Rudyard Lynch and Samo Burja Talk The Left’s Future and Problems with Modernity

Hey, Upstream listeners! Today we're trying something a little different. Last week, my friends Rudyard Lynch and Sam O'Berja had a livestreamed conversation on What If Alt-Hist, a YouTube channel on the Turpentine Network, and we're releasing their discussion here. They cover a wide range of topics, including the aftermath of the presidential election, the decline of French influence in Africa, the psychology of modernity, and more. Please enjoy.

Hi everybody, this is the second livestream we've done recently, and I've brought on my friend Sam Oberge. We've known each other for like, I would say, 3 years. You were one of the first people I met when I dropped out of school, and Samo has a lot of really interesting content. He runs a think tank with a lot of writers, and he also runs the Palladium magazine, and So thank you so much for coming here. It's a real pleasure to have you.

It's always a pleasure. It's always a pleasure, Roger. I think it's been a very eventful past few weeks. Has the election gone how you have expected and the aftermath how you expected? I think we've not actually chatted about it yet.

That's an interesting question where I predicted Trump would win a month in advance because I was looking at the collective zeitgeist. And you find for zeitgeists, there are often multiple— people study individual variables, but they are unable to see the underlying broader trends. But the individual variables don't work that often, or they're often sporadic evidence. And so I could see almost every single trend made Trump look better, and almost every single event made Kamala look worse. And that's why I predicted Trump would win. And My fundamental reaction here is I don't think we've seen the full endpoint of the election. I was surprised at how little energy there was, but I think that we are in a play where the act is not fully done.

Do you mean how little energy there was on, say, Democratic Party pushback?

Yes.

Where you— there have been no protests, for example, right? Like, I know that in San Francisco, uh, where I live, in, in 2016, uh, you truly saw like massive protests. You saw like a deep despondency Now it's like almost like this vague sense of giving up. And I don't think this will last. I think this is just an initial shock. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, of course.

Yeah.

My idea here is I think the left is in a fundamentally dangerous position, and I believe that they know that they're not really in a good place. And I think they're looking for something for plausible deniability to act. But It's unclear what that is, and I think the left is holding a collective breath where they wonder, what is— what are we gonna do next? Because I think— because I paid a friend to watch 10 hours of BreadTube and write a strategic analysis of where the left is at now, and I'm gonna make a video about it. But what he said, his study of all these leftist creators, is they knew things weren't working, but they don't have a better idea. And so they're kind of stuck in this disjoint. I think that's symbolically true of the left in general. And I also think they've burned through their emotional circuit, where I think they have raised the emotional ante so much that they can't keep it going forever.

In a way, the emotional ante was already exhausted even when Joe Biden was running. You can feel that the earlier Biden campaign was lower energy than the first Biden campaign. And in the power struggle and the switch to Kamala Harris, It was a wave of astroturfed enthusiasm, but it was astroturfed. It was like all the legacy media organizations in unison basically declaring her a good candidate. I did not see a sense of existential dread or worry of another Trump presidency. Like, in a strange way, on some level, I think they just expected to win. I think they thought it was so obvious and that they were so bored of making the anti-Trump argument. They already called Trump a fascist. Like, what more can you do? So now I think they're literally mildly depressed. They're mildly in shock at the world. And I think this will not last. I think within 2 to 3 weeks, we're going to start seeing the first trial balloons. What do I mean? Individuals from the Democratic Party will speak to try to narrate what the defeat is and to try to mobilize the population on a particular thing. Now, they might redo Project 2025 as this sort of like boogeyman, right?

Yes.

So, you know, Trump won and then we're basically fighting Project 2025. I think the previous anti-Trump campaign rested a lot on the millennial generation. As the organizational and activist backbone. Part of it is millennials just got old. Anyone who made their career complaining about Trump 8 years ago, well, that was 8 years ago, and they've not been promoted to the top of the party.

Right.

And they know it.

So that's a very—

like, maybe like their team's not rewarding them quite enough, even.

You've raised several very good points, one of which is I was really shocked at the astroturfing Kamala too, because I have a background in media and I, I know how these agencies work. I know how content creators work. And the fact they changed within 24 hours means that they have a very, very well organized media machine. It means that they can create any narrative and apply it overnight because they've been doing this for years. And that should make you backpedal and think what else was astroturfed. So that's the first point. The second point is the left operates under a tremendous amount of emotionality, and at their greatest strength is their ability to get inside the heads of their followers. And the left is capable of so much in-group cohesion due to that, and they use emotionality in their moral code because the more emotional you are, the better a person you are.

And Thus, the way you are protecting your ego at all times, whenever you are repeating a talking point, you are defending your self-perception as a good, positive, moral, righteous person.

Yeah.

Also, you are allowed a vent for your frustrations. Like, part of the fundamental psychology related to this worldview is that aggression is bad. You can only aggress against the aggressors. So every time When you identify a plausible or scapegoatable aggressor, you feel very alive because all of these parts of your nature, the envy, hatred, anger, all that, you can unleash it with full moral backing, moral legitimacy.

I very much agree with that. And that's actually— that's the Unabomber's point. And I think the Unabomber, although of course I do not support terrorism, I think he makes several very intelligent philosophical points. And I find it funny he's a Pole, because of course a Pole would say that about communism. And so they've burned through their emotional circuits. And what I see for the left now is that they're— I believe them to be in a position of fundamental weakness where AI, the wokeness in its ultimate culmination, and finally the— there's— and the internet. These 3 things really put the managerial class in a difficult place. And I think they fundamentally know that they are on desperate ground. And so I believe they're trying to take over institutions as rapidly as possible so that they— so that their people can't get removed due to natural technological meritocratic change.

I think that the 3 points you raised, at least the internet, is— it cuts both ways. There's sort of the Chinese model of a controlled society with the internet.

Yes.

Is the ultimate opportunity to make every citizen legible, perhaps with the help of AI systems, every citizen traceable. The alternative vision is the internet of the 1990s, early 2000s, of which we see a faint echo on Elon Musk's X.com, and perhaps now ever more so on YouTube, and perhaps also on Facebook. Like, I know you know that there are many great channels that get demonetized on YouTube quite aggressively, and that there was a change away from freedom of speech over the last 10 years, even as demand for a variety of views has skyrocketed. So the EU, in my opinion, wants to go down the China track. They don't justify it in terms of like, you know, Marxist-Leninism or Maoism. They justify it on like, you know, anti-hate speech, etc., etc. Like even elements of sort of protecting privacy of the citizens, right? But really, what is attempted is a digital bureaucracy so that when you go online, you are always in a walled garden. The walled garden is controlled by obscure corporate policy. Behind the scenes, the corporate policy is dictated by government or created in dialogue with government. And we have ample evidence this was the case with the major social media giants in Europe. And I think in the United States, let's remember, you can now follow Alex Jones on x.com. I don't think Alex Jones is allowed on YouTube. Do you remember when he was basically banned from the internet? Like 4 or 5 platforms simultaneously pushed him off the internet, right? And I'm not saying I would endorse everything Alex Jones says, but he's kind of a canary in the coal mine, right?

Yes, I, I agree with that. And I, I, when I look at the European Union, I see some similarities with China due to bureaucrat ruling class. And there's a certain ruling class of a society—

Like Mandarin-style rule. Yes.

And that ruling class imprints archetypal traits upon a society irrespective of its context. So there are similarities between feudal Japan and feudal Europe because they both have the warrior nobility in charge, but they're societies that had zero contact with the other. And with the European Union, I see that to be true. And a video I need to make soon, because it's been coming to me lately, is I believe we exist on the edge of what is possibly one of the most important historic events ever. And that is whether the internet will be free or whether it will be controlled. Because if the internet is free, we get the Balaji universe of the network becoming the new government, and it would return to medieval Europe, where in medieval Europe you have You would, with the internet, you'd see both localization and transnationalization, because everyone who would share values would move to Montana, and they would work a job that would be in the big city beforehand, remotely. But at the same time, like the Whatifalthist fanbase, this is a trans— we are a transnational organization, where you guys have similar values, you listen to similar content, I'm sure you share a lot of— I'm sure lots of you watch Sammo. You have these, uh— these non-national triangulations of values that breaks down the centralized government because the internet can organize people more efficiently than the centralized government. The second time—

Provides a straightforward alternative for the most important aspects of control in a classic 20th century managerial society. A lot of people don't understand that in the late Soviet Union, in the '70s and '60s and '80s, the consequence for speaking against the party wasn't that you were immediately dragged off to a gulag. The consequence was you would never work in a desirable industry again. You were on a blacklist. Now, if this sounds familiar and disturbing, I mean, maybe it should be. I remember the 2010s. I know, you know, many people who were fired and became unhireable in their industries for things they said in a capacity as private free citizens on the internet.

Yeah.

Now, this is in the absence of any, like, speech laws, right? This was the de facto social regime. So I I think the internet not only allows people to network in the way you accurately described, if it is allowed to be free, it also allows people to, in an unsupervised way, transact with each other materially.

Right.

So they can in fact create their own alternate economy. They can create their own alternate educational institution. And, uh, you know, once you have access to information, once you have access to economic opportunities, and once you have freedom of assembly in digital space, even if in physical space the right of assembly has been sort of shut down as hard as you can, right? You're very limited in what you are allowed to do in terms of voluntary associations, even in the United States. I think at that point you have recreated the public square, like you said, and perhaps a return to the medieval world or even the polis, right? Because the public square of a polis existed no matter what the government of a polis was. It was a physical space. You went there to trade, you went there to speak, you went there to socialize, and no one could stop you. No one could bar you from entering in.

Yeah.

If you weren't an outlaw.

I agree with that. And there's a but that's in the timeline where the internet can defeat the government. The other timeline is we've said this before, we have telescreens everywhere. The level of surveillance our state has is vastly greater than George Orwell could have ever dreamed of due to AI. Due to these things track all of your information. They know your purchase history. They know where you walk. Yeah.

They always carry it in your pocket.

Yeah. They have—

they're physically present.

Exactly. They know where you're physically present. They know who you text. And most communication now is by text. They know your sexual habits. They know how fast you breathe at night. And if the state can have this information and pair it with AI and robots, we will end up in one of the worst dystopias ever. And I feel comfortable saying that because I will be dead if this timeline works. The consequences of what I say now don't really matter because I'm past the threshold. But we exist in this very critical moment, and I— I'd like to convey to people in power watching, the most important thing you could do now, and I would give anything else for that, is establishing data protections on people and passing various laws and making encrypted structures so that the government could not consume every single second of our life.

I think that it is extremely important that we either make the individuals opaque to government institutions, or alternatively, we also perhaps make government transparent. True transparency in government would be if all government functions, and I mean all, were always available to the public. Can you imagine what the world would be like where you log into a feed and you can see the meeting of the president? Now, of course, maybe you can't keep secrets from China, but have you noticed where your phones are made? We're not keeping any secrets from China.

Yeah.

Sort of like China knows everything about the US, the US knows everything about China, we both have backdoors, uh, so who are we hiding from? Well, in a way, we're hiding from the Chinese population, we're hiding from the American population.

Is there—

The justification, hiding secrets from each other. Now, this is a little bit hyperbole. There's way more truth to this than you would think. In many historical periods, you see notional political enemies basically respect class privilege. Like, that's the reason why sometimes you have non-assassination equilibria between elites, because, you know, 2 elites fighting, let's say they're both feudal, for example, or they're both bureaucratic.

Yeah.

Neither of them wishes to engage in a kind of warfare that destroys their own underpinning of power in the other country, because they understand this will be crippling and damaging to them and also eliminate their ability to interface with that new territory. Arguably, that's sort of precisely what happens when the Germans in desperation in World War I supported the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Suddenly, centuries of German influence over Imperial Russia vanished because the system changed. The Germans who were powerful in Imperial Russia weren't the Volga Germans, they were the Baltic Germans, the ones that were nobility, right? They would rise sometimes to senior positions like senior generals in the Imperial military, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, because of this, there was a deep break politically in Europe. And I could name many other examples, and I'm sure you've talked about these on, on your show as well, because I know you're familiar. Yes.

So I'd like to—

There's like a desire to preserve the political structure, right? And I think currently we're in an equilibrium where citizens are becoming more and more transparent to government. The only thing that's saving us is the government is incapable of processing information, but the technology to process information gets a little better every year.

Yes, it's really remarkable how much information the government has and how poorly they make decisions, because I'm going to use the far right as an example, where the government should have infinite knowledge on the American far right because they can read the texts of everyone involved. but they actually make profound miscalculations off how the right thinks. Or another example is that people frequently— the American government could very, very easily get statistics on how poor and desperate the average American is. They could— if they haven't made an AI language model to read through the public's texts yet, I would be very shocked. So they could make a language AI model to look at the emotionality of the population at any given time, and then develop strategies to get elected and stuff based off people's private texts, but they're not using that effectively. It's insane.

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I think it is always the case that people imitate to a great degree, uh, both those around them, those that came before. Currently in the United States, both the Democratic Party and to a much lesser extent the Republican Party are aping political careers, uh, that were minted in a world that no longer exists.

Yes.

People are still trying to be, you know, Bill Clinton of this generation or the Joe Biden of this generation, or on the Republican side, Until Trump's most recent victory, people were trying to be the Ronald Reagan of this generation.

Yeah.

People want to repeat the old recipe for success, but that country doesn't exist anymore. 1950s America doesn't exist. 1960s, 1980s, even early 2000s America is kind of a foreign country. Like, I challenge the audience to watch some TV from the early 2000s, like just watch some shows. There has been massive social change, and every statistic shows massive economic change as well.

You're right. It's crazy where I was watching a Huey Lewis video yesterday, and Huey Lewis was a singer from the '80s. And it was crazy watching because he was known for being one of the more milquetoast and normie singers. And so this is what a normie produces. And you compare it to our society, and this would never be made today. And it's often in things that people don't notice, where, for example, standards of sexual propriety have actually become significantly more conservative in the last generation, where I think nudity in films has crashed by 50% in the last 2 years. So that's one thing. Secondarily, almost everyone's white. And this is in Los Angeles, a city that's only a third white ancestry, or it's like half— it's over half white ancestry due to Latinos having white ancestry. 1/3 American non-Hispanic white, then you also have a society where people are broadly middle class. And it's interesting, even verbal stuff like they, at the beginning of it, they show a radio, a radio show, and the radio show is talking in this very convivial, joking way that you would never hear now. And it's little stuff like that, or not that little, that adds up over time. And I say that because I grew up in rural Pennsylvania in the 2000s, and that America was still very identifiable to The Simpsons and John Hughes and classic Americana, because I only think we can reference Americana in our social vocabulary now. We can't go back further. And Americana is post-World Wars art.

Yes.

And the— I say at some point in the last 20 years, we went from John Hughes, Simpsons, to— I call it Blade Runner 1600s. That's what I call modern America, a combination of Blade Runner with the 1600s Wars of Religion.

I think that, uh, that description is like fairly accurate, right? You have these like hyper-scaled units of economic production, be it the like, you know, compounding mega corporations or the, you know, slightly dystopian LA You know, others can speak as to how dystopian or not LA is, but, you know, San Francisco at this point is like famously cyberpunk. You literally have self-driving cars harassed by lawless vagrants yelling at the cars and graffitiing the cars. And the cars are somehow made by a super rich corporation, but somehow the super rich corporation can't keep the cars safe from vagrants. And of course, the police like do nothing. And you're in this strange situation where you can be riding in a luxury self-driving vehicle truly from the future, like those white Jaguars. And yet you are in a way exposed as if you lived in the third world.

Yeah.

In a way you are living, you're living in third world and first. It's in the same city, in the same time, in the same place.

Yeah.

Which is Blade Runner predicted.

I, that's all, those are all very good points. And I call it Blade Runner in the 1600s. And the 1600s is one of my favorite eras of history. Because they were facing a secular cycle in the same way we are. Are you familiar with secular cycles, Samo?

Yeah, the secular cycle theory of— yeah.

So we have that, we have religious fanaticism. And if you showed our political differences, I believe are basically religious. And I can explain that if you'd like, because it's an entire worldview. So we have secular cycle, mass political polarization, society on the verge of a civil war. You have the effects of globalization. You have incredible inequality. You have an information technology disrupting the previous power structures. And you have what I think is becoming a more multipolar world where I was shocked when I saw the French and the Turks are fighting a proxy war in Libya. I thought, are we back in 1637?

Well, they're certainly contesting the Mediterranean in a very wide way. You know, perhaps about the dispute on natural gas mines off the coast of Cyprus. Cyprus, of course, being divided between Cyprus, which is sort of implicitly Greek, and Northern Cyprus, which is implicitly Turkish.

Yes.

Both Turkey and Europe, of course, hunger for alternate sources of natural gas now that Russian natural gas is no longer an option. French have sent ships to be stationed in Greek ports, and the Greeks, of course, have welcomed this because I think on some level they're afraid that they're going to lose more islands in the future.

Yeah.

Greece has undergone immense economic contraction. And then let's add on top of this, um, West Africa, where the French used to be very influential, they're no longer influential. So one of the last remnants of sort of their colonial empire is this sort of vague influence in the Middle East, plus a few more, a few corners of West Africa. In several places in West Africa, The government is no longer backed by French special forces. Very weak, easy to topple, easy to coup government. It's not backed by French special forces, but by Wagner. And they pay Wagner in mineral rights, that being the infamous or well-known Russian private military corporation.

Yes.

They've been sort of exiled into Africa, which is funny, right? Like, they've been completely— their wings completely clipped at home because of what happened with the tank drive to Moscow. I think that was last year. That was 2023. So much happens. You have to, you have to think, is this last month? Is this last year?

Yes. Another 1600s, another 1600s comparison. The huge mercenary armies and—

Well, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. They're the Swiss mercenaries of the modern era. And the US has its mercenaries too.

The question I would like to ask you is, I knew about France's influence in Africa with the Franc-Afrique, and I, when I write, like 4 years ago when I dropped out, I made the prediction French influence would grow in Africa. I have no idea why I said that. I don't know, but I was completely incorrect, and France influence decreased. And I've told my friend Lord Miles, who's a professional adventurer, that if the UN world order didn't exist, You would have a, uh, just people like Wagner or BlackRock, Blackwater, they would have mercenary bands seize control of parts of Africa. But my question is, what did France do to lose West Africa? Because it seems to have happened really quickly.

I think part of it was essentially their deep conflict with, uh, I mean, first off, I think that there is a culture war within France. And as crazy as it sounds, I think a lot of very senior French officials are just tired of being called a neocolonial power. And they would prefer to not be a power than to be called nasty names and being called neocolonial. And the officials themselves don't personally benefit that much, even if it is good for French power, culture, economy. If this sounds implausible, consider how much the decolonization of the British Empire went out of almost a moral vanity, not even focusing on good moral outcomes as to what happens after you leave. Just, hey, we're no longer colonizers. We're now all good. We are not doing anything nasty anywhere. So that's number one.

Yes.

Number 2, there is a conflict over migration in Africa. Where especially Italy under Meloni has been hostile to France and hostile to France claiming that these interventions in West Africa that secure French power there are driving some of the migratory wave that comes through a broken Libya straight into Italy. So Meloni's like on record in speeches critiquing the French and even blaming the French for some of the poverty in West Africa, which I don't think is quite right. I think it's just a radically underdeveloped region. But the political instability stuff, well, that's hard to argue. It was French intervention that initially toppled Gaddafi. So that's not quite West Africa, but there are many refugee waves from West Africa that have since passed through Libya. And Libya was sort of this breaking of the dam, right, that results in this perpetual issue that Italy has to deal with. Italy's become frontier of Europe from being fairly boring of Europe even 10 or 20 years ago.

Yeah. Quigley, who I keep over here, he's got a really fascinating class analysis of colonialism where he says colonialism was the European upper and bourgeois classes. They'd been— or really the European nobility and some of the bourgeois interests benefited while the other social classes didn't. And so he said after the World Wars, once you had universal suffrage and The bureaucracy seized power. The bureaucracy didn't want to keep the empire. And one of the things people forget about European colonial empires is these were very small projects. For example, large parts of—

Small in terms of personnel and funding allotted to them. Yeah.

Yes. For a lot of these, especially for huge areas of West Africa, the French just sent an officer out there who showed up with some machine guns and the natives said— and keep in mind, across all The African colonialism was not how most people think, where most European possessions in Africa were 0.01% white. And for any given— for Britain, the African Empire was less than 1% of their foreign trade, and Britain was one of the countries that traded with Africa the most. And it was normally these ego projects made by these European nobility who were trying to conquer stuff Viking style. And when they did take the land, They gave the Africans self-governance. And so it was the same chieftains in charge. They would just give gifts to the Europeans. And so it was very small groups of people. So it was incredibly easy for the Europeans to first take Africa and then immediately leave because there weren't major connections to the continent.

I think that these were very lightweight projects and colonialism was in many ways almost an individual venture. Yeah, this is perhaps even true of the earlier waves of colonialism because, you know, if you were a venture capitalist in the 1600s, you would bet on a ship going to the Spice Islands and back. And then if there's some local trouble with people when the ship arrives, well, the ship has cannons and maybe you have this fort that's your warehouse and you need to store some goods there. And pretty soon you're the kingmaker locally in random parts of Asia. But that's In a context where cities already exist, the sort of tribal structure of Africa is even a step below this. Now, of course, there was profitable mining in South Africa, but those are— that's the one place that is distinct from your analysis, because that was in a way a society more similar to, say, Australia and the United States, with significant numbers, first Dutch settlers and then English settlers coming.

Yeah.

Yes, those are all correct. I'm gonna go through the fan— I'm gonna go through the fan mail and also just hit up people who don't know who you are. About 2,500 people are watching. For those who weren't here at the beginning, Samo runs Bismarck Analysis, which is a geopolitics think tank. We've been friends for 3 years. He also runs the highly prestigious, prestigious Palladium magazine. So this is Samo for those who do not know him. Secondarily, let me go through the— let me go through some of the super chats people send. Oh, thank you for your love, Adrian King. Big Poppy Capone, maybe Italian, said, Roger, you should tell— you should do a video telling your whole life story. I got to drop the narrative. I got to drop the biography details in over time. I can't. give it to you all already. The arc's not over.

So— The problem with writing a good biography is that if you write it too soon, it's not a good biography anymore.

Exactly.

You know, we could say a joke that Walter Isaacson wrote his Elon biography way too soon. Clearly, the last chapters are not yet written, right? It's become obsolete just over the last 6 months. And I'm sure the same would be true of you, Roger.

I— yes, I need to do the things to write in the biography before I do them. Say, hey, hey, bro. OG, what a faultist enjoyer. What made you want to shift from alternate history to anthropology? So I did alternate history when I was in high school. I started it when I was 13 and I did it for 7 years and I had kind of gone through every reasonable timeline. And for those that don't know, alternate history is like, what if the South won the Civil War? What if the Nazis won World War II? And I was making timelines. What if the Shimabara Revolt worked in 17th century Japan? And what if the cotton gin was never invented? So I went through the timelines that really you could already do, and then I started to understand the world. And when I was in my gap year, I had a series of questions I wanted to understand about the world because I didn't know them. And so I started reading books on that. And some of those questions are, Why is Latin America poor but America is rich? Why doesn't the Middle East have Black people if they had a slave trade as big as, uh, the West did? Why did my home state of Pennsylvania crash? And why did the West rise to world power? And finally, why didn't Southeast Asia accomplish more? So in the process of trying to answer those questions which had been bugging me, I read up enough on anthropology that I could make the shift into that content. Hugo Gliz 656 says, Bismarck analysis of Mexico shifted my understanding of my own country. And will you ever do a video on the Federal Reserve and modern monetary theory? Maybe, but I know I don't know enough about economics to really do the topic justice. And Bob said, Rudyard, you're like a nuclear weapon that doesn't realize that they are the most powerful weapon out there. You being as young with this wisdom and reaching so people are demolishing the left while leaving lots of conservative fallout. Uh, you flatter me beyond recognition. Uh, I just try to do what I do and, uh, follow the next step. But thank you very much, and I had to read that out because you gave me 50.

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I'm glad to hear the audience enjoyed the Mexico brief.

Yeah.

It was a very interesting, deeper analysis where the relationship between the cartels and the politicians is much more mutual than usually presented, right? Usually it's almost presented like this poor, embattered government at the mercy of the cartels. And the cartels are powerful. The situation has co-evolved since the very start of the modern Mexican state. So that the line between who is the political ally of the cartels and who is opposing the cartels— I'm not even sure anyone opposes the cartels. I think they just oppose the other guy's cartels. So I think that's what people might miss. I think the state formation in Mexico co-evolved with the cartels, and that's why it's so endemic. And that's why it would mean not just to declare war on the cartels, to truly declare war on the cartels. You would have to declare war on the government elites. Yes. You know, well, that would be what a Mexican— it'll be more of a Mexican Bukele than a Mexican Milei.

Yes. When I was in Mexico City, I saw that the actual downtown for Mexico City is not a nice place. It's one of the scuzzier parts of the city. And so the parliament— there's no restaurants around the parliament. There's no restaurants around the presidential palace. There's nothing to do there. There's no shopping. And I'm thinking this is— this would be like the Holy Roman Empire's capital in one of its more failed time periods, where if the area where the government happens is that unpopulated, it means that this is not a centralized state.

It's a very decentralized state in a way. It's just Mexico City happens to be a pretty big city. All else equal, and it certainly has its privileged luxurious areas. Something people might miss exists around the third world are these strange enclaves of what we would recognize as upper middle class life, with like gleaming shopping malls, with like Sal Dior and Louis Vuitton. And you can find this in Cairo—not Cairo proper—but the new administrative city of Cairo, east of Cairo. You can find this in Brazil. You might enter. for example, a very privileged club, which is almost like a private city, giant swimming pool, sports stadium, shopping mall, but you've been checked by security and checked your membership at the entrance. Elites around the world, even in countries that have not industrialized, that have not developed economically, recreate a lifestyle that I think you might see, for example, I don't know, in the DC suburbs of Virginia, for example, like that might be recreated very easily.

That's what I've seen personally. I've, I've lived for short periods of time in Southeast Asia and Latin America. And yeah, you'd be surprised how many people there live lives better than Americans, even upper or upper or middle class Americans, because labor is so cheap. And one of my friends, he lives in both Mexico and America. And he prefers Mexico because if you're in Mexico, you can have 5 maids take care of all your stuff. You can have a weekly massage really cheaply. You can have a chef. You can eat out all the time because the cost of living is really low. And this is one of the worst parts the West has. Having lived in multiple countries, the 2 worst things about America, although I still choose to live here, are expense and Karenism. The Karenism, I think, is a real thing that drags America down.

I mean, with regard to it, you know, if you can have both the nice earphones, the smartphones, the self-driving cars and the servants, in a way, you've received the best both from the Industrial Revolution and from the pre-industrial world. And that's why these sort of elite life is so addicting. Places that have this are India, Egypt, Southeast Asia. And in places where too much of the population became rich due to, say, distributing oil revenues, such as the Gulf monarchies or UAE, well, they just import a completely new cheap labor class. And actually, here's a fun provocation. Uh, America— the world currently has 2 model mass immigration societies. One of them is UAE, where the immigrants have no rights and they're temporary labor, and 90% of the population is people who are working without any sort of citizenship. 10% are citizens who are beneficiaries. And then there is the United States where, yes, of course you have undocumented workers undercutting the natives, but in another way, at the same time, the citizens are paying significant taxes for social services that are sometimes fraudulently sought out for, or even paying taxes to help run NGOs that import even more of them, you know, airdropping 20,000 or 30,000 Haitians wherever the votes are needed. But that wasn't, you know, that, that happens. That's, that's not a joke. That's just how the system works. And both of them have a ruthless political economy. In the first one, in the UAE, there's hyper-exploitation of the migrants. But all the citizens are basically on board with it and on board with the power of the royal family is the oil revenues distributed centrally. And in the American system, well, in theory, there's a consent of the citizens, but I think the no voter ID laws, like, that's just such a backdoor into democracy. You just like escape all electoral accountability if you can just have non-citizens come and vote.

Yes. Yes. Immigration is one of those things I supported pre-COVID because the context changed completely. Where if the context is we're going to take some people in because it's economically, uh, good for us and to move the population younger and in a controlled way, I used to support that. But once it actively became something where it's clear the population doesn't consent to it, it's clear that it's something that's done for the active purpose of demographic change and pushing down wages. It goes from— one of the things I actually—

I'd like to talk about— Printing, printing votes, right? Yes. I feel like the Democratic Party, like, actively loves whatever demographic produces the right voting pattern. I think they will find a strange new disrespect for the Hispanic population now that record numbers of them voted for Trump. They're suddenly going to discover that Latino men have a machismo problem and that we need Latino feminism. Yeah, etc., etc.

There's a point I wanted to talk to you about where I've been thinking about what psychological motivations this immigration culture comes from. And I think the left has hijacked a certain variety of host culture, and certain societies are more hospitable than others, like where I grew up. My mom would teach me the exact etiquette for hospitality. So she'd say, if someone's in your house, ask them for their coat, ask them for a drink, tell them they can sit down. And different cultures have different emphases on how important hospitality is. And what I find with the left is they're warping some kind of host rule, because if there's a guest in your house, you're not going to call them out as much as if they're in their family. If they're rude, you're less likely to say— Hey, shut up. And so hosts get certain privileges in societies, and I— it feels as if the left has hijacked the host culture. Or if you're in a business deal with a very different society, you won't call them out for making social cue mistakes in your society. But the irony is the left is pulling on this psychological trigger in societies that have very little host cultures. And so I'm wondering what's going on here.

Well, essentially, you can have political clients that everyone subconsciously holds to looser standards.

Yes.

For example, right, if you have a group that intimidates voters in Sweden, and this group is a left-wing group, and they're communists, and they're 40 blonde Swedes that are beating up voters, I think the country is outraged.

Yes.

If they're 40, um, you know, if they're 40 people of Arab ancestry who are also notionally affiliated with the Communist Party, but I don't know, maybe they're like Free Palestine people or whatever, maybe they're something else, maybe they're Islamists, but technically part of the Swedish Labour Party or whatever, then suddenly they feel like it's like 50% more acceptable. And it's not because of the blondness, it's because of the foreignness. So it's not fear of like, you know, no one's afraid of communist Nazis. Like, that's not a fear. Right. It is literally the subconscious human impulse that you've correctly identified, which I think is universal. I think people always automatically give a pass to foreigners unless foreigners are enemies. Like, if someone is visiting your city, uh, visiting your town, even visiting your home, and they're foreign, like, you actually don't take offense at certain things that would be deeply offensive if you knew they understood the rules.

Yes, exactly. And yeah, that's completely correct. Extremely good observation there. Thank you. So it leads me back to a concept I've been thinking about where— are you aware of the concept of the Great Chain of Being?

Yeah, the medieval concept. Yeah.

In medieval philosophy, lower forms are towards hell and higher forms are towards God, and it's a spiral like a double helix that leads up and down. It's also the Tree of Life. And so in that medieval philosophy, the— basically Satan is pettiness, and it's complete, uh, it's just complete desire for your own gain. And that which is higher to God can see further across. And so it's higher versus lower form, smaller versus bigger. My idea is that different ideologies point basically good vibes or bad vibes. And I think modernity is constructed off a series of underlying Basically incorrect psychological assumptions that are killing us. And if you look at trauma therapy for PTSD, it's all based around rewiring subconscious assumptions people have. And I think we are stuck in a society where we have all of these very negative subconscious assumptions that are tearing us apart, but we're not honest about to examine them. And the best example I can think of is nothing is enough for us. We are in the wealthiest, safest, most hygienic, best-fed society ever, one of the freest, and it's still not enough for people. And we constantly, we constantly flagellate ourselves for not being perfect. And there's a lot of different psychological narratives like that which are really hurting people.

I think that there is a deep internalized war on human nature and an attempt to make sense of an experience that's basically incoherent, right?

Yes.

We are, we are in a way on our devices and in our social systems already subject to a fragmentation, personality fragmentation we weren't meant to endure.

Yes.

If you think about it, you basically— this is one dissociates every time they, uh, go on their phone. You leave your physical location and you enter this nether realm, uh, gazing in your little black mirror that you carry in your pocket everywhere. And then at work, you are basically surveilled on the clock as much as I think only slaves were in antiquity.

Yeah, yeah.

Because the mechanisms of control and mechanisms of surveillance have just become so much better. Like, there are many places where your work on your laptop is surveilled and recorded in detail.

Yes. Yes. You're completely right.

And, you know, and, and when you go off the clock, again, in theory, you're a free citizen. You could say off the clock what you want on the internet. But if your company does not stand by what you said as nominally a free individual, company might suffer financial damage. So in other words, you don't even have the political freedom of self-expression. divorced from like economic subservience. So I think we have a crypto political subservience. These things just compound one on top of the other with more and more cognitive dissonance. And, you know, you have to be a bit schizo, maybe process it correctly.

Yes. So I think what you said is a very good point. And I think there's psychological pressures to modernity we don't have words for. And I think these are causing irreparable damage. And one of the more schizo things is I've invented a term called demon plague theory, and I'm using especially magical language for the sales side of it. But a demon plague is a negative psychological plague that spreads across a population. Examples include Stalin, Hitler, the French Revolution, where negative underlying psychological forces seized control of a population. and then made them do acts that they would have never done in a more sane mindset?

I think that the medieval view was that madness is contagious.

Yes.

And you would have situations such as, you know, a town was assumed to have gone mad, and the king would actually just avoid going through that town on their journey. They would, like, actually divert past that town. And I think perhaps the medievals were bit wiser in this than we are. Yeah. Many of the things that are trends, things that spread through social media, are these not contagious madness?

Yes. Yes. I'm curious, have you ever read A Secular Age by Charles Taylor?

No, I haven't.

That's one of those books I should make a video summarizing so no one else has to read it.

Where—

and I apologize if Charles Taylor ever hears this, but it's one of the most interesting intellectual books I've ever read. But it was excruciatingly painful to read. And the thing that I really got out of it, it's a history of the psychological process of secularization from the Renaissance until today. And it hits a lot of really interesting points that people should know about, but they don't. And it really changed how I saw the world because he talks about stuff like the buffered personality, where the medievals saw our minds as ecosystems where we bring good bacteria in. And the church existed to protect the, uh, The church existed to be military defenders against demonic possession. And he goes through a bunch of stuff like that. And it's— it reminds you of the book I'm reading now, which is The Myth of Disenchantment. And it studies the exact point when we academically decided that the world is not an innately living place, where we moved to the mechanistic worldview. And the thesis of the book is that was never an academic choice that was made. No one ever made that argument for why the world's disenchanted. It just happened.

Interesting. So it was like almost a sociological phenomenon?

Yes.

Or was it a zeitgeist? Or how did that come to be?

The thesis of the book, which is really interesting, and it relates to Charles Taylor's book with The Secular Age as well, where the thesis of The Secular Age is that it's less a technological force that religion went into decline, And it's more so a— relates either to the incentives of the power structures for those in charge, or that the church itself got less fun. But with the Disenchantment book, what it says is that this— it makes a very interesting point where it makes the argument that all of the people who are writing about disenchantment themselves believed in magic. And What the argument it makes is that this is a 3D chess move where they believed in this themselves and they were lamenting that the world had become disenchanted, but at the same time they had an axe in this game. And it's really interesting. I, I don't fully trust this perspective. I think there's another angle I'm missing. But you look at Descartes, you look at Isaac Newton, you look at the people who we associate as mechanistic secular thinkers, even Freud or Marx. And these people were all interested in the occult on the side.

This is definitely the case. And a lot of them believed in mystical traditions of self-transformation. That's why I say the Freemasons were an important society. That's where the Hermetic Order and so on were relevant. I think that the process of self-education was always in a deep way gated knowledge.

Yes.

Because at the end of the day, it's hard to scale. Secondly, it's sort of a source of power. And I think people, people are attracted to esoteric teachings just because they're esoteric, like just because it's hidden.

Yes.

If it's hidden, something automatically feels more powerful.

Yes.

So not all of this stuff worked. A lot of it was crazy, but I think some of it probably did work. And it would be interesting to study modern cultural trends, mass media trends, and see where they come from, because it has also shaped our media world. Like, lots of the people who produced our media are students of this or that tradition.

Yes, agreed.

And Hegel is taking Hermetic teachings and this thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. And Hegel was actually used for psychological manipulation over the 20th century. Because you get the public to believe one thing, they believe the opposite, they go back to believing it. And for those who have studied Edward Bernays, who— Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and then Bernays's nephew himself was the founder of Netflix. So their family probably has some good genetics. And Bernays invented modern PR, and he invented the study of how to psychologically manipulate people. And I think that's had bigger effects than we would realize. And do you have any thoughts on how that's going to make Samo?

Well, I think that the 20th century has sort of been the century of the transformation of the public mind, where the public mind was brought into an audiovisual format. And I think if there is something to say about this, it is that Perhaps beginning with— already beginning with cinema and television, I think there's a state of altered consciousness that is promoted just by the act of watching in silence for long periods of time other people speak. In a way, it's very hypnotic, right? So if you control what is said, yeah, it's inducing this altered state. And I think where the lack of awareness Um, the lack of self-awareness essentially in this altered state prevents a distance from what you have read or what you have heard. I think it is seeing is believing, and we were shown so much that just isn't so in the 20th century. So we also believe still to this day, as almost traditional lore, so much that isn't so.

Yes, I'm very glad you said that, where I believe that Hollywood became our mythology, and a mythology is a society's switchboard. So we completely replaced people's mental switchboards for how they related to the world. And it worked because we were seeing things that appeared real enough to us that we could emotionally process it as real.

I mean, the key thing here is that before, if you read 19th century accounts, it feels like people are living in a fan fiction mix of the Iliad and classical Roman history and maybe the New and Old Testament. And if you today try to find it, people actually struggle to find biblical allusions. They, of course, completely lost all the other traditional mythological aspects. Yeah, but they certainly know their Marvel movies.

And I've said before, this is why I made the modern civilization video, because I think there's a profound cultural shift that happened around the time of the World Wars that's comparable to the rise of a new civilization. And that leaves us on a wonderful cliffhanger, but thanks so much for coming, Samo. It's been a real pleasure to have you.

It was excellent to be here. Good to see you as always, Richard. You too. Peace. Bye.

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