criticisms, actually.
	Or the other thing about him is that he's a racist nationalist, which you hear on the left.
	But I actually think the best way of understanding him is as this kind of postmodern simulacrum of a nationalist.
	And we can project our hopes and dreams upon him.
	And he can kind of mean whatever we want him to mean.
	And it's a new type of...
	Yeah, that's fairly accurate.
	Yeah, the Trump campaign was an interesting thing.
	That's around, like, when I kind of got red-piddling, you know, got into this and a right or whatever.
	But I suppose, like, there's the pre-election Trump and the post-election Trump, and you should probably delineate the two because what he ran on is so different from what he is now.
	But, yeah, you know, a lot of people picked up on this, that Trump has this post-modern aspect to him that, like, he kind of reminds me of...
	Greta Thunberg in a weird way in that they're both so outrageously whatever they air, they're like a parody of themselves that it's kind of impossible to critique them.
	Because that self-awareness is already kind of latent just in their very being, if you know what I mean.
	So Trump was able to defy all sort of conventional morality.
	And a lot of people thought his divorces and stuff would count against him with the Christian vote or whatever.
	But Trump was just so out there and so in defiance of the moral norms that were governing.
	I think a lot of leftists were saying Trump is a postmodern phenomenon, but I think he's actually a sign of things to come, which is talk about this shift into metamodernism, where the dominant irony of postmodernism, you know, Generation Z now that have been completely raised, just steeped in irony, raised on 4chan and YouTube and all this.
	And, like, what happens is, you know, irony is wholly negative.
	It's always used in deconstruction.
	But we're in a situation now where there's nothing left to deconstruct really.
	Like, there is no metanarrative beyond sort of this, you know, nihilistic, solipsistic individualism.
	And so, you know, after the deconstruction comes reconstruction in a certain sense.
	And the trend, it hasn't been discussed much, but the trend in metamodernism seems to be that the reconstruction...
	It takes the form of a kind of a self-aware return to tradition.
	You get what's called ironic sincerity, which is a kind of self-aware sincerity.
	And that's what I saw in the Trump campaign, because he's very self-aware.
	He has this postmodern aspect.
	He's very brash.
	But at the end of the day, the reason he appealed was there was a sincerity there, which was a return to a kind of more industrial era, more morally wholesome United States.
	And it's interesting, even in, like, the, you know, the aesthetics that flourished in the alt-right, like, kind of fasciae of aesthetics, where it's just, like, marriage of forms from a bygone time with kind of a hyper-modern aesthetic.
	So you get, you know, retrofuturism was very popular, because, like, the 80s was another time where, you know, people were looking at optimism to the future.
	So you get this interesting marriage of, you know, people were...
	Sharing a lot of, like, sort of Soviet retrofuturism, where you have, like, a very traditional form, like a nuclear family, but, you know, they're living on Mars.
	So it's this clash of, like, the sincere return to simpler time of moral wholesomeness or whatever with the progress of modernism, and that's what metamodernism seems to be taking the form of.
	Yeah, I think it's interesting because I was just thinking about the generational aspect of it.
	Speaking as a Gen Xer, and I guess Ed is, I'm a little bit older than Ed, but he is more or less a Gen Xer, more of a Gen Xer than a millennial.
	We can remember the 80s and we can remember a time that, you know, it was certainly hopeful.
	It was decadent in its own way.
	That was the age of, you know, staying up until...
	6 a.m.
	on high on coke and, you know, wagering all your money on some stock junk fond or whatever.
	But it was actually an era of American hopefulness and American power and arrogance even.
	This kind of ended with the fall of the Soviet Union where, you know, we won.
	And then the 90s was actually a bit of a different decade.
	It was almost kind of a hangover from that.
	And I think the you know, one of the reasons why the boomers are attacked is that they seem to have a kind of meta narrative to them.
	They you know, it was we we.
	And I think the Zoomers are almost interesting in their lack of a metanarrative at all.
	It's not so much the kind of black-pilled metanarrative that distinguishes Gen X, where we were like, you know all that stuff you talk about, civil rights, spreading democracy to the world, that's all bullshit.
	You're just doing it for the oil or all that kind of Gen X cynicism or Gen X irony.
	But I would say Zoomers are almost in this position where they don't have any kind of metanarrative and it doesn't matter.
	It's irony upon irony.
	It's like the Russian dolls where you keep opening them but there's no ultimate end to it.
	There's just another ironic...
	You know, Joker mask figurine below the last one that you pulled out.
	And I think that does...
	I mean, again, I think sometimes we get a little too into the generational divide and we start attacking our elders or our younglings.
	But I think there really is a fundamentally different experience.
	So what do you think about this, Ed?
	Is this way too...
	Lit crit for you and your empirical mind.
	Yeah, my immediate reaction was that you are both talking centrist postmodern bollocks.
	There may be a kernel of truth in the bollocks.
	Yeah, and that is this.
	With reference to what you said about the 80s, I thought that was quite interesting, because if you think about the 80s in England, I'm not so sure I can comment on America or Ireland, but in the 80s in England, who was running Britain?
	Who was running Parliament at that time?
	On the one hand, in the Conservative Party in 1980, who was the Foreign Secretary?
	Lord Carrington, a hereditary peer.
	Who was the Home Secretary?
	It was William Whitelaw, gentry, you know, basically kind of lower nobility.
	And there were loads of other people like that that were running the country, the upper class, the aristocracy.
	And they have these groupish values, these values of noblesse oblige, of self-service, of laying down your life for your country, of thinking of the group, and that kind of thing.
	And who was the other group that was running the country?
	It was the trade, Labour.
	But the trade unionist Labour, most of these people that were members of Parliament for the Labour Party, but not the leader at the time, that was Jim Callaghan, unionists, left school at 14 and gone down the pit.
	And those were the two groups of people that were running the country, the upper class that have these groupish, these group selected, you might call them values.
	And the working class that have, again, to some extent, these group-selected kind of values.
	The somewheres, the people that are somewheres, not the anywheres.
	The people that have, in the upper class, they have a strong connection to the land, to the village.
	They're the lord of the manor.
	You know, they have this connection.
	In that way, they're connected to a sense of place and a sense of family.
	Family is all important to them.
	Where they are is all important.
	And the working class, it's connection to a town, to a village and to a local area.
	That was who was running England.
	Now, I think, as I was criticised on our last stream for saying positive things about Mrs Thatcher, and a lot of people were annoyed by that, so let me say some negative things about Mrs Thatcher, and that is what is heralded with her, and to a lesser extent her predecessors, Heath, Harold Wilson, and then her successors as well, Blair, Major, Brown, is the rise of the middle class, and the complete evisceration from Parliament of the upper class, there you go.
	And it's kind of shameful to be upper class and they don't tend to get elected.
	And the working class, they are either literally destroyed or they stop.
	The trade union movement is crushed.
	And so there's this change to these middle class values, these values of individualism.
	I think that was happening anyway.
	That had been happening for a long time.
	That had been happening maybe even since World War I, you could say.
	Or even you could go back further.
	You could say that had been happening since the medieval period.
	But I think it really gets crystal.
	In the 80s, we still haven't gone full individualist.
	There's still this balance there where there is substantial and growing individualist values, and you could argue that Reaganomics and Thatcher's what she did to England and whatever is reflecting that, but there's still this influence of these group-selected values that certain ideas aren't questioned.
	You've got this generation, World War II generation, even the tail end of World War I generation, who have fought for their country, who've known suffering, who've known what it is to have to make a sacrifice and have done that.
	Unquestioning.
	Unquestioning.
	And then you have this new generation that don't know anything like that.
	They've never really suffered.
	And you have the expansion into the organs of power of the middle class.
	And I think that what is interesting about what's happened in both America with Trump and Britain with Brexit, as embodied in people like Boris Johnson, is you have...
	A society that has been totally overtaken by these individualist anti-group values, which goes other things as well, because one of the things that defines the middle class is moralism.
	They don't have as much money as the upper class, and they want to distinguish themselves from the working class.
	How do they do that?
	They do it by saying they're religious, by saying they're moral, by saying they're educated, by saying they're more refined, by saying in that sense that they're superior.
	These are the Puritans, the Puritan people.
	That's what the middle class were.
	And they take over, and you have this alliance in America of the kind of upper class, really, of someone like Donald Trump.
	I mean, okay, America's quite cagey about who is upper class in America.
	I mean, is it the descendants of the southern plant?
	Is it the members of the, what's that called, the Society of Cincinnati, which is a bit like a kind of House of Lords?
	Is it the Society of Cincinnati?
	Wait, wait, wait, wait, yeah, or whatever.
	But there are basically an upper class in America, and that's what Trump is part of.
	And he has, therefore, there's something inherently disingenuous, I think, about the Middle East.
	They're always striving to not fall down into the working class.
	You know, in England, we talk about the garden gnome test.
	You'll get people who are lower middle class and their kids want a garden gnome.
	And their parents say, God, you can't have a garden gnome because they don't think people think they're working class.
	They work on a garden gnome, you know.
	Like in Bridget Jones, don't say what, say pardon, she says.
	Don't say what, say pardon, in Bridget Jones.
	And pardon is a sign of being lower middle class.
	Upper class, say what?
	And working class, say what?
	So you have this...
	And you have this genuineness, therefore, to upper-class people.
	There's a degree to which they're difficult to corrupt because they've got loads of money.
	And they're kind of secure in who they are.
	They're not trying to prove anything.
	And so that's why I think you see with Trump this genuineness and thus this charisma which appeals to working class people who also have, I think, a genuineness in some way.
	They're not saying they're honest or whatever, but they're not trying to be something they're not.
	They just want to work in class.
	They just want to get money and whatever.
	They're not moralising in the same way the middle class are.
	It's the same thing in Britain.
	You have this alliance of the...
	The Brexit people led by, OK, Farage, would we say he's upper class?
	He'd say he was middle class, but nobody upper class says they're middle class.
	So, I mean, certainly he went to public school, which puts him in the top socioeconomic 4% of the society.
	And with Boris, obviously, Eton, you know, a gentry family descended from royalty on one side and Turkish nobility on the other.
	So this is an upper class person and has managed to achieve this majority of 80 by winning Labour areas.
	It's extraordinary.
	So I think that's the fascinating thing, this class alliance of the genuine versus the pretentious, of the people that are happy to have garden gnomes, either because they like them for one reason or the other, and those that wouldn't touch garden gnomes because they're common.
	The victory of the garden gnomes.
	And so I think that's what's significant to me about it.
	I think there was an interesting wealth aspect to Trump, because the other night there was a Democratic debate, and the meme from the Democratic debate was wine cave, and apparently Mayor Pete Buttigieg went to a wine cave.
	There was actually a funny joke on Saturday Night Live, which hasn't been funny for a while, but they said it was filled with expensive wine and candelabras and crystals.
	It was just like Eyes Wide Sh**.
	Except without any sex appeal whatsoever.
	Which kind of, I think, probably accurately describes it.
	But they treat that, you know, there's this idea that the billionaires are running the show and etc.
	Whereas Trump was really able to flip that on its head in the sense that I'm a self-funded campaign.
	I'm not going to be beholden to all those people.
	I know how the game is rigged because I was the one rigging it and now I'm going to rig it on your behalf.
	That was an amazing move that he made.
	That's, again, if you look at English politics, you had in the 80s, you had the gentry.
	It costs money to get yourself selected to be an MP, right?
	You've got to travel around the country.
	They don't pay expenses.
	It takes ages and ages to do it.
	It costs money.
	Who's funding this with the gentry?
	They're just funding themselves.
	They're difficult to corrupt in that sense.
	It was public service.
	Did you know that when Winston Churchill, who, OK, was upper class, but the lower ranks of it and was constantly in debt because he was an alcoholic and a gambler and whatever, the salary was £500 a year in the 30s?
	So someone like him, he couldn't afford to have the lifestyle he wanted, either massive country house and the 42 staff and whatever, and be an MP.
	And Kenneth Clark, who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 90s in a Conservative in England, he actually worked.
	So he'd work half the day in Birmingham as a barrister and then make his way to London and then be an MP for the second half of the day and then go home again.
	And he did that for years and years because you couldn't.
	The salary was so low.
	And it meant that on the one hand, that meant that they were corruptible, the people in the middle.
	But on the other hand, now they've got these massive salaries.
	Now it attracts greedy people rather than those concerned with public service.
	So there's been this change to the ACs that's very interesting.
	Real quick, with Trump, he wasn't just some rich guy.
	You know, whether we want to deconstruct his actual wealth, I think we'll save that for another time.
	There are people who think that it's all smoke and mirrors, which I think there's some actually reason to believe that.
	He was a word that I won't say that is well-known in America, but it's a terrible word that begins with N that you refer to African Americans, which I, of course, cannot ever conceivably say on YouTube.
	But you use that word and you say rich after it.
	And it means basically that you've never had money before.
	You're not really sure.
	You're actually not.
	Sure of yourself.
	You're comfortable in your own skin.
	And so you go and blow all your money on absurd Cadillacs and gold-plated trinkets and so on.
	You are enriched in that sense.
	And I think Trump kind of was a visual of that.
	Trump is not like the other billionaires.
	The other billionaires are Michael Bloomberg or the Starbucks guy who was running for president for a little bit.
	They're actually very boring.
	They kind of present themselves as...
	I don't know.
	A bogus or truthful story of how they pulled themselves up from their bootstraps.
	Trump was kind of very different than that.
	They wear the black suit and tie, just like a politician, the kind of uniform.
	You could argue that Trump was so...
	A, Trump was hereditarily wealthy.
	One could argue that there isn't an insecurity, which you perhaps would get if you were poor and became wealthy.
	But he was so gaudy and bombastic and ridiculous with his wealth.
	He was rich enough to be that gaudy and bombastic without it actually affecting him.
	Right.
	Which is actually quite clever, because then it appeals to perhaps what his potential electorate would do with money if they had it.
	But anyway, our friend here...
	Exactly.
	He was always appealing to...
	He was the poor man's rich person, in a way.
	Since if he acted like poor people would act, if they had a billion dollars, they'd put their last name on top of a big, tall building, and they'd sell ridiculous ties and steaks.
	And with Boris, there's the comedy element.
	We Britannic peoples, I include you, Richard, and I include Keith in that, that is...
	The eccentric.
	We like the eccentric.
	Why do we like the eccentric?
	Because we have to.
	We have to like the genius, otherwise we wouldn't have produced so many per capita geniuses as a people.
	And the eccentric is really a kind of a version of the genius.
	If you like, it's the genius without outlier high IQ, but with some other traits of the genius, the charismatic.
	And that's what Boris is.
	And there's a genuineness to this.
	I remember years and years ago, they did this new thing when they're interviewing people on TV to try and make it interesting, where they get the reporter to stand there.
	While the person they're talking about walks out of the building.
	So something's happening visually in the background while the subject walks past.
	And this happened.
	And of course, she was talking about Boris as he walked past her.
	And he's actually stopped live and said, no, no, I never said that.
	No, I can say, what are you talking about?
	And it confronted her.
	And that really kind of characterised the difference, the genuineness.
	Perhaps it's a created, it's an artifice, it's something he's worked on, but it comes across as this.
	But you were going to say something anyway.
	Yes.
	Yeah, you do see this kind of as a...
	A symptom of sort of a decline in social trust, I think.
	In Ireland, there was a very famous billionaire here that was like a self-made billionaire during our economic boom, Sean Quinn.
	And, you know, he took a big gamble on a bank here and lost all his money.
	And it was, like, massive campaign, like, oh, free Sean Quinn and, like, give him his money back and all this because he was, like, you know, he was man of the people and he, you know, he got rich.
	And there's this feeling of, like, you know, someone like Trump is, like, oh, he's a jerk, but he's our jerk.
	And it's, like, when the system is so rigged, it's, like, well, if we can just, you know, get one of them on our side to sort of steal as much for ourselves.
	And, like, when Ed was talking about that alliance between the elite and the working class.
	It kind of reminds me, if you've ever seen Century of the Self by Adam Curtis, he talks about this, that the post-World War II Labour government was actually full of elitists.
	You know, a lot of them were from very sort of noble backgrounds.
	And these were the people that brought in, you know, the NHS and, you know, the modern welfare state into Britain.
	And he talks about this, that they saw themselves as an elite and they took a very paternal view of the state.
	And so it's this kind of paradox where, you know, as things get very democratized and liberalism becomes much more dominant, the kind of people you're getting into government now, they tend, you know, even like the rich businessmen, the self-made men, there's this attitude to the state and to social institutions that's naturally sort of revolutionary or radical, whereas when you have like a paternal elite class, there isn't that same feeling.
	When your elite is coming from the capitalist class, there is this attitude to the state that's very opposed to it naturally.
	It's individualistic.
	Who are the people that do well under capitalism?
	I mean, whether it's taking us all the way back to Weber, it's people that have these individualistic kind of Protestant values, really.
	And that's who does well.
	And those values have come to sort of dominate society.
	Equally, who does well, Weber argues, it connects to this, is people that are kind of religious.
	that being religious, very, very religious, gives them a sort of a certainty and a firm, but also an incentive to work hard.
	According to Weber, they want to be sure they're part of the elect.
	God will bless his elect.
	And therefore, it tells them that they are part of the elect if they become rich.
	And what we seem to have now are these Puritan groups without God.
	And it's about reassuring themselves that they're the best.
	I'm the most moral because I glue myself to a train or stand on the roof to hold up working class people in the morning or whatever.
	It's more than that because wokeness is a kind of puritanism and wokeness is coming from capitalism.
	Wokeness did not come from the proletariat.
	For God's sake.
	If anything, they're a bulwark against it.
	And it came from the capitalist class.
	I would even say that it might have been theorized in academia, but it certainly became the religion of the hyper-middle class in the sense that at this point, if you deny...
	A transsexual child the right to gender reassignment surgery.
	You're somehow evil.
	Much like in an earlier version of America, if you're drinking too much, you're womanizing, you're the devil itself.
	Now, it's been transferred.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	There's a question that it came from the middle class.
	Of course, it's in the middle class.
	It's the people.
	They are quite well off.
	But they're not wealth enough to be secure.
	And so how can they get themselves self-esteem?
	Well, it's by saying, OK, well, I might not be rich, I might not be wealthy, but I have morality.
	And this deals with their distance.
	They're not certain they do.
	And that's why they have to go completely over the top and become so upset if their ideas are questioned.
	So it's a way of competing within their own superstructure for status in an ever more woke kind of arms race.
	I think this ties into what we were saying earlier, that as we've, you know, with Thatcher and Reagan and these people, as we've traded our elite for a sort of capitalist elite...
	They have these values, you know, capitalism and capitalists are naturally sort of revolutionary, you know, they have to break down barriers to trade to open new markets.
	I think what you see actually with wokeness is this is the ethic of the capitalists, this is the, you know, the high-low alliance.
	And what happened really, you know, people talk about cultural Marxism, but what the effect of cultural Marxism, what the effect of the Frankfurt School was, was that in the late 60s, when these radicals were taken to the streets, Capitalism just basically adopted the social stuff without the economic stuff.
	So, you know, Mercury's talked about an alliance between the Black Panthers and the radical environmentalists and all this stuff to overthrow capitalism.
	And even Zizek has talked about this, that...
	For the capitalists of the time, they realized that an ethic, that appeal to this kind of revolutionary social ideal, was actually very beneficial from a capitalist point of view, because what has it led to in the real world?
	It's led to an erosion of borders, an opening of markets, you know, cheap labor, move to consumerism away from other means of fulfillment.
	And, you know, what people call cultural Marxism, I just see as the sort of social superstructure of post-Fortist capitalism.
	It's cultural capitalism.
	The nuclear family was the superstructure of forest industrial capitalism.
	And now, if you want to defend capitalism, the superstructure of modern capitalism is transsexuals and gay marriage.
	It's a very interesting point that he makes there.
	Kevin MacDonald has this concept of effortful control.
	The idea is that you can kind of force yourself to believe something.
	If the incentive is strong enough, you can compel yourself to believe something.
	And you say you could argue that some of these left-wing, these woke people, they're not...
	They actually think these things.
	On some level, perhaps they unconsciously or whatever know that they don't, and that's why they have these conflicts, and that's why they become triggered and emotional when the illogic of their position is highlighted.
	So what it would imply is that...
	These people on some level, these middle class people, they understand that it is in their economic interest.
	And in evolutionary terms, our economic interest, although this is not the case anymore, but for a long time, was tied in with our evolutionary interest because rich people outbred poor people throughout history until really quite recently, is to ensure that there is this complete breakdown of any kind of paternalism, of any kind of religion, of anything that stands in the way of attaining money.
	And so, and being able to morally virtue signal, that's the other thing they want to be able to do, of course, those two things, but also money, and so therefore you have to undermine the working class, so there's cheap labour, that's great, that's helpful to people like them, it means that plumbers are cheap, and the kind of things they need, labour, whatever they want to do, is going to be cheap, and you have to, and then the virtue signalling and all this kind of thing.
	Helps to continuously undermine that.
	It undermines nationalism, undermines all these things that stand in the way of making money.
	So I think that you could argue that there is...
	I think there's probably more to it than that in terms of evolution or whatever, but I think that perhaps is part of it.
	Yeah, I would agree with that.
	But what they've created is this fragile state as a consequence.
	What they've created, if you follow Peter Turkin's research or whatever, as a consequence of it, when you have...
	Lots of workers who are badly paid, that's one of the things that creates a fragile state.
	Pissed off.
	People are unhappy.
	And people are open to being inculcated with new things.
	And then in addition to that, one of the things they've gone on about is education.
	It's a very middle class thing.
	Education.
	Everyone has to have formal qualifications.
	Conscientiousness predicts middle class.
	Conscientiousness is about rules and formalizing things and whatever.
	And so you have this ludicrous situation now in the UK where something like half of people that are 18 go to higher education.
	I mean, it's completely insane and unsustainable.
	And what that creates is intra-elite competition.
	I mean, lawyers is a good example of this.
	All of these people do law degrees.
	There's not enough places in Britain to be a solicitor or a barrister for anything like that.
	And you can't really differentiate them.
	They're all smart.
	But they're not all smart, really, are they?
	Well, I know, but they're smart enough to do a rubric review or whatever.
	They think they're smart.
	They've got a law degree.
	And so this makes them resentful and unhappy and angry that they can't get what they want.
	And so this creates intra-elite competition.
	Which creates instability.
	And so you have this breakup of the elites that hate each other.
	And then the third thing of the state fragility is this distrust, then, that this raises.
	Because you have this breakdown of trust within the elite, you have this broad distrust, you have ideas like fake news, judges as the enemy of the people, or whatever.
	All this is happening.
	And according to Turkin, we are at the level of distrust that America is at the level of polarisation, based on his quantitative methods of working this out, that it was at the beginning before the Civil War.
	Right.
	And at that time, there was overpromotion of law.
	There was too many lawyers and whatever.
	All of these things were too much immigration, all of these things.
	So we're at that point.
	And of course, in the 80s, when Richard and I were children watching Care Bears and whatever, you know, you don't remember things like this, I'm sure.
	You've probably been brought up on all kinds of politically correct stuff.
	Childhood was comparatively pretty politically incorrect, but yeah.
	He-Man.
	Oh, I loved He-Man.
	My daughter and I were actually watching He-Man recently.
	I was like, oh, I love this show.
	You have a sister, don't you?
	But I was the only child.
	And an only grandchild.
	And an only great-grandchild.
	And Christmas, 86. Or 85. 85. I got both Snake Mountain and Castle Grayskull.
	Oh, wow.
	They spoiled you right in that year.
	There wasn't this breakdown.
	There was much more of this trust.
	There wasn't the internet to undermine things.
	And so they've caused their own demise, I think, or are causing it.
	Well, let's talk.
	Okay, this discussion has been so meta that we haven't even really talked about Trump too much.
	But I think that's fine because anyone can go talk about Trump.
	I think we're offering something different.
	I think there's this aspect.
	I agree with what Turchin is saying about I actually haven't read Turchin in a little while.
	I need to revisit him because when we chat, you're always bringing him up, so he must be on to something.
	But the polarization has almost become a race in modern America.
	And I don't know if this is occurring in Britain as well.
	Because everyone, at least overtly, is PC and post-racial and colorblind or whatever.
	But when you drill down on some of these, say, polling or...
	The political party has almost become a race.
	It's not so much that you disagree with the liberals, that they're spending too much money on welfare or something.
	It's that you don't want your children to marry a liberal.
	And you think the liberals are inherently bad people.
	They think they're above the law.
	Whereas on the reverse side, it's conservatives are...
	Utter buffoons and racist and they just want a billionaire Nazi in charge and all this kind of stuff.
	And so this...
	A system is going to break down, but it has to break down along current fault lines.
	And I think it's very sad in many ways that it's breaking down on these party-polarized fault lines.
	Parties would be manifestations of fault lines.
	Right, and they clearly are.
	It's going to do that always.
	I mean, if you think about the civil war in England, the fort line, were you pro-the monarch or pro-parliament?
	Right.
	Then as you move on to the fundamental breakdown of British politics, and by extension American politics, are you Whig, i.e.
	more pro-parliament, or Tory, i.e.
	more pro-king?
	As I understand it with Irish politics, the division was over the civil war.
	If there's a civil war, and that division will go on for a very, very, very long time indeed.
	Taking up on your point, though, about them hating each other increasingly, my colleague Noah Karl has done research on this, and that is true, fine, there is polarisation, but it's much more that the Liberals hate the Conservatives than the Conservatives hate the Liberals.
	So the Conservatives might object a bit if his daughter married some hippie soy boy, whatever, but the Liberal would really, really strongly object if his daughter married some Conservative.
	Stereotypically.
	Because they have a stronger puritanical.
	It's much more religion for them.
	It's much more kind of a replacement religion.
	So much more kind of venom.
	And also the height, Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations.
	And the finding was that there's these five moral foundations.
	And there's a degree to which right wing people have all five of them.
	And there's a degree to which the left only have basically two of them.
	So they're not very strong in disgust.
	And they're not very strong in loyalty.
	They're probably not strong in disgust.
	No, I will accept disgust of people who aren't liberal.
	Exactly, yeah.
	But just to look at the world they're birthing, I mean, the best argument against it is you just look at it and you're like, this is stupid and gross and insane.
	Yeah, you don't need to rationalize beyond that.
	It's not just Turkin's model that would predict this.
	It's all kinds of other models.
	I mean, the social epistasis application model of my colleague on the mutational load and what that leads to, and also Putnam and the research by Tattoo Vavnen on what happens if you have a multicultural society.
	They always break down into war.
	Okay, but will this, because this is a counterintuitive We're comfortable.
	Since 2006, I actually believe, in America, there are no new high-paying jobs.
	The jobs that are being created under the greatest economy in our history are retail and bartending and things like that.
	It is not the middle class version of this, but people are still ultimately content.
	They can purchase enough on their credit card.
	They they can get they can pay 999 to get Netflix and watch it all.
	And again, I think the obesity epidemic and other things around that are indications of this.
	It's hard for me to imagine there being a civil war.
	When I see...
	Boomer tweets about, like, you know, oh, if Trump's impeached, we're going to all rise up and take over the government.
	I just, I can only roll my eyes at some level.
	And then the other aspect of this is the fact that in, say, the American Civil War, you had actual ideologues who were prominent in government who...
	Whatever their failings might be, could articulate what this was about.
	This was about perpetuating a slave system.
	This Civil War was actually about race and not about all these tariffs or whatever these libertarians want to tell us.
	No, this was actually about maintaining our order.
	Whereas the Republican Party, it's goofy.
	At best.
	And with Donald Trump, whereas all that that Donald Trump of 2015 and 2016, you know, retweeting Mussolini quotes and saying they're all going back home and, you know, I want Americans to dream and all this kind of stuff.
	This has been wiped away.
	For this half-remembered dream of Thatcherism or Reaganism, where, look at the, it's amazing, the Dow Jones went up again.
	Everyone is happy.
	Everyone is rich here.
	Or we're going to literally, at this point, he's doing rallies where he's talking about bringing back the old light bulbs and toilets and dishwashers.
	We're going to throw out those EPA regulations.
	Your toilet is just going to basically create a tsunami in there.
	And your dishes will be washed in 30 seconds with this nuclear blast that's going to occur.
	Greta Thunberg be damned.
	So what I'm saying is that we have this hatred and distrust that's undeniable.
	But it's being articulated in the stupidest possible manner.
	It's being articulated among people posting memes on Facebook or complaining about...
	Dishwashers.
	It just doesn't strike me as this is going to actually lead to violence and civil war.
	I think America is going to go out with a whimper and not a bang.
	I don't think there's going to be a new civil war.
	I think there's going to be a meme war.
	Yes, I don't think it would be a civil war of the intensity of the last one, no.
	And I wouldn't be surprised.
	I wouldn't be at all, more like the fall of Rome.
	I wouldn't be surprised if people were less able to articulate things, because as my research, my colleagues' research has shown, we're becoming less intelligent.
	And the less intelligent you are, the less good you are at articulating things.
	I mean, you have all kinds of civil wars in African tribal societies.
	They're not intelligent enough to articulate what they're fighting about.
	What they're fighting about is their genetic interests and the genetic interests of their group.
	They don't articulate like that at all.
	They don't articulate in any way.
	And so you wouldn't expect us to be as good articulating what's going on as Enoch Powell was, and certainly not, as people of the generation of the Civil War, which was the most intelligent generation the world has ever seen, as far as we can work out.
	I think the fact that the level of comfort is so high would mean that this would be a slow decline and
	a slow low In India, lots of little things going wrong all the time.
	And when that happens, as you see in India...
	Stress levels are higher.
	People become more religious.
	They become more instinctive.
	They become more nationalistic.
	They become more conflict-prone.
	And you get what's happening in India, by the way, at the moment now, which is basically a nationalist government that's taking over the second largest state in the world.
	So that would be more how I would see it, yes, than a complete breakdown of civil war, because the level of comfort, as you say, is that people have something to lose.
	Whereas in the American war, a lot of people had nothing to lose.
	And also in the American civil war, where they were willing to wager something.
	I mean, you were only a generation after the industrialization.
	And so these people have been subject to selection.
	And so they would have been strongly grouped, selected and thus prone to lay down their lives in a way, which is in big, you know, big numbers in a way that is, um, what was it?
	10% of the population that was killed.
	Um, Which would be unlikely to occur now.
	So yeah, I think it would take a different form.
	I think it would happen.
	Well, I think the way I would say this, if there is a civil war, would the last man show up?
	The last man in Nietzsche's sense, obviously.
	It's just I would say no.
	Yeah, I don't really like this narrative that a lot of people have, especially in the right, that like...
	There's going to be some big collapse that's just going to have this big paradigm shift overnight.
	You know, the libertarians like, oh, the fiat currency is finally going to...
	We're finally going to prove that fiat currency isn't real and everything's going to collapse.
	Or, you know, the more nationalist types that there's going to be a race for any day.
	And it's like it's still going to be trapped in this sort of optimistic paradigm where there's progress and then there's a collapse.
	Whereas really, like, we're in the decline.
	We're witnessing the decline.
	I mean...
	If you want to know what the decline looks like, I mean, there was a study out the other day that, I know you were, I've been dying to attack you all weekend for defending Thatcher, but nine of the ten poorest regions in North Europe are in the UK, and the richest region of Europe is also in the UK, which is the city of London.
	So it is this, like, slow de-industrialization.
	You know, in the US, everything's getting focused on Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
	You know, you have these areas of Manhattan, The nation state is completely losing all power to even control any of this because...
	With things becoming so international now, it's like, you know, you get this thing, well, if you try to raise taxes, corporations are just going to leave.
	So capital isn't beholden at all to nation states now.
	And nations are in this weird position of having to sort of undercut each other to try and feed off the scraps of these international organizations that are just not beholden to the values of whatever nation state they're in now.
	And at the same time, that gives them such power that when they do set up shop in a nation, because they have to plan long-term for their own business success, they end up making decisions that have massive social effects and shape the social superstructure of whatever nation they're in.
	And that's now become an international rather than national.
	So it's affecting the sort of international ethic by the few countries that are sort of...
	Yeah, the idea that there's going to be some big collapse, I mean, I don't really buy it.
	The system has proven itself to be so sort of anti-fragile, the way it just absorbs its shocks.
	I would note, though, that in general, my feeling would be that, based on the studies I've read, that we're in the winter of civilisation and it will be a slow death.
	Was there a sudden collapse of Rome?
	Well, you can talk about turning.
	Such as the invasion of Rome or such as Rome were drawing from Britain.
	That was the kind of turning point.
	And you'll have turning points.
	You'll have things after the event.
	I would argue that the crash of Concorde should be considered a turning point, for example.
	This was a significant thing.
	We'd always managed to rescue it before.
	Little stupid things going wrong in declining civilizations.
	Concorde crashes.
	And I don't think we're ever going to get it back up in the air again.
	And you'll have turning points, which after the event, people can simplify and go, oh, yes, Concorde crashed.
	And that was when the West collapsed.
	But of course, it's not it's not it's not going to feel like that at the time.
	But on the other hand, it is true that I forget the name of the paper, but that if it's 20 or 30 percent, you get tipping points.
	And when you get tipping points, things can happen relatively fast.
	Right.
	So one of the things that you get is an area and foreigners start moving in.
	And once foreigners make up about 30 percent of the population of that area, then you get a tipping point and the people who aren't foreign will start to leave relatively quickly.
	Which are these perceptual abilities to kind of smell the air and understand correctly what's going to happen.
	And this can lead to certain things happening quite fast.
	So there may be certain events like that.
	I think 2008-2009 was certainly a turning point.
	And in a way, the lost decade since then has been a turning point.
	I mean, we've never...
	We had a stock market crash and we've had a stock market...
	Bonanza recently.
	But there's never been an actual recovery and there's never actually been optimism, that kind of heady, positive social mood optimism that you would associate with, say, the end of the 1990s or the housing bubble era in the first seven years of the 2000s or so.
	And so we've had this just kind of fake economy where everyone is unhappy.
	The Dow Jones keeps going up.
	I think there's actually been a markedly decline in optimism about technology, which is interesting, which I definitely did not see in, say, the late 90s.
	I think that was a turning point.
	I think maybe Trump will be Trump will and maybe even the impeachment of Trump will be viewed as a turning point in the end of America.
	I could even see a kind of failed Biden administration, a kind of new LBJ type thing as the liberals put forward a centrist.
	And that is not really good enough.
	And we kind of enter a new world of politics afterwards.
	So I think we've seen some clear turning points already that really are perceived as such in the decline of Americanism.
	These declines have happened before many times.
	I mean, they'd happened in the ancient world.
	They'd happened by biblical time.
	They'd watched societies rise and fall.
	And they'd noticed what happened.
	And that is that the society becomes wealthy and people stop having children.
	For whatever reason, we're not quite sure why.
	Something to do with high intelligence and rationalising everything, or something to do with these studies where you are primed, although there's a lot of criticism in psychology of this priming thing, with ideas of being wealthy, and it reduces your desire to have children.
	And then when it's the rich that stop having children, the rich are more intelligent, and society goes into the decline.
	And that comes together with the questioning of religiousness.
	It's on the decline.
	The questioning of patriarchy and gender structures, all of these things, sexual licentiousness, all of these things all come together when the society goes into decline.
	Trust collapses, blah, blah, blah.
	And this has happened again and again and again.
	And it seems to me there's absolutely no reason why we wouldn't follow.
	It's just that if civilization is a catapult, we've been catapulted into space further.
	Well, either it won't be as far or it will be a more dramatic fall.
	My colleague Michael Woodley has argued in his new book that this kind of might solve the Fermi paradox.
	So this idea that we should be able to discover aliens because statistically there should be other civilizations in the universe.
	But the problem is they're so rare and when they happen, they're fleeting.
	They always will go through the same thing, reach a certain point and collapse down.
	And so we don't have any aliens or time travelers because a society is, civilizations never got far enough at the same time that another civilization has got far enough to be able able to contact each other.
	This is intergalactic pessimism.
	The galactic problem.
	I would also add another aspect to this is You know, Dugan has talked about these great ideologies of the 20th century, liberalism being the first one, and then communism, and then fascism as a kind of reaction against communism, and in its own certain way, a degree of defending liberalism.
	And I would just, you know, put capitalism along with liberalism.
	But these were all, you could say, part of a fossil fuel age.
	And they were an age in which every ideology offered a higher standing of living to those who adhered to it.
	There was no real traditionalist ideology that said, you know, vote for me and you'll be sent back into peasant drudgery.
	We're going to take away your television and your upward mobility, but give you the hard certitude of...
	Of Catholicism or whatever.
	All these ideologies that have actually worked have offered a higher standard of living, and all of that has been possible not simply because of the Industrial Revolution, although that certainly played a part, but because of the age of fossil fuels.
	And that is a limited age.
	And, you know, peak oil might be overdone, but...
	That doesn't mean that it is going to last forever.
	And I think someone like Greta Thunberg, as kind of ridiculous as she is and worthy of criticism as she is, she kind of is a kind of childlike Cassandra announcing a hard truth.
	And that is real.
	I don't know how the world...
	I don't know if...
	Humans, the current crop of humans, are mentally prepared for declining living standards or that dream of big money and having it all is just taken away from them.
	And all of that looks impossible.
	I think it would drive us mad.
	If anything, that will inspire violence.
	If we return to this idea of the suddenness of a collapse, so one thing that would happen is that it would come in the decline of civilization.
	We were in 1870 at whatever it was, 16 inventions per million of population per year.
	Now we're down to about four.
	And by the end of 100 years hence, we'll be back down to basically nil.
	So we'll be back down to one.
	So we'll be back down to where we were at 1100.
	We'll be in the Dark Ages on that measure.
	And what you would expect is that at some point, the health service will start to be undermined.
	It won't be able to sustain a health service.
	And when that happens, there will be a big collapse.
	Because we have a dysgenic population.
	So many people are congenitally ill.
	And they wouldn't...
	40% child mortality in 1800, 1% child mortality today.
	What does that mean?
	It means that 90% of the population...
	6 million was the population of Britain in 1800.
	Now it's over 60 million.
	90% of the population would die.
	90%.
	Once medicine starts to fall apart.
	And that would be something that would happen conceivably quite fast, relatively quickly, over a matter of a decade, perhaps.
	There would be this collapse once civilization has gone backwards so much that it couldn't sustain a complex medical system.
	You know what I'm saying?
	Oh, go ahead.
	Yeah, I was just going to say, you know what I find interesting though, is even like, on the left now and liberals, they all have this idea like everything's going to, you know, in 2050, sea levels rise, everything will be underwater, you know, we're all going to pay for our sins, the environment, whatever.
	But then on the right, there's also this idea that even if they'll reject climate change or whatever, they think there's going to be a huge collapse in the next 20 years.
	Maybe Ed can speak in this.
	It seems like anyone I talk to doesn't think civilization is going to make it past 2050.
	And I wonder, has there ever been a time in history where the popular religion was this apocalyptic collapse where everyone thinks...
	Yes, there have been many times in history where religion has been highly apocalyptic.
	What does that reflect?
	Is this like people's guilt at the nature of the system or is it just like the field of declining standards?
	I think people can look around and they can understand, they can sort of wisdom of crowds and they can kind of understand what's happening.
	And what religion tends to do is it tends to take that which is evolutionarily adaptive and kind of make it into the will of gods.
	The kind of religion that was adopted that became popular in the 1600s was Puritanism.
	And anti-witch hysteria as well, those two things.
	And those two things would presumably have been adaptive, and they would have been adaptive in a context in which there were too many people.
	So the witch hysteria is, B, there's strong group selection and lots of wars.
	C, living standards are collapsing because the population is too high.
	populations too high within countries and within Europe.
	So you get wars between European countries.
	Religious groups get selected for over non-religious groups because ethnocentric groups get selected for in that current And so, therefore, you get this apocalyptic kind of religion where the other people are absolutely evil and they have to be destroyed.
	Protestant v.
	Catholic or whatever it is put as in religious terms.
	But you have similar things, Hundred Years War, violent apocalyptic period of time, and the witches were basically poor people that were sponges off the society.
	Sort of nasty old people that nobody liked, undermined group coherence, and just weirdos with peculiar anti-patriarchal, and that's anti-religious ideas.
	So I would say there was a period like that then, and there was Civil War, and there have been other periods like it as well, around the time of the plague, of course, then, apocalyptic, whatever going on there.
	And you had similar things at the fall of Rome.
	You had the embracing of these mystery cults and all this sort of thing, and Christianity, which could be argued as the ultimate apocalyptic cult.
	So when things are in decline, this tends to happen.
	And even with Judaism, when you had the decline of Judah, you have...
	What's going on there?
	I actually think that there will be strong religious revivals and that the turn-of-the-century new atheism of Dawkins and company I think was actually kind of a head fake.
	I think that Christianity arose in the Age of Anxiety.
	Now, what Christianity became and how it evolved is something we can discuss, but yes, that period in the decline of Rome is known as the Age of Anxiety, and it unsurprisingly was ultimately dominated by an apocalyptic cult, which Christianity is fundamentally.
	And was, I think, primarily at that point.
	The end times were upon us.
	They were coming.
	We were going to see it.
	And I think the kind of, again, like early 2000s housing bubble era was the time of new atheism and moving away.
	Cultural factors like Jesus is King by Kanye West.
	I don't think this is just a PR move on his part, and I don't think this is just one album.
	I actually do think this is a major trend.
	And Christianity is kind of becoming what it ultimately is.
	You know, Christianity appealed to the dregs of the Roman Empire.
	It appealed to Jews.
	It appealed to women.
	It appealed to all sorts of rabble before it became a state regime.
	Can I take you up on something that's quite important?
	Sure.
	That's a bit of a myth, really, that it appealed to the dreads of the Roman Empire.
	To some extent it's true, but it also appealed to the middle class.
	Right.
	It was the same middle class virtue signaling that you see in the apocalyptic cult of extinction rebellion or an interrelated trends was also Christianity.
	It was as I said, the dregs of the Roman Empire.
	No, but you said this sort of work.
	You were implying it was the poor.
	No, it wasn't.
	I like the poor.
	As I said, the dregs of the Roman Empire became Christians.
	The middle class of their time.
	They had the names like Simon who is called Peter.
	This means that this is a mixed marriage of Greek and Hebrew.
	And so he was a fisherman.
	He was the manager of a fishing company.
	I mean, these are middle class people in the same way you get it now.
	Middle class people who aren't that rich.
	Maybe they're not upper class and they want to play for status.
	How?
	Through one of these kinds of...
	But look at Kanye.
	And I should probably do some writing on this or at least some thinking on it.
	But I listened to his album, Jesus is King, and I hated it, obviously.
	Not just on a musical level, but if you look at what he represents, he is upper class in contemporary America.
	I mean, for God's sake, these are, you know, Kim Kardashian can make $10 million by faking her wedding or whatever she did.
	She can make millions off of sex tape.
	I mean, she's the ultimate expression of postmodern capitalism.
	But they basically present themselves as broken.
	And needing this big other that's going to kind of subsume them and save them.
	They kind of accept the fact that they're in a broken world.
	And I think oftentimes the figure of Christianity is the fool.
	Christianity's heroes are not the heroes of other religions, like the good ones in which you it's your God is an expression of your power and your ability to dominate.
	Your God is an expression of your healing of your inner brokenness.
	And this mix.
	You know, I'm terrible, but I'm going to find some truth out there.
	I think actually is genuinely appealing to postmodern Americans.
	And so I guess my longer term prediction is in this age of anxiety, age of delitimization of existing institutions, of the existing order, this age of a chaotic breakdown.
	I think if anything can bring these people together, it is something like Christianity.
	But it's going to be a primitive Christianity.
	It's not going to be the Christianity that Trad Catholics love where they'll post images of kings and princes and castles on Facebook or whatever and talk about how this is the Christianity.
	It's going to be this real Christianity, the Christianity of its very origins.
	The only Christianity form that hasn't cucked, really, is orthodoxy.
	Right.
	I totally agree.
	I certainly have sympathies for that, but I don't think that's going to be the dominant form of Christianity.
	Also, there is this kind of fetishization of the East in Western culture.
	Even if you go back to ancient Rome, mystery cults and whatever, it's always from the East.
	And the wise men came from the East.
	And there's always been this.
	So, if it were to be a form of Christianity and Christian revival, then one suspects it would be something like that.
	I don't think it would be a word, Oxy, and I say that.
	I would love that.
	It's going to be global.
	Orthodox Christianity is the third Rome.
	It has national churches.
	It's not going to take...
	I think it's going to be global and individualistic, which is the ultimate...
	This is the innovation of Judeo-Christianity.
	Something like the New Age.
	A bit like the New Age, but I think Kanye nailed it, actually.
	Spengler talked about this, the increase in religiosity and the winter of civilization.
	That's interesting what you're saying about Kanye as well, because when I think about it, I don't recognize anything in the top 50 charts now, but it's full of these...
	Latino women that sing auto-tuned songs and shake their ass.
	But there is this growth of like...
	There's this weird trend of like...
	Do you know who Billie Eilish is?
	I know about her.
	I don't really...
	I've never listened to one of her albums.
	Yeah, there's this weird trend of like 17, 18-year-old singers that portray themselves as really authentic.
	And she gives interviews where she's like...
	Oh, I'm so depressed.
	What's your favourite colour?
	Oh, it's black.
	They're all so broken.
	You're 18 and you've been signed to a record deal since you were 16. You're from an upper middle class background.
	You grew up in a white suburb.
	What has you broken?
	It's weird.
	It seems to be appealing to the Zoomer generation.
	It is a weird thing.
	Another thing I thought was surprising was that this returned religiosity.
	A lot of people are turning to sort of trad-Catholicism, because it seems like trad-Catholicism sort of asks too much of people.
	I thought it would be much more kind of a New Age spirituality, where it's all about realising yourself, and it's this very bastardised, hyper-real version of Eastern traditions, where it's like positive thinking and feel-good or whatever.
	So I am surprised if it's taken form of Catholicism.
	I would be surprised.
	I'm not surprised that this happened a little fast.
	I think I think I think I think I think And it seems to be quite probable that,
	well, there's actually studies on this, that if you compel a boy to do girly-type things that he considers girly, he becomes anxious.
	And if you get a boy to play violent computer games, he does not become anxious at all.
	He's fine.
	Get a girl to do that, she becomes anxious.
	Get a girl to do that as a two-player thing, so she's competing with another girl, she becomes even more anxious.
	And this would be consistent with evolutionary differences in being male and female, that men are evolved to violence and competition and sort of high testosterone sort of things, and women are evolved to the opposite.
	And if you put women, and also because the effect is higher on boys, there's a degree to which women are evolved to deal with manly things in a way that isn't.
	true in the reverse.
	And that would be consistent with women being dumped by people, partners and polygamous marriages in which the man goes for the younger wife and the other women have to go off and kind of allo parent.
	But anyway, there's this issue where people are put in a situation where it's not evolved, and you could argue that...
	Upper middle class people are very much put in a situation, particularly girls, to which they're not evolved because there is this pressure, you've got to get a career, you've got to do all these kind of things.
	It's very unpatriarchal, really, whereas if you're working class, it's much more clear gender roles.
	We're not traditionalist in a lot of ways.
	OK, there's other things that are stressful, like illegitimacy and not having a father and other things that are there.
	But in terms of being close to how we're kind of evolved to live and instinctive and whatever, they're fine.
	So I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's high levels of depression.
	And also, as well as an optimum level of mental instability, of anxiety.
	So the higher up the social scale you go, the more anxious people are.
	Because it acts as a kind of motivator in education and in work and whatever, and so it predicts being middle class.
	So I'm not actually that shocked by that.
	It's also possible she was just abused by a music producer.
	Maybe both.
	Should we put a bookmark in this discussion?
	This was extremely meta.
	This is why I'm always saying we need a moderator, because whenever I'm the moderator, we just go off into la-la land, perhaps, as Ed would describe it.
	We're not firmly grounded.
	No, I think this is a very good discussion.
	Yeah.
	We didn't mention Brexit or Trump, but I think we really got at what's happening below the surface, which is much more important than what's happening above.
	Well, I mean, we could discuss something else at the end of the year.
	Oh, okay.
	Let's discuss something fun.
	We'll do a quick fun thing.
	What about abortion?
	Abortion on.
	I guess...
	We're celebrating the birth of Christ.
	We give predictions for the next decade.
	Oh, predictions for next decade.
	Okay.
	This is a very interesting one.
	Or reflect on what will the 2010s be remembered as?
	The decade of the dildo.
	Wait, what do you think the 2010s?
	Real quick, I have to interject.
	This isn't actually the end of the decade.
	We're back at the year 2000 all over again.
	The new decade begins in 2001.
	It's one, right?
	This is zero.
	This is the last year of the 2010s that we're entering.
	It's not the first year.
	This just drives me crazy.
	That being said, what do you think the...
	What do you think the 2010s will be remembered as, and what do you think the 2020s will have in store?
	Well, do you want to go first while I think about it?
	Okay, so I think if Turkey is right, then the 2020s will be a decade of unparalleled conflict and violence.
	So I'm looking forward to it, and I've got my Netflix subscription, and I'm looking forward to watching all kinds of documentaries.
	You don't need a Netflix subscription.
	You can just open up the window and observe the violence and chaos outside.
	That's the new Netflix.
	It's zero dollars per month.
	Not up my way.
	No, I'd have to go to Englewood with you again, or whatever that place was called, Englefield, to see some serious...
	Go and have a Church's Chicken.
	But you wouldn't let me do because you were both scared.
	But I had that lovely pie though, the bean pie.
	Well, we were adopted into Chicago black African Muslims.
	So when the Civil War breaks down, they'll protect us.
	They will.
	The Nation of Islam will protect us.
	I think we got on with them very well.
	And I impressed them all by scoring that basketball thing at the pub.
	Oh, yeah.
	So, you know, I got a lot of respect that day.
	But I think it's going to be a lot of...
	I think it's just going to get more and more...
	I mean, we're seeing it already, the over-extinction rebellion, people have had enough with Brexit, with the election in the UK, there is this polarisation, and I think it's just going to get worse.
	And you're seeing this movement in two directions.
	On the one hand, yes, the movement in the media and whatever, and the left and just insanity, you know, this woman that sacked recently.
	Just for tweets, biological, essentially.
	You can't change from being a male to a female or a female to a male.
	This woman with some German name, Forstatter or something.
	And J.K. Rowling then tweeted about it positively on her side, which was interesting.
	So people, I mean, it's been looked at that the possibility there might be a peak woke, that there might be...
	Even on the left, even the most delusional left-wing people will get to a point where they realise it's in their interests to stop advocating this nonsense and to persuade themselves to advocate other things.
	Now, that happened.
	I mean, that's happened before.
	Tony Blair, for God's sake, stood in 1983 on an election to leave the European Union to get rid of the nuclear deterrent, massive trade unionism, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then managed to persuade themselves over the pursuit of 10 years to believe in none of those things.
	It's perfectly possible for left-wing people.
	They've abandoned their economic insanity.
	All of them, or most of them anyway, people like Blair.
	So it's perfectly possible they could do so in terms of culture as well, if they regard it as in their interests.
	And they would.
	If right-wing values were to take over, they would, of course, abandon these things.
	So I think you're going to see this greater and greater split, identitarians and conservatives and whatever on the one hand.
	There'll be internal splits within them, of course.
	And nutcase leftists on the other, more and more extreme, and some kind of interesting reckoning would be...
	I would say this.
	In my own lifetime, there have been a few events that were actually recognized as such when they occurred, as turning points, you could say, as events that were far bigger than themselves.
	And then all of the news was effectively...
	In their wake.
	That even if we talked about this news item or this happening, it was ultimately about something else.
	And I've lived through a few of those.
	I would say that 2001, the Twin Tower attacks, which has now kind of faded into memory remarkably, was one of those.
	And the Iraq War certainly came in its wake.
	And the Iraq War was something where, you know...
	News would have come on the television or on your laptop or whatever, but it was ultimately about that at some level.
	This kind of age of the 2001 Iraq War W era was then passed over into the financial crash era.
	And this is something I think maybe even younger people maybe didn't quite experience, or maybe you did.
	But all news from about 2000...
	2008 through 2012 was more or less about finance and uncertainty and the end of the middle class dream, etc.
	By the time that petered out, we had the Trump era.
	And as we know, all news is about Trump.
	I do think that that is coming to an end.
	It just has to come to an end.
	So there's all these five to seven year long periods where there's one event that...
	Also, within our lifetimes, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism.
	No question.
	And then that heady idealism that came at the end of that.
	You know, in the 1990s, when I was coming of age, I had just entered college.
	I was graduating from high school.
	I mean, the kind of talk about literally everyone on Earth being a millionaire and just all problems will be solved.
	No more war.
	Why would you go to war?
	It doesn't make sense.
	And from out of that heady idealism, very similar to the period right before the first world war, uh, there was this Muslim in many ways, traditionalist reaction, this big no against the end of history.
	And, So I think we're due for a new turning point.
	And I think this is something that's just over the horizon that we can't quite grasp because we're not there.
	But I do think that there's going to be a new event that is much I certainly am not a Nostradamus.
	I can't tell you exactly what it's going to be, but a lot of the trends that I've talked about previously, the revival of Christianity and religion, the general fragmentation, the kind of I think all of that is going to play into it.
	But there is going to be an event in the coming two years that is going to change how we look at the world.
	It's going to change what is news and what we're talking about going forward.
	And that's going to happen pretty soon.
	Yeah, I mean...
	Yeah, I guess that's...
	The thing to predict a decade is there can always be one of these black swan events, as Nassim Taleb calls them, that you can't foresee that the probability is so small, but in hindsight, you try and sort of explain away and you can make sense of it with different factors.
	Yeah, yeah, like World War I is an example he uses.
	But if, you know, if the current sort of trends continue, like I suppose the 2010s were like the decade of the hyper-real, you know, with everyone having a smartphone, it was a real manifestation of some of these ideas.
	But now, like, going into this decade, like, in a sense, like, that social space online has taken on a reality sort of as real as the real world.
	I can see in the 2020s this fragmentation becoming really stark where, like, you know, it's kind of like people will become more individualistic sort of politically, but you'll see...
	Much like the Gen Xers would pay lip service to being radical individualists or whatever, but they'd all wear the same band t-shirts and they'd all support the same...
	Like Xers in Ireland and England, they'd all support the same soccer teams or whatever.
	So there's this kind of hyper-tribalism around things that they choose.
	I think you'll see that in the 2020s where you have these sort of social spaces, whether it's, you know, you're a gamer or, you know, whatever else people are into, buying bathwater or whatever.
	But there'll be these sort of, people will have this idea of sort of choosing their tribe I don't know if you're familiar with the video game Fallout where it's like this post-apocalyptic world and there's one village where everyone is worshipping an undetonated nuclear bomb and there's another village where everyone's an Elvis impersonator.
	I think these different spaces will become so sort of So self-referential that they almost won't be able to coherently communicate with each other.
	They love their own vocabularies and the idea of a collective social space will sort of disappear and just be given up to some dominant big other that no one really engages with anymore.
	This is the kind of atomisation that Zygmunt Bauman was talking about happening 25 years ago.
	I think that process is happening.
	What you would predict, and this stream is evidence of that, what you would predict is there is polarisation, there is a degree to which those different groupings would cohere into two fighting blocks, essentially.
	I certainly think politics would just become something for radicals as well, because it'll be another one of these spaces where, if it's your passion or your real interest, it'll be...
	The Spurge types, they'll be into it.
	It will become something for radicals in the sense that if society is polarised, then politics becomes more violent and more dangerous and you've got to be radical to want to be involved.
	Yeah, but also I think 99% of people will just like...
	Because people that are raised on the internet now, they don't have to pay attention to real-world events.
	You can choose what your interests are.
	the time when there was two TV channels in my own country for example you know everyone watched the current affairs show everyone watched news whatever so there was always some level of engagement but now you know
	Yeah, these silos of communities that That are actually quite large, but then totally disconnected from some kind of anything that could be called mainstream.
	We see that in the alt-right.
	That's what kind of the alt-right has become, in a way, are these kind of various silos.
	And it's kind of sad.
	I do think that Trump, just to bring it back to 2016, the formation of the alt-right kind of in a nutshell was that I
	mean, maybe it was good, maybe in hindsight.
	There were some bad things about it, but it was what it was.
	But I think even looking at where we are now going into the 2020 election, I can't imagine anything like that occurring.
	I think there's going to be an attempt to make it happen, but I don't think it will take.
	Yeah, it would have been very different if Trump lost the 2016 election because all that momentum from 2016 and the alt-right would have sort of carried forward because they still would have seen themselves as a vanguard.
	Whereas with Trump in power, it was, you know, I'll stick to the plan.
	A lot of people that were really interested in the 2016 election cycle just completely zoned out because they're like, well, we won, we have Trump in power.
	So he did have this strong anesthetic effect where so many people just zoned out, and especially boomers.
	It's like, you know, the boomers now are back defending, you know, the same policies that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would have carried out because it's Trump.
	So whereas, you know, if Hillary Clinton was in power during Charlottesville or, uh, you know, during the, during the silencing of, of people on the internet or during any of the policies that Trump has carried out, really, there would have been a massive, there would have been a further polarization, radicalization.
	Hillary granting corporations and billionaires tax cuts, that could have been amazing.
	And if you believe it...
	If you believe that book, Fire and Fury, about Trump, apparently Trump's plan was to lose the election and set up something resembling Fox News and take all these dissidents and take all this momentum and turn it into just a big anti-Hillary, anti-establishment thing for the next four years.
	That was his plan.
	I mean, I know it's controversial, but maybe in a lot of ways it would have been better off if Trump did lose.
	I don't think that's a controversial statement at all, at least from my perspective.
	I heard that Kim Jong Un got a job playing Father Christmas in a local pantomime.
	He fancied a career change.
	There was an Onion headline from a number of years ago, which was...
	Kim Jong-il agrees to total nuclear disarmament if he is allowed to play Batman in The Dark Knight Rises.
	But it was so funny because it's like, ah, that would actually probably work.
	During the Korean War, there was a few Americans that defected to North Korea.
	And then they got jobs in the North Korean film industry playing American bad guys.
	And then married Koreans, North Koreans.
	And we looked after for the rest of their lives.
	Even when there was famine, they always got their ration.
	They had a lovely time, I think.
	Sounds like a good gig.
	You can get it.
	All right, gents.
	This was a lot of fun.
	This is the first time Keith and I have spoken, so I hope it's not the last.
	And anyway, I wish you all a Merry Christmas.
	I love this time of year.
	I'm going to be doing a little skiing, taking it easy, being around the kids, and so on, and my fiancé.
	It's going to be a great time.
	But let's put our nose to the grindstone in 2020.
	That was a criticism towards me, Ed, because you know.
	Yes, yes.
	Ed is incredibly prolific.
	Life is to live.
	Get on with it.
	Do it.
	Go.
	I know.
	You're such an Anglo.
	Get up!
	Yeah, I don't sit around drinking Guinness all day.
	No.
	He'll just write a book in five days or something.
	When you're bringing in all them studies, it reminds me of that quote from Plato, you know, I'm trying to think, stop confusing me with facts.
	All right, gents.
	I'll talk to you soon.
	Thank you.

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