RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Conservative Anti-Capitalism?

May 8, 2021 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

01:29:16

Conservative Anti-Capitalism?

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	Hello, everyone.
	Good evening, at least where I am.
	Good morning, good night, good afternoon, wherever you are.
	We are live on Odyssey and on Twitter, and we are going to talk about conservatives discovering a critique of capitalism, or, in fact, that.
	And Mark Bromann and I were just talking about...
	This is probably a stream, so we decided to put one together.
	Anyway, hopefully this will be a joyful use of your time before you hate watch SNL and Elon Musk and the evil billionaire mastermind who's oppressing you.
	Mark, how are you doing?
	I'm doing well, yeah.
	Good.
	Even Elon Musk couldn't convince me to watch SNL.
	I don't think anything could convince me to watch SNL.
	It's just so abysmally unfunny.
	It is really unfunny, and it's tedious, and I don't know.
	Maybe I'm just getting older.
	I don't think it was always quite this bad.
	I think there's just a certain shrill, mid mid wit shrill quality that seems to infect like the age of polarization.
	Whereas like 30 years ago, you could actually make fun of people.
	It's related.
	It's certainly related to political correctness, and it's sort of increasing the fervor.
	You know what?
	To dilate a little bit on this, do you know one thing I noticed is that, you know, Comedy, famously, doesn't age well.
	And that has something to do with just the changing times and things that are relevant.
	It has something to do with just changing kind of mores, or if you want to call it political correctness, you can call it that.
	Things that were made 20 years ago are now shockingly racist, whereas they were funny in the 90s.
	You know what I'm talking about.
	But I think it also, comedy...
	There almost has to be a certain unified nation for comedy to be funny.
	You have to allow everyone to be in on the joke for it to be funny.
	And I think in hyperpolarization and just fragmentation of the United States, cultural fragmentation and then political extreme polarization, there's no coherent...
	public that is in on the joke and can laugh at it.
	And so you're kind of making fun of the other side and, I think that's how I would describe it.
	Perhaps I'm being overly theoretical, but that's why I would describe the fact that it's just simply not funny.
	Even if I were an urban liberal, I don't think I would actually find it funny.
	Because it's the kind of things you would hear from regular old urban liberals at a coffee shop.
	It's just tedious, shrill, political...
	Yeah, no, I would agree with that.
	I mean, and I think that probably it's also the sort of tone or ethos of the country has changed a lot since kind of the heyday of Saturday Night Live.
	And there was, you know, to your point, there was a greater sense of commonality.
	We had the three networks at one point, and we were all kind of sort of being indoctrinated by the same propaganda.
	And the Internet, yeah, the Internet hadn't really kind of allowed these other perspectives to emerge.
	But at the same time, too, things were, I mean, I think the Internet accelerated things on both sides.
	So it accelerated both liberalism and a kind of reactive conservatism and ultimately white nationalism.
	But I think that back at that time, when we were less of a divided country, and I think that that's not just a meme.
	I think that we were, at some point, less of a divided country.
	Yeah, humor was more accessible to everyone.
	So I think that that's a good point.
	We as a nation could make fun of George Herbert Walker Bush or Dukakis.
	We as a nation could do that.
	Whereas now, it's like, if you support Donald Trump, then you might as well be living in the Handmaid's Tale.
	You are an evil religious fascist.
	And so we can't be in on the joke anymore.
	It has to be one-sided.
	And I think some of the few times that SNL has been somewhat funny is when they kind of make fun of someone not being politically correct yet, like being five years behind.
	I actually saw one, I think, on YouTube where there was a mob boss.
	That had been, if I remember correctly, he was like a mob boss, but he had been in prison for a decade or something.
	And he was like back and he was like, all right, I'm reestablishing myself on the throne.
	And then he was confronted with...
	Like, members of his mob, violent mob gang who were, like, transsexual.
	So it was actually kind of funny because they were transsexual or gay or whatever, or they needed a mental health day or whatever.
	But then they were also talking about, like, knocking people off, you know, like, selling drugs.
	It was kind of funny.
	But the whole joke was that, like, oh, he's been away for 10 years, so he's not up to date with political correctness.
	Like, that was the joke.
	That can be marginally funny, but I think it's telling of why humor has died.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Yeah, and also because of the polarization, everyone is on edge and everyone is offended, right?
	I mean, I guess these are sort of obvious points that people have made, but yeah, as a consequence, and this is people...
	People in the comedy industry talk about this as well, is that humor is kind of being squashed because of this political correctness.
	Yeah, I mean, I guess it's sort of a tragedy in a way, but on the other hand, I mean, life goes on.
	Things change, and things have changed in our lifetime, and will continue to change.
	And things have to change, because they weren't sort of healthy before, right?
	And in fact, it was kind of...
	When we had these sort of more finite media sources and everyone was watching the three networks, the indoctrination was stronger.
	And we were headed in the same direction, ultimately.
	But we were kind of headed on a slower boat, effectively.
	Whereas the Internet has kind of accelerated our kind of speed toward this sort of ultimate kind of leftist demise.
	I mean, that's one way of articulating it.
	So I think the internet has been responsible for accelerating degeneration and decline, certainly.
	But it also has, you know, not to use all the cliches of the alt-right, but it's also sort of awoken a lot of people to kind of these dangers because of that sudden rapid speed, right?
	We use this metaphor of the frog and the...
	In the boiling water.
	Yeah.
	And that was more the case.
	That was more the case back when legacy media ruled the day, right?
	Now it's less the case.
	Now, we, of course, are in very imperfect conditions now.
	But at least there is some portion of us that are both kind of aware of the dangers that face civilization and also are somewhat intelligent and competent, right?
	Yeah.
	So, ultimately, this acceleration is a good thing.
	Right?
	Well, whether it's good or bad, it's happening.
	It's this wave that's coming into shore.
	And you can go yell at the wave, or you can go, maybe, I don't know, throw sand at the wave or something, but the wave's going to come.
	And so, this is tide of history.
	It's coming to shore.
	And the question is, can you surf the wave?
	Or not.
	One thing I would also just mention, we're of course off topic, but that's fine, is that I have a little bit of nostalgia for the 2016 alt-right.
	Because all of these things are now even more intense now, but they were definitely present in 2015 and 2016.
	And I think there actually was something pretty great.
	About the alt-right just kind of bringing back humor, although in this totally outlandish, ridiculous, indefensible, often scatological form.
	But there was something kind of funny about that.
	I remember I was just browsing through things a couple of weeks ago, and I saw this Dave Rubin video from 2016 where he was actually praising the alt-right.
	He was like, well, I don't like the gas chamber memes, and they're a little too edgy for me, but they're pretty funny guys.
	And I think maybe...
	That impossibility of humor, the alt-right was trying to smash through that with outrageousness.
	And I would say that the alt-right in general has gotten a lot less funny.
	It's not that funny anymore.
	It's over.
	The joke's old.
	You can't tell it twice, certainly not thrice.
	And I think maybe that's kind of telling as well about where we are.
	But there was something to that.
	Just totally insane 2016 humor.
	I kind of miss it in a way.
	Yeah, and I think it might have been related to...
	It certainly was related to the attitude and the sense of possible victory or even a kind of delusional sense of imminent victory, right?
	Which puts people in a good mood and puts them in good humor, as it were.
	So I mean, I think that that was part of the reason that we found those jokes funny, which looking at the jokes kind of more objectively, maybe they weren't really that funny to get with No, they make you cringe when you see them again, but regardless.
	Okay, first off, let me just do this.
	If you want to ask a super chat, you can do so via Entropy.
	So it's entropystream.live.
	Radix Live, capital R, capital L, Radix Live.
	And we will read your Super Chats on air no matter how insanely 2015 they are.
	I'll just leave that up for a little bit.
	So what we're going to talk about is this interesting trend that of conservatives...
	I took note of a Lauren Southern video, which I sent to you, which came out five days ago or so.
	With all due respect to Lauren, whenever Lauren Southern is picking up on a meme, you know the lemon has already been squeezed.
	It's already losing something.
	Regardless, she said some fairly interesting things, but I think it's worthwhile to kind of look at this issue more broadly, look at why the right...
	particularly the American right, but I think this certainly holds in Europe as well, especially Britain, aligned itself securely with capitalism, at least post-war.
	When we go before 1945, you start to find different strains.
	You find hyper-libertarianism in the United States and what Murray Rothbard somewhat inaccurately called the old right.
	You'll also find the eugenics movement, Madison Grant, and so on.
	You can find fascism.
	You can find all these sorts of things, but I want to focus on Post-1945, and in America, particularly the Buckleyite movement.
	And that was, from the very beginning, aligned with capitalism.
	It was also aligned with a big government to an extent.
	I mean, Buckley somewhat infamously wrote in an article for the Catholic Commonweal or something, I believe, which is, we need to accept big government.
	Totalitarian government for the duration.
	He said something like that.
	Because the Soviets are doing it too, in a kind of Machiavellian way, you have to be just as evil, if not eviler, than your adversary.
	So it accepted the Cold War.
	It accepted, to some degree, the kind of security apparatus that would have to be built alongside the Cold War.
	You could call that the Deep State, if you want.
	But it also was firmly aligned with capitalism.
	And this was known as fusionism.
	I think that term was coined by Frank Meyer, who's probably not very well known anymore.
	But you can see this throughout.
	Russell Kirk might have been a little more mystical than the others, but he was right in that.
	Certainly Buckley was.
	This became a kind of ideology in some utterances of Margaret Thatcher with pronouncements like, there is no society, there are only individuals and families, and so on.
	That was a bit much, but I think that kind of logic actually ruled the right at large to a very large extent.
	They were accommodating to the welfare state.
	They never actually rolled back the welfare state in any country.
	You have certain interesting instances with, say, Margaret Thatcher in Britain or Ronald Reagan.
	But the growth of government might have slowed, arguably, maybe a little bit.
	But that was continuing to go on.
	But there was this kind of ideological or emotional attachment with capitalism, big corporations, etc.
	And I think there was a lot of good reason for that.
	First off, you had all of these marvelous inventions that were coming online.
	This is when car culture entered the world, etc.
	After the destruction of Germany in 1945, America was the only game in town to a large extent.
	The idea that you would go against what is clearly improving the lives of millions of people would be odd from the right wing.
	The right wing is about the status quo.
	It's also about hierarchy.
	A certain new hierarchy was developing that isn't about land or titles or military prowess, but is about...
	And I think it would be odd for the right to really critique that in a way.
	That would be kind of anti-right.
	And I think it still is, actually, to a large degree.
	And I think this started to change.
	Really, not that you couldn't find the occasional oddball who was a...
	Clearly a right winger, but someone who would critique capitalism and kind of sound like the left and quote, you know, provingly quote the left.
	But I think this became a kind of popular phenomenon really with Trump.
	And whether Trump himself caused it or whether he was a kind of expression of it remains to be seen.
	But I think that's when it became new because Trump was an odd president.
	And if you...
	It seems weird to even say that, but he was something new.
	And if you look back at his 2015 coming down the golden elevator at Trump Tower, it's most famous for his discussion of the wall and, you know, we're losing at the border.
	They're laughing at us in Mexico City.
	But there was a lot of, you could say, kind of 80s and 90s national liberalism that was thrown in there.
	It was a lot about The Japanese are killing us.
	The Chinese are killing us.
	All the manufacturing is going overseas.
	And then Trump himself and many of his various utterances had said things like, well, you know, I'm a conservative on most things, but I'm pro-life and I support national health care.
	And he said at some point, we're not just going to leave people in the streets.
	So he was a different type of president.
	And I think a lot of conservatives have come in his wake and they've kind of picked up on that.
	They've done a lot of complaining, and I'm thinking of Tucker Carlson most prominently, a lot of complaining about the excesses of global capitalism.
	Two things.
	What they actually mean, what they are actually complaining about is extremely ambiguous, and then what they would replace it with is also...
	Very ambiguous.
	And the way I would think about it is this way.
	What is the problem with capitalism?
	Is it capitalism's success or is it capitalism's failure?
	And I think this is actually a really important thing to define.
	Are we now mad that our industry has been hollowed out and that the Midwest is...
	Is now truly the Rust Belt.
	And we aren't achieving that kind of universal middle-class lifestyle that many people thought we could achieve in mid-century, really mid-century going into the 21st century.
	Is it that it's failing and we need to kind of help it out?
	Or is the critique that capitalism is in a way all too successful?
	The opposite of immiseration, that by giving you too many luxuries, that it leads to individualism, sexual perversion and degeneracy, just the hollowing out of culture, commercialization, etc.
	They don't really say that.
	They don't define which one it is.
	Maybe it's both to a certain extent, but...
	The fact that they're not able, apparently, to define it kind of makes their critique rather hollow.
	And I think it is actually entirely hollow.
	I haven't heard anything.
	I mean, Lauren Southern or Tucker or any of these other people, I haven't really heard anything that struck me as an important critique of capitalism.
	And just putting forth welfare socialism as a...
	I think is also equally naive or blind in the sense that welfare socialism is a derivative of capitalism.
	The welfare state can smooth out the edges of capitalism, help you if you're unemployed, and so on.
	The welfare socialism does nothing.
	In terms of reducing the dominance of these big corporations, reducing the commercialization of all aspects of life, it does nothing in terms of these really serious demographic issues that we're facing, life expectancy, birth rates, and so on.
	It is entirely derived from capitalism.
	It just kind of...
	Smooths out the edges.
	And the notion that all these things would be fine with UBI or more welfare or something, I think is entirely naive.
	And it's just, I mean, I'll start us out on a kind of polemical note.
	I find the so-called conservative critique of capitalism to amount to little more than whining.
	And it's hollow whining.
	Now, that doesn't mean that a real critique isn't necessary or can't be made.
	But you need to first recognize that when you start complaining about, say, you know, this family can't afford a big screen TV anymore.
	You're kind of within the chamber of capitalism.
	You're not really critiquing capitalism.
	You're basically saying we need some more welfare to smooth out this capitalism.
	In terms of whether we need to support the family or something, keep in mind, birth rates across all ethnicities and across all income levels are declining.
	So this notion that they just need a little more money and then we're going to have all these kids or whatever just does not hold.
	The notion that they would be more trad or religious if they had more welfare or something simply does not hold.
	None of this stuff holds.
	And so I'm kind of left with the fact that it is vague whining on the part of conservatives.
	Is an actual critique necessary?
	Of course it is.
	But an actual critique really would amount to a proposition.
	You are demonstrating why this phenomenon is occurring because of a larger system.
	And also you're proposing an alternative, or at the very least you can make predictions.
	And all of that's lacking in the kind of Tucker...
	Lauren's Southern-style critique of capitalism.
	I find it wanting.
	Do you have anything to add there?
	Did I light a fire in some way, Mark?
	Well, I did watch that video.
	I actually think Lauren's kind of cool.
	I don't mind Lauren so much.
	I agree.
	I obviously disagree with her politically, and she might be thinking more, or ostensibly thinking more strategically than us, which I don't think that ultimately works in terms of being more implicit as opposed to...
	more explicit, at least in this kind of political realm that we're in.
	So, but I don't know if that's the best of the alt light in a, and she has in a way, no competition.
	I would say that I despise every other member of the alt light.
	Yeah, and I probably agree with that.
	I mean, I can't, you know, maybe there's some exception to that, but I probably don't know who they are.
	Yeah, so my critique of her argument is not a critique of her, which I think that she seems like actually a kind of decent person.
	But what I would say is the following is, I think that she brought up this idea of, you know, essentially she was getting to this idea that there's a kind of a lack of spiritualism or a lack of higher meaning in people's lives.
	And implicit to that, I think, I think that she's probably a Christian.
	And maybe that's a known fact.
	It's just not known by me.
	So implicit to that is the idea that what we're lacking ultimately is Christianity, right?
	The difficulty there, and on some level, I do agree.
	I think that the problem is that we're, you know, contrasting communism with capitalism or socialism with capitalism is contrasting these sort of caducean snakes, as it were.
	Ultimately, we're dealing with materialism.
	And by materialism, I guess you sort of have to be specific with the term.
	Something distinct from like flesh and race, which you could class as material.
	Right.
	We're talking specifically about wealth and money and who gets to possess wealth.
	And who gets to possess money and ultimately the power that's derived from that.
	into race, effectively.
	And, you know, and that's where...
	I think it's bigger than...
	I mean, I agree that there...
	There's a kind of nostalgia or naivete of like, if capitalism hadn't gone through this town or something like that, then they would all be kind of happy Christians dancing around the maypole or something.
	I agree that that's fairly naive.
	And it's kind of weird in a way to...
	I want there to be greater material success so that people will be more spiritual, although there probably are some connections there.
	But yeah, I mean, the way I would describe it is that none of these, I mean, capitalism, it's obviously a huge term, but it is a massive system of wealth accumulation.
	The accumulation of money through money and the use of this vast wealth accumulation to increase production dramatically.
	I mean, let's use that as a somewhat, you know, some kind of definition of capitalism.
	But it's obviously bigger than that.
	Capitalism, and I think this is what these people are ultimately trying to get at, it is the, you know, like totalizing system where all of life seems to And so even religion itself would function within that capitalist matrix as maybe a new lifestyle option that you use 2% of your income to pay for through charitable donations and
	you get a tax break.
	Everything is within that matrix.
	And I would say that, I mean, that is...
	True.
	None of these people are really offering a kind of radical way out of that matrix because I think at this point, there really is no escape from capitalism.
	And I think that has a lot to do with just the immense power that...
	These corporations hold that this just immense wealth complex of just trillions of dollars in debt and derivatives just flowing around the planet endlessly.
	But I think it actually is spiritual in many ways.
	And I don't think that this whole process could have been built on top of anything else but a spiritual basis.
	In the sense that the spirituality of capitalism is to be happy.
	And thus, whenever I hear people critique capitalism for it doesn't make you happy enough, I think they're ultimately kind of trapped within that cage.
	Capitalism as a theory of man, as a kind of all-encompassing system, is based on your desire to accumulate Wealth and pleasure, and that being the dominant mode of why you are on this planet.
	And at this point, and that would go for, I would actually say the same thing, that's kind of like a crude description of America, but I would say the same thing about the Soviet Union as well.
	True socialism, at least to some extent, that basically had the same type of ontology as capitalism.
	I don't think in 2021 there is really any way of escaping this.
	In many ways, because other class structures, whether it's the peasantry or nobility, etc., and even the bourgeoisie of yore, have all been...
	What's the right word?
	Have all been squashed together.
	The class structure has evaporated.
	And there basically is one class structure.
	Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't radical inequality in the world.
	I mean, the difference between Elon Musk and some guy struggling to sell drugs and feed himself on the streets of Chicago, obviously huge.
	Wealth differences.
	But in terms of a basic, who is that person?
	What is he doing on this planet?
	What are his motives?
	How does he gain value?
	There's really no difference.
	We are increasingly entering a global, totalitarian, classless society, you could say.
	And how we got there is an interesting question.
	How we can get out of that is a very...
	Intriguing question that seems impossible to answer.
	But I think we just need to fully recognize that, that all of these critiques of capitalism are all within capitalism.
	They're basically...
	The Tucker critique is like, we're not paying truckers enough or something like that.
	We need UBI so that people can afford their Netflix subscription.
	That's all it is.
	It's a kind of endless loop of...
	Capitalists critiquing some of the excesses or inefficiencies, perhaps, or just ravages of capitalism.
	But there's not any real attempt to get out of it because I think some real attempt to get out of capitalism would have to entail a new theory of the world and a new theory of who humans are and what we're meant to do on this earth.
	Yeah, no, a good monologue.
	So, you know, the trolls on the internet won't pat us on the back, so we've got to do it ourselves, right?
	Yes.
	But, yeah, no, I mean, I would say that, geez, my train of thought, I was making a stupid joke and my train of thought kind of derailed.
	We'll do a super chat.
	Also, I'm going to go run and just read a paragraph.
	I was reading this cool essay last night.
	Okay.
	Shulgi Shulgi for 50. Whoa, thank you.
	Hi, Richard and Mark.
	Is the cattle and cowboy thesis refuted by China, Cuba, the DPRK, Venezuela, Iran, etc.?
	These countries have populist leaders who rely on mass mobilizing the populace.
	Keep up the great work.
	I'm a big fan of both of you.
	Hail Apollo.
	Nice.
	Why don't you take that?
	I'm going to grab something real quick.
	Is the cowboy and cattle theory questioned by some of those notorious rogue regimes?
	Wait, wait.
	Repeat the question.
	I thought you were going to answer that.
	I'm sorry.
	I get distracted, please.
	Hi, Richard and Mark.
	Is the cattle and cowboy thesis refuted by China, Cuba, the DPRK, Venezuela, Iran, etc.?
	Because these countries have populist leaders who rely on mass mobilizing the populace.
	I'm not familiar with the thesis, so I can't really answer the question.
	Well, for there to be cowboys, you need cattle.
	And in a way, for there to be cattle, you need cowboys.
	There's going to be a kind of certain elite segment that is, you know, wrestling all the cattle.
	I presume this is what he's meaning.
	You can send a free super chat or send me something on Twitter if you mean something else.
	So are any of those rogue regimes like Iran or China, are they actually getting away from that through a kind of authoritarian populism?
	Oh, well, yeah.
	I don't know.
	I think the problem is that they ultimately...
	They don't have a ton of power geopolitically, so that they are hamstrung by the sort of larger, you know, political world, which is dominated by America and the people that dominate America.
	So I think that they're ultimately, to the extent that they're getting away from it, they're getting away from it in a kind of unmeaningful way, because they are these sort of isolated states in the world that are effectively powerless, right?
	And declining in their own way as well.
	Well, not China, but yeah.
	But yeah, I think certainly North Korea that, yeah.
	Well, China, yeah.
	But I think that China, I'm not even sure if that's ultimately the case.
	I think that China is kind of better integrated into the world than people think, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, so I don't think that they are.
	So I think that that is a kind of misconception about China.
	I mean, China is very different from the West.
	There's no question about it.
	But it also interacts.
	In a capitalistic manner, in a highly capitalistic manner with the rest of the world.
	In some ways, it's highly integrated, but it also does have its own autonomy.
	Is that based entirely on a kind of authoritarianism that makes it distinct from the West?
	I think it also has to do with the kind of ethnic and racial characteristics of the Chinese themselves.
	I mean, I guess you could say that they are more authoritarian as an ethnic group, as it were.
	And I don't think that the modern world has really kind of changed them in any fundamental way, but they're just kind of adapting to, and not even adapting in a meaningful way, they're temporarily adapting to sort of current conditions, as it were.
	But, you know, if the West, the trajectory now is that Western civilization will kind of decline into a third world and become irrelevant in the world scene, if that trajectory continues, China will sort of kind of go back,
	will kind of remain the same on one level, but kind of just sort of return to a more dormant state where there are less kind of capitalistic opportunities in the world that are ultimately generated by the West, right?
	Yeah.
	I'm dubious about Chinese global hegemony idea.
	I simply don't know if they're able to get beyond the Chimerica relationship.
	Interesting things that they've been doing that are moving away from the planetary dollar system.
	They're actually buying less U.S. debt from what I understand.
	There was this Chimerica relationship where it's like the Chinese buy consumer debt and then Americans with their credit card purchase Chinese goods in Walmart.
	I think they are moving away from that.
	Whether the Chinese are able to build a world system is a question that's yet to be answered.
	And I don't know if they have that type of imperial will to be big daddy as opposed to little brother to the West.
	Yeah, I agree with that.
	They've struggled to have a hegemony for Vietnam.
	The idea that they're going to take the planet or take America or something, I just find this a little bit dubious.
	Not that it can't be done, and maybe there's something really crucial that I'm simply not seeing.
	Well, their plan would be to outlast the West, as it were, right?
	So that would be their strategy.
	But I don't think that they're going to overtake us in any sort of aggressive way, neither militarily or economically, really, ultimately.
	I think that the West has always been the leader in that relationship.
	Yeah.
	Let me talk about a few things.
	These are some ideas that I've had in terms of a conservative critique of capitalism and why it's currently wanting and maybe how we could get to a real right-wing critique of capitalism.
	That is fruitful.
	And actually, I'm going to say things here that are going to be extremely shocking and elitist, so buckle up.
	So let me start off this way.
	Every nation or system has a kind of mythos.
	And for America, for a very long time, it was The American Dream.
	What is that song from Miss Saigon?
	What's that I smell in the air?
	The American Dream.
	Sweet as a chocolate eclair.
	The American Dream.
	I don't know that one.
	I'd sing the other part if I did.
	Okay.
	But what is the American dream?
	I think it can mean a lot of different things.
	I think it probably had a certain essence in more of a frontier society, in which it was about expanding to kind of an open, endless, seemingly, continent.
	And kind of almost going down levels in civilization, I think there was a certain kind of American dream.
	It was very interesting, very uniquely American, and also selected for a really rough type, an American type that was tougher and more ruthless, even.
	Individualistic to some extent.
	But also hyperbonded with his family and community in a battle against the wilderness and in some ways against foreign races and other things.
	I think if the American dream has any essence now, it's basically as upward mobility.
	And you hear all these stories.
	You'll hear these stories on television and State of the Union addresses by the president, etc.
	And it's like...
	You know, my grandpappy was a coal miner and he just always hoped that one day his kid would go to college.
	Or, you know, I'm the child of immigrants from Vietnam and I'm a doctor now.
	Or, you know, I was working as a janitor up until I was 40 years old and then I just got my life together and now I own the janitor company.
	And there are real stories like that.
	There's a lot of reality.
	But the common thread is upward mobility.
	It's not downward mobility.
	Because I hate to tell you, there's some other examples of people who, I was born in a trailer park, and I died in a trailer park, and my children live in a trailer park.
	There are also some upward mobility of, I lived in a middle-class suburb, and now I can't pay rent, and I'm on drugs.
	There are a lot of those stories that they don't tell.
	But the story that is told is upward mobility.
	What are some of the implications to upward mobility?
	And if I could be so provocative, why might we want to start to adopt downward mobility?
	Because in a good way.
	So there's this great series of books, Farewell to Alms and The Sun Also Rises by Gregory Clark.
	He does these Hemingway-themed titles.
	For whom the bell curve tolls should probably be next.
	And what he talked about was this downward mobility in societies that preexisted the Industrial Revolution.
	And so what he meant by that is that the rich, the most successful, the most high-born, and the most intelligent were having by far and away the most children.
	And indeed, The peasants were getting screwed and were not having children.
	The noble kind of had prima nocta rights, you could say, over everyone.
	First-night privileges.
	He was having the children.
	His line was expanding.
	And what that type of situation led to was downward mobility.
	But what does that mean?
	That sounds bad.
	What does it actually mean?
	Well, it means that if you're the second or third son in a noble line, or wealthy line, or just an intelligent, successful line, you might very well have to go be a kind of yeoman farmer, gentleman farmer.
	You might even go into the city and be a shopkeeper and so on.
	But what happened was a kind of genetic replacement.
	Slow but steady over the centuries of high-born people replacing low-born people in those professions.
	And it was downward mobility.
	And so what this ultimately means, because all good things come from on high, it means that good, intelligent, good-looking, put-together people begin replacing the criminal element, the low IQ, you know, We're actually replaced in society, and we all became more noble as an organism.
	And everyone loves the idea of upward mobility, but isn't it maybe a bit horrifying to imagine that...
	The sons of coal mining workers are doctors.
	Is that really a good thing?
	Or would you rather hear that your doctor is the son of a noble line, a noble family?
	I would much rather hear the latter, although I don't quite buy into any of these myths.
	And I think there's on another level...
	There's a kind of inherent problem with upward mobility in the sense that you are going to kind of run up against a brick wall of technological innovation and intelligence in the sense that one of the things that seems to be assumed or implied by upward mobility is that fewer and fewer people are going to be You know, coal miners.
	Certainly fewer and fewer people in the United States are farmers.
	Farming is industrialized to a magnificent degree so that you don't need all of these small landholders.
	And so farming, now they make up a small single-digit percentage of the population, farmers.
	They used to make up a huge percentage of the population, probably closer to 50. It's now five or less than, probably less than five.
	And so we kind of think of these ideas of replacing some of these older occupations and kind of everyone moving into these higher levels of postmodern, post-industrial information work.
	Well, at some point, that's going to hit a dead end.
	it's going to hit a wall in two ways.
	First off, the degree to which we can continue to kind of, you know, Enter the outer realm of information manipulation is limited at some level.
	We can't just continually get away from the root aspects of an economy like farming and industrial production, etc., in the major professions.
	But also, you hit a brick wall in terms of intelligence and the sense of this learn-to-code meme.
	I think everyone, including probably most liberals, just cringe or laugh at the learn-to-code meme.
	Not everyone is going to make a successful iPhone app.
	Not everyone, to be frank, can handle that kind of mathematical grammar that you would need to code a computer program.
	It is ridiculous to expect that from most of the population.
	And so we seem to be kind of hitting this wall We've touched on the outer limits of the post-industrial economy.
	Actual innovations and inventions are declining.
	We've also hit the outer limits of intelligence.
	All of these things kind of lead towards a UBI conception.
	UBI, by no means, is a critique of capitalism, or socialism is that word meant something in the days of the Soviet Union.
	It's not.
	It's a way of softening the rough edges of capitalism.
	It is basically saying we are producing unbelievable amounts of wealth through these digital monopolies like Google or Amazon or Apple, even though...
	Amazon and Apple have physical products, of course.
	You get the point.
	The digital age leads to this massive wealth centralization and so on.
	And we need to just soften that out and help out the people who won't ever be coders and who are probably born not to be coders.
	Let's be frank here.
	So I think that's where we're headed.
	I think UBI is here to stay.
	I think we're going to have UBI actually well within our lifetimes.
	But I would suggest this, that if we are to form a kind of conservative critique of capitalism, if you want to call it that, we have to think of it in terms of downward mobility.
	And we have to think of it, dare I say it, as the great replacement.
	That is, we will replace you.
	High-born, good-looking, intelligent people are going to move downward on the social stratum and begin creating a more noble race.
	And we've done this experiment after the Industrial Revolution of upward mobility.
	And look where it's led us.
	There you go.
	Well, that's optimistic.
	That's optimistic.
	We can do it.
	We've done it before.
	Yeah, I think it will require some conscious direction, though.
	I don't think it's something that will just happen.
	I agree.
	That's why I'm talking about it explicitly.
	We need to fucking do it.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And I think relating back to Lauren Southern's point that there's a spiritualism that's absent, one of the great deficiencies of Christianity, at least certainly as it manifests in the modern world, and also to an extent as it's manifested historically,
	is that, though I guess especially in the modern world, is this idea that there is a kind of separation between the state and the church, between The cosmos and the corporal world versus the spiritual world.
	And that Christians are not really supposed to be kind of involved ultimately in the cosmos.
	Their destiny is in the hereafter.
	That's kind of the orientation of their energies.
	So I think that part of the problem lies with the way that we sort of kind of connect these threads and we solve this problem.
	Is through having religion that is a kind of state-based religion.
	So the state takes control and starts giving man a sort of higher destiny or higher mission, which he lacks now, right?
	And now we are concerned with materialism using that sense.
	As referring to wealth, especially.
	We are, because that's all there is.
	There is no kind of purpose that's been given to us by the society, aside from this kind of bacchanal direction that's given to us through Hollywood.
	And everything is ultimately materialist in that wealth sense of the word, whether it's, you know, it's all about kind of dividing up the pie, as it were.
	So I think that that is the kind of missing component.
	And what you're describing, I think, can occur, but I think it has to occur through the assertion of power, through people cohering and working toward a goal and toward a direction.
	It's not just going to occur on its own, is what I would argue.
	No.
	Oh, please.
	Well, what I describe might occur on its own in a kind of collapse-like situation.
	I mean, this is something that Ed Dutton is talking a lot about, and I think he would agree with a lot of what I just said.
	I mean, we seem to have squeezed the lemon until the pipsqueak.
	At this point, in terms of debt finance consumption, debt finance government, debt finance everything.
	We're just at this point where we're getting less and less GDP output out of more and more debt.
	And this just kind of can't go on.
	And are people, due to just degeneration, are people kind of not intelligent enough to run this thing?
	I think these are real questions.
	I do think that there would be a cleansing purge, as it were, with a collapse scenario that resembled the Bronze Age collapse or the collapse of the Roman Empire, etc.
	And that some of the downward mobility...
	A lot of the downward mobility that I was talking about would naturally occur that way through the reinstitution of Darwinian selection, basically.
	I think that might very well happen, but I do agree with you that if we want to avoid these cycles of growth, degeneration, collapse, growth, degeneration, collapse, then there has to be A spiritual center that is connected, A, with the here and now, but also with the state.
	That is the body, the strong arm of the sword of any people or race.
	And that just disconnecting those things, I think, was really an original sin, as it were, within the American system.
	And you can see this occurring across the Western world as well.
	But that lack of a connection of a spiritual impulse and the state, which is the way of protecting the population, I think that we can't avoid the cycle of collapse until we reintegrate church and state.
	Yeah.
	No, you know, the only thing I would say is that I think it is the case that the strong will go on, right?
	So I think that that is true.
	Who the strong are becomes the question.
	I think the strong, you know, historically, certainly we see that Jews, for example, have been strong.
	And I think that they will remain strong.
	You know, I mean, I think that they will end up kind of adapting in a way, in ways that they've adapted in the past.
	I argue that they will become post-Jews, right?
	So, in other words, I think it's possible that the cult of Judaism will become so unpopular at some point that it will be abandoned and something else will kind of be developed in its stead that more or less resembles it.
	But that's just a theory.
	But I think that they are people that show resilience in conditions like this.
	Some of these noble families are...
	I mean, I think that...
	Won't.
	I agree.
	Yeah.
	And really, to kind of speak frankly here, Aryans as a race, generally the tendency in this sort of...
	In the kind of civilizational process of both founding and settling civilizations and developing civilizations, we, in a way, are the people.
	We become the civilization.
	We are the people.
	And what you see in the decline of civilizations is sort of the degeneration of this Aryan gene, typically, right?
	We see that in India, for example.
	And I would argue we see that all throughout the Middle East, for example.
	Those were formerly, you know, whether they were speaking a Semitic language or they were speaking an Indo-European language, they were whiter people, right?
	I mean, those were kind of these powerful, potent civilizations, right?
	And so maybe I have less optimism.
	Now, I think that ultimately this sort of Aryan founding thesis, I think there is a kind of like, we see on a kind of macro level, we see white flight, right?
	So in other words, we see a racial migration away from these civilized or urbanized centers that start to become non-white effectively through, you know, as part of a kind of urbanization process.
	And you see...
	Whites moving west into Europe, for example, you know, into the Mediterranean and into Europe.
	So, you know, that is a problem.
	And I think that really, the question of religion becomes a question of maintaining these civilizations and expanding and developing these civilizations.
	Religion in the way that you and I understand the term religion.
	But I do agree with you to the extent that I think that the strong will survive, right?
	So the most noble of us will survive.
	I agree with that, certainly.
	But I think that the white race itself will suffer demographic loss in the short term, because if we can't hold and control civilization and whether implicitly or explicitly impose a racial criteria,
	You know, as our founders did effectively for a while, even though they were, you know, our American founders did for a while, even though that they were Christians, and that is kind of against ultimately a Christian creed, then, you know, civilization falls.
	It declines.
	So it's not, you know, and we would obviously want to avoid becoming a diaspora.
	We would want to live in civilizations.
	Where we had a genetic similarity to the peasants or the people that were not necessarily high-born, right?
	So I think that there are big problems that we have to deal with.
	Now, I think what you're saying, and I like that you are taking a kind of optimistic note, so I'm not being...
	I think many people hear what I just said and describe it not as optimism, but as entirely sinister.
	Oh, like elitist.
	Yeah, well...
	Downward mobility is elitism, and upward mobility is peasantism.
	I mean, it just is what it is.
	Sure, but I would say the following.
	I do think that you will encounter these sort of mixed elements in the classes.
	You'll encounter, obviously, degenerate elements in the upper classes, and then you'll encounter sort of eugenic and healthy elements in the lower or middle classes that...
	Just through whatever kind of fluke exists there and can rise up in a kind of legitimate way.
	You know what I'm saying?
	But to your point, I think that that's probably not the general tendency or trend, right?
	We're talking about general trends and tendencies.
	Yeah, I think the strong will survive.
	And that's something that Nietzsche said as well.
	But once the strong survive, they have to find a way to kind of secure themselves and protect themselves from others and sort of regrow a civilization, as it were.
	What we will do after the collapse is really the question that we should be talking about now.
	And I think just whining about problems with the current system, it's important to understand it and point them out.
	I think we would kind of all agree that this thing is not too long for this world.
	We are living through a degeneration cycle.
	And just the idea of like, let's go back to an earlier stage of this degeneration is luckily impossible and totally fruitless.
	So I do think we need to better understand the system and better understand the past and then start to think of where we want to actually take this thing in the future.
	Yeah.
	No, I agree with that.
	And yeah, I think that, you know, it's funny because You know, we obviously are in this sort of milieu where we're adjacent to these people who are extensively related to the we're not really, the old light, for example, and people like Nick Fuentes.
	But I do feel like that there is a kind of sense that, like, the chamber is empty, that, like, really, there is nothing left in the right.
	There's just nothing.
	I mean, it's just kind of like, you know, however, like unpopular I am, or, you know, however your popularity has suffered since 2016 in these circles.
	It's kind of, it's kind of irrelevant because, you know, people like Nick Fuentes might have a kind of, they might have a greater sort of popularity.
	The hatred of me is so immense that it's almost like its own form of popularity.
	We have a kind of underrated...
	I feel like I'm known by many more people than I'm followed by.
	Many people who don't follow me talk about me.
	This guy's a lolcow or whatever the fuck they're saying.
	Whatever cope they have.
	I don't think that Twitter accounts for infamy.
	I don't think social media accounts for infamy.
	Infamy is actually not recorded in social media.
	In any case, but yeah, so I just think that they're kind of just running, they're running on an empty tank.
	I just feel like there's, and it is a kind of like elephant in the room sense where like, we're done, guys.
	The whole thing is done.
	It was kind of a joke.
	And we have no actual plan, you know, trust the plan.
	We have no actual plan or like legitimate sort of realistic will to power.
	And we're just kind of going through this sort of grifting motions, these grifting motions.
	And, you know, they are sort of...
	Adopting some of the more benign ideas that you and I and other people in the alt-right have been discussing for five years now, using the instance of Lauren Southern.
	Bless her heart, she seems like a good girl.
	But you understand what I'm saying.
	There's nothing there.
	She picks up the football after it's been spiked.
	It's over.
	They're unwilling to cross the Rubicon to real solutions that you and I are talking about.
	They're unwilling.
	They're stuck in this limbo.
	It's not going anywhere.
	You're grifting and you're still have audiences that are trusting the plan or that are still hoping that there'll be some kind of solution.
	There is no solution in the offing.
	It's just this kind of dying, declining thing that grew from 2015, 2016.
	And not to a small extent from stuff that you started, but it was just kind of parasitically grew from there.
	And now it's kind of dying.
	I mean, it's just sort of dying.
	And there is a kind of sense that it's over.
	Well, I think even the Trump movement was kind of like a...
	A death scream or whatever the right term is.
	You've seen this discussion in the mainstream media and people are understandably and rightly wringing their hands about declining life expectancy in the United States.
	It is flatlining, effectively.
	Life expectancy is going down.
	It's not just a matter of COVID.
	This actually started in 2016.
	And I think in some ways the whole Trump phenomenon and this kind of new conservative critique of capitalism and so on, it did kind of emerge out of this sense that this just isn't going to work anymore.
	And this is...
	The cost-benefit ratio is over.
	We're dying, basically.
	And the Make America Great Again, which is this kind of inherently retroactive look, it wasn't so much discovering one's youth.
	It was almost like an old man discovering middle age or something.
	It was like trying to just take it back.
	Natural human response.
	All of it, all of this stuff, the reason why it is so reactionary and kind of so incoherent is because it's like there's a certain awareness that the game is up, that the chamber is empty, as you said, that this can't go on.
	And we've just got to do something.
	Now, there was no plan.
	There was no real serious even critique of the system.
	There was only vague whining.
	But just the fact that it happened did express something.
	Very important.
	And I think we should kind of recognize that, but also recognize it for what it is.
	Yeah.
	I don't think they have the will to kind of do what needs to be done.
	And I think that they, so it's just, it's a kind of dying beast, this whole alt-light phenomena.
	Yeah.
	Well, let's do this.
	We have a couple of Super Chats.
	We have four more, actually.
	So yeah, we've gotten about $100.
	That's pretty fun.
	Travis Hammer.
	I just want to support the cause.
	I think you two have the most viable and forward-looking vision of any of the dissidents.
	Thank you, Travis.
	I appreciate that.
	Bartamu.
	For 10. Man is too noble a being to have to serve merely as an instrument of others.
	For men are not made for positions, but positions are made for men.
	It is never permissible to degrade a human soul for the benefit of others, nor to make a villain for the service of honest people.
	Can you name the man who said that?
	I'll give you a hint.
	He's French.
	You're quizzing me?
	Yeah, well, it's okay.
	It's Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
	Oh, okay, yeah.
	I wouldn't have gotten that.
	Now it makes sense, now that you've said it.
	He's just simply wrong.
	I mean, I don't know what to say.
	The pyramids could only have been built with slaves.
	And, you know, I would say philosophy could not have existed outside of a stratified slave-owning social order, because that is the only way to create a certain type of breeding.
	I don't know if you were just quoting that as a criticism of me or you're quoting that to show how naive Rousseau is.
	But yeah, I mean, the question is not whether we're going to use mankind as an instrument.
	The question is...
	For what end?
	Are we going to use mankind as an instrument to help us get to a higher goal, a noble goal that is beyond us, that's superhuman?
	Or are we going to use him for an instrument of evil?
	Or are we just going to allow degeneration to occur?
	It's a problem of America where it's a liberally defined And so, you know, you have rights, and we actually have greater free speech rights.
	I think that's a good thing, in fact.
	So we'll give the devil his due.
	But there's no real essence in a liberally defined order.
	It is a kind of empty shell.
	It doesn't actually stand for a people.
	It stands for a kind of legal mechanism that is the constitution or the political system.
	And that's a big problem.
	Agreed.
	Okay.
	So Frederick McKenzie, he's given us two super chats, 20 bucks in total.
	Have you read Karl Marx on the Jewish question?
	He has an account of Judaism employing Christianity in the development of capitalism.
	I have not read that essay in some time, so I don't want to comment on it.
	I was actually reading another book this morning, and it...
	I remember going on Amazon.
	There's a good collection of Marx and Engels on religion.
	I was kind of thinking, I need to maybe get my mind turning on these.
	Do you have anything to say on Marx and the Jewish question?
	Because that's kind of more up your alley, maybe a little bit.
	Yeah, I mean, it's...
	Well, I haven't read that in a while either.
	But I think that...
	I mean, it is in a way...
	To the extent that we understand Marx as an anti-Semite or Marxism as anti-Semitic on some level, which you could conclude from some of the language used, in this way it does resemble Christianity.
	Though Christianity I don't think is anti-Semitic.
	I actually have a video that explains why it is not anti-Semitic.
	It's kind of like the way that the Gospel of John is anti-Semitic because it is chastising Jews for not accepting Jesus in a way, which is a very certain type of anti-Semitism.
	Let's put it that way, whether it's anti-Semitic at all.
	Or anti-Judaism, you might say.
	It's a form of anti-Judaism.
	Right.
	In the sense that it is going beyond Judaism, which Christianity clearly is.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Maybe a bit like, I don't know, Stalin killing the old Bolsheviks or something.
	I mean, you know what I mean?
	They're all communists.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And you have to wonder, though, if this is in the same way.
	Antisemitism or kind of implications of antisemitism exist in the New Testament.
	They exist as a kind of tantalizing bait, right?
	Because in other words, antisemitism was so widespread in the ancient world at that time that Christianity gains credibility by making these Jews and these Pharisees effectively villains in that parable, right?
	Yeah.
	So there could be a similar kind of tact applied.
	There with Marx.
	You could argue that Marx was self-deceived and he was doing it kind of unconsciously.
	I mean, it's possible also that he was being very conscious.
	We know that Marx was friends, actually, with some very famous and powerful capitalistic Jews that were...
	So, in other words...
	I think that it could be a little bit of a...
	He could be sort of pandering to an audience with those anti-Semitic remarks in the hope that they are interested in adopting communism or what would become a communist Marxism, right?
	Right.
	It's a kind of Christian-like move where it's like we're going beyond Judaism in a way.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Marx was in a way kind of...
	Arguably, he's kind of going beyond liberalism.
	Like, this is like super liberalism.
	It's identical in a lot of ways.
	I mean, all the early communists were Jews, right?
	Yeah.
	And, you know, Marx is not a reviled character among Jews, generally.
	I mean, you know, up until relatively recently.
	I mean, that's, you know, Jews have, in fact, Jews generally have a somewhat favorable view of communism still to this day.
	I mean, it's the meme that real communism hasn't been tried, right?
	So just like the early Christians were Jews, the early communists were Jews, right?
	So I think a good analog, or rather a good comparison is Christianity.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	We actually have a good super chat that I'm really glad was asked because this gives me an opportunity to kind of launch against Lawrence Southern and all these other people.
	It's about the modern architecture question.
	We have seemed to have lost beauty in modern architecture.
	Was this capitalism's fault?
	I would not blame capitalism for this, although I certainly believe that it has played a role.
	In a way, only understand this decline in architecture that way.
	But I just find this to be this naive American tourist who wants to go look at pretty architecture in Europe as a tourist and wants to basically go look at architecture that's no longer really functioning in the sense of, you know, how beautiful is Notre Dame's cathedral, etc.
	Now, that doesn't mean that we can't make life better.
	I think that there is a certain kind of uniform, drudgery, nihilism, you could say, about the suburbs of cookie-cutter houses and everyone kind of separate at equidistance, socially distancing, you could say, and just this beige on beige.
	I agree.
	And I think a lot of things could be done easily to make those kinds of things more communal.
	And they actually are done.
	Most new big suburban developments, they've actually kind of created a certain kind of new urbanism.
	So you'll have like a little bit of a town center and a kind of Potemkin village of a small town America kind of recreated within the suburbs.
	The fundamental issue of trying to get all that efficiency is something bigger than capitalism.
	It's not just capitalism in the sense of wanting to be efficient and money-grubbing or whatever, because capitalism can also create Extremes and luxury.
	Would you say a Frank Gehry museum, whether you consider that ugly or not is up to you.
	I'm a little bit...
	I'm kind of on the negative side, but I'm actually maybe more ambivalent about that than most.
	Whether you consider that ugly, is that just made out of pure efficiency in mind?
	No.
	It's a grossly luxurious type of thing.
	Luxury products, they are...
	There's a renaissance, in a way, of fine leather handbags or art, Swiss-made watches, etc.
	There are huge auctions going on right now, which people are massively overpaying for these things.
	So capitalism does not create uniformity.
	I think that uniformity is one aspect of it that is often given...
	It's often...
	It's given to the proletarian elements, and it's often kind of a necessity of effectively bringing them up to a higher standard of living, giving them a suburban home, as opposed to having them live in some kind of squalid place in the burbs, not in the burbs, in the cities.
	Or living the peasant life.
	It's about bringing them up to an order and how you do that.
	How you basically bring billions of people up to a new standard of living.
	That's a huge problem.
	I wouldn't just blame capitalism for that, like blaming efficiency.
	I think the fact that we don't build great architecture is actually deeply cultural in origin.
	I would just suggest this.
	Of all those beautiful European places, what kind of oppression went into creating those amazing ancient marvels of the ancient world?
	You're probably not quite willing to go there to understand the kind of oppression.
	There is also a certain, once you get closer to the modern age, There's a certain kind of craftsmanship and masonry and so on that has certainly been lost, and maybe it's worthwhile bringing that back, but you have to understand what that would actually entail.
	If we're going to build buildings like that, we aren't going to have a universally middle-class society.
	You cannot build carved stone facades hand-done.
	For 300 million people living in the United States, it just can't be done.
	And again, to just kind of be like, oh, capitalism did this.
	I just find it very cheap and pretty much of a hollow critique overall.
	Why can't we build monumental architecture?
	I think this is entirely cultural.
	And you can kind of look at what are the monuments now in those European cities?
	That people like to go visit?
	What are the ones that have been created over the past, say, 50 years, as opposed to monuments that were created in the age of capital throughout the 19th century, early 20th century?
	They're Holocaust memorials.
	Does that kind of tell you something about that this is a cultural and spiritual issue of why things are so ugly and not really an issue of...
	capitalism, wealth and equality, etc.
	Yes.
	Also, The state should lead, though, on these issues.
	The state did lead.
	The state did lead.
	Let us straight to hell.
	But there's also, I mean, just to give the devil his due, there is a certain aspirational quality to high modernism.
	I generally get inspired going on the riverboat tour of Chicago and seeing the history of the skyscraper, which you can kind of...
	Read that textbook just right in the skyline.
	There is actually something really interesting and cool and aspirational about modernism.
	I don't think we should discount that.
	It's not just all drab.
	Well, yeah.
	And actually, I think especially in the field of architecture, there's some interesting...
	Some of it's hideous, of course.
	Brutalism.
	But there are some modern buildings that are striking and are very creative and beautiful.
	I don't think it's possible to entirely discard.
	Elements of modern architecture in particular, of all the fields, you know, of painting and music and stuff.
	I think that architecture, there might be some innovations there that are interesting and worth considering.
	Yeah, and architecture in particular, whereas modern art music is, you know, almost like cacophony and it's totally dissociated from most people, most all people, in fact.
	Modern architecture, when it's done well, actually speaks to people on a visceral level.
	And in a way that fine art doesn't as well.
	Contemporary painting is just your average Joe or even your average professional intelligent person looks at modern art and they're just like, alright, what the fuck?
	What the fuck is this?
	This is complete bullshit.
	But a cool new skyscraper in Chicago, whatever, that actually does speak to him, kind of communicates with him on an artistic level.
	That's one of the few serious art forms that actually does that.
	Yeah, I mean, it probably is.
	I assume it is connected to the fact that buildings actually have to be functional.
	They actually have to stand, right?
	So they have to have some basic form.
	So they're given some basic form, and then the sort of creative artistic innovation has to take place within a functional.
	Within this functional form.
	Maybe that helps.
	Again, some modern architecture is absolutely terrible, but some is good.
	What do these conservatives want?
	I would be curious.
	What do you want to see?
	Well, some of it is like sort of futurism, right?
	You would imagine the RKO futurism.
	You would imagine some of these cool, like sort of modern, like science fiction looking buildings.
	That's what we want to see.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I don't know what they want to see.
	What do they want?
	Like, we're going to, like, they probably want some like 19th century French department store or something.
	They're like, oh, why should they build them like they used to?
	They're just doing what they always do.
	It's like they complain.
	That's what they do.
	That's all they do.
	They don't generate new ideas.
	They just complain.
	I would want to glass and steel like Parthenon.
	There has to be some kind of old and new fusion that goes forward.
	It's not reactionary.
	It's not also...
	Pure modernism, you know, Mies van der Rohe or something.
	It's finding a way between that.
	Yeah, and it doesn't even necessarily have to be kind of strictly, you know, for example, I mean, obviously we're already kind of describing this idea.
	It doesn't have to be strictly sort of neoclassical, though that should be something that it has also developed, of course.
	But I think that maybe one...
	Good key or one good requirement is that it has some symbolic value, right?
	So in other words, the architect is thinking symbolically in the way that, you know, the classical architect was thinking.
	He was thinking, he was making a temple, right?
	The idea that you're making a temple and, you know, what are your choices signifying as an artist?
	So I think that that would be, I think that that could improve architecture, even modern architecture.
	Is if the architect is thinking in symbolic ways, right?
	How is he venerating a god through this building, for example, right?
	I agree.
	I think that's a good starting place.
	Yeah.
	Is to think of it as like a temple in the sense of it's sacred in some ways, or to think of it as a kind of communal gathering place.
	Yeah, you know, I agree.
	Ayn Rand, what is the book she does about the architect?
	It's Fountainhead, right?
	And I think that that's the only Ayn Rand book that I've read.
	Though I've read essays and excerpts of other stuff.
	I just like to re-read the rape scene.
	Oh, sorry.
	I shouldn't have said that on air.
	You caused a couple of women to faint in the audience, I'm sure.
	In a good way.
	So I think that...
	But she has this...
	There's a scene in that book where he's making a temple, like he's making an inverted church, right?
	And the idea she develops seems like a poor, actually, idea for a building.
	But it's a kind of...
	The thing that's striking about the idea is that it's a completely sort of symbolic and almost both symbolic and also an ideological idea.
	And so rather than make a church, he's making an inverted church, and it's a church to man, right?
	Which actually in some ways, you know, if you're looking at the Bible and you're looking at these in a Brahminian, you're doing a Brahminian interpretation of the Bible, man or Adam is actually an Arian figure, I argue.
	But the way that the temple takes form in that book is that it's an inverted temple, so nothing is higher than man.
	You know, I don't remember it perfectly.
	I read it in a while ago.
	Yeah, I haven't read it in some time, actually.
	I do remember that scene, yeah.
	So that when a man walks into the building, nothing is higher than him, right?
	So I think it's actually sort of a depression in the earth or something.
	I don't remember how he sort of like...
	But what I admired about it is that there was a symbolic consideration to the building.
	So I think that that is something that should be a kind of requisite for architects, is that they're infusing it with a symbolic meaning and with a kind of shared understanding of symbols and also with a shared understanding of the way symbols should be directed toward inspiring man, Adam, let's say, right?
	And rather as opposed to demoralizing it.
	I agree.
	All right, let's do this.
	Let's check to see if we have any more Super Chats, and then we can just call it a night.
	All right, that's it.
	All right, this is a good conversation.
	I'm glad we had it.
	I think I'm kind of gesturing towards a lot of newer ideas that I'm going to be talking more about in the future.
	Yeah, thank you, Mark.
	And I will talk to you soon.
	Thank you everyone who donated via Super Chats.
	Awesome.
	And thank you everyone who watched.
	Ciao.
	Peace out.

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