How Civilizations Cycle & Collapse | Samo Burja and Rudyard Lynch

Hey, Upstream listeners. This is Natalie, a producer at Turpentine, the podcast network behind Upstream. This week, we're airing a conversation between Sam O'Brya and Rudyard Lynch. Sam O is the founder of Bismarck Analysis and co-hosts Turpentine's show, Live Players. Rudyard runs the Whatifalthist YouTube channel and co-hosts Turpentine's show, History 102. You should definitely check out Live Players and History 102 if you enjoy the conversation ahead. They analyze differences in civilizations around the world throughout history, including the ancient Romans and Greeks, ancient China, present-day California, and more.

We'd love to hear your feedback.

You can email me at natalie@turpentine.co or leave a comment to let me know what you'd like to hear more of on Upstream and which guests you're most interested in. Please enjoy the episode. Hi everybody. I'm so happy to have all of you watching, and we're having a Turpentine exclusive with, uh, 2 of my friends, Erik Torenberg and Sam Oberge. And today we are going to talk about civilizational differences. And this is something you very rarely get where most of the time, and I fall into this myself, I end up talking about current politics or things that are very important. Things that are very obvious to today's life, but we forget that there's these underlying massive differences that control almost every aspect of a person's life. And here we are to talk about the differences between different civilizations.

I think that the first point I'd raise, and Rudyard, I'm very happy to have this collaborative collaboration with you, is that people underestimate how different societies can be. There is some truth to, let's say, a technological determinism of a broad kind. So there are some things that an agricultural civilization will have in common with a different agricultural civilization. So there are definitely parallels one could draw between the inundation-based irrigation agriculture of ancient Egypt and the society that forms there, and let's say high Middle Ages Europe with the plow and even Mesoamerica with maize and human sacrifice. But these things are also somewhat different, right? And I think that we lack usually this kind of imagination of what our own society could be, because today I would argue we kind of have like 1.5 industrial civilizations around the world. So I think our imagination of what a civilization could be at our current technology level, how different it could be, is very limited, very narrow. But, you know, looking back to at least the agricultural track record of the last 10,000 years, we see that, in fact, civilizations can develop in very, very different ways.

I think the best way to start this and the best way I personally found civilizational differences is to see a non-Abrahamic society. Because something— Islam and the West are not— they have a lot of differences, but if you just look at Islam or the West, you'll ignore that there are a certain amount of similarities. Where a great example is only Abrahamic civilizations have a concept of linear time, in that every other society thinks time either doesn't exist or it's cyclical. Where in India or China, they think that time is cyclical. You always restart where you're going to go. And in African societies or a lot of other societies, they just don't have a concept of time or didn't until European colonialism. And once you start looking at non-Abrahamic societies, and this is a big flaw that political types fall into, is that they assume things that are basically assumptions from Christianity are inherent truths of the universe that are obvious. Linear time's an example. Another example being equality of all people. Another example being progress. The idea that we, the idea that the meek are inherently good or the oppressed are good or that hierarchy is bad. These are all fundamentally originally Christian ideals. And oftentimes when you look at another culture, we are projecting ourselves. And when these, when foreigners come to the West, they They're not sharing how they differ because it's not in their self-interest to do so. So you'll talk to an Indian or a Chinese person and they won't say, in India, we don't think, we don't have a concept. We think that reality is an illusion by the gods. In China, they won't say that we think hierarchy is an inbuilt part of society, but these are huge differences that you wouldn't know about.

I think that there's certainly the case that people have various kinds of egalitarian impulses, but these can be processed in very different ways. So even if we have some sort of inheritance, as, you know, some of the evolutionary psychologists say, towards like, you know, envy and towards small groups and relative equality, that impulse can be processed and factored in in vastly different ways. You know, medieval China with its civil service exam system, the equality rests in anyone can try their hand at the civil service exams, civil service exam. They might not have a very good shot of passing it. it if they weren't already, you know, basically gentry and studying for many years to prepare for it. But still, in principle, there wasn't necessarily an ability. However, there was the idea that the Confucian scholars are higher than the masses. And then of course, the emperor themselves is chosen by heaven, and it's almost this physical fact of the world, right? It's almost the universe as a whole. has sort of conspired to elevate this dynasty, you have to accept it. It's not so much the sort of Western variant of divine rights monarchy where it's almost like, you know, God almost gives you a thief and then you're supposed to be a good Christian king. And there's not that there's something uniquely special to your soul. Maybe depending on which theorists of divine rights monarchy you would read, they would argue that, you know, a king is kind of like a priesthood in a way, and that you might have like a special even sacramental aspect to something like coronation. But that's different than like a, you know, a fundamental inequality of the soul. Reading ancient Greece, which should be, you know, classical Greece especially, should be familiar to us as one of our foundations. Yet all of the points you raised, Rudyard, if you go read Plato, they don't share them, right? There's no linear time. There's cyclical universe. Souls— some people are born with golden souls, other people are born with silver or bronze souls, right? So there's inherent Almost metaphysical inequality there. And we can, you know, say several other things. There is, there is some idea of the polis of solidarity where like the polis should be tied together. That's why the guardians in Plato's perfect republic don't own property. So you might think that's egalitarian, but no, actually this is supposed to be subordinated to the polis. So already then that violates our individualist assumptions and thinking right there. Plato's Republic is built on a very different political theory than, say, I don't know, the kind of social contract theory of post-Enlightenment states in the West.

That taps into a very important specific point that I think people rarely get to, but I don't think classical civilization is the same society as the modern West. And that's something This is especially true in conservative punditry where they say Western civilization going back to the ancient Israelites and the ancient Greeks. And I think that's just patently false where if you, I'm going to use Quigley's civilizational definition where if you want to look across the 6 axes Quigley has for economic classical civilization, classical civilization was a clan society. It wasn't individualist. It operated under The clan was the dominant economic thing. They didn't have some, they had an earlier ver— they had a market economy, but not capitalism. They had a completely different, as you alluded to, Sam, they had a completely different theory of political philosophy. They, they didn't have science. They had rationality, but the scientific method was invented by monks in the Middle Ages. They didn't have Christianity as their religion. Almost every single axis you would look to determine what is Western civilization. did not exist for the Greeks and the Romans. And one of the points Samo has made that I agree with is that Charlemagne is the first time you see a fundamentally distinct Western civilization develop. I would, I might push back a few hundred years to 600, but it doesn't really matter to me. It's in that timeframe. And this is something—

Perhaps the founding, the founding sort of empire of Western civilization. isn't the Roman Empire that we think about, but it's actually the Kingdom of the Franks, the Frankish Empire, because that produces the synthesis of a post-classical Latin-speaking population giving birth to Italy and France, but also civilizes, Christianizes, detribalizes the Germans. And, you know, produces the, the root of Dutch and German society, and through imitation England as well. Like, the many kingdoms of the British Isles, the Anglo-Saxon ones, were aspiring to and emulating the Frankish realm long before the— long before the Norman Invasion many centuries later, where, you know, I would argue that this full convergence happened between the Isles and the continent.

I would agree with that. And I say that Western civilization is the combination of Christian, Roman, and Germanic influence. And one of the points Samo made when he spoke a few years ago that I find interesting, and I was thinking about this today actually, is one of the things Samo alluded to is that the Spanish and the Latins are on a different civilizational trajectory. And so you have a North European civilization, Protestant civilization, and a South European Latin civilization. And said South European civilization ultimately culminated in the Spanish Empire because I was reading through Will Durant and there are about 5 master questions that I've tried to answer for my career. And one of those master questions is, why is Mexico poor, but America is rich? And why did Italy fall off? Because if you look until 16— until 1650, I'd say Italy is consistently one of the wealthiest places in the world that produces the most historic change.

And then Even true of southern Italy, which is usually discounted, right? The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, by the way, another Norman conquest, right? Just as William the Conqueror goes from northern France to conquer England, there are Normans that sail all the way to Sicily and southern Italy conquering a kingdom there. That kingdom was immensely prosperous and was known for its wealth. So not just a north-south Italy divide.

Yes.

In a big historical picture.

And I've had this question for why did Italy get poor? Because it's a pretty stark historical event where once you get to the 1700s, you see very few important Italian figures and Britain very rapidly surpassed Italy. And I had read 3 histories of Italy to figure out the question, the answer, and none of those histories of Italy gave me the answer. And then Will Durant, one of my favorite writers, wrote a paragraph that explained all of it. And this is one of the principles I've found reading history that There are certain books that are worth 100 lesser books. And oftentimes the task of someone in this sort of field is find that one book that's worth 100, that's worth 100 other books. And what, what Will Durant said is that the thing that hurt Italy was the Spanish Empire, because you look at Latin America and there are places like Argentina where Argentina shares lots of traits with North America. And this is something that goes against narratives where Argentina is temperate climate. Fertile soil, unified river system. Argentina and South Brazil are more white than America is, but you can see that there's a political difference. And that political difference is why Argentina has consistently failed. You look at Italy. Once Italy became a de facto Spanish colony, that's what made Italy become less important because the Spanish pushed what I call the Trinity of Tyranny, or family, church, and nobility. The family, the church, and the nobility are the 3 consistent factors that hold back progress, even though they are the biggest— they're the biggest stabilizing factors for society. I don't want to discount them, but they're the biggest things that authorities can use to keep a population down.

Well, this is true to a great degree. However, I have to note here that it was also the Christian church that in an earlier stage of the development of Western civilization produced the only literate class that people could draw lawyers and an educated civil service from. If we go back to Charlemagne, the partnership and the tension— so this partnership and tension, almost war between church and state, is baked in right at the start. There is a collaboration, but there's also a balance of power. And perhaps if government and church balance each other, Historically, much more freedom was perhaps available in some Western European feudal states. Now, to say just a little bit more on it, Latin was promoted by Charlemagne as a language that should be studied. And he funded the creation of numerous monasteries, churches, Latin schools. There was a revival of the use of Latin. in the Frankish Empire. And we can continue this trend perhaps in the Protestant offshoot of Western civilization, where eventually it's not enough that the priest should learn Latin and be able to read the Bible in Latin. Perhaps everyone should. And by the way, in the early Middle Ages, it's not a given that your priest is literate. So we tend to think of Christianity as necessarily a literate religion, but in many places, priests were just not—

Hmm.

Not even priests were educated. The sort of retreat of literacy from the classical era was truly immense, right? Going from a population that was 80% literate to a population that was like maybe 2% literate, 1% literate, and then slowly inching upward through the Middle Ages.

Hmm. Interesting. The Roman Empire was 80% literate.

I've seen estimates of that type, but it is difficult since we have a bias here. We have a bias towards the urban population of the empire. Perhaps it was 30% literate, or perhaps it was 80%. There are differences in estimates. However, if you go to a major city, Roman city, you're not just gonna find graffiti where it's a sort of a cartoon, an unflattering cartoon of Julius Caesar. There'll be graffiti inscriptions, right? There'll be like, you know, calling him a bastard or, or talking about—

Yes.

His exploits or anti-political slogans. It only makes sense to do graffiti if everyone reads it or if most people can read the graffiti, right?

Yes.

So that's like a good indication of that. And the second indication is letters, widely preserved letters, including letters from legionaries writing back home. This includes legionaries from other parts of the empire. So we have one Egyptian legionary writing home to his family in basically rural Egypt. Clearly he expects someone is able to read this letter. He writes the letter himself. There are a few cases where people are, are sending dictations, but this is kind of interesting. There's a post system.

Yeah.

Of some kind. And, you know, even for classical civilization, I think if we could travel there and experience it, we would be surprised by many, many things. Even Rome is not a civilization we fully understand. Much has been lost to the mists of history. We don't actually know how you can handle such a volume of mail, right? And those are the sort of main arguments that people use related to the literacy of the empire.

That's a very good point. And I'm of two minds. The first is that France in 1800 had a 20% literacy rate. And if you're looking at France in 1800, you're looking at one of the very most developed societies in history. England was up at a— England was like close to 100%, I think 70 to 100% in 1800. And You bring up, you brought up a couple of interesting points I want to tease out. So I'm just going to hit this like bullet points. The first is, I agree with your thesis that the Catholic Church created modern science. You look at the scientific method, it was made by monks in the 1300s. And I'm one of the people who will agree with that thesis the most. The second thing is that, as to your classical literacy, Jesus Christ was literate and he was a carpenter. And so what that signifies is that the middle classes in the Roman Empire at least were literate. And for the third point, I think one of the biggest things people should know about history is whatever thesis you have about a particular era of history is true, but the opposite's also true. And an example of this that I like to use, because it just shatters people's conceptions of history, is that people would have sex in public in the Middle Ages. And we see medieval Europe as this very puritanical religious society, and it was significantly more religious than us. But what religion meant in that society is a very different thing, where the things that we associate with Protestantism today, like sexual purity or cleanliness or reading the Bible, medieval Christianity was totally different. And you go back to the ancient Greeks where all the figures that we see as rationalistic philosophers like Plato or Aristotle, not Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras, they were prophets. They were taking psychedelics. They were very likely taking psychedelics. They were experiencing the spirit world. And one of the things that I like to say is that we write up the Western philosophical tradition like it's autists, but it's really schizo. And for people who are not Zoomers, what that means is that an autist is like, I want to look at every train system of 19th century America. A schizo is, I have just dreamed that the great hurricane has come and that the world will be washed away from the evil. And the Western philosophic tradition is more so mystics trying to rationally explain mystic experiences. And when you look at the ancient Greeks, these are, this is a religious fundamentalist society. Athens treated women like the Taliban does today. And we remember the Greeks as this really clean, really rationalistic society. But the reality is we're looking at a religious fundamentalist Borderline Taliban collectivist slave society, because Athens was a bunch of clans. Athens was a series of subdivided clans.

We, we, we contrast Sparta and Athens, but if we compare Sparta and Athens to each other versus today, they're more similar than not, including having the large slave class and having collective social responsibilities. Ironically, of all places, in Sparta, Sparta might have been the best place to be a woman in ancient Greece.

Yes.

Because you could manage estates in your husband's absence and you could, I believe, own property in your own name. And that was not true in Athens. And Athens actually thought that this was, you know, practically scandalous, including the fact that women were encouraged to exercise and be fit.

Yes.

Which they were not in Athenian society.

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I'm curious, Samo, have you pulled on the pre-modern feminism rabbit hole? Where if you look, I get this from 19th century authors because post-1930, no one will write about, or post-1950, no one will write about it. But Athens had a feminist movement. Rome had a feminist movement. The Abbasid Caliphate in 1000 AD had a feminist movement. The Babylonians had a feminist movement. And I like using that because it's in—

Oh, the Babylonian one is interesting because I, I know of the other 3 and like their political significance up to including the point of being parodied, right? Was it the play in the Greek play, Lysistrata?

Yes. The video I'm about to release tomorrow talks about that, actually. It's an anthropological study of the left. And I basically say, if you can use assembly women as, because the ancient group, for those that don't know, Aristophanes wrote a play about a society where only women voted and they made it a communist society where they broke down the family. There was no privacy. And then there was, and a bunch of, and they had sexual equality where you had to sleep with an ugly woman to sleep with a beautiful woman. And I said in that video—

There was a committee determining who, who has to sleep with who.

Yeah.

And I said in the video that the Greeks, that leftism must tap into some very fundamental part of human nature if the Greeks knew about that. And what it says, and the reason that the founding fathers were able to predict socialism and the natural endpoint of democracy is that Greece went through what I call its Latin America phase, where after Alexander the Great, Greece went through this phase of juntas and dictatorships and socialism. And so the founding fathers, even though they existed in an ecosystem of, of aristocratic monarchies, knew that with the trend they were pushing, the endpoint of it would be some form of feminist socialism.

Well, One thing that should be considered is that America's founding fathers, such as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and so on, were looking to antiquity for political theory, not just empirical data points. And the classical political theory of change was the kiklos, the cycle, again, probably originally derived from a full cyclical conception of time. But as a side effect, it actually matches the data fairly well, where you have a cyclical progression of political forms, right? Where you have— and there are several variants of the cycle. You have an Aristotelian variant, you have a Thucydides variant, and it is usually some form of view where you have monarchy that decays into tyranny that is replaced by aristocracy, that decays into oligarchy, that is replaced by, you know, basically some form of democracy, which then decays into mob rule. And then some of them say that the cycle restarts and you basically have a ruler arise from the masses, and then democracy goes back into, into monarchy. So the view of the Greeks was that every single transition is bad. Every form of government has a functional and nonfunctional variant. And your job as a political engineer, a lawgiver of society, was to decay— was to slow that cycle as much as possible. And a later Greek author that saw the Roman state argued that the Roman state actually was an amazing hack on this because it was a perfect mix of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic principles. So America's founding fathers, in a way, when they carried out the revolution, it was a literal revolution. It was a turnover, right? It was a cycle. And the goal was to slow down the progression to the next cycle as much as possible, to extend the period of good governance as much as possible. But I don't think prevent it in perpetuity. I don't think if you ask them, well, will this last forever? You know, some of them might've been even very optimistic. sort of very pessimistic. Thomas Jefferson, I think, said that, you know, every 2 generations or every generation, you know, you have to have the tree of liberty must be watered by the blood of tyrants and patriots. So maybe in his mind, the Constitution is just— should have been refactored 4 or 5 times now and 4 or 5 more American revolutions.

That sounds like Colombia. I could pull out—

I mean, I mean, maybe Thomas Jefferson would have thought highly of Simón Bolívar. I, I I don't know. I know he thought highly of Napoleon up to the moment when Napoleon crowns himself emperor.

Yes. Thomas Jefferson, I do respect him, but he was kind of an edge—

the most Jacobin.

He was pro— I say that the, the right versus the left divide is French Enlightenment versus British Enlightenment, because I just made 2 videos on the next 3 videos, Anthropology of the Left, which is done, Anthropology of the Right, which is done, and The Greatest Lie Ever Told. And that's about how academia lied about human nature over the 20th century. Which is a conspiracy that's so vast, you, you realizing how vast it is makes you feel insane. But I could pull, I largely agree with what you said with those Greek authors, but you asked me about Babylon and Babylon is a fascinating test case because—

Do you mean the old Babylonian Empire or the Neo-Babylonian Empire?

I meant, I mean the Neo-Babylonian Empire on a civilizational trajectory because dear audience, what happened is that You had Sumeria. This is like 3000 BC. And then Sumeria fell, and then the Amorites were tribes from Arabia who conquered southern Iraq.

It was a complete linguistic turnover where the Sumerian language is not a Semitic language, but the Babylonian language then was a Semitic language. They, however, inherited the religion of the previous civilization to a great extent.

Yeah.

And kept around Sumerian as a priestly language. It's really funny reading some of the accounts where You have a situation in the 23rd century BC where you have basically roving bandits and pastoralists grazing their sheep and their cows in fields that were once, you know, they were once used for agriculture and the vast irrigation systems collapse. And the king of the great city of Uruk is a guy that only has 50 warriors. Now, this doesn't maybe mean anything to the audience, but that's like, you know, the equivalent of the emperor in Rome. Rome is just a medieval bandit with 50 warriors instead of this vast city that at one point had hundreds of thousands of people. So even things that are already ancient have this rise and fall dynamic and partially have a population replacement dynamic.

Yes.

With the Sumerians themselves complained bitterly about the reduction of their own fertility and also how they can't stand these newcomers. How these come into the city, you know, you can't even spell your own name. Literally, you know, I'm a Sumerian. I can spell my name. You can't even spell your name. You are just like, you don't know how to handle your beer. Get out of here. Right? I'm so much better than you are. Like we have texts like where someone's basically ranting like this. We could joke that this is like a 4chan post except 3000 BC. Right?

That's fascin— that's fascinating. I gotta get some Mesopotamian sources off you because I've read the same thing about Egypt where Egypt had its own immigration crisis due to Libyan migrants. And I know that one of the great ironies of Mesopotamia is you see all these trends way older, where Mesopotamia faced a crisis of Syrian migrants and Syrian barbarians. And it's funny to think of Syria as a barbarian place because in the scope of civilization, Syria is one of the first places ever to get civilized. But there was a point when the only cities were Mesopotamia and Egypt. And some hill forts in Canaan, and then the Syrian Aramaean barbarians. And we forget about the Aramaeans, but—

Well, we, we should imagine the Syria of the era to be much more like, you know, Lebanon is the land of the cedar tree.

Yeah.

Forests were widespread. There were vast cedar forests in large parts of Syria and parts of Lebanon. And in these forests, I think we can safely infer from the very Epic of Gilgamesh, lived various wild people and wild tribes. So if you imagine forest barbarians fighting the occasional Egyptian and Sumerian logging expedition because they valued the very tall cedar trees that were a very sought-after source of wood, I think that's not an incorrect model of a certain period of Syrian history.

Interesting.

And then much later it desertifies partially due to deforestation, partially due to existing climate change. I actually think that this is one of the few cases where the slow degradation of the environment is real. I think around the Mediterranean and the Middle East, you did have a deforestation leading to desertification.

Yes.

With more rainfall like you see in Europe or certain parts of India, you don't have this desertification effect. But the forests of the Mediterranean were always very tenuous ecologically. That's why modern Greece, if you go travel to Greece, it feels like just a pile of rocks. And you have Aristotle complaining about how we've already cut down all the trees for our many ships and for our sailing and how now it's like so tricky to find good wood for ships that it's impacting naval power. And actually the Persians have an advantage because they have more forests.

Hmm.

Yeah. So that would be 300 BC. People were already complaining about deforestation in Greece. Yeah.

It reminds me of the Spenglerian point that a civilization is on the rise when it fights against the land. Where once the land is domesticated, then the people start. So Spengler's point, civiliz— and it's very similar to the Aristotelian political theory, which Bernard de Jouvenel, he made the modern version of it. And Spengler's theory, society emerges from the ground and it takes up the soul and the character of the land. Then it grows. And once the land is conquered, then it Becomes an urban society, but through becoming an urban society, it loses its soul and loses the character that formed it. And I find your Aristotle 300 BC marker interesting because once the Greeks cut down all their trees, they exported themselves across the whole Middle East and Greece stopped being the most important place in, in, in Hellenistic civilization. They had to export their people to take out the land in the land in the Middle East. And one of the things I find interesting is I'm reading Will Durant and He's talking about 17th century England, and it was basically an empty society. England was mostly forest. And it's interesting that France was the most advanced country in Europe before England, but England had a sort of cultural advantage from being rural later than France did. And it's all very, it's very fascinating. And Mesopotamia.

Mm-hmm.

with Babylon, and this is something I've pulled from a handful of different authors, is that they went through their own civilizational trajectory. And something that plays off what Samo said is that the last Babylonian emperor, his name is something like Necho, although it's not Necho. His biggest hobby was archaeology. He would dig up old cities. So this is an area of the world.

Yes.

It's already old enough in the, when the Babylonian Empire fell, they opened the gates for the Persians. We think it's because They had such ennui, and for those that don't know, ennui is a word for spiritual disconnection, that they would rather have the Persians conquer them than govern themselves. And that's a hallmark of a society in decline when you just don't put up a fight. And that happened in either opening your gates for invaders or not trying. That's happened in Greece when they let the Romans in. It's happening now in the Western world. In China and India around 1000 AD. When the barbarians—

The concrete museum, by the way, is around 500 BC. It is actually curated by a princess. So Enigal is the daughter of the ruling king, and the king is funding the museum, but she acts as the curator. And we know this because when they found all of these items collected from long-destroyed Sumerian cities, Babylonian cities from 5 years before 500 BC, they would put little labels. So I can only imagine the existential dread of the archaeologist in Iraq, 1920s, carefully, you know, scooping away the dirt and then finding museum labels. And at first, you know, and even older artifacts brought to there with an explanation of where they were found. Like, surely that must have been like a moment of mortality.

Yes.

If I was working as a British archaeologist in still British Iraq in 1920s and I find this, I couldn't help but have like a premonition about the British Museum. So I don't know. Let's see. Maybe, maybe in 10 years, riots will actually already destroy the British Museum. I think we shouldn't actually assume it's gonna even last 100 or 200 more years. It might.

Exactly.

Or it might not.

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The, with the Babylonians, at the end of Babylon, 3 quarters of the population were slaves. And that's a really interesting anthropological phenomenon I've found of how were there societies like Tsarist Russia or Thailand 300 years ago where 70% of people are slaves. It does happen in history. And Michael Hudson writes a lot about how debt slavery killed the ancient world. And in Babylon, you saw this cycle of debt slavery, and the Bible touches on this really well too. This cycle of debt slavery destroying the population, removing an incentive. Both Babylon and Egypt suffered from agnosticism and atheism, which we forget. And the Axial Age around 500 BC with when Laozi, Confucius, Buddha, and Socrates all lived at the same time. Watch the History 102 we made on it. That society was an agnostic society. And we forget that there was atheism and agnosticism 2,500 years ago. And things I would complain about on my Twitter are things authors from back then would say. They would say no one respects anyone else. People don't love each other, that no one's polite anymore, that there's random thugs. It was social breakdown, 500 BC. And with—

I think that there is a Assyrian author. that complains about how once it was worth to read every work, but now too many people write books and no one reads books.

Yeah.

Right. So, so I think we tend to assume that this is old people complaining about society that are basically wrong. But another way to consider it is that if societies do actually go through some kind of cycle, at numerous points on the sinusoidal curve, it will be going down and you'll be able to find samples from decaying societies century after century after century. Like in 19th century China, which encountered Western civilization, they thought of themselves as a society in decline and they were right. They were still losing books. There are certain classical Chinese texts that today we only have because they were looted by basically Western military forces intervening. in 19th century China. So this is a society that in theory already has the printing press. It actually, it definitely has the printing press, right?

Yeah.

But it's neglecting, discarding its own legacy. Now, right now when China, I would argue, is a different civilization than what it was 200 years ago, I think the sort of trauma of the Communist Revolution and the Cultural Revolution created a new Chinese civilization. They're sort of rediscovering but very, very selectively the older legacy. And it is very selective because whatever is brought and promoted as essentially Chinese must be harmonized with this sort of still Marxist-Leninist—

Yeah.

Materialist theory that they adopted, right? Adopted arguably directly from the Russians, which I think, you know, this is another one. I think people might not be used to thinking of modern China as a hybrid between medieval Chinese civilization, Russian civilization, and Western civilization. But if you look closely at it, it has features of all 3.

Yes. You saying that made me so happy because it's a thread I've been thinking about where I call— there's a couple different dimensions, and oftentimes with complex ideas, you'll find different thinkers hit it through different routes. And I've developed something I call modern civilization. In modern civilization, one of my friends jokingly says Spengler calls the Western civilization Faustian, and modern civilization is the devil the West made the deal with, where Faust is an ancient European story that Goethe updated, where a man, apparently it dates back to like Aryan times or prehistoric times, and a man sells his soul to the devil in exchange for money and power. And modern civilization is the belief structure under which previous societies train, trade their identities for. And modern civilization is built upon concepts of the rational mind being superior to tradition, equality, progress, the blank slate, and a variety of other things. And it's interesting to look at a place like China where It is this combination of an ancient civilization that goes back thousands of years, but there's also this very new element. And when I briefly lived in California, one of the things I found is that I was comparing where I grew up in rural Pennsylvania to Europe, because I've lived in Europe and Pennsylvania. And between rural Pennsylvania and Europe, you have majority white population. People wear clothes invented in Europe. You have Christian, you have Christian social code. English political philosophy, you have the stories people tell their children are European stories, that Hercules or the Bible or King Arthur. In California, not majority European society ethnically, the social code is postmodernist. The, the architecture is not European, or they are European. It's very 20th century European that doesn't pull on the previous trajectories. The political philosophy and effectively the religion is not, it's not European in the traditional sense. And so what I saw living in California—

I think that in California, you know, especially in the Bay Area, you have Christianity and Judaism give way to a series of unnamed religions. The most well-developed one is actually what we could call West Coast Buddhism, which is fundamentally different and incompatible with Asian Buddhism. It has a thin veneer of science and rationality, proposes a basically solipsistic philosophy where the limits of the perception of the brain, you know, mean that basically the best thing you could do is kind of like wirehead yourself and just be okay with whatever is happening. But it drops all of the troubling things about reincarnation and gods and demons and hells and heavens, which traditional Buddhism has.

Right.

And then says, oh no, actually this is pure Buddhism. And, you know, Asian peasants, they have no idea how to do Buddhism. Me, however, you know, you know, a white or a, or maybe at best an Asian American, but actually usually I see white guys get into this. Meanwhile, a white software engineer, I certainly know how Buddhism works because, you know, really the mind is like a computer. So I'm kind of making fun of this neo-Buddhism. But the significant practice of meditation plus ubiquitous use of psychedelics plus weird origin story that is not truthful about the origin of Buddhism, that has become a kind of consensus here. And, you know, often what is best thought of, but that's merely the best developed variant, right? I think we can name West Coast Buddhism. There are essays there, actually essays by very serious Western Buddhists who find this kind of stifling orthodoxy a problem, and they want to do something closer to the original Japanese, Chinese, or Hindu Buddhism. But the other religions already also exist, and I think that there is an interesting cultic aspect that happens with the transformation of gender. I think when you transition, maybe that can be ideologically done in a different way, But for many people, it becomes this like almost important spiritual action, like a victory over yourself to write yourself. And you have small belief systems popping up here and there on top of more mainstream trans rights, which I believe are like, like sort of Faustian the way you prove it's sort of like, it's, it's sort of like this is the first step to transhumanism.

So.

I have— from man, I have become woman, or from woman, I've become man. And then one day, I won't be man or woman at all, and my humanity will be left behind. So, I think there's a certain transhumanism there. And then there's the more traditional techno-accelerationist transhumanism, which has nothing with biohacking or changing your body, just kind of assumes that we will merge with computers, worship computers, computers will take care of us, we will be saved through the computer. So I think singular would be the third sort of new religion of California. Not to go so deep into it, but we are talking about how religions shape civilization. And I can see already like 3 possible religions popping up just here in the Bay Area.

Yeah.

And most of them will probably go extinct, but I wouldn't be shocked if there is such a thing as Californian civilization 200 or 300 years from now.

I recently made a video, The 4 Religions Fighting Over America, and I say that America is competing over Darwinists, Christians, machine worship, and Marxism. And these 4 are covertly fighting over America. And you bring up a very interesting point, Samo.

Oh, I, I like the machine worship framing because we definitely are, you know, maybe it's again, the bias I see, the view from San Francisco is that machine worship is one of the great religions of America.

Yes.

Right.

And, and I, I'm not even completely unsympathetic to it. It's just, I don't believe it'll personally save me, but some of my friends do. Right. They believe that before they die, the singularity will come and then they're gonna have a great life forever. I mean, Erik, you, you probably have many, many friends as well that just straightforwardly believe this. Do you believe it? I, I hate to interrogate you about your religion.

How, how would you rephrase it?

Oh, I would just phrase it as we might live forever if the singularity is soon enough. Like, I mean, to be fair, maybe, but you know, is that how you would personally bet? We have friends who are personally betting this way as their survival and how they deal with existential dread of, you know, the knowledge of death.

I would not bet on it. No.

Okay. Same. I wouldn't bet on it. I wouldn't say it's physically impossible, but I would say I wouldn't bet on it.

Yeah, I think, I think it's, it's worth pursuing or worth trying to, to, to achieve, but it's not an inevitability for, for it in my—

But I think the way a lot of, a lot of luminaries of Silicon Valley approach it is a little bit descended from Christianity because it does promise personal salvation. It doesn't promise a dissolution of identity like sort of West Coast Buddhism does. It sort of promises that I personally might survive if only I accelerate. technology enough, or if only I figure out superintelligence and then the rest of technological progress doesn't matter, the superintelligence, if aligned.

Yeah.

So if I summon a good demon or a good god rather than an evil god, then I will be rewarded and I'll get to, you know, I will live forever and other people might too, but that's kind of not what I'm doing it.

What's interesting is we also see people use that as a way to dismiss their arguments. When people talk about AGI, people will say, oh, that's just religious thinking. And I think that's a mistake too.

I agree.

Just because it is religious thinking, uh, or sort of, uh, you know, has, uh, rhymes with, with certain religious tropes, it doesn't mean that it, it can't actually become true.

Well, religions would have no power if they could not reshape society and the world. You know, if you're living as an Aztec and, you know, these funny people show up from Spain and they say, you know, our God has decreed that we will save you from your backwards demon worship, you're like, this is ridiculous. This is magical and religious thinking. But then those 400 dudes on horseback are coordinating with each other really well. And before you know it, you're their subject. So there's a political realization, but then there's also like a technological realization, right? Like, you know, I don't think we, we marvel enough at how crazy it was to argue that everyone should know how to read and that that will happen one day. that as a religious duty you should know how to read. Like, this was a profound transformation of what it means to be a human being, going from preliterate to literate. And now possibly we're going postliterate. It's like you're almost a different organism. You can draw on lifetimes you never lived. Like, Rudyard, you have probably drawn on 1,000 or 10,000 lifetimes if you read history. But anyone who's even read a biography of someone has drawn on more than one lifetime. And perhaps you would get the stories from your grandparents or from a tribal elder in an illiterate society, but you certainly couldn't get a fairly accurate account of, say, the life of Julius Caesar or even the life of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is just at the point where the last people that knew him will like slowly start dying. So 50 years from now, he would've passed from verbal memory, but we have plenty of books on the guy. So if Silicon Valley wants to aspire to him 100 years from now, they'll be able to do so. And finally, also the religions have successfully, you know, transformed societies and they have also successfully transformed nature. I think one of the more interesting points is that many religions have a terraforming aspect. Rudyard, I know you're familiar with Ethiopian Christianity. Do you two know that they basically plant a little forest around their churches?

Hmm. I had no idea.

They often have this idea that there should be a representation of the Garden of Eden around. So you sometimes have these like little forests that you're not supposed to cut down around the churches, and these are supposed to evoke these Edenic qualities. So, uh, I found that a very interesting little tradition, and perhaps it seems like a trivial way to us, But you know, if Ethiopian Christianity was there for 2,000 years, I guarantee you that changes the ecosystem.

Yes, this conversation opens up so many threads that I don't think we have time for. I could go into how a lot of trans and AI pulls on obscure mystic traditions, or I'm gonna hold back.

So what I'm hearing, we should do another episode.

Ha ha ha ha! I would not be against that. Yeah. So. I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you the cliffhanger and then I'm going to hit 2 points I want to hit. So the cliffhanger is, if you look at AI and trans, it pulls from, and if you look at modern science too, all of these things pull from hidden esoteric teachings that go back thousands of years, which have been hidden from the public. Where science pulls from Hermeticism and trans and AI pulls from elements of Gnosticism. And other kinds of secret mystery associations. However, we will not get into that. And the point that the audience can go screw itself. We're the ones in charge. So random guy listening in Florida, I want to know that I truly loathe you. You are a terrible person.

That being said, I, I, I don't know who that is, but okay.

I just want to insult a random guy in Florida. You know who you are. Actually, no, he doesn't. I'm just making this person up, but But what I was trying to say is that I have, having lived in 6 states, I think people underestimate the intra-American regional differences where I have a periodic checklist.

America is more of a continent than a single country.

Yes, it's almost like it is a continent. And but what I find, I want to, I all have a mental checklist of things that happen in California that were not inside my frame of reference growing up in Pennsylvania. Erotic cake stores, stuff getting delivered, packages getting delivered by drones, machine worship. And I think people underestimate the sheer scale of differences inside America. And I'm starting a video series called The Anthropology of Blank. So it's the anthropology of North America, the anthropology of Latin America, Asia. I go through every single continent and it goes through what people migrated there, what their cultures are, what the regional differences are, the language, religion, whatever. And people vastly underestimate differences inside America, but I think oftentimes intra-American differences border on different civilizations. I think, and it's not just red state, blue state. I think red state, blue state is a factor, but I think the American Northeast is a different civilization than the West Coast. And it often doesn't fit like easy lines where I find Texas and Pennsylvania have very Similar cultures, although it doesn't—

having—

I study social cues and I study how people live life, and Texas and Pennsylvania have a lot of similarities they don't have with Georgia or other parts of the South or the Midwest. And I don't think it's an easy thing to measure, but almost every single element of life can differ across America. And I, I, I, I found groups and I found that if you want to get someone to show up at an event in New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, or California, you have to use very different motivation techniques for different regions. And my final question, Samo, is what is your favorite obscure civilization that doesn't get enough traction?

Oof. Well, if you're gonna ask me, I'm gonna have a very obscure answer. And the answer is the Nuragic civilization of Sardinia and Corsica, because they built huge castles, like over 5,000 castles. In the Bronze Age, and they traded apparently all the way to modern-day Scandinavia and are the first people to have sort of these horned helmets. So they are one of the candidates for one of the Sea Peoples that raided ancient Egypt and so on. They were still building these nuraghs, these fortresses, by the time the Romans arrived. It's also very deep continuity.

Beat me. That's, that's some obscure stuff. I was gonna go for South—

Check out their aesthetics, by the way. They have this bizarre, like, like the, the armor they depict their warriors in is almost like bug people. They have like extra eyes on the armor, extra hands. It's a very strange and interesting society and aesthetic. By the way, every time how we can tell civilizations are phenomenologically different is that every civilization has actually a unique aesthetic. Mesoamerican, Egyptian, Chinese, et cetera, Western, medieval.

Yes. A thesis I have that I'm going to be quick with is I think there are, and this comes with assumptions of basically superiority, but there are higher and lower civilizations. A higher civilization creates a philosophy of the world that it spreads to other societies. And so the classical, the Indians, the Muslims. The West, China, they created their own worldview that they export to other societies. And the society I would pick, the Khmer, they aren't like that. Where if you look at the Khmer civilization, or the Khmer, as it's often seen in Cambodia, I went on a really big Southeast Asia research project because I knew that I knew nothing about them. So I read 10 books on the topic because I wanted to figure out what they were about. And one of my best friends, he was a professional anthropologist in Cambodia for many years. And he came back with a lot of interesting stuff where he said the native peoples of Cambodia, they literally see magic in their daily lives. It's not even a question. They just see it.

And well, perhaps we will converge with them too, with the use of artificial intelligence. We are, you know, enchanting and changing the world around us.

This is magic.

It kind of is. Kind of is.

And the thing with the Khmer that's interesting, and this is something people don't think about, is that Legitimately, a majority of their population were slaves. And they would literally use young women as a currency where they would trade young women as a form of money where like, I'll give you 5 sex slaves in exchange for lumber. And it's the Khmer built the, I think it might be the largest structure. It might be the largest structure in the world without, I'm sure the Soviets had some factory that was bigger, but under certain qualifications, it's the largest structure in the world. Mm-hmm. Where Angkor Wat is just truly, truly vast, and it's in the jungle of Cambodia. And the Angkor civilization had their own civilization cycle where they also hit decadence, and they had a collapse in the 1200s comparable to the Mayan civilization collapse, where Angkor fell apart, and then Thai barbarians came out of China. And the Thai people are actually from Yunnan in southwest China, and And so it's interesting to see this society. And interestingly, the Angkor people are Hindu, which we forget. The Indians were the people who established civilization largely peacefully across all Southeast Asia. So they call it Greater India in old books, and they call the area around Champa, or modern Saigon, whatever they call it now, that Ho Chi Minh City, I think. Yeah, that was called Champa, and they call it Cochin China. Because Cochin's South India and there's China. And so it's this entire society that just people forget about. And Cambodia went through its own Poland-Lithuania phase where Vietnam and Thailand gradually consumed all of Cambodia. So it went from the largest country in the region to being completely conquered by the, by the time 1800. Cambodia was conquered in almost the exact same timescale as Poland-Lithuania was.

Well, we, we have in history many civilizations that ended up being less impactful on the world we live in today because they were overwhelmed militarily or destroyed through their own cycle. So perhaps on the note of these 2 obscure civilizations, we wrap up for today and we'll—

Yeah.

We have plenty of material for next time.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg. Is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Hey everyone, Erik here. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts to shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, investors, and influencers like Econ 102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week, and we're looking for industry-leading sponsors. If you think that might be you and your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's erik@turpentine.co. And let's partner together.