Emmanuel Todd, Defeat of the West - the main ideas explained in English

0:00 Emanuel Todd's the defeat of the West is one of the most important books on history and geopolitics in 2024 it was published in January but it has not yet been translated into English and it's also not the easiest book to understand because it has some big Ideas which you probably need a little bit of background explanation of to really understand the nature of his argument so in this video I'm going to explain to you the key ideas of Emanuel Todd's the defeat of the West the main ideas the underpinning ideas uh about society and the West that you need to understand to really

0:46 understand the argument and I'm going to give you a bit of a sneak preview of The Narrative of the last 30 years of how NATO the United States uh the West walked into the Trap of Ukraine as Emanuel Todd says approached its defeat and this is so timely because it's July 2020 24 the NATO Summit in Washington is about to occur and it's uh incredibly important to understand this book to see some of the frankly dangers that NATO presents to the world why we should really Embrace uh multi polarity and less Ardent alliances with powers like

1:35 the United States of America so this video is part of a series of videos I'm doing around the NATO Summit and around uh Emanuel Todd's book on the burning archive I'm Jeff Rich I'm a writer historian and I try to help you understand the really good quality world history that's been written out there so that you can make up your own mind about the big events of G politics Emanuel Todd's book I think the best way to break this book down here it is in French def uh my French is not great but it's enough to be able to read the book I think it's best to sort of break this book down into three parts one is some of the underpinning ideas about history

2:22 and uh Society uh that Todd has based on his background as a historian Anthropologist and demographer sociologist if you like historical sociologist if you like the tradition in which he's writing and then it secondly I'm going to describe to you the five main ideas of the book which are really around what is the West uh and how it is approaching defeat and then finally I'm going to give you a bit of a sneak preview of The Narrative of the last 30 years that's ties together those big Ideas into events that we can really understand and that help us address how we got into the pickle that

3:10 we are all in and that uh certainly the west and NATO leaders are in in their Washington Summit as they meet with Emanuel Macarron in crisis Joe Biden in crisis a new British prime minister perhaps and uh a lot of difficulties in Ukraine let's talk about the underpinning ideas first now uh I did a video uh 6 months or so ago about uh Emanuel Todd's book that looked at the very start of the book where he talks about 10 surprises of Ukraine they include surprises like Russia was much more resilient economically Than People expected or Ukraine was more resilient

3:56 socially and militarily than perhaps Russia expected the interesting thing about those 10 surprises which I'm not going to repeat now though is what Emanuel Todd asks uh noticing those surprises is well why why did this happen why is it that uh if you like the West launched a war against Russia that it could not win what was it about its society that led it to do that this is where his background as a if you're like a historical sociologist comes into play Emanuel Tod himself says that he is a historian in the anals School tradition which looks

4:44 at the long D duray which is long periods of time long centuries long developments within societies and how those developments create a sort of mentality amongst people how they shape social attitudes uh people's orientation in particular he has uh in his other books including uh notably uh this book which has been translated into English a few years ago uh lineages of H modernity a history of humanity from the Stone Age to homo americanus which was written in part uh following the election of Donald Trump following

5:30 brexit uh and the sense of a crisis of populism crisis of democracy and looking for a deeper longer term explanations of that uh he's in a way done something similar with the defeat of the west but in that book in particular he really uh focuses I guess on three broad uh long duray patterns deep sociological characteristics of society that underpin their ideas the first of those is around family structures uh he has studied extensively the structure of families in uh different Societies or around the world

6:15 and to summarize a basic uh complex argument he basically says the Anglo American World the sort of uh Western European Protestant sort of world developed a particular uh family structure that was far more individualistic if you like than many of the other family structures of societies like Russia or China or uh sort of West Asian societies South Asian societies and that that uh family structure itself is part of the social mores that underpins liberalism in uh those Western

7:01 societies ideas of what is you know Freedom what is the good life all that sort of thing so that is really crucial to understanding his argument and we'll see that as we get to his main ideas the second underpinning idea is an argument around educational stratification he provides a lot of data about huge changes to literacy and education that have occurred around the world but is but in this context particularly around Western societies over the last centuries uh you know there was a huge growth in Mass literacy in particular with the growth of primary and uh SEC

7:49 education and then secondary education in the 19th and 20th centuries and that growth of mass literacy and Mass Mass education was very supportive of a democratic epos in society it meant more people were educated more people were informed more people were capable of contributing to public debate to political life if you like but from the 1950s 1960s accelerating especially in the 1980s uh there is a massive growth in higher education and that leads to a different kind of society Mass literacy

8:34 is still there and the cultural OS of mass literacy is still there but the growth of uh higher education encourages if you like a division between the the educated and the less educated between uh if you like the atlet and the masses the trades and the university graduates that uh has become quite character eristic of Western societies and that in a way is uh has the opposite effect to mass education it encourages a sense that if you're like the elite uh is better than the mass and that uh they deserve their their success if you like

9:21 they deserve their privileged position so it creates a sort of a tension of values within the society and then the Third theme is around democracy and he's written previously a book I think called after democracy and some of this research previously also comes in very much into his work in uh the defeat of the West his essential argument is related to that argument about education that democracy is more than just the right to vote or you know free and fair elections that sort of thing or it's not just the popular will It's a combination of Institutions values that are informed by

10:07 family structures and the kind of cultural Moray that are uh structured by the social life that people have he argues that especially in part in relationship to this sort of um higher education explosion especially in Western societies over the last 50 years the Democratic OS is not so much there in fact he sort of summarizes this uh whole book in lineages of humanity which is sort of background understanding to the defeat of the West uh to say that you know our societies our Western societies have never been older richer more educated or more devoid of collective belief they're

10:55 quite strange societies and to just uh we have to kind of try to come to terms with the real strangeness of how our societies have developed to really understand what's happened with the defeat of the West and that's where we get into the main ideas of the defeat of the west but you might be asking what is this defeat of the West is it a prediction or not or is it actually a reality now he's not just emptily saying you know uh Russia's won the war or that sort of thing prematurely saying Russia's won the war when after all the war is not over although such a prediction would certainly seem to be uh

11:42 important rather what he's really saying is that the West is approaching a quite specific strategic defeat and here let me uh read from the end of uh the book where he said says he describes he gives you know a full characterization of the nature of this defeat and this will introduce us to the key ideas he says the ephemeral Ukrainian successes of uh 2022 launched the United States into a bidding war from which it cannot Escape without suffering a defeat no longer no longer simply local but global Military

12:27 economic and ID logical the defeat now would be the German Russian rap pront the dollarization of the world the end of imports paid for by the inter uh internal Collective printing press so he's talking about you know the US just issuing more debt in order to pay to buy stuff and great poverty it's a fascinating book because uh he finished it in September 2023 and of course in in early October 2023 the the Gaza situation uh uh descended into the the horrors that he is currently uh experiencing and so uh Todd

13:13 also wrote a second postcript to the book and here he says uh this which if feel like contains the the gist of some of the main ideas of his book if we want to anticipate the Strategic choices of America we need therefore with all urgency to abandon the axioms of rationality the US is not looking um for benefits evaluated against costs in the village of Washington in the country of mass shootings in the time of zero religion the primary driving force is a need for violence it's a pretty Grim conclusion and there are a number of

14:00 ideas there that are fundamental to his argument the village of Washington uh the country of mass shootings why what does that Express the hour of zero religion that seems quite a strange idea and what is this primary driving force it's also a very different idea to what you might hear in a realist school from John mimer or many sort of um sort of day-to-day comment is on the geopolitics of you know the multi-polar world because he's talking about how the mentality of the West has been shaped by its society and by its history and not just assuming it's acting as a rational

14:47 uh a rational agent so let's look then at the five key main ideas of of Emanuel Todd's book The defeat of the West the key chapters I really want to focus on uh the question of what is the West because this contains I guess some of the ideas and the arguments that are most challenging I guess for people who are more uh coming to this book from the general news on geopolitics rather than a deeper sort of kind of world historical sociological perspective his chapters on the Washington gang and the real nature of America oligarchy and ISM first main idea is he explains well what is this West that has

15:35 been defeated what is the West what is the West now what Todd says is the West is born in protestantism the Reformation the split of religion between Catholics and Protestants that occurred in the Well from around about 1500 approximately but particularly associated with Martin Luther in Germany and of course uh various figures across uh Europe in in different countries as well and this argument itself is based on another famous figure another famous practitioner of historical sociology Max babber who in a famous but perhaps often

16:23 rarely read these days book The Protestant ethic in the spirit of catholism ISM outlined a profoundly influential argument that fundamentally was an attempt to explain why why in when he was writing this uh essay in around about 1910 1905 I think uh why was the West dominating the world what was it about their societies that explained that and he was in part responding to to uh I guess the Marxist idea that it was all you know um exploitative capitalism exploitative materialism and Max vber argued it was

17:09 had something to do with the way in which uh Protestant ideas shaped as as uh I was saying before with the long Duran mentality how certain religious practices shaped the mentality of people in the west to perhaps behave in certain ways to believe in certain things fundamental to that idea for Todd's argument in particular is um the pro many many Protestants believed that they were that they were the elect they were the the people who God had chosen to send to heaven and what they needed

17:55 to do in their life was to act in a way that demonstrated indeed they were elect they were not Sinners unlike those other people so there is actually a kind of a an ethic if you like of inequality of superiority and that sort of thing that is uh at the heart of Western protest protestantism so he's not arguing that uh you know uh protm is great and all that sort of thing or religion is great and the West Was best when it was religious and Protestant but he's arguing that that sort of culture and that mentality has shaped uh the

18:42 political institutions the uh the values the culture of people in the west profoundly and I think that is profoundly true there's a lot more to that argument but that is essentially what he means by the West being born in protestantism uh and that argument then also becomes quite important to his second big argument which is that the West now is in what he calls a zero state of religion what what does that mean you might ask well he basically talks about three states of of religion the the primary State the zombie State

19:27 and the zero State and they're not just ideas he actually grounds this in um quantitative analysis of certain fundamental religious practices like marriage rights birth rights funeral rights uh and he has you know data on various societies use of of uh religious ceremony religious practice uh profess religious belief and all that kind of thing so his basic argument is I guess if you're like in the early days of the West uh uh people believed in the stuff they practiced the stuff there was that Collective belief and then in the zombie

20:16 state which is I guess he largely describes as you know if you like most of the 20th century the uh the outward practices of those are still there but people don't really believe inside and then the zero state is when we approach that point where the society is devoid of collective beliefs people don't even really follow those practices now he's not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing he's just saying that is a sociological reality that people used to have these shared common beliefs and now they don't that is profoundly

21:01 influential to his analysis of what uh the nature of America really is uh and this is where two other key ideas come into play his chapter on his analysis of America is entitled the true nature of America oligarchy and neoism let's take those two in turns first of all nalism because nalism relates to the ideas around zero religion uh the thing as a Todd argues as a anthropologist a sociologist a historian of

21:47 mentalities is um you know individuals uh who uh exist in a society are shaped by that Society with its strengths and its weaknesses so in the absence of collective beliefs that actually has uh uh the that structures the the nature of um how individuals shape and Orient themselves effectively what he says is uh there is a tendency towards nism into believing nothing and to uh a a tendency towards destructiveness to towards violence again it's a complicated argument I'm not going to go into too

22:33 much detail but if you like it's represented by that fact that he pointed out the extraordinary mass shootings in America and he also argues that if you like people are increasingly shaped not by a broad Collective not by a broad set of religious beliefs but by the narrow groups in which they participate their profession their immediate uh um identity groups or indeed uh in the case of the elites of Washington foreign policy the village of Washington the uh The Blob as we will see then his other very crucial argument

23:20 and very provocative argument is that the West is no longer a liberal democracy it is a liberal oligarchy uh now this is if you like a a rhetorical reversal of a lot of the rhetoric around the Russia Ukraine war it's a war you know you know for democracy against the autocratic Russia and China and so forth and again uh this is where his work on family systems comes in individualism collectivism the ways in which family structures um shape both historically and contemporarily uh Chinese Society Russian Society Etc is

24:07 different but he has a very uh clever and interesting reversal of the argument about liberal uh democracy he says the thing about liberalism is primarily it is uh historically it was about uh not just elections and that sort of thing it was a set of moray and a a a set of laws that protected the rights of minorities and he says the key minority that is protected in today's Western Society are you know if you like in the terms of Occupy Wall Street and stuff are the 1%

24:53 are the billionaires are the oligarchs and so he says yes the West is um still liberal in so far as it goes about protecting minorities but it doesn't do it in a democratic way that that its democracy has become an empty shell without uh those real values are empty shell informed by the educational stratification that we talked about before by the divisions between the elite and the elite and the masses all that sort of thing and hence the West has become a liberal oligarchy and this is becoming an increasingly common argument not just by

25:40 Emanuel Tod those four pre those four key ideas feed into a particular crucial analysis that he has about the nature of what he calls the Washington Village so the West is born in protestantism and the United States the peak of its power was very much a wasp country white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Samuel Huntington uh the author of clash of civilizations celebrated that wasp tradition as in fact the thing that meant that the West's civilization was better than others and he himself came from one of the grand wasp families of

26:26 America so the West is born in protestantism and was that its culture it's it's religious culture uh the the Moray that have shaped its Elite have changed fundamentally from uh that initial uh vital culture to what Todd calls a zero State and so they are operating without any sort of real Collective Guidance with in the narrow groups in which they operate in an increasingly nealis way a way that seems to release and not contain urges to violence and within a liberal oligarchy

27:12 and all those uh social forces come together in Todd's analysis of the Washington Village he writes there in uh his chapter on the Washington Village um that he looks with the eye of an anthropologist uh on uh the group of individuals who concretely conduct the foreign policy of the sick power that America has become who is this tribe with singular morals which through its tastes and decisions has led the West to the gates of Russia that is uh what I

27:58 believe barck Obama called The Blob he uses that term too saying it's a very worrying microorganism and he essentially says this Washington Village suffers all the faults that he has just described uh a tendency to oligarchy a tendency to to believe in its uh superiority uh a tendency towards violence and eism and an absence of constraining outwardly oriented uh collectivist uh values that would link the Washington Village to either the

28:44 rest of American society or indeed the rest of the world and in particular that culture those Moray lead uh to disaster lack of diplomacy a disastrous lack to think empathetically about the needs of other countries and a tendency to treat Politics as mere political theater a tendency to uh see politics are only in the eyes of the members of the uh you know the bubble as uh Scott Morrison used to say about the camber bubble in politics or the blob in uh Barack Obama's terms

29:32 or the village of Washington uh sort of local parochial concerns a preoccupation with how will play in the press the relative power and Prestige of key figures within the American political scene without a real connection with the uh broader outward society and that is what is driving this dis disastrous March towards the war in Ukraine so there are five key ideas of Emanuel Todd's book liberal oligarchy zero religion the Washington Village neoism and the West being born in protestan protestantism and the sort of adaptation of Max Fab's great essay the

30:20 Protestant EIC and spirit of catholism with a Twist an updated Twist from Emanuel Todd's work on family structures education and and post democracy but still within that sort of framework of the long duray and examining mentalities now they're all very big Ideas uh that may or may not be familiar to you as a watcher of geopolitics but in the uh one of the final chapters of the books Emanuel Todd brings it all together into a CO cerent Narrative of what has happened over the last 30 years as the West came from the high point of seeming

31:07 to win the Cold War in 1989 or 1991 depending on how you date it to the point today where Emanuel Todd and many others are talking about the defeat of the West the birth of a multi-polar world and he essentially traces uh that 30 years into four key periods the first period is 1990 to 1999 which he describes as the peaceful phase where uh cocka hoop with its success in the Cold War everything seems to be going well for the west and yet uh they've perhaps forgotten about some of their own weaknesses in their society

31:54 and yet they are not pursuing an AG aggressive attitude towards Russia and to China they're bringing them into the West if you like on a peaceful basis and then he describes the period 1999 to 2008 as hubis this is the point when after 911 and uh the the various interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan uh the overreach of American power becomes clear and then he describes the period as uh between 2008 and 200 uh 17 as the American reply in German

32:41 hubris and Germany is a very crucial part of his story because he argues I think rightly that there is a natural geopolitical uh geographical uh and uh connection or potential partnership between Germany and Russia that this in this period there is a a push back from America about any potential rapoon between Germany and Russia think nordstream and then finally there's the period from 2016 to 2022 which he describes as the Trap of Ukrainian nalism where

33:28 the West is drawn in by its own weaknesses and the leadership and weaknesses of Ukrainian Society into this Dreadful trap now that's just a very short summary of that narrative I actually think there is this is an incredibly Rich narrative that he does provide and I think it is a particularly uh beneficial Narrative of what's happened over the last 30 years compliments work like Richard saakar the Lost peace and others and I'm going to be describing that in another video and more just tells the history of the events of the last 30 years and how

34:13 they've led to the disastrous situation where on the eve of NATO Summit in uh in 2024 in Washington it appears that the Washington Village has indeed walked into the Ukraine trap uh that NATO is uh likely to experience either a strategic defeat or make a catastrophic decision that could risk the future of humanity and the West as Manuel Todd has argued has been defeated so make sure you subscribe and you'll be uh notified when I release that video in the next few days