“I Was Wrong”: Why the Civil War Is Running Late - Rudyard Lynch (WhatIfAltHist) 2026 Update

0:01 Ruard Lynch, welcome back to Dad Saves America. >> Hi, it's a pleasure to be here as always. >> It has been about a year and a half, I think roughly since you were last here. And you were all over the internet at the time proclaiming the pending civil war. Now, if you look on the news and obsess about Minnesota, one could say maybe you were a little early. But what's your take? Did are we in a civil war now? Was that prediction maybe a little too hyperbolic? How have you uh shifted in your thinking on this civil the American Civil War uh circumstances? >> I stand by my older prediction and I think it's still going to happen. I'm

0:48 not going to give out a date soon because I've been wrong the previous time. Um, but all of the variables uh that I said I still stand by because the situation has not fundamentally changed. Um, >> let's recap those for those who haven't seen the first. What was the original thesis? >> I had studied about four uh different eras of history that have parallels to ours. And so I compared them and I looked at a variety of historic cycles for when revolutions happen. And from adding all of that together, I predicted America would have a civil war comparable to like the English Civil War, the American Civil War, or the French Revolution. A and the fall of the Roman Republic to say the fourth one. Um, and these are consistent threads we

1:34 see pop up again and again over history. So, what what are some of those threads? cuz I one of the things that since we last saw each other that I've um spent more time thinking about and reading about is that is the French Revolution and and to me it seems like we are closer to a French Revolution type of cultural problems >> than say the the American Revolution seems kind of almost an oddball. It's it is almost not a revolution. It was more like a a skirmish that preserved the existing order. Whereas like the French Revolution was like let's overturn everything. Let's turn Notraam into the Tower of reason or whatever. >> Yeah. >> Um >> what what what do you do you do you agree? Do you think that that's >> more like where we're at?

2:20 >> A very important thing I've learned in the last few years is that the ideology of the French Revolution is the same ideology or really religion of uh the current crisis. And I've just discovered one of my favorite new historians who's a Catholic historian named Chris Dawson. And so he rewrites all of world history through the lens of sort of Catholic apologia, but he's very good about it where he puts it in the Catholic frame, but he's not propagandistic about it. And so he has a book called the gods of the revolution looking at these different ideologies from the enlightenment forward. And so he says that the French Revolution was a sort and davville says this too. It was sort of new religion that had specific precepts. And a lot of people like to

3:07 blame the leftism on the Jews, but when you go back to the first generation of thinkers, they were by and large Frenchmen >> in the 18th century. And so St. Simone is a great example. He was a thinker who said um in 18th century France, we need to get rid of sort of normal human things like masculine and feminine or ethnicity or social class and replace them with a new man. He talks about ideas that sound very similar to trans. He said or his buddies and his so sort of social cohort said we need to import migrants from the third world to destroy the first world in the early 19th century. Um, and they talked about making a new priesthood of the science and priesthood of rationality where they

3:54 have scientific materialist rituals. And so if you were to go back to the French Revolution, it's an ideology that in many ways is very similar to the current one. It's just they keep on rehashing it as new. >> Okay, I'll keep this quick. Be sure to hit that like button, subscribe to the channel, and ring the bell so you won't miss more Dad Saves America as our videos come out each week. And it also really helps us because when we reach out to guests, they look at how many subscribers there are to decide if they want to come on and share their ideas. So, please subscribe to the channel. It really helps us out. And thanks for watching. Now, back to the show. I It's funny cuz I just came across his name for the first time cuz I was trying to understand like how far back does the

4:40 idea of global government go? >> Yeah. >> And I asked I think I asked like Gemini or something, you know? Yeah, I I spawn all the all the robots to do do research and then compare their outputs and then try to verify that they're not making stuff up. And he came up as one of the earliest globalists and then I think he had his name is escaping me now. Is it Compe? I forget. But he had a disciple that is considered the father of sociology. Are you familiar with this guy? He was similar. There's multiple people who are called the father of sociology. Durkheim, Max Vber, um there was a probably French guys. >> Yeah. But he he he was also similarly like a kind of global utopian blank

5:27 slate jackaben kind of guy. >> Yeah. >> Um you mentioned that there's this there's a notion that leftism comes from the Jews. What is that? because I I um obviously we're not going to go into some rabbit hole about all of the factionalism on the right, but I have found as somebody who's very I like Judaism. I have close Jewish friends. I came out of New York and entertainment, so that's kind of part for the course in a certain sense. But I find the kind of like blame the Jews for everything stuff that's going on right now to be pretty scary. What's your understanding of that narrative? Like >> I agree. I've come to see anti-semitism more as like a biological switch where

6:14 it it fills a very primal archetypal function inside the human mind that it once the switch gets hit um basically people suspend rationality. And that doesn't say if you want to push back there every evolutionary switch involves growing up in a certain context where certain things are justified and other things are not justified. I don't want to look at that angle for it. But it's clear that this takes a very deep part of people's psyche. And the thing that I I I was just writing about um the political shifts of the last few years because I was trying to rewrite what was it like for me to perceive how the internet's changed in the time since Elon bought Twitter. >> Mh.

6:59 >> And uh the thing that really struck out to me as I was writing and I I had to add an extra chapter in because I thought, oh, I'll just talk about the the Israel Gaza conflict as a side theater. And I thought, wait, this was the dominant political current of a two-year period, and I had never processed it because I I largely do not care about this conflict. It it's uh entirety of Israel is the size of New Jersey and Gaza is the size of Cape May and Gaza is smaller than Chester County and by a significant margin. >> These are these are shared these are shared collar county, Philadelphia roots that you understand. And I, you know, I understand. >> Yes. And uh and so I'm I'm Celtic and I know how honor disputes work. And this

7:47 is so clearly to me a sort of like hereditary honor dispute like North and South Ireland. And no one looks at North and South Ireland and thinks, "Oh, what if we just dropped UN peacekeepers to stop this 400-year-old blood feud?" That would just be seen as staggeringly delusional. But also I can look at the Israel war conflict and think none of the people involved are my kin. This is a different continent. I am not part of this honor dispute and I am grateful for that. And then I see everyone else hop along to this this sort of like clan honor dispute depict like the morally right and wrong faction. I thought that's not what this is about. The people in the Middle East do not share this frame with you. Um, but it really struck me that the the Israel Gaza

8:32 conflict, it was basically used to invalidate sort of public figures where everyone was had their position. Are you for or against it? And it it's crazy that it was used to sort of divide up the public. And furthermore, we wasted 2 years of what could have been valuable discourse on this. We could have talked about the demographic issues or the economic issues about the mental health crisis, China, and yet we chose to talk about a country the size of New Jersey and it's war in an area the size of Cape May. >> Well, and it's I know it's always a little bit like there's multiple conversations going on, although frankly the all the issues you talked about don't get enough airtime or consideration to be so I think you're right in principle. Um,

9:20 it is also strange and seems almost on purpose that you have sort of Trump come in and be reelected with a lot of energy behind him and what should be functionally like a unified American right behind this in an interesting way and then this issue which had been sort of festering on the like omni ideology intersectional the left where it's like, "Oh, well, the Jews are rich, therefore they're oppressors, and now we can just all be whatever they're whatever that blob sticky sticky thing they have that attaches everything to everything else." It it's it comes back on the right now in

10:06 the past year in particular and just creates even more splintering. So, how do you understand why that is? Not not again again like the particular players Candace, Fuentes are kind of less interesting. That's all they're all varying flavors of shock jock. >> Yeah. >> So, the fact that we have spent so much time in like serious political environments talking about them is kind of goofy. It's like obsessing about Howard Stern in the '9s when considering whether NAFTA should be passed. It's like, yeah, but but like it does seem deeper. How do you how do you think about that? That's a that's a good point or a good question and I'll say two things. The first is I think this is a way to avoid responsibility or seriousness. I think the public is

10:51 actively picking issues where they won't have to look at their own problems. And I think Israel is a useful psychological projection because it's sort of so religiously and culturally loaded, but it's also totally away from any of our issues. So everyone can point at it and say this is what we care about. And that can allow them to abdicate responsibility over their own country and their own lives. And we're we I have said before that the core of leftism is the abdication of responsibility. And because the left has controlled all of our institutions of basically teaching people and cultivating them, you end up with this hyperleist victim narrative that spills into the right. And this is one of the things I really hate about I I I've been thinking a lot about the

11:38 different parts of the right and um the the two elements I think are really holding the right back now are the boomers and the sort of uh like degenerate online zoomers. Um and I think these two demographics are bad in different ways. the boomers are sort of complacent and willing to see their society die if it if they can still take in the six figure check. Um, and they're blinds to the issues. Well, the degenerate Zoomercons, uh, they just try to attack anyone who actually tries to solve the problems. They focus on silly things and the only thing they really care about is the most petty and stupid status games.

12:23 hanging out with looks maxers, etc. >> Yeah, I was I was talking with my dad. What would my What would my I was saying, what would my great grandpa who grew up in the Irish ghetto think about looks maxing if he heard about it? He ser he he he guarded German PS in World War I. If you talked to this guy about looks maxing, what would his reaction be? >> Let's think about that for a second. Did you play it out? What do you think it would be? So I talked to my dad and we inherited two cudgels from this guy because he was a policeman until he passed on two giant cudles. >> The literal cudles. >> Yes. >> Not not not the not cudgel as a kind of use like like a rhetorical term. >> No, because he was a policeman. So he he he kept cudgil in the house and he

13:09 didn't have a challe though. Um which is a failure for an Irish family. Um, but uh he he had he had a policeman's Billy Cub club club and then he had his own personal billy like club. Um, so he could beat you up in your free time and uh his work time. Um, and uh, no school like the old school. >> My my dad just listed expletives as his as his response. >> Sounds about right. That's, you know, well, we we both have um our our our our heritages are both sort of filled with expletives. Mine being southern Italy and yours being Irish. So, it's like we're both like the people that came to America or our great-grandparents were treated terribly, eventually found a place and never lost a potty mouth.

13:57 >> Yeah. >> Even in polite company. Um well so there's there in a way you know it seems like there are kind of many civil wars happening in our culture and our discourse but but how does that to come back to my original question about like where are we in your original thesis of a bigger civil war like a real one is that part of what's feeding this h how how what what's your Why do you think it's still happening but hasn't yet happened yet? And h have you updated the way you think this would happen actually? Is it like states versus the federal government like we're seeing in Minnesota? That seems like the hints of

14:43 something plausible and not great. In my earlier predictions, I had divided this between the two different crises of the mouse utopia biological crisis versus the political crisis of the civil war. And I had spoken of an event called the psychological black death. And so it's similar to the crisis of the 14th century where you had the hundred years war, the gs and the jiblines and uh the battle of Nikopoulos u where you have the these countries having civil wars and political crisis but the black death is a facilitating factor. >> Is this the it pardon my bad history is this the war that ends with the treaty of Westfailia? >> That's the 30 years war. Okay. The

15:29 hundred years war was the one that ended with Jonavar. Ah, okay. Um, and so the facilitating factor for the crisis of the 14th century is the black death, which was a disease that killed half of Europe's population. And so for me, I was always torn between does mouse utopia hit first or does the political crisis hit first? And my assumption was always that the political crisis would hit first because I did not think that this sort of level of denial was possible. And I've been studying Nichze's age of the last men lately. And that's been the the key variable that sort of had this a lot of this locked into my mind. But um

16:16 I think we're basically seeing internetbased psychological degeneration and atomization hit as the first layer and that's delaying political crisis. The underlying political issues are still there. I think sort of mouse utopia is delaying this though. So, mousetopia being this sort of um confined bizarre psychopathology that happens when with in mice when you put them all together and they breed like crazy, right? >> Yeah. >> Uh >> why would that be what does that mean though? What what does that mean? What does that mean that mouse Utopia is delaying? Are we just getting caught up in nonsense like looks maxing and stupid weekly news cycles and not looking at

17:03 stuff like the population collapse or the fiscal the fiscal death situation or what? >> I want to state this for your the people in your audience who don't follow my work. But I I say I'm betting against God. That's one of the phrases I use. And what I mean by that is I think foretelling the future is an impossibly difficult task. So I operate in a place where I'll make a probabilistic guess and then each year I factor in new information into my assessment and then I rebuild my worldview. So I see I see the way I view the world as a sort of organic garden that I'll see the plants grow and then I'll drop some extra fertilizer. I'll cut out this plant if it's not growing right. So when I'm saying these things, I'm forming an idea that I can later work on. And most people sort of put out an idea say this is my identity. It's going to be

17:49 correct. But I don't think that's actually like a fair or a reasonable sort of metric to use as a person because if you if you want to guess the future, you're betting against all of God's creation and there's always more variables going on. Um, so the reason I'm saying that is three variables showed up that I didn't really account for. And there the best paradigm that explains all of this is NZ's concept of the age of the last men. You can ask me about that if you'd like. Yeah. But those three variables are screen addiction, socialism, and mass utopia. And so those are the three variables that I think are delaying a political crisis because it's not like things are getting better. They are in fact getting worse. But people don't have the mental

18:35 framework on how to deal with it. They're sort of lost. And I think we're in a state of psychological limbo now. So let's take each of those three um in reverse order. So let's start with mouse utopia. Give the brief recap of what the mouse utopia experiment is and its application to the present. >> Mouse utopia was a series of studies in the 60s and 70s that was meant to assess the effects of overpopulation because the world's population had tripled in the last century and maybe probably even more than that. Um, but what happens when you give mice perfect conditions with no external threats, perfect climate, no disease, is the mice breed like crazy. So you start with nine, you

19:20 end up with 2,000 mice in a cage that could potentially hold over 6,000. What then occurs is a supercharged version of decadence >> or imperial declines. So without an incentive, the mice stop being able to form relationships. They have a what Calhoun calls the first death or a spiritual death where they lose their internal monologue. Then the mouse social structure falls apart. Male mice become hyper mas hyper feminine. Female mice become hyper masculine. Um there's sort of K-pop style beautiful ones of people who are just obsessed with their looks looks maxing in fact. Um and mice lose the ability to maintain relationships where they their society falls apart. Some mice become autistic,

20:07 other mice become hyperviolent. Um, a and just every single time the birth rate crashes to zero and the mouse colony totally fails. >> So, yeah, there's all kinds of sync with what we've seen in our in our social order there, right? The the the the feminized men is particularly weird. What's the theory behind that? Why is it just that the like the male drive to be ver like viral doesn't have an outlet and so it's like a an an adaption to the new circumstances of comfort like what have you you've spent a lot of time on this looking at this mouse utopia experiments what's the causal reason for like

20:54 suddenly you know like in Japan like young young men are sometimes buying bras and they're not even saying I'm a girl. It's just weirdo stuff. Totally weird. Like for the mice though, what's the reason for the mice? >> I'm thinking it through. Um so first of all, there's a removal of there's a removal of external threats. And then secondly, in mating rituals, purposeful inefficiency is good. Which is why guys buy expensive cars or watches. Um >> conspicious consumption. >> Yes. just like look at me, I'm a high status. I have all this stuff I don't need. >> And so certain meeting rituals devolve into highly into purposely ineffective antisocial behaviors as a flex. Um, no,

21:43 I'm completely serious. And so >> it makes sense >> when you end up in a dynamic like that with also crowd psychology that crowds take on sort of lower level psychological attributes and then magnify them. So when you're combining no external threats with doing the opposite of something being attractive and then crowd psychology is that for people without a lot of independence, they sort of get stuck in these psychological crowd games where they're confusing sort of a crowd something that signals well to the crowd with actual behaviors. A lot of the left was a scop made by communists, which sounds like a conservative conspiracy theory, but this has been studied and completely

22:30 bookended. But these things that started out as communist political strategies are now people's unironic beliefs. You >> mean like queer theory? >> Yeah, exactly. That started out as a cynical move by the Marxists to destroy the society and the family. And now plenty of like teenaged uh young women actually believe this as their real identity. I think of it like uh we just finished the second season of Land Man and there's this great scene in it where the the beautiful like daughter goes to the university and she meets her roommate and her roommate is like a copy and paste like Tumblr blue sky avatar like they them with a ferret androgynous

23:18 you know and like as the plot progresses, you see, they actually kind of end up becoming friends. But but like the the the snapshot of that the like where and like and the book end of like where are you from like Minneapolis is so perfect. Um so that's all like adopting somebody else's SCOP as an identity for yourself. >> Yeah. And it's it's really remarkable and uh I've been studying crowd psychology a lot. It follows its own logic. Um but it's really common that sort of a scop becomes a reality and our worldview is often Marxist propaganda where the Marxists made a certain propaganda and they were quite open about this. You can look at the Soviet uh the Soviets talked about all of this. It was released either by

24:05 defectors like Yori Basminov or after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Soviets had this done to a science. But then the quote people who the Marxists called useful idiots, they actually believed it and then started implementing it across the society. And >> American academics in the 60s basically >> and and the death of God um the death of God removed any sort of immunity inside our collective unconscious where once you remove the divine framework, people can't actually discern the world. I've been coming more and more to think that religion is a biological organic part of humans minds and so removing it basically removes the structure for discernment. the So, you've got this mouse utopia

24:51 dynamic, this sort of um population, comfort, new forms of status seeking that are sort of bizarre biologically but serve some social purpose but then become in this mass feedback loop. >> Yes. And then we've shifted now into the sort of the socialism in a sense which is okay then you have these sort of parasitic ideologies. Why is socialism communism? I just say communism because I frankly think that the whole use of socialism is a joke and also a scop. >> Yeah, >> it's all just communism. It's all just a single sort of fundamentally like materialist theology that tries to say it's about equality

25:37 but it's always just about power. >> Yeah. >> Um is that how you think about it? And like what what is the so how why is socialism one of your three key uh pillars of this like the problems we're facing now? This is why I find Nichzche's age of the last men so useful because NZ was writing in the 1880s and he predicted he said no one will actually understand my philosophy till the year 2000 and the reason he said is that at the in the 21st century he said after two centuries would be a period he called the age of the last men and the age of the last men would be a society that would glorify mediocrity complacence and the west would be dying of nihilism And he said during the age of the last men it would be so sort of

26:24 sterile and comfortoriented that you wouldn't be able to cultivate healthy human life and the society would be based off what he called resenti or envy where he said the age of the last man is a combination of a lot of wealth and comfort and then in the absence of the death of god there's no way to justify suffering or exertion and what fills the void is sort of envy-based socialism. um where the aim of the society is sort of cutting people down as this sort of mutual envy her dynamic and the final so it's um death of God removes moral framework you see the rise of sort of socialism and um conformist ideologies that fill the void

27:12 and then you have the wealth and the comfort and so Nietz said the age of the last men would be the most dangerous era of western history ever where the west would be committing suicide due to nihilism. But he says it ultimately is defeated. >> What is your understanding of what nihilism is? Like what define nihilism for me because I I I it's worth revisiting these basic definitions. >> There's a a wonderful book called nihilism by uh father Sarapim Rose who is an orthodox theologian. And so he goes through how nihilism is imprinted across all of modern society. And you would understand this better because you're Catholic, but so imagine in a sort of a a religious worldview,

28:00 the coming from God is sort of if you submit to God, then it generates new things around you. And so there's this idea that life matters. And because of this core belief that life matters, if I do an act, it sort of generates more for the world. And so it's it's it it's uh it's a sort of um emergent order, as you might say. Um that once you follow these principles, you can trust in the emergent order. Nihilism is the inverse of that. Nihilism is that because things at their core don't matter, my actions don't matter and thus I should not. It's a variety of things. I should not be held accountable for the choices I make. Um, no one's better than anyone else. And so if you sort of go through

28:47 everyone's logic chain, if the end of the logic chain is I can do this because nothing matters, it's nihilism. And what father Sarapim Rose did so well is he articulates different social institutions where for art as an example um we make bad art because we don't genuinely value art's potential for a Christian or other world societies art is partly a reflection of God's creation. And so through through God perceiving art, it creates an value for the art that uh that basically you are making something innately worthwhile that other people will look at and derive value. But if you're nihilistic, the art is supposed to be gross and

29:34 weird to reflect that. >> So So you so that's the the specs for the median Netflix TV show. >> Yeah. It doesn't need to be good. It can just be slop. Do a bunch of DEI checkbox stuff. Make your favorite former character like black and gay uh checkbox. Move on. Uh >> it's not art. There's no art part of it except maybe occasionally the framing is pretty and the lighting looks nice. >> And one of the things Nietze said that was quite precient and I am not a nichian. I don't even really like Nichze that much as a philosopher if I'm honest. I think he just got several things quite correct. Um and uh so he called the left anti-life and that's

30:20 a very precient thing to say in the 19th century. >> Yeah, that's interesting. >> And he said that during the age of the last men, the left will metastasize from like supposedly caring about minorities and women and whatever to just being raw anti-nihilism, anti-life. And I think we crossed that threshold where CO was the last point the left pretended to care about the groups they're helping. I I I I have a term called um like the John Oliver SNL America. This tin this like relatively small window when the current ideology of liberal we're still the dominant voice of America. And it's disturbing to see that demographic of people devolve from pretending to care about whatever groups they're saying to in reality just supporting the Iron Boot. Because

31:06 whenever you look at leftist messaging today, it's basically accept iron boot, you will be poor, don't have kids. >> Yes. Oh, and kill your babies. >> Yeah. In fact, that should be like a right of passage that you as a woman kill your baby. Kill a couple babies and then you can really say you're a woman. I've heard I've had I have a friend who's a lawyer. um she now runs her own firm and she said that it was so prevalent among female lawyers to have had an abortion that because she was she's Catholic and because she was against that and actually had kids she was it was quite literally told to her like you're not part of the sisterhood. I mean it's so anothetical to the entire

31:52 premise of like an organism to be actually in favor of ending your population. It's like the most inorganic >> Yeah. >> thing imaginable. It's like what do all life forms want to do? Right down to deer and insects. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. It's uh and NZ said that the age of the last men would become a capstone for the future of what to avoid but not for the reasons people think. What he so na said that there'd be mass tyrannies at with the death of God. He said this would be a phase but then after that phase would the nihilism would creep in and he said what was insidious at the age of the last men is sort of how passively evil it is. It's I have a difference between passive evil and active evil. Active evil is burning

32:37 villages down and uh just murdering people. Passive evil is enabling and it's not doing things when things needed to be done. And he said the age of the last men had become a capstone for basically the evil of decadence. it would be the the most personified ver it would be like the perfect version of evil decadence. And he said that was something we needed to sort of have in our mental toolkit to avoid but we didn't have. So he said the age of the last men would be us being forced to learn the lesson of basically that passive evil is just as evil as active evil. One of the things because so the description this Nietian description is very frightening in how preient it is.

33:23 >> Yeah. But one question I have is when when did this age start from your perspective? Because you know when you read um when you read uh the uh man's search for meaning by Victor Frankl which is just I think such a important it's like a cornerstone book for me in my current phase of my life. He talks about for those who haven't read this book, it's Victor Frankle. He's a psychologist. He had been through the Holocaust. He documents the experience in this really like almost the documentary kind of way. And then the back half is trying to grapple with why did some people survive and protect their identity and their psychology and others just give in. And it's quite

34:11 powerful. A lot of good stuff for today. One of the things he notes that just struck me is the like is the nihilism of youth in the 1950s. >> Yeah. Because of the comfort and like he sounds like he's describing 2026, but it's he's describing the the nihilism and the and the and the lost boysess of the 1950s. Yeah. >> So, when did the age of the last men start? Is it in the 21st century or is it much earlier than that? I've been thinking about that because I've been wanting to make a history 102 video, which is my second podcast. Um, I'd recommend it above my first actually. Um, because I made a podcast in the 1950s and the thesis I had is you can't really

34:57 perceive the 1950s as a conservative decade. It was progressive compared to everything before. And if you actually go back, this is a this is a society with uh socialism, a 90 plus a 90% tax rate. It's got feminism. It's overwhelmingly people sort of went to church, but there was no actual sort of like spiritual belief underlying it. Um and >> cut flower society. >> Yeah. Very well put. Um and it's a gradual thing. I've developed a term called plastopia. And Plastopia is sort of the plastic utopia we thought we had in the postw World War II era. Um, and then so >> it's kind of like The Graduate. Did you see that movie, The Graduate?

35:44 >> Oh, sort of classic 1970s Dustin Hoffman at the uh it's it's like loaded with this sort of 60s critique of American culture. And one of them is one of the moments is he's uh you know he's he's graduated from basically the thing is he's graduated from school and what's he going to do and life feels meaningless and he's he's like in a bourgeoa family and he's at if I remember this correctly it's been a while he's at like a uh like a dinner party or something and he meets like one of his father's friends and he's like son you should get into plastics and it's meant to be I think a metaphor that the whole society is basically just plastic. >> Yeah. Um, and so the thing with the age of the last men is you have I want to make a video in the future. Line go up, line go down. 20th century is line go

36:30 up. We are entering line go down. >> You mean materially? >> Um, >> or just in along a lot of dimensions >> dem demographically, materially, uh socially um >> psychologically. >> Yeah. And so the turn from line go up to line go down is scary, but it's ultimately just a moment in time. So if we accept that this is just a moment of time, we can maintain sanity and not take it too seriously. Um, but the so the start of the age of the last men is World War I and a lot of this stuff is sort of trauma reaction to World War I where everything because people talk about the Holocaust in World War II. I think that's genuinely valid as a sort

37:16 of we are reacting against that. I think what we're reacting against even more is World War I where you saw these sort of uh traditional heroic masculine monarchies fight this epic sort of Lord of the Ringsesque conflict over these old European countries, but it was done in the most horrifying ways possible with trenches that looked like Mordor uh gaze at the psalm with trench feet. And so when you're looking at everything our society is built about, it's sort of we want to reject everything that went into World War I. And so we've been trying to reject their concepts of heroism or colonialism or earnestness or the idea that science can genuinely model the human condition. And so we've doubled down on a lot of unhealthy traits due to

38:03 that. But where where I think the age of the last men really set in was the '60s with the removal of all the standards and the time it flipped from sort of line go up to line go down is 2008 >> where because it's it's a so line go up line go down >> is like a singular process but at the same time um it's two because you have when you look at sort of the the society that led to the current mouse utopia, it has a lot of the same traits, but it was perceived in a very different light because it was seen as part of the prosperity. So, it's

38:48 the same process. It just looks very different from different sides of the mountain because once you get to the top of the mountain, you see the way down. It totally changes the ascent if that makes sense. Is it uh you know it's it's funny for you to bring up World War I because it is this it is >> I come back to that period quite a bit because for for a bunch of reasons that are sort of just my own nerd path. >> Yeah. Woodro Wilson and and and in 1913 and this sort of like and I've been reading more and more about this revisiting his um his like notion of scientific administration and I I I feel like he is the first full instantiation of that French jackabin

39:37 ideology like the oh we have the science now most of the public are actually rubes so what we really need to do with the help of my buddy Walter Litman and then Edward Bernay is manage people's perception of reality so that their choice set is narrow because they're basically wild animals and imbeciles. So democracy in any form is sort of a joke. We just need to manage the public. We need to have a global government structure. So he creates the League of Nations in the aftermath of World War I. And so it seems like that like World War I is like the crisis opportunity for the kind of technocratic global WF elite to give be birthed by by that group by

40:26 Wilson Lipman, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, this that whole group sort of says like this is our time to use science, trust the science, including eugenics which we all really like and like That's That's kind of So I've been Is that part of that? Is that Is that in Is that Is that part of your model of what happened in that moment? >> Yeah. No, you totally nailed that. You You did a great job explaining it. That That's what I would have said. It it's that generation and it's uh it's Wilson Bernay's in progressivism meant a different thing back then is it it means the same thing but different. And I'm guessing you're getting the argument from Soul >> and a bunch of sources. But sure. Yeah, for sure. >> Soul talks about that really well. >> Yeah. the unconstrained vision of man, the sort of straighten the crooked

41:12 arrow. >> Yeah. He also he he's written about um progressive World War I era progressives a lot too. Um but Edward Bernay is a he's a sort of interesting figure and there's a great documentary Century of the South. >> I've just been watching this actually. >> It's one of the best documentaries of the last few decades. I think >> it's um uh Michael Shelonburgger recommended it to me. I'm like I'm I'm like into episode three so far cuz it's it's older and long and I you know but um Yeah. So so it's al Yeah. So it's also Freud. So you've got this Freud stuff that's all and he he becomes completely despondent about about mankind and so so you know bring us back. So you've got this this Age of the

41:59 Last Man starts with like the whole vision of the world being smashed by World War I. Yes. What? And and then World War II is basically just a kind of echo continuation of World War I really. It's like sort of the we call it like the inter war period between the two. Um yeah, that that's correct. Uh there there are sort of different um James Bum says World War I is the last war of the capitalist order and World War II is the first war of the managerial order. And you can see that with the regimes that went into World War I were by and large aristocratic uh parliamentary monarchies. They were the kind of society you could have seen in the Middle Ages. Um and that order ended

42:44 with World War I bringing in the managerial society, >> the collapse of the Hapsburgs. >> And I've been looking a lot uh at sort of mass society. Um, mass society is the idea that you have media and national institutions where across the country everyone listens to Dolly Parton or the Beatles. They have the same bureaucratic structure. And so mass society is how do you make social institutions for as many people as possible that once you do that you establish weird incentives where if you enable the most people as possible then you hit lowest common denominator as the shared value. Um and so World War I smashed that open and you also had to convince these populations

43:30 to die for their countries. And so it created incentives for sort of social handlers to first of all radically manipulate people and tell them things they want to hear. And so that generation of social engineers around the world wars >> built a pretty inhuman society. And that was something they built through the education system, the architecture, the intellectuals where in our society something is only registered as real if the system recognizes that it's real and if the system benefits from it. And so >> what do you mean by the system? >> The bureaucratic structure. So truth is organ truth is orchestrated by the bureaucratic structure in our society.

44:15 If the bureaucratic machine says something it's is true then it's true. Um >> the New York Times in the deep state like what what do we mean by the bureaucratic structure? >> So trans is the best example of this same thing as climate change for trans the the current managerial priest class said that men and women are the same and they can remake reality. Trans people are real people. So they're bludgeoning you over with common. So, I find people defer to AIS on the internet a lot. It's weird where they'll just say like Grock, is this true? Um, Claude, is this true? ChatGBT, is this true? Because they sort of see it as a machine god. If you had actual rationality, you would be assessing the point you're given through these

45:02 rationalistic frameworks that Aristotle or Francis Bacon developed. But you're just listening to the machine god because that's how they already think. The system supplies them the truth. I will not analyze this myself through common sense and reason. I will listen to the output the system gives us. And that's how you get people to believe the utter absurdities where the idea for example killing the rich will make us wealthier is so staggeringly insane if you look at common sense because who do you think generates the innovations? who do you think are the people who were running the companies where um if you want to get a nicer iPhone then it's not going to be small entrepreneurs who do that it's the pre it's going to be the

45:47 wealthy uh and so when you believe these strange disjoints where as an example if you're from a city like Philadelphia the idea that all cultures are the same is insane because I say Philly is four different subcultures you have uh northeastern Catholics southern blacks um Midwestern Protestants and then sort of northeastern wasps. And these are all people you will deal with in different ways. But then you can just shove the idea all cultures are the same. And they can believe that because the system tells them to believe it because from the systems perspective, all cultures are in fact the same because they're equally exploitable. the um one of the things that I I I

46:36 worry about and I think feeds into the nihilism you're talking about is the use of this term the system. So, I want to linger on this for a little bit because I know you think about this stuff in a deep way, but a lot of people on the internet, basically every populist in one form or another, some of which I'll agree with more than others, will say that we have a thing called we have a we have there's a the system. And and I guess what I'm gonna I want to push on and see how you react to is the way I think about a system just like kind of technically is it's actually got cause and effect mechanisms in it that are essentially reproducible. Like oh a system when you push this button here this light goes on over

47:22 here. Like like the electric grid is an actual system. It's all connected. It's got to run at 60 Hz. It's a system. But when you have sort of this like the society even you have something that we'll say is the system but it's not really a system in the same way or maybe it is and so I want to hear right cuz it's not >> it's like okay >> it seems like it's more almost more Marxist it's like a more >> there's there's like a class culture divide like you have a kind of people that go through a certain kind of education and come up together through Yale and Harvard and UPEN and Philly and they all have this same way and so they their view is very particular and they end up there's this like dirty dozen of schools that end up

48:08 occupying like half of all managerial jobs. >> So that's not the same thing as like the electric grid but it maybe is close enough. So but that's still not the same thing as like this is where I get a little worried when I hear even my friends say like we need to burn the system down or smash the system. I'm like can you be a little more specific? I I think that's a very valid point because I am talking about something very different from the Marxists. I am pulling this from virtual de Juvenile um who is a libertarian philosopher from France a century ago. And he divides society between the society and power. And so power is an established organization where you send out orders where the government is power, a

48:53 corporate bureaucracy is power and then the society is the organic self-organism that it's the it's are you emergent order or are you bureaucratic? And so preodern political philosophy was all about how do we increase the power of the society versus the power of sort of bureaucrac bureaucracy because bureaucracies become sort of cultural dead matter. They're not responsive to their environments. Yeah. >> And so when you're looking at Aristotle say that a society's natural elites should govern it. What he means by it by that is that when you have the social organism, people will naturally rise to the top and be widely respected as competent or skilled rather than being chosen by a

49:40 hierarchical bureaucracy. And this has occupied the minds of philosophers for thousands of years. So I'm just dipping my toes in. But when I'm talking about the system, I'm talking about bureaucratic structures that operate under hierarchical rules. and um sort of pre-established systems that trouts organic emergent order. >> One way I think >> I'm going to add something else as well. >> Where when Marxists talk about capitalism being a system, they're doing psychological projection where capitalism is an organic phenomena attached to its environment. And as a rule, the more your society's social structure reflects nature or reality, the better it will do. And so the reason

50:26 capitalism and democracy and science work so well is they have these checking mechanisms of does this social structure replicate nature? And what Marxism does is it tries to crush nature and control every element of it. So when you're looking part of the reason that figures like Donald Trump or Elon Musk garner respect from the American public and can lead on the right while the left can't do that is because these people have actually gone out into the world and built reputations and status through dealing with the real world. And we can't respect the people who were rewarded according to the systems logic because the system operates under rules that are removed from reality. So the

51:12 left will look at their own people and say that in our own priest structure, this is like a level 12 battle mage and so we should give them status. But then >> you're talking about Hillary Clinton. >> Yes. Hillary Clinton is a level 12 battle mage. >> Yeah. But I mean the real odd one is it's like that's that that model of selection found its perfect what was it like HL Mein said like eventually democracy will be some will be so perfected that the president will be a complete [ __ ] I'm paraphrasing but Kla Harris is the is the final is the final boss in hierarchy that is based on nothing nothing that could be considered measurable merit. >> Yeah. I I've considered uh if I had extra money or whatever, I've considered doing a media stunt of finding the

51:58 singular most oppressed person on earth in the left's framework and interviewing them, the the Muslim, bipok, trans, queer, disabled, autistic person and see what their actual opinions are. Um >> the these often don't don't go as expected. >> Yeah. And it's interesting to see, this is a tangent, but it's a valuable one. how often the left's psychological projections of certain groups are not accurate. They have a sort of very distinct psychology from what the left says. Left's image of black people is not what actual black people are about. They almost always pick a highly assimilated sort of educated class of black people. But then if you if you

52:44 look at black communities like Atlanta or Philadelphia or uh uh St. It's nothing like the left's portrayal of black people. The the left has uh because they have concerns that are far more like local and reasonable. They by and large do not care about the left's social projects. They often see them as abominations. Um they often are socially conservative. Um and if you look at the working classes, again, the real working classes had nothing in common with the left's projections. The working classes were not the sort of vanguard of the Marxists. Intellectuals were. The working classes had their own specific sort of more practical interests of can I get my kids to go to the right school?

53:31 Is my is my job going to lay me off? And so when the lefts did or when when our uh ruling class did de-industrialization, they were technically saying they were supporting the working class's interests while doing the exact opposite. Well, the best example of this that comes to my mind is of character like Claudine Gay at Harvard. So, she was the president during uh you know, at the time of um 107 and yeah, you know, was brought behings and whatnot, but her backstory is so much more awful. So, she's one of these sort of hack she's literally a hack. She's she's like a known proven plagiarist that's published very little actual research. While she was at Harvard, she was all

54:16 about critical theory nonsense. Meanwhile, she's a silver spoon kid that came from a well-off background. Has nothing to do with sort of um poor black culture, inner city black culture, any of that stuff. She actively sought to and largely succeeded in trying to destroy um Roland Frier who actually was like a poor black kid that managed against all the odds to become a great genuine intellectual and a scholar at Harvard. >> Yeah. >> But so so he and and his work was pushing back on all of her assumptions including for example uh the actual stats around police. So his some of his work included that the police are actually less likely to use

55:02 deadly force against a black asalent um for the reasons you would expect, which is they know they're going to get in trouble. And actually like more than half of all police forces are black or people people of color, black and brown people, non non-Caucasians. So um she's like the avatar. She's basically like the like the the Woodro Wilson of our times. like she's the avatar of this like fake social signaling race hustler. >> Yeah. I I I've always had a wonder if the reason she got her job is because her last name is gay where so that sounds really superficial and lame, >> but as we've put together the left psychology, they are in fact profoundly

55:47 superficial and lame. Look at the culture they produce. I'm just thinking because they're not deep people and I'm thinking no hair, last name gay, black, woke. She is like um if it's like a card game, she's like a clean deck in their weird status games. >> She's a straight flush. It's really interesting to look at sort of the left with culture because they're sort of psychologically spilling all their guts where they have no push back. So if you look at leftist Hollywood, they'll just say utterly psychologically deranged things that were just too numb to notice. Where the subtext behind all of the recent Hollywood is these are just

56:32 profoundly petty people and they're profoundly pathetic. where they always have to have the old white guy get emasculated. They can't write real characters. There's no sense of depth or purpose. And it really reminds me of CS Lewis's quote that if you want to be original, tell the truth. And if you try to be original, you'll be like everyone else who's trying to be original. And it's just disturbing that these people have cultural authority. One of the things that I think the moment we we are in now, especially sort of in the aftermath of 2024 and the Trump assassination attempt and all the big voices coming out and him getting reelected and and like the sort of full

57:19 realization of of like Elon's ex is we we have a moment where we can have the kind of conversation we're having and say and say things that you didn't used to be able to say. >> Yeah. And I I I struggle with this and I'm trying to explore how to do it myself, which is how do you tell the truth, which is which in especially at the at the margin where you're talking about something that is going to be offensive, but it's true. Whether it's about race or genetics or differences between men and women on average, you pick the subject. the Jews in society, whatever it might be, whatever sort of hot button. Um,

58:04 there was something called like decorum before and maybe going further back there was like a Victorian version of that that was even more controlled or more there was like more complex order of how you would go about conducting yourself in public. And now we're in this time of okay, we came out of like this this period, this sort of Biden censorship industrial complex era of of the total cancel culture insanity. You can't even say that the immune system responds to to to viruses and bacteria >> really, right? Like natural immunity would became like a sensorable act, right? natural immunity is therefore so we're post now we're in a time where everybody

58:52 can say anything kind of at least in America not in Europe because they put you in jail and so so now it's like well where do I where have I where do you then cross the line is should there be no line there is no norm to look to >> that's a that's something I've been thinking a lot because I've come to the same conclusion that there's no social norms to mediate interactions. And that's very dangerous. Especially so with sort of mouse utopia, mating crisis, that if there's no shared social norms, you can't police interactions. And when you can't police interactions or develop rules, people kind of just sputter because people need to have a social structure that tells them how to cooperate with others. And uh the sort

59:38 of the lie of postmodernism is that everyone can do that as an individual. But then the system attacks anyone who actually tries to build a frame. >> Well, and it's like this sort of maybe is a natural segue into this third. So you list sort of three components of the moment like the mouse utopia, socialism, and then screen addiction. >> Yeah. >> And it's not I feel like this like normless everyone's a troll. the the systems of actual algorithm are that that drive all of our feeds reward that. >> Yeah. >> So that's kind of like a not great norm that we can both not like censorship and also be worried about. I've so I'm going to drop these points in so I don't forget them. But one of the things I've been thinking about is a lot of this is

1:00:24 like riding a horse. It's similar skills where and the second thing is I think honor culture could fill a lot of the void for this stuff. So the reason I say is riding a horse is horses are hurt animals and they're not actually that responsive to stimuli itself. When you deal with a horse, they care more about the body language you do and the way you deal with something than the thing itself. And that's exactly how internet the internet works where the thing you say on the internet doesn't really matter. There's no standards. It's sort of the bearing in the character you do it with. So, the reason people can get away with the worst possible opinions that are just deeply evil in my opinion is that they're playing their group's crowd psychology well and they're following its rules. And so, people on

1:01:11 the internet care about do I do the does this person follow the social rules of my algorithmic ghetto. The problem though is those become highly solopscistic and stupid. So, it's all of these social groups have these highly stupid rules that no one thinks about, but it's just a herd mechanism where the way herd animals work is they care the most about the status games inside their herd. So horses, and my mom was a horse lady, um they would they'll fight over who gets to have this little clump of land in the herd, and they all stay together in the same part of the pasture, and they'll fight and bite each other over who gets to be the first person in the herd, and who gets to take this tiny clump of land. And that's what most internet disputes are about. And they cannot see past their these little

1:01:58 status games. And so the way to sort of deal and so the internet the worst thing is an absence of confidence where the internet will utterly attack you and the internet also attacks vulnerability a lot which becomes a huge issue because vulnerability is the underlying thing behind depth. So if you're attacking vulnerability everything becomes peripheral signaling games and that's where we are now. And so the only way to sort of get past this is to set a frame of masculine leadership. Because once you've established the frame of masculine leadership of this is what I believe in, this is what I think are true. These are the rules I follow and if you disagree, you can go somewhere else. Because without that, everything

1:02:43 devolves into the sort of the status games. >> Why is that leadership masculine? Because fundamentally um alpha men do not alpha men will have trouble respecting sort of a female leader and women often do not respect female leaders either. And so the archetypes of strong female leaders in history are by and large queens. Um or like Margaret Thatcher. Uh Margaret Thatcher is the democratically elected politician who I think sort of speaks to female leadership. Um, but the structures that hold society together have been masculine. That's corporations, that's churches, that's militaries governments

1:03:30 adventurous ships. These are sort of war bands of men who congregate together under a shared goal. The structure, the organizational structure of society has to be masculine. And women can inhabit these structures sometimes as leaders. So when you have a female leader, she's inhabiting a masculine leadership structure. And there have been capable female leaders like Queen Elizabeth I or Katherine the Great or um Cleopatra, but they're inhabiting a masculine structure. >> The person that comes to mind who I'd love to have on the show at some point, oh her name is Helen. Her last name I I always >> No, she she wrote about how basically Andrews. >> Yes. Helen Andrews. And she basically says that what we what woke is

1:04:17 fundamentally is the feminization of all of our institutions. >> Yes, >> it is the because like technically she's like when you have 60% of college graduates becoming female and then all of these fields becoming dominated by women. It's not that there's anything wrong with women, but women have on average different group and social dynamics and they favor different things. And among the things that they favor more versus less is they favor more emotion versus versus truth seeeking and comfort and harm reduction versus truth seek. Truth seeeking tends to get like reduced in the hierarchy of preferences. If if I can if I can save the baby, truth is not as important. If I can ease your sorrow, truth can take a backseat. So, um I know

1:05:06 I know this stuff is like it's easy to kind of talk about in big senses, but it seems like that's what you're what she's describing maps against what you're laying out more or less to a tea that it's like the structure needs to be built around uh merit, reality, truth seeeking, um performance, efficiency. And if you have that, any person, male or female, can do that. But that structure needs to be there. And if it's like small P politics and feelings, well then you're going to have it's there's no there's almost no good way out of that. >> Men are like iron and women are like water. You need to use the iron so the water can flow. If you don't have the iron, the water is going to flow in coetely. And so in a healthy society,

1:05:52 you have the masculine institutions of this is where we channel social interactions through these standards. And so in traditional European society um you had the nobility, the church and then the merchant classes having these structures that social interactions flowed through. But if you remove those structures, it's sort of just all chaos where um women's sort of empathetic agreeable urge naturally leads to chaos and it works if there's a framework to accept it. And if it doesn't, everything just becomes discordant >> one. So this is actually a perfect example of the kind of um issue that

1:06:38 we are now in uncharted waters for how to talk about and have it not just kind of get lumped in with like the worst examples of Andrew Andrew Tate type stuff because he will say things that are living squarely in this conversation and then he'll go off into you beyond. So like how how do you think about in this time? How like what do we need to be what like what should be the rules of the road for the conversation we're having about about this topic for example to get meta because it's actually it's when we talk about screen addiction being terminally online being in these ideological ghettos you end up in like womenhating world very quickly when you start to talk about some of these on average distinctions and we have to be able to

1:07:25 talk about them >> yeah in a way that's not just like Neanderthal yes and the way I do This is we agree to inhabit frames that we can hold for now and over time you evolve those frames for what the context needs and what I mean by that because that's a very abstract way of seeing something very concrete is we start by agreeing to basic things because I have a visualization in mind this is my core these are the things I know for certain and then you have differing levels of certainty to raw chaos and so once I map my frame of life of this is my core, these are the things I know, these are the things I don't know because we can start with obvious designations and then agree to that and

1:08:11 then gradually build rules over time. But you have to be intentional about it and you have to sort of say this is the frame we're operating under. This is the consensus. If we can agree to this as the first step, then we can agree to something as the next step. And you do it over time where I I if you say that uh every society in human history has a patriarchy that would be historically true. But then the question is what is the next extrapolation from that? We can

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