Pints With Aquinas - Paradigm Altering Political Theory w/ Dr. Andrew Willard Jones

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Liberalism is failing. Instead of making us more free, we are becoming more isolated from what makes us most human: from community, family, and friendship. Debates between progressives and conservatives continue to no end, but things only seem to get worse. In this episode of Pints with Aquinas, Dr. Andrew Willard Jones presents a paradigm shift for politics. Against the story of secularism, where politics and religion are separate realms, Andrew argues that Christ came to save all that is human: politics, economics, business—all of it. Instead of fighting over a failing liberalism, Andrew shows us why (and how) we should redeem politics by building families and communities of Christian love. Show Sponsors: Strive 21: https://strive21.com/matt Ascension: https://ascensionpress.com/fradd Andrew's Links: Politics of Tyranny: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAMSXFVVL3azK77X3Q4Y2wdVuVecmZuRL NewPolity Articles: https://newpolity.com/blog?author=5bbdf5b7e4966bea2acb7dee#show-archive "Before Church and State": https://newpolity.com/books-in-inventory/before-church-and-state-a-study-of-social-order-in-the-sacramental-kingdom-of-st-louis-ix "The Two Cities": https://newpolity.com/books-in-inventory/the-two-cities NewPolity Conference: https://newpolity.com/events  

Gibroni. Gibroni. Are we ready? Dr. Andrew Willard Jones. Nice to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. Do you go by Andrew Willard Jones? I don't. No. Just your book.

Well, it's great to have you on the show. I've, you know, everyone I love and respect, love and respects you. So I'm looking forward to getting to know you a little bit. OK, is that too much? No, it's fine. I guess it's a little awkward. No. Is that too much? No, it's, it's fine. I guess. It's a little awkward. No, we're going to buckle up because it's about to get away with, um, I was just asking you how you've been. And you said that you were grading.

Yes, I've been grading. I finished. That seems to me to be the worst. It must be the worst part of teaching. It is. Why? By far. Because you hate your students and what they write is garbage. The second part is closer to the truth. Well, though, you know, you have, let's say, 50 papers to grade all on the same prompt, all undergraduate reflections on the same prompt over and over and over again.

You know, do you? I wonder as a professor, like if somebody like took you off guard in the first paragraph so that you're like, whoa, is that to their advantage? Absolutely. Really? So the way this works, if you wanna know the secret, is, and this is every professor I know who I've talked to about this does this

basically the same way. As you read the first paragraph, you have a grade in your head. Then as you read it, they can work it up or down depending on, you know, there's room for improvement they if they pull together or they can really sink the ship But yeah first paragraph pretty much sets the that makes sense. Yeah Like I'm sure Scott's not grading his papers. He must have some assistant. I don't know that probably What would it take for you to get that or is that just impossible? I'd have to become Scott

Probably what would it take for you to get that or is that just impossible? I'd have to become Scott Or go someplace other than Francisco Yeah, yeah, we do our own work at Francisco, so I'm gonna be co-teaching in Austria with Rob McNamara awesome Hopefully that means I don't have to grade but I'm not sure you could finagle that it's well What's funny though? Maybe the reason he was open to co-teaching with me is because that'll be my only job You're the grader. Yeah, but if I was gonna teach a university class I would do I would want to do two things and you tell me if these are just Idealistic ideas that wouldn't actually work once I hit the ground. Okay, one would be I would love to Implement a strict dress code. Okay, like if people come in with ripped jeans or pajamas, they can piss off. Yeah

I'd want a suit for the men Wow You're not a suit but like a jacket like a sports jacket for the men And I like the ladies to dress in Sunday attire that kind of thing That would be one thing and then I'd like to somehow punish them severely if they didn't do that The other thing is I would like to publicly. Yeah publicly shame them and then is I would like to publicly publicly shame them. And then also I would like to try to fail everybody unless they could convince me otherwise. Like I would really enjoy failing people or at least giving them a what's a fail. It's a deal fail.

Well, no, no, an F. I mean, a D is not good. So I'd like to give them a like, I'd like to just begin in my head thing and everyone's going to get a D. Yeah. And then I had a professor and I say that just because I wonder if people have gotten very soft And well, that's certainly the case I had a professor an undergrad who started out everybody with a hundred points and then every assignment you turned it and went down So it's just your grade was minus four. So minus and you're so you're a hundred percent a just over the semester Just so your best

bet was to submit nothing so you had a very negative sort of approach I also had a professor that enforced a dress code but it was more is that too idealistic does that not work on the ground that's what I was wondering you say that's a good idea in principle but I don't know I think you'd be fighting a lot of fights yeah yeah yeah I had a professor that used to make fun of men if they wore shorts. That's good. And he would always make some joke about what are you going to a beach party or something and like nice shorts and he would say things like that in front of them in front of the class. I had Dr. Michael Barber for a

theology class and he had a dress code and I remember once I forgot to wear a jacket and he just quietly came up beside And I remember once I forgot to wear a jacket and he just quietly came up beside me and whispered in my ear, nothing like a professor whispering in your ear to have you never do that thing again. Next time maybe wear a jacket, okay? Yep, absolutely, definitely.

So sorry, please don't talk to me again. Yeah, I mean, it depends where you are. You might be able to pull it off at some institutions. He was a good professor. I've gone to universities though, where the students come barefoot in pajama pants. Oh my gosh. You know.

They should be excommunicated. Not just kicked out of the school. So what do you teach? I teach history, church history. I teach political philosophy. I teach in the honors program. So that is a great books program as well. So mostly it has to do with political Political theology political theory the history of those things. Mm-hmm

So we always interested in this or did something happen in your Catholic faith that oh No, I mean I grew up. I grew up in a family that was very politically engaged. I don't mean like Electoral politics. I mean, like we sat around the dinner table and talked politics, um, but not religious, but very politically like at, you know, basically my parents really didn't like the communists or anyone who looked like communists. So we talked a lot about that. That was in the eighties. Um, so I was always really into that, interested in that, started reading political philosophy at a very young age,

thinking about it, talking about it. Religion was not important until I was in college. So Catholicism became important to me in my senior year in college, maybe the end of my junior year. And a lot of it had to do with the study of my junior year. And in a lot, a lot of it had to do with the study of philosophy and history where I came to the conclusion that I had this sort of choice before me

that I was either going to go hard, Nietzschean, nihilistic, like that was an option that was open to me. Or Catholicism. Interesting. But nothingism. Interesting. But nothing else. Those were the two options, either nothing mattered or everything mattered. Okay.

But anything in between was a cop out. I like that. Yeah, I was about to ask you what was about Nietzschean philosophy, and that makes sense. Nothing matters or everything matters. That was where you were at. Yeah.

And how old were you about that? Oh, 1920. So did you have a, were you a Catholic growing up? No. Um, we were, we weren't religious. We didn't, when I was very little, we didn't, we didn't do anything religious. Um, my, my parents put me in parochial school in Catholic school when I was a kid, my brothers and I, um, because I hated public schools. And so, and, and my mom and my mom and dad saw the Catholic Church

as like allies against the bad guys. So I remember my mom saying, well, Bill Buckley's Catholic, so it can't be all bad, that kind of thing. So they put us in school for those reasons. And then my brothers and I ended up converting as kids, mostly just because our friends were Catholic and they were going through first communion and doing all that kind of stuff. And so we did it, but my parents didn't. And that didn't last very long. It didn't stick. You know, as soon as I was in high school, that was like a distant memory

to me. I don't, you know, college, it was gone. I was- You weren't going to Sunday Mass or high school or anything? Our family, we would go sometimes, but, but not all the time. It was not a very important thing. I guess we, I think my parents wanted it to be like they thought it would be good, but it just wasn't in our family culture. It just wasn't what we were, you know, pray very Scandinavian. And so like praying and stuff would have been really awkward. Okay. I'm out of the loop. What is it about Scandinavians and praying?

Well, I mean this isn't fair, but it's like anything that's sort of an outward show of Vulnerability I see is get rid of that. It's not normally something you would do. Yeah So then at what point were you looking at nothing matters or everything matters? How old were you? Well, in college. Okay. So, I mean, I started having some intimations of this early

and I thought I could solve the problems with, my problems with like economic theory. So I go very into the Austrian economist, very into libertarian type thinking So I go very into the Austrian economists, very into libertarian type thinking. And then realizing that that was just a big tautological game that didn't answer, actually answer any of the questions that that was very shallow. And my professors at Habitat Hillsdale College in Michigan, and my economics professors couldn't answer the questions I had. And they just wanted to kind of take a philosophical question and,

and re feed it through the kind of libertarian closed system and get whatever answer came out. But the answer wasn't the actual answer to the question. So anyway, it was, so that wasn't working. So then I had experiences with with friends of mine at school who were hedonists. Hillsdale was a very strange place in the 90s where it was. There were some evangelical Christians, but but most of the intellectuals, most of the really smart kids were, and professors, honestly, were libertarian economics,

kind of Anne Randian ethics. Okay, so egotism, you know, this hedonistic kind of thought seemed to dominate among the smart set. Okay. Okay, so I was engaged in that, and I remember what happened was I had a friend who was. Very free morally.

He was he was taking advantage of freshman girls, basically, was the gist of it. And I found that to be ugly. And and I I remember having a conversation with him where I suggested that that was not a good thing to do in which he challenged me to come up with one reason. Interesting. And within my system, I couldn't.

Interesting. Like within the- Because it was consensual. Because it was consensual, yeah. That was his only barrier. And I had to come up with something about power differential, something about about duties responsibilities to the weak I mean I started coming up having to and none of those things apply right so none of those things are real

So it's like well, I either well why aren't they real well not for a not for a libertarian I see you know that the fact that you are smarter doesn't mean that you give to the one you're The one who's dumber than you. That just is an opportunity for you to take more. OK. Right. When you said your friends were hedonists, did they claim hedonism as their philosophy, moral philosophy? My friends are not fair of my friends. I mean, no, they they were the contingents within the school

who identified as hedonists or you're just saying that they were? No, no, no. Maybe some, yeah. I'm sure some. But for the most part, it was an ethics, there was an ethics, I mean, intellectually anyway, the way people actually live and the way they, what they espouse philosophically are not always the same, right? So most, even though philosophically we might be a straight individualists and, and heatheness

ultimately, you know, the way people actually live often is better than that. we might be a straight individualists and and hedonists ultimately you know the way people actually live often is is better than that, but Yeah, there were there were people who would argue that self-interest and Maximizing self-interest is the only ethic that is coherent maximizing self-interest, presumably while not preventing the soul or coming into conflict with the self-interest of another. Well, I mean, you serving the self-interest of another, like that would be the,

I mean, there's all, there's all, this is, this is the problems that I ran into. Right. So, so you have to, they, you'll end up, people will end up trying to construe some sort of a system where it's in your self interest to respect the parameters of others self interest or others autonomy or others, but those things always fall flat, right?

And they fail for reasons that the classics, Plato and Aristotle already articulated that if you can get away with it, then why wouldn't you do it, right? If you're self-interested, right? Like if you can, I mean, the classic example of Plato in the Republic is where the hypothetical is if you could have a ring that makes you invisible.

Yeah, and so you could get away with injustice and no one would know. So there'd be no consequences for you. Then if justice is merely a self-interested motivator, if you were just merely because that's what works out the best in the long run. All ships rise. Yeah.

Then if you could imagine a scenario where you could get away with it, then you would be unjust, right? You would behave in an unjust way, which seems to hold water for me. I mean, the libertarian ideal fails and it actually fails in practice. I mean, what you see when you have a self-interested society

is that the powerful use their relative power in order to take as much as possible from those who are relatively weak. Let me lay something out. Right. Let me lay something out. I mean, that's what in fact happens. Let me lay something out. Right. Let me lay something out. In fact, happens. Let me lay something out and you tell me what you think. Because I agree with you.

I think I've always found it difficult listening to atheists who tell me that they can abide by an objective morality that isn't self-interested. Right. It seems to me like for a command to exist, command only makes sense between two minds, you know, so if I ask the question, how should I live? Well, if there's no sort of God dictating to me how I ought to live, then it's, and there is no God, and we're just sort of a meaningless sort of a byproduct

of evolution or something, then it seems to me that I should act in a way that gives me the most pleasure or meaning or fill in whatever the blank is. And that could be a sophisticated understanding It can be you don't have to be shallow. That's right. Yeah, and someone might say well Then what's to incentivize me to act one way or the other like if you disagree with how I act You're just you have no authority over me. That's right And if society disagrees with how I act well society is just a collection of use

That's right. And they don't have authority over me. So I do find it really difficult to figure out how, yeah, you could get to a sort of- What they can do, the problem I remember, and I'm reaching way back, I haven't thought through a lot of this stuff in a long time, so.

But the problem I remember is that they can account for the existence of morality, but they can't give a convincing argument for why you should be moral. Right. Okay, so they can say evolutionary speaking, a society that has these sorts of rules where everyone obeys, has better success against society. More conducive to- And so there's certain herd instincts develop and all this.

They can account for historically why it is the case that you see morals. Yes. None of that tells me that I should be more That's right. Right. So yeah, why should I obey evolution? Which is something here I am feeling that I don't want to obey those things. So isn't that just another evolutionary Strategy that's being tried out now that now to be to be fair to the hedonists They might say well, we're not saying do what feels good in the moment. We're saying even do the hard and difficult thing now. So that good will eventually, so you and maybe maybe others.

But again, others, it would seem like the reason I want their good is for my good. Like I want to live in a good town. So it's good for me if you do well so that I can do well. I'm sure you can even say you can even say evolutionary speak, in an evolutionary sense, you've developed these sentiments towards other human beings because it's in our biology like a wolf with its pack that we have certain fondness towards people and there's no reason to fight against that. You might as well, it brings you pleasure to see your kids prosper, right? And so because it's ingrained in your very genetic makeup, so you might as well work for them

Okay, these you so they can account they can account for that but none of that None of that answers a question. Well, what if I don't want to What if I don't want to care for my children? What if I don't want to do? Everyone has experienced something like that. Yeah, yeah, I know more than five minutes. Yeah, I don't want to do the thing I know I should do. And then you end up saying something silly like, well, for the good of the species or something. It's like, well, why would I care about the species? Why would I care about future man?

Why would I care about? And why should I? Why should I? Yeah, yeah. So these things, this is a chain of reasoning that led me to the world is about power. You want to, you know, a viable option philosophically is that the world is about power, you want to, you know, a viable option philosophically

is that the world is about power, that those who are weak have power strategies that resemble morality and resemble, because they're attempting to subdue the more powerful because they feel threatened and weak, and so they gang up together and make all these rules. But there's really no reason to abide by any of that and if you're aloof and above that then you're free. Mason- Yeah, this is very much Nietzsche, correct?

Bresentiment. Jason- Yeah, yeah. But there's a coherence to that. Mason- Yeah, I'd love you to kind of help for those who are watching who haven't read a lot of Nietzsche. Can you help explicate that just a little bit more? Because I think that Nietzsche might sometimes get a bad shake because people have just heard one or two things about him. Yeah. Help us kind of get inside the reasoning of why one might, or what he's teaching and why it's attractive. Yes, I think the basic, and I'm not an expert on Nietzsche here,

but the basic idea is that the overriding principle of human life. So the overriding impulse is what he calls the will to power, which is a, um, uh, it's hard to describe, it's a feeling of self-sufficiency or a feeling of self-determination. Okay, so it's not the will, what people want is not to be under the thumb of another. All right, that's what they desire. And that is always the case. So once you're in that world,

then different strategies can start to be deployed for how to do that. And you describe his two main ones are the aristocratic and the slave morality, right? Where the aristocrats, the aristocrats, the aristocratic morality are the ones who feel powerful in their own right, like they know themselves to be powerful, they know themselves to be beautiful, they know themselves to be good, he'll say. And then, so they have this positive sense of the goodness of themselves. And then they contrast that with the badness of the weak.

So the weak are bad, not, the badness is secondary to the goodness of themselves. So they kind of dwell in their own magnificence, right? And then they see others who are not so great, that's bad. And so the aristocratic mindset has the emergence of good and bad. So what Nietzsche is trying to do is describe how morality comes into existence. And the existence of good and bad is with the emphasis on the good. So the good is first us, then bad is derivative. So then he says, a slave morality is the inversion of that.

So the slaves are the weak. And the weak, they know they're weak, but they don't want to be weak. They feel weak. And so they, this is what you're talking about with resentment, is that they resent and come to hate the powerful. What they can't obtain. What they can't obtain.

And so they start to describe the powerful as evil. That's right. And the powerful are bad, the powerful are evil, and that becomes their primary thing, is that the evil of the other are bad, the powerful are evil, and that becomes their primary thing, is that the evil of the other is primary, and then their goodness is derivative. And this is laid out in Christian morality, he would say. Yes, Jewish and Christian morality, right?

So he says you can get good and evil, you can derive them from this will to power, but there's two main ways in which you can find them that come into being, either the aristocratic or the slave morality. And he thinks that Western civilization transitioned from an aristocratic-dominated one to a servile morality through the dominance of Christianity and into the modern world. So his call is, of course, to reject the slave morality and become an aristocrat.

I think even analogy to today with the kind of like, with the, what do they call it, the victim Olympics, where it's like the victims who claim to be victims in our society are now lauding it over the rest of us, calling us racist, bigoted. Like an extreme example of Nietzsche's conception of the slave morality. All right. So that when you see other people having a good that doesn't require you, your existence. So what I mean is like then you hate it and want to destroy it out of spite.

All right. Because so if you look at something like and I was thinking about this the other day when I was walking to work and I was thinking about how, um, like you brought up the, some, recent victims. So if you think about like pride, the pride movement, pride parades, pride, it's hard to see all that without feeling that it's actually aimed against their enemies, right? Like it's primarily not a celebration of themselves, but more a kind of middle face, middle finger to the bag.

Like if the opponent wasn't there, they wouldn't be doing it. Oh, that's really good. Whereas if you look at say like a Corpus Christi, a Corpus Christi procession or the celebration of Christmas or something. We don't require the enemy for that to make sense. Right? Like if everybody was celebrating it, we still would. Right? That, those, that's some maybe inkling of those two moralities that Nietzsche is talking

about. So there's something to this, right? He's wrong. I think his historical analysis is wrong. That's who the bad guys are. I think he doesn't understand Christianity. He understands a late 19th century German liberal Protestantism, but he doesn't understand historic Christianity. So he sees in it what actually what he's actually seeing is modernity and, and a victory of a certain type of liberalism. Okay, so, you know, that I guess that's somewhat of the nutshell. I mean, I'm sure there's a niche of people who are going, oh, come on, man, support to it.

That's really helpful. Something like that. So what was it for you in college that made the choice for Christianity over nihilism? It's the beauty. I mean, it was, it was, um, cause you had that conversation with your friend and you weren't able to persuade him as to why he would not be doing it. Yeah. Yeah. And I went, but what I knew is it was ugly. Yeah. And so, you know, Nietzsche

and his followers have this idea that the powerful are the beautiful. And it's like, but when I look around at history, that's not what you see Right, like it's very often the case that the way that power manifests itself is horribly ugly right and and and so there's a there's a there is an aesthetic argument where it's just if I can choose either I'll choose the one that's nicer and I don't mean nicer like in a sort of Pollyannish way, I mean more pleasing. Okay, now that's not a philosophical argument, but it's a foot in the door.

It kind of reminds me of a sort of Pascalian wager where if the evidence is equal on both sides, then I'm gonna choose the one that seems to give me the most benefit. Exactly, yeah, which is not where you wanna end up, but it's maybe a place to begin. Yeah. Right, so what happened is there is that I was at that point I was dating my now wife At Hillsdale Hillsdale Sarah. Yeah, and I and I remember having this conversation with her when I said

I think we should be Catholic and she's like great. I'm Catholic. I was like, oh, that's awesome So she was a cultural Catholic and you know She said great just like that. She's like, well, that's awesome. So she was a cultural Catholic and you know, um, she said great, just like that. She's like, well, she believes me. I mean, we talked about it. No, she wasn't really practicing at that point, but she never rejected it. It was, you know, it was, um, yeah, it was, it was very common. You know, it's very common in the Midwest that you get that, right? Catholics who don't reject Catholicism, but aren't really practicing it. Um, and, uh, she said, fine. I mean, we talked about it. And so we will, how do we do it?

And the first step as well, we, I remember actually getting like looking it up and getting like a list of the precepts of the church. It's like, well, I guess we have to follow the rules. So we'll start following the rules and we started following the rules. And then, you know, over time, reading, doing a lot of reading and learning about the spiritual life and learning about the truth of it, that it isn't just,

it isn't just a beautiful sort of work of art, it, you know, Catholicism, it's also true. You know? Okay, so there's a big gap here, right, between I find it more beautiful to what are the rules? Did you make that jump? Did you see something in Catholicism when this must be true, what are the rules, and I make that jump? Did you see something in Catholicism when this must be true? What are the rules? And I'll just start living it and see if it's true.

Yeah. Or did you look for arguments for it before? Well, no, I was at that point reading. I mean, I read, man, I wasn't expecting to have this conversation. So I'm trying to remember now the first serious book I read, because when I said, okay, let's be Catholic, I think I should be Catholic, because I studied enough to know that Catholicism was the exact opposite of this nihilistic hedonism. And- Why Catholicism and not something else?

I had no interest in Protestantism or anything like that at all. But orthodoxy or? That wasn't. It always felt like you were getting off the train one stop too early for me. It was like, again, it was like, I'm not interested in the halfway measures.

And if it all has meaning, then it seemed necessary that the church, I had a sense of the Catholic Church as being the center. Like I knew that there's, maybe that doesn't make sense to say it that way, but that there's periphery, there's stuff all around the periphery that are participating in what Catholicism is.

And, but there's something in the, like Catholicism as like what holds down the middle and that means it's not perfect. So I wasn't, I had no, I had no sense that I was trying to find some sort of utopia or some sort of religious, um, some place that like was perfect and had all the answers or anything. It was like, where is the, where is the place that all the vectors go? You know? And it's like, well, there, you know, to the middle, which is Catholicism, nothing else. All right. And you said, you said the first serious book you read. What do you remember?

Yeah, I do. I said, I said, okay, what is all this about? Well, here's a book called the introduction to Christianity by Joseph Ratzinger. And it was like an introduction to Christianity. That's what I need. But it's actually a very heavy book, a very serious book. And I remember reading it and going, Oh my goodness, these guys are brilliant. And that was my first understanding that what I thought Christianity was, was stupid. Like I was stupid. And that the people I was reading who were telling me what Christianity was, were either idiots themselves or lying to me.

You know, were're miss you were, didn't really know what they were talking about because what I found in that book and then the other books that it led me into was a tradition, an intellectual tradition of incredible depth and sophistication. Right. Um, and, and that's just not the way it's construed by Christianity's opponents. So anyway, it discredited a lot of the people I had been reading who were criticizing Christianity, just more or less immediately. And then I started reading a lot and learned.

After I had become Christian when I was 17 years old, well after I read Love and Responsibility, and I remember thinking, this is so beautiful and right. Yeah. And it says nothing about, it's not offering arguments for God's existence, but if this is all I had, I think I'd just become Catholic because I don't know anybody who's saying such a true thing. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that was like my experience. So where you have the experiences that you have in life, don't, I'm gonna see how to put this. Very often the secular theorists take the experiences you have in life and then they like deconstruct them.

Okay, so, oh, you love your wife. Well, here's what's going on. There's a mutually beneficial contract, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, okay, you're, you're, you're, you're importing into the relationship with my wife, all this stuff that I actually don't feel, right? Like I actually don't, I don't, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're those things. I don't. And so you're, you're reconstructing, you're deconstructing and then importing a bunch of concepts that aren't there.

And so what, if you can have what Catholicism allowed is for me to just say, no, I just love my wife. I just love my kids. I don't need to deconstruct it. Whenever you look at a kind of human, let's say just relationship or anything, and it's either less than you think it is or more than you think it is. And you're saying that the secularists not it's either less than you think it is or more than you think it is right, right and you're saying that the

Secularist are saying it's less than you think it is and then they have to come up with a complicated system to explain why it's less than You think it is but that's just not your experience and it just seems more reasonable to assume that it's more because that's prima facie What it is. Yes, if it starts to feel convoluted it starts to feel Like they're attempting, like, like it's like, there's a defensive battle being waged against the truth, right? You know, where everyone feels like friendship is real, but let me tell you what's really going on. And it's like, Hmm, okay. Or we could just say, wow, friendship is real. Let's talk about it.

That's really cool. So it's, it's like, it's like an interesting, clever argument. That's false. That's false. And maybe people get, and we get kind of, uh, tantalized by the cleverness of it. And it almost always frees you from some, from some duty or responsibility. Right. Like, yeah, it gets you out of something. It seems like those arguments. Like it, it, you out of something. It seems like those arguments, like it, you know, justify some, some temptation because if love is real, we'll then think about the

consequences, the consequences of that. All right. Is there something that could convince you that it's less than you think it is your relationship with your wife, let's say, is there like an external argument aside from your immediate experience? Well, it's obvious. what's obvious, what becomes obvious in the Christian life and what's awesome about Christianity is that Christianity comprehends its own negation. So what I mean is the idea of sin allows me

to look at my relationship with my wife and see exactly where it is less than I think it is. Okay. You know what I mean? Like, Oh, the here are places where I am being selfish, where I am using, where I am in a, some sort of a negotiated relationship. And those places are not fitting our places that are bad. Yeah. Right. Whereas the, the secularist, at least the libertarian version of it can't comprehend the reality of love

So the this is the genius of Christianity, right? It like I would say it comprehends its own negation it its own negation is included in what it is Whereas the atheistic view of it can't comprehend anything other than the fact that you think it is exactly. Holy mackerel. That's why it's deeper It's more subtle it's deeper. It's more subtle. It's more, and so, you know, this is the reason why, this is one of the reasons why Christianity, I mean, as a political theorist, why Christianity is non-utopian, right?

Where people will often accuse me, or some of the people who are like me, I guess, of being utopians. And sometimes we maybe fall into that a little bit, but, but because we're talking about how Christian societies or Christian civilization is superior or, you know, more, more fitting for what human beings are or the path to human happiness. But included in that is that Christianity itself is the movement,

I mean, Christianity in the church militant is the movement from imperfect to perfect, from vice to virtue, right? From sin to holiness. And that movement is a dynamic movement that always includes both of those components to it. So a Christian civilization is one that is not only full of sin, but knows it. Right. Whereas the hedonistic civilization doesn't know it about itself. Do you know? Like it doesn't, it doesn't see its own, its own fault, whereas the Christian one does. Or could you say that the hedonistic society believes the enemy to be the fault? Exactly. That hasn't got on board with the...

That's exactly right. Yeah. There's always the bad guy is someone other than you. But don't Christians fall into that as well when they point to the, I don't know, the bad people in our society? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not always wrong. No. But it is. But we can scapegoat people, presumably. Like, I'm thinking of the kind of those Baptists who had the signs, you know, God hates fags and you want to say, no,

God hates your stupid sign to put Jason. Yeah. So like that might be an example where we kind of artificially divide the world between or. Yes. there's the the Christian read on history is complicated So if you look at the st. Augustine is there really the guy to go to here and the city of God and And the way he describes this is there's a real struggle going on in history between The city of God and the city of man or the earthly city between the city of God and the city of man or the earthly city,

the city of God being in league with the angels and destined for salvation, the city of man being in league with the demons and destined for perdition. But in the world, in the time of history, they're always intermixed and intermingled and they're passing through each other, right? So there's a part of each one of us that there's aspects

of us that are citizens of the citizen of the city of God, others that are citizens of the city of man. I believe a quote of Augustine's is there are those in the church, you know, there are those in the world of the church. What is it? Yeah, I know exactly. There's those who are in the church that are really citizens

of the world. And there are those in those who God has the church that are really citizens of the world. And there are those in, those who God has, the church has something like that. Right, but really, all of us are to a certain extent. Yeah. And so, but the point is that those two cities both exist historically in the sense that there are certain epicenters of where the city of man or the city of God congregate, right? Those who are moving towards salvation congregate in certain places,

and those that are moving towards perdition congregate in certain places. So there is, it's not wrong to say there are bad, those guys over there are bad. That could very well be true, but that doesn't negate the, and so am I part, you know, right? So, and, and so it's a more complicated, it seems like a more complicated scheme of understanding history. Yeah, so, so Christianity then becomes as a historical form, as a civilizational form is a, a, a, a form of constant reform, right?

So the, so Christian civilization has never finished, it has never achieved its goal. It's always seeking out where it's failing and then attempting to overcome those failures. But in doing so, it always is creating more places to fail. Right? So the church in history is both constantly reforming and constantly being corrupt, right?

Because that's the plight of Christians, all Christians. We're always both pursuing holiness and sinning, right? Wow, yeah. So we do that on the individual level and then on the societal level. And this can be very confusing for historians, right? So it's very common among medieval historians to to go back and look at the medieval civilization

Christendom and go look at how they're always talking about how bad they are and look at these priests are always preaching about People are greedy and the Knights are violent and all this they weren't really Christians And it's like the response being well, that's that's exactly what I would expect Christians to do, is to look at their society, find the things that are not yet redeemed and talk about them, right? And it's probably the case that a society that talks about its own faults more,

is more Christian than a society that doesn't talk about them very often. Mm-hmm, right? All right Yeah, that's really good I gotta tell you guys about my new favorite app. It's called ascension and it's by ascension press This is the number one bible study app in my opinion and you can go to ascensionpress.com Frad go there Uh, and so that way they know that we sent you it is absolutely fantastic it has the entire bible there very well laid out the whole bible is read to you

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Again, go to Ascension Press dot com slash frad. It also has all of their amazing Bible studies. So I remember back in the day I had a big DVD case of Jeff Cavan's Bible studies. Well, it's all there on the app. So go download it right now.

Please go to Ascension Press dot com slash frad. Very, very broad question for you. OK, what is politics? It's all there on the app. So go download it right now. Please go to ascensionpress.com slash Fred. Very, very broad question for you. OK, what is politics? Because this is where we're going, right? What is a Christian civilization? I guess so. Yeah, I want to know what politics is. It's very. There's a lot of different ways to answer that question.

The way I tend to do it is to say, is to try to answer what we mean by it. Okay, because we use that word. Yeah. Rather than trying to go back and find some historical definition. Fair enough. Okay, so I think what we tend to mean by it is the,

and if we think about it, I think this is what we mean by it, is the use of power. So how is power used? And that's very broad. I mean, it can be, well, how does power work? What is power? What is, and then, so you have questions about what power is, and that goes to anthropology, metaphysics. Then you have questions of, well, how ought it to be used?

Those, then you're, so you're into ethics. And then, and so, and how can it be used or how could it be used, right? So there's, there's a lot of questions, but I think it, I think it always has to do with how some human beings impose Their will and maybe that's too strong, but but order the lives of other human beings okay, right so power

Social power I think is what we mean by politics Social power what does social mean like it just have to do with like like I wouldn't say my power over this coffee cup is politics Yeah, right, but I might say that that if I could Manipulate you even just through rhetoric that I'm verging into politics interesting, right? So it has so it's somehow social between human beings. It's not just power in general, but it's, you know, power between people. I think that's something like that. I was fed this a lot.

I'm sure you were too. This idea that the medieval ages were bad and were bad until the Enlightenment. Yeah. And I'm sure this has to do with politics in some way. Yeah, definitely. Is this narrative something that continues to be taught and do you agree with it and why not? Well, yeah, I think it continues to be taught,

although it's losing some appeal, or at least it was losing appeal. Maybe it's back, I don't know. The post, maybe I shouldn't even go down this road, but the postmoderns in the 20th century were more interested in attacking the Enlightenment than they were attacking the Middle Ages. And so we got, there was a little opening

where the middle ages could kind of be redeemed a little bit because the postmoderns hated the enlightenment. But that's over now. Now no one cares about anything. So now we're back to hating everything. So, but yes, that narrative is the norm, I think. It's what's in most of the textbooks. It's what kids learn.

And it's wrong. It's very wrong. And it's based on this idea. Well, I don't, okay, I'm just trying to answer, Matt. I'm sorry, I'm stumbling all over the place. But one of the ways that you answer things is with ideas, like talking about the history of ideas. And that can be misleading in thinking that the ideas

are what cause everything, but that's not what I'm trying to argue, okay. But there are ideas that correspond to actions. And one of the ideas that we get in the modern period is the idea that human society history is in its nature chaotic and disordered. All right. So, um, this actually, this actually precedes, uh, the enlightenment precedes,

um, John Locke and Hobbes and these guys. And, and really maybe, maybe one way to see a foundational place would be even in Protestantism where there's a sort of idea of total depravity. Um, that history is a realm of a satanic realm of, of, of sin. And, and, and so you have this idea that chaos and violence is what is the norm. And then order is imposed. So order comes in and is imposed on top of that.

The classic expression of that is Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes, and you know, the Leviathan, the famous account of the state of nature, you know, where he says life is nasty, short, and brutish, brutish, short, and I don't remember the quote, but whatever. The point is that it's a war of all against all. And then what emerges from the war of all against all

is the Leviathan or the corporate order, the corporate power that's so overwhelming that it awes and frightens all the individuals into compliance. And that's the emergence of society. Now, Hobbes is kind of a dark version. You have Locke that kind of tries to lighten that up with a few ideas about property and stuff

that don't really hold a lot of water, but whatever, he tries to make it sound less dark. You have Frousseau who's doing a similar sort of thing, only kind of inverted. You have all of these accounts have the political as being artificial, as being artificial, as being useful, as being a creation that human beings come up with

in order to solve this problem of violence and of conflict. So they all rely upon certain assumptions. They rely that anthropologically we're primarily individuals, self-interested individuals, that that's the, the, the base condition. So they can't account. Well, one of the ways where this is obvious is they can't account for the existence of like families or children or anything like, I mean, there are counts. If you want to, if you want to,

if you want to see just how kind of ridiculous John Locke's political theory is, all you have to do is go read what he says about family and children. I mean, it's just like, can you sum it up for us? Cause I haven't read it. Well, that the only reason why a man has a child is, is because he's worried about his old age and like the kid will take care of him. Yeah. And the only reason why a man and a woman get married and have children is so that they, so that they have, they can pass the estate on, which will then care for them.

And then once the children are raised and there's no reason for them to stay together, they can stay. Exactly what we're doing about earlier. It's less, not more. Less, not more. Less is complicated. Yeah, exactly. Thomas Hobbes says that when a baby is born, the mother has a decision of whether to kill it or keep it. If she decides to keep it, then she's its master and it's its her slave. And that's the beginning of political society of the master slave relationship. All right. These sorts of things, which is

like, wow, I've seen mothers and babies and that doesn't seem to be what I see. It's not my experience. But they all, because children are the fundamental problem for that anthropology, right? Because children are completely dependent. They're not independent. The power differential is obvious and there's no way that we can construe the love and that is demanded by the child from the parent as being something that's self-interested for the parent.

I mean, it seems, those are always a stretch to the point of being absurd. So that creates, so they always have to carve out like an exception for family. Family is like the weird private place where weird things happen. But as soon as you leave the house and get out in the world, now we can explain it all through contracts and negotiations. Interesting. You know, it's like, well, if I, if, if love is devotion is true in the family, why can't it be true with my neighbor? Why can't it be true to my friend? Why can't it be true with my business partner? Yeah. If it's real, then it's real. Yeah. But if you begin with

the assumption that your family interactions and relationships are contracts, then there's nothing else to be had elsewhere. Exactly. Right So that's the point is that I was getting at is that that exactly is the shift from the medieval to the modern. So the medieval assumption is that there's a primordial peace that man is in his nature at peace with each other in friendships and in familial relationships and that sin is tears and sin are wounds on that.

And sin is very real. Sin is profound, right? It's not like they're negating the existence of evil, quite the contrary, they talk about it continuously. But that evil is occurring on a substrate of peace, right? The peace. Social peace is what is in the garden, and sin is what distorts and wounds it and hurts it. But human nature is, in its essence, peaceful and loving towards each other. Right, so that's the default.

So for the Christian, we've been cast out of Eden, and for the atheist, to use just that term, we've never been in Eden and we're seeking it? Like we're in the chaos and we're seeking Eden? Is that the two? Like one starts with chaos and seeks to establish order one Believes that order was at the beginning of things right sin brought up. Yeah, that's a way of putting it I think that the I mean and that may be more true with like the socialist bent of it as far as the Recreation of some sort of Eden or the okay finding of it, but that wouldn't be I think liberals

Yeah, are more happy with With just a sort of muddled stasis middle ground where we're not killing each other but it's not paradise and we just kind of produce new stuff and consume it. So we're in chaos. So you're saying that for the liberal, we're in chaos and we just have to make the chaos as bearable as possible, but we're not striving for Eden. Is that what you mean?

Well, or that Eden is not something that happens in time. So for Protestant, the liberalism, the liberal bent, I think is much more Protestant and develops out of Protestantism. And so there's the idea that salvation is something that occurs in a totally different realm, right? That somehow has been- Yeah, independent from my daily life. Yeah, independent from the world, from history, right? Like history is occurring and then,

and then the believer is sort of unilaterally plucked out of that into, right? But history itself isn't moving towards its own holiness, right? Mason- Could you clarify the difference between what we mean by liberal? I want to know what that means. So what is liberalism and then how is that distinct from the modern leftism we hear? Can we just do that before we move on? Bregman Oh, sure. So liberalism, philosophically, there's lots of different versions of liberalism,

but the simplest way to describe it is it's the idea that it's anthropological individualism. Okay, so human beings are individuals. All right, then society is secondary. All right, so the individual exists first, then the society flows out of that. It is the idea that normally it rests on the idea that human relations are contractual or violent.

So they're like the famous articulation of this in the Austrian school of liberals is that human relations are either contractual or hegemonic and there's no third way. What does that word mean? I've heard it but I don't know what it means. Master slave. Hegemonic. One person is dominating the other. Or it's contractual. Those are your options. So it presupposes, yeah, so those are your options. It normally Those are your options. It normally views then social order as being one of these contractual arrangements.

Because of that, the purpose of social order is the maximalization of the individual's ability to realize his own ends, whatever they may be. Dude, that is exactly what Dave Rubin talks about constantly. Okay, so whatever they happen to be. you individual, the individual, you like one thing, I like a different thing. Someone else likes another thing.

And the social, the purpose of society is to maximize our abilities to pursue those ends. And then the only morality is don't step on anyone's toes as you seek those ends. Right. But we can't explain why you shouldn't, but just don't. Yeah, you really can ends. Right. But we can't explain why you shouldn't, but just don't. Yeah, you really can't. All right. So so there's there's it's just an agreement.

It's a contract. It's an agreement. Yeah, it's an agreement. I don't want my desires. Right. You served. You don't want yours. So let's agree not to do that to each other.

Why would you keep the agreements arbitrary? Why would you keep the agreement? And what happens is a question Hobbes tackles. It's like he's like, well, why would you keep the agreement's arbitrary. Why would you keep the agreement? And what happens- This is a question Hobbes tackles. It's like, he's like, well, why would you keep the agreement? Right, well, the only reason why you would is because the consequences of breaking it outweigh, outweigh whatever gains you hope by, you know, by breaking it. So that means that the social,

the enforcement mechanism has to be ubiquitous. The enforcement system has to be ubiquitous. The enforcement system has to be ubiquitous. Right. If every human interaction is contractual, and the only reason why people keep contracts is they're afraid of the consequences of breaking it. Yeah. Then every human interaction has three parties, the two people engaged in it and the enforcement mechanism, the state.

Okay. Right? So you have a ubiquitous state. And someone like John Locke thinking of big brother explicitly says this. I mean, and that the state, that the only way it works is for everybody, everybody who enters into the compact to surrender all that they have, all their rights, all their property, all that they have to the state, and then the state grants it back to them. And now the state owns everything. Right? That's the way. And so they can manage and control everything.

Is that what we mean by socialism and communism? No, that's a whole different. This is liberalism. This is liberalism. Help me understand that. So liberalism, liberalism seeks to, okay, so if we're gonna take liberalism as an ideology and say it's sincere, okay, which is a stretch, but let's just assume it's sincere. So what you're trying to do is maximize human autonomy. Yeah.

All right, you're trying to maximize the individual's autonomy. So what you're trying to do is, so here's the problem if you're a liberal. You're trying to maximize individual autonomy. Your anthropology dictates to you that human beings are by nature independent rational actors. All right. So we are making decisions about our own self-interest independently of everyone else, other than

to the extent they impinge upon that self-interest. Okay. So that self-interest. Okay. So that's the anthropology. And yet when you look around, what do you actually see? It's like, well, actually what I see are moral codes, gender norms, family structures, religious dogmas. I see customary law that's governing.

I see all kinds of things in society that seem to be limiting the scope for autonomous rational action. I see all kinds of thing of forces, not just states or anything that are impinging upon that individual or the realization of that anthropology. The coming to fruition of that idea of the individual rational actor who's charting his own course through life Right. Okay. So the original foundation of the state is

That is to get together in order to reduce the impact of any other Authority or power structure on the autonomy of the individual. Okay. Okay. So the state is a is a agreement that's designed to say, well, if you're bare minimum kind of lock in, at least we'll stop crime, like other strong people from taking your stuff. Yeah. External and internal threats. Yes. So we'll stop that from happening, from people taking your stuff from you. All right, that's just the beginning. But why stop there? Right, like if the purpose of the state

is to maximize individual autonomy, then anywhere where you see individual autonomy being compromised is a place for potential expansion of the state. You see, so family structures say are oppressive. Family structures are oppressive. So they are convinced, and you take someone like John Stuart Mill

or someone like that from the 19th century, where you're looking at society no longer merely as physical coercion, where you're looking at society no longer merely as physical coercion, but you're looking at society and understanding how cultural coercion works, how pressure works, how shame works, how pure pressure. Advertising. Yeah, all this sort of stuff is there

and it's all affecting that realization of the autonomy of the individual. And so the project then has to be to locate structures that are minimizing individual autonomy and to expand into them, do away with them, right? Replace them with the state, which is indifferent. So advertising wouldn't be one of them then, I imagine. Well, it depends who you ask. It depends who you ask. I mean, I, the problem with advertising is that, is it just has to do so much with

making so much money and then you get different interests involved. But there is a manipulation upon my desires. And I would think that the liberal- If liberals were consistent, they would, they would, they would go there. And I think some left liberals probably would. Okay. The problem is, is that liberalism is incoherent. And so there's people who have a very vested interest

in the idea that self-interested contractual relations are always mutually beneficial, can't account for advertising as manipulative. Or they can't admit that it's manipulative, you see, because it's free. I mean, it's a free exchange. Oh, okay. All right, so they can't admit,

this is one of the reasons where I quit being a libertarian in college, is because I asked my professors about advertising. Because, and what they told me was, well, advertising is the way that people communicate to each other what's for sale. And it's like, that's not what advertising is at all. Advertising isn't just like a list of the specifications. Mason- Advertising is instilling a desire within you that you didn't have previously. That, that, so why is that not fraud? Right, what's the difference between,

between advertising and fraud, if fraud is lying, you know, in manipulation through lying, right? These things, I think, I think that the, they can't account for it. The liberal, the free marketeer liberals can't account for it. So they have to just kind of pretend like it doesn't exist. Well, to give me an example, you're talking about the ubiquity of government, right? Yeah. And we're talking about, okay, so liberalism is about the

autonomy of the individual being maximized, right? And so the is that right? Yes. Yes. Ideologically. And I hesitate because I don't think that's what a lot of liberals are actually doing. But that's that's philosophically. That's what they want. Right. They want every individual to reach their. Yeah, that's what they say. OK. And and so and it sounds like we're saying that then the only kind of immoral

thing would be to squelch another person's autonomy, though we have no good reason for making that claim. That's right. So what happened? But it's not against the rules to suppress someone else's aggressive action against you. That was the founding of the state to begin with. So if we expand our understanding of aggressive action to move from like actually physically invading the property to saying psychologically abusing you. Okay?

Which is what a liberal would think, say, religion is. Right? Is psychologically- Mason- That's what Richard Dawkins called it, child abuse. Bregman- Then the expansion into that realm is a continuation of the same philosophy that led to this establishment of the police force to begin with. Okay, so this is the reason why liberals look at the world and where they see non-political power structures,

they see oppression. They see the patriarchy. They see moral codes. They see wherever there's authority, right, that has power, that's not the state, they see wherever there's wherever there's authority Right that has power. Yeah, that's not the state they see oppression. I Guess they would say unless those being oppressed are willingly oppressed in which case they're not oppressed and we should leave them alone Isn't that a little then then then it's I mean when you say willingly oppressed that you have immense Well, I mean, they're not willing if they're willingly immense. Well, I mean, they're not willing. If they're willingly oppressed, that's a contradiction. They're not oppressed.

But if a child wishes to be fathered, then presumably the liberal would say, well, just leave him alone. Like, let everyone do their thing. Yes. I mean, that some people would say that the problem with with liberalism is that it develops a it develops, it develops a, it develops, there develops a sort of elitism in it where the people who are in, who are currently being oppressed

are not in a position to see their own oppression. Yeah, so you have to see it for them. But we see it for them. And so we're going to free them. So the march of progress then- That's interesting, I think of BLM here because I have several close black friends who would say, I don't see the oppression that you're telling me interesting. I think of BLM here, because I have several close black friends who would say, I don't see the oppression

that you're telling me that I'm experiencing BLM. And BLM is saying, well, we see it for you and they're going to make sure you see it sort of thing. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then that's right. So the experience of progress is this march of identifying and eliminating non- non state based power structures hmm, right and this

I Mean this this is the reason why the liberal holds in great suspicion things like patriotism Love of family love of, love of whatever. I mean, like any sort of pre-contractual, pre-rational affection or devotion that is somehow in potential conflict

with the hegemony of the disinterested, ubiquitous state is almost certainly oppressive. Right. And so and so a target, maybe we haven't gotten around yet to eliminating that, but we will. And that's the march of progress. Wow. Right. So, well, real quick, what's the difference? What's your experience in liberalism and leftism, then? Like this is new term that people are using today, right? Leftism. And it seems to be I don't those who are maybe liberal, but against free speech.

I'm not sure. Do you have a, I, I don't, I mean, there's, there's, sometimes there's convenient terms, right? We can talk about left liberals and right liberals. Yeah. Um, and that, and that's convenient because we, we know who we're talking about. We're talking about, you know, right, right. Liberals are, are, uh, uh, free marketeer conservatives. Left liberals are progressives and not just your free market, but also pro patriotism, pro patriot. Like I would say that in people, I'm thinking of Dave Rubin. I haven't followed his stuff for a while, but

lots of times they're just incoherent sort of positioned himself on the right side of liberalism. Who's attacking the left, who are attacking, you know. Lots of times there's a poverty of terminology and of concepts, and so people who know they don't like the progressives can't find a way of expressing it, and they are grasping around, and it seems like the opponents to the progressives

are the individualists, right? But that's not the case Both both sides are individualists. Okay, right both sides are and and so You you they sometimes grasp after so so I had this experience I had this experience the other day when I was driving back and forth from work I listened to talk radio and you get like five minutes a day, which is enough, right? Cause they just say the same things over and over again, but Glenn Beck was on and he's at one point talking about God and family and the love of country and all this.

And then transitions just talking about Hayek and free market economics. And it's like, well, have you read Hayek? Because what Hayek and free market economics. And it's like, well, have you read Hayek? Because what Hayek says is that everywhere where there's not competition, we ought to extend competition into it. Like what he says is that the world

of the pre-capitalist world that was dominated by non-rational structures was oppressive. And it was that he actually, he actually says in the road to serfdom that that's just communism and fascism under a different name, right? That, and, and so the love of, or the devotion towards family, community, country fits very uneasily with the right liberal system.

They're actually incompatible. All right, and so there's a lot of people that try to hold those in two separate realms then. So they'll say, we have the economic and the political in which I'm a liberal, and then we'll have the familial religious in which I'm a conservative, right? In which I believe those things are

real and good. And it's like, well, that's better, I guess, than being a progressive. But the problem with it is that your economic theory is going to systematically attempt to destroy that place of conservatism. Every place where there's a value that isn't monetized is a place to make money. Every place where there's a value, where there's a loyalty or a friction point in human society that isn't a part of the market is a place of inefficiency. And so it's a place where profit can be generated. And yet we all know what it's like when somebody invites us

or asks us to host, I don't know what this is like, but women do, a Tupperware party, who you're told to sell to your friends. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So that there's a, I think what we're actually witnessing society today is more the elites, and this is getting into stuff that maybe you do it. The, the elites that are dominating our society today are more accurately described as the heirs of big business and capital, rather than of the leftists of the middle of the

20th century. They're not communists. Like when people say that, it's like the only reason why you would say it would be if you meant, if you were using it rhetorically, right? If you didn't mean it. Who's not communists? The elites today. Yeah's not communists? The elites. Today.

Yeah. Okay. Right? They have no interest in redistributing wealth. They have a lot of interest in maximising the centralisation of wealth. Yeah. Right? I mean, nobody's proposing nationalising Apple. Right. Right? No one's proposing that the tech companies, you know, like these are,

these are not, this is not socialism, right? This is, this is radical liberalism, right? If you're going to, if you're going to apply it, any sort of ideological label to it, I think. So, which is, which is a stretch because once you, once you get to radical liberalism, they're really no longer liberal. Okay. Radical liberalism is what? Well, let's put it this way. Let's try to put it this way.

In the liberal ideal, you have a disinterested state. Yeah. Okay. Disinterested state. Yep. Okay. Disinterested state that's attempting to maintain an umbrella of control under which individuals can move freely and maximize their gain. Okay.

Whose interest is it to maintain the disinterested state? Okay, hang a wall. Whose interest is it to maintain, yeah, probably the powerful. But why wouldn't they use the state to maximize their own interest? Well, if they could, they would, presumably. Presumably. So liberalism doesn't work. Could you say all of that again? Well, if if the state is this disinterested umbrella under which individuals move, that's what

the state ought to be. You have the problem of who populates it, who mans it, who runs the state as a disinterested thing. If your anthropology you begin with is that everybody is self-interested. Where do we find these more than humans that run the state in a non-self-interested way, that run the state in a way that maximizes the ability of the great sea of individuals to fulfill themselves?

Where do we find these people? Right, well, theoretically they wouldn't exist. And so you have to maintain something like, it's in their best interest to maintain a disinterested state. But that seems to not be the case. Mason state find that it's very much in their interest to make it not so disinterested. Yes. That is my phenomenological experience of it. And philosophically predictable. It's like, well, it would seem like the liberal state, to the extent that we ever had it, relied upon pre-liberal values, meaning there had to be people

who cared about the common good. Yeah. And who were convinced that a liberal regime was the best path to the common good. And so they would attain power and then maintain it for the good of all. But if that's possible, why not have it everywhere? I want to tell you about a course that I have created for men to overcome pornography. It is called Strive21.com slash Matt. You go there right now or if you text STRIVE to 66866, we'll send you the link. It's 100% free and it's a course I've created to help men to give them the tools to overcome

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was the best path to the common good. And so they would attain power and then maintain it for the good of all. But if that's possible, why not have it everywhere? The analogy of the umbrella is that it's a protective thing That's what we mean by umbrella and it's and it's ubiquitous So it's this ubiquitous thing that protects me from having my rights being infringed Yeah, right and now it could become it very early on it It extended well beyond what? What libertarians would like,

which is just the sort of negative, the negative rights. So if you, in the 19th century, liberalism, in the late 19th century, then in the early 20th century, liberalism turned around and took a more positive approach where it's not just violence against you, but it's any sort of cultural pressure against you is bad. All right, so we're not only going to stop the criminal, we're also going to stop the one who's propagating oppressive gender norms.

So why isn't the oppression against Christians in America today seen as negative? Well, because Christians are oppressors. Okay. Okay. So what you're not, you're not, you're not oppressing the oppressor. You're liberating the ones whom the oppressor is oppressing. Yep. Okay. So, so there is a, so like think about, think about it like this. So just how unnatural this is, when you look at human beings, like the course of a human life, and you say, historically speaking, so in a historical situation, to about most of human history, a human life, it might go something like this, where you are a child and you're dependent upon your parents.

Right? You care, and then you work for the family, you're dependent upon your parents. Then let's say you're in your late teens, early twenties, you get married, you have children. Now there's people dependent upon you. All right? You raise them. All right? You raise them. By the time they leave, your parents are dependent on you. You care for your parents. You care for your parents. By the time they die, you're dependent on you. You care for your parents. You care for your parents by the time they die You're dependent on your children Okay, you're old now, but at no point is there this

fantasy of the the unattached Individual actor who's just roaming through the world satisfying his desires in contractual relationships satisfying his desires in contractual relationships, right? Like the normal, and so that normal course of a human life is governed not by contractual or economic or explicitly political relationships, but by familial relationships or friendship relationships. And those are governed historically by religion, by morals, by custom, by the way we are, right?

The way we do this, which are not voluntary. What I mean is no one gets together and like drafts it. You know what I mean? Like we inherit it, just like we inherit our duties and our benefits, not just our duties, but also other people's duties towards us. We inherit these things. So that's the condition that the liberal wants to eliminate.

The liberal wants, because their ideal is the individual property-owning actor. So they have to try to create that ideal in fact. This is what makes it ideological, right? So the ideas come prior to reality. So you have the system, right? You have your state of nature, your system. Is that what you mean by ideological? Yeah, exactly.

Ideas come before reality. And then you have to bend reality to match the system, right? Rather than the other way around. Okay, so the liberal set about doing this. And when they look out at the world then, what you and I might say, see as natural, they see as unnatural. Because what's natural is the state of nature, which is the disinterested individual rational actors,

right, which never existed, but ought to. Yeah. Okay. So that, in, which never existed, but ought to. Yeah. Okay. So that, in the 19th century, they very quickly realized that that had to be proactive, that force of liberation had to become proactive and not merely defensive, right? Like it wasn't enough to just protect people's property, but we had to now protect them from all of these cultural structures that were oppressing them. So then you end

up forming progressivism. But this is not at odds with right liberalism. Okay, so the more autonomous, individual, autonomous, unattached, free to move wherever one is most efficiently used in the economy, free to consume, I mean, not just free to, but all those structures, all those non-liberal structures of society are all places that are typically uncommercialized. Right? So the expansion of the commercial into more and more realms of human life is the same process of the expansion of the liberal anthropology into more and more realms of human life. Right, so progressivism and the expansion of commercial activity are accomplices.

Right, this is the reason why, historically speaking, the expansion of the state and the expansion of the market always occur at the same time. Okay. Right, so there's this like weird American myth that the free market guys and the big government guys are at odds with each other. But that's just not true.

Like historically speaking, that's not the way it occurs. The expansion of the state and the expansion of the market are the same historical dynamic exactly because the market can only expand into realms where the contractual relations are expanding, which is the process of replacing non-contractual relationships with contractual ones, which is what the progressives are trying to do. So you have these two movements of liberalism, and they argue with each other, but they're really accomplices in the march

into late modernity. Hmm, so Yeah, so what we what we see I think what we see in the in the late 20th century then into where we are today is that the Liberalism progresses to the point where no one believes in liberalism anymore. Okay, well. And what does that mean? No one believes in what?

Like, replace the word liberalism with what you mean by it. No one believes in- Freedom doesn't- like the maximalization of individual freedom becomes- that's not true that no one does. Let me put it differently. It becomes cynical. Okay, so it's like an example is like if you read Cicero or something from the Roman Republic, the Roman, where he doesn't

believe in the gods, but he thinks it's really important that people do. All right. And this becomes, this becomes a sort of trope in late Roman elites, right? Like, well, of course the gods aren't really existing, but it's important that people do. And I think in our decadent republic, you get a similar sort of thing where you have elites that only really care about their own interests. And yet it's important that the people maintain these devotions to liberal ideology. And because that's part of how the power works, the power structure works. And so you actually have a ramping up of liberal ideology as the society becomes less liberal. So like as the power structure, the state and the economic structure cares less

about maintaining a liberal system and more about the construction of its own hegemony, the more it gets that way, the more it talks up liberalism. Okay, yes. All right, so you get people believing, you know, believing somehow that the expansion of, say, commercial interests into every nook and cranny of our life is somehow

prerequisite to our freedom or something. Do you know? I mean, like where you have free market, free marketeer type right liberals who have a really hard time bringing themselves to criticize the tech companies for example. Yeah. Right? And that's because they're ideologically hampered

by and they can't just say what's right in front of you. They see the problem, they're tired. Which is their time and their own worldview. Yeah, like what's right in front of you is that these, this is tyranny. Okay. But your ideological system won't allow you to say it Right, um, but but I mean that's the reason why the ideology has to be jettisoned I guess that was a lot. I don't I

Can't wait to listen to my own podcast. I'm gonna learn a lot. I don't know. I can't wait to listen to my own podcast. I'm going to learn a lot from the second and third. Well, what what does a Christian civilization look like? And what should we be striving for? And is it anything like it was in the in the Middle Ages? And what was that like? Yeah, I think I think that the the heart of it is That I I mean I guess the word I would use to describe it is

Subsidiarity that's the word that the the church has given us. It's somewhat of an unfortunate word. Why because it sounds I Don't know sounds like bureaucratic and maybe vaguely medical I don't know. Sounds like bureaucratic and maybe vaguely medical. I don't know. It doesn't sound terrible. So, but the point of it is the idea that human beings, I mean, the very gist of it is that human beings flourish or human happiness is the objective.

That's the end, human happiness and human flourishing. And that human beings flourish as persons in relationships. Not as isolated monads. Not isolated. Yeah, not atomized human beings, but rather in relationships. Not as isolated monads. Not isolated, yeah, not atomized human beings, but rather in relationships. And not only do they flourish, but they actually come to be in relationships. Like you come to be the person that you are

in the relationships that form you and which you form, because every relationship you have is both changing you and changing them. And when you have really like very real personal relationships, you're quite literally growing into each other, right? And becoming the person you are only in relation to the person who you're with.

So true, as a man married 17 years. Totally true. I'm so glad I chose her to influence and mold me. Yeah, exactly. So, but this is where human happiness is actually found. So it's like sometimes I'll her to influence and mold me. Yeah, exactly. So that and that but this is where human happiness is actually found. So it's like sometimes I'll talk to my students and I'll ask them, you know, try to imagine a happy happiness, like a happy person. Like imagine in your head a happy person. What does that look like? Yeah. Like what is a happy person

like? And then and then I'll say, now, does it make any sense to imagine that without imagining other happy people? Like a happy person. Yeah. Is not one who just consumes Netflix all day and gets Uber Eats. Can you imagine a happy person that isn't in that imagining, including friends and family, which who are also happy, right? Like a happy man isn't happy if his wife is miserable and his kids are miserable.

You know what I mean? Like the happiness is. But just real quick, and it's probably a much less substantive point that you're trying to make. So forgive me for trying to keep up with you, but it does seem like today we're being told that the happy man is the man who consumes Netflix, porn gets, it gets Uber eats, isn't reliant on other people, has no needs impressed upon him from others. Isn't that what we're seeing more and more? Well, totally. I mean, it's, it's, it it's if you watch advertising, you know, you watch a football game or something and you see the advertising, every commercial is nothing but that person

always smiling. Right. Like the individual unattached. So no one's dependent on him. He's not dependent on anyone. Right. Yeah. And he's got a big smile hanging out with his friends, whatever. They're selling some new Pfizer drug for some reason. I just thought about this, that stock photos of families seem to be very cheesy, probably because they're from the 90s or something like stock photos of individuals like sporting the latest show. Right. Right. Right. But when you see like a stock photo of a family, I don I don't know they just but the point the point is that we know statistically right that that's that that person's actually not happy

So in fact the more atomized we've become the more lonely the more miserable more alcohol and drug abuse The more suicide the more like you know that the society actually is becoming increasingly unhappy The more the liberal ideal is realized Right. Okay, so because we're becoming less human less human Yeah, human beings are social in our natures like happiness is a fulfillment of our nature than becoming less of your nature is the opposite of happiness and it becomes yes happiness is only had when it's had together, right so like The happy family is a perfect example of that, where in order to say happy family,

you mean the people who make it up are happy, right? Like the happiness of the people is what constitutes the happy family. But you can't imagine the happy individual other than the family being happy, right? I mean, if the family's miserable, he's miserable because he's a part of a happy family and they're happy or miserable together I mean, if the family's miserable, he's miserable because he's a part of a happy family

and they're happy or miserable together. That's like the nature of it. And so happiness, if happiness is social, is a common good, meaning it's only had when it's had together, and it's had at the most intense level at the most intimate of relationships. But those relationships aren't self-sufficient. So for example, us with our wives,

we have a very intense personal relationship and happiness and with our children. So happiness is most intense there. But those relationships are themselves dependent upon larger relationships. Even stuff as rudimentary as we have to speak a language with our family and we don't create our own language. Right?

Like we're inheriting. We have, what do we like to do with our families? We, you know, I mean, we like to read books. We like to tell stories. We like to play sports. Whatever those things. But those things are all things that the family has to go outside of itself.

So a family, say, Robinson, or a Swiss family Robinson or something like a family deserted on an island is capable of a certain amount of happiness. But there's that happiness draws it out to encounter other families, right? You know what I mean is, you don't want to be stranded on a desert island with your family. You want, if that were the case, you'd say, man, I wish there were four or five other families, right? You know what I mean? Is they don't, you don't want to be stranded on a desert Island with your family. You want,

if that were the case, you'd say, man, I wish there were four or five other families here with us. Right? Yeah. So that my sons and daughters could marry. Yeah. So we could be happier. Our happiness, the happiness you experience at that smallest level calls you out into a deeper, a deeper happiness that involves a larger social group. All right, and so say the village, the town, the whatever, and then the same holds, but the same construction

of the person that we can see at the most intimate level is occurring at those higher levels. So you as a family are becoming who you are in relations with the other families in which you're living and so on, right? And then towns with other towns and you can, the concept of subsidiarity is this idea that the different levels of the social order are all ordered towards the perfection of human happiness, which is ultimately had at the most intimate level, right? So like the smallest or the deepest relationship

is what's being perfected in its integration into larger social orders, right? So those larger social orders then are necessary, not only in a positive sense of giving space for the happiness to expand, but they're also necessary to negative sense of protecting the smaller orders from any sort of predator or including internal to them.

So an example might be something like child abuse, right? Where you say, okay, the family is where happiness is the most intense, but because of that, it's also the place where misery is the most intense, right? Where you say, okay, the family is where happiness is the most intense, but because of that, it's also the place where misery is the most intense, right? The possibility for misery is the most intense at that level for the same reason that happiness is. And so if you have a situation, say, where a child is being abused,

then the intervention of a higher order, level of order, into that smaller one, say to remove the child and to put them say in an orphanage. Okay. We can say that has to occur, but the genius of the insight and subsidiarity is what is occurring when the child says put into an orphanage that's better than his abusive family, perhaps probably. But it's not as good as a happy family.

Meaning it doesn't replace the happy family. That higher level of order, say, the level of the city, is capable of a certain institutional action, but it can't reproduce what a loving family can. So when it acts, it acts in a remedial sense, right? You see what I'm saying? It can act to stop a greater evil, but it can't replace the good that is had at the lower levels.

Yes, that makes sense. Okay, so that means that the construction of apparatus, government apparatus at higher levels has to be very carefully done. Okay, so like the replace, it's the inversion of the liberal, right? So the liberal wants the highest levels to be the most powerful things, right?

To reduce the existence of all smaller levels of order in order to free the individual, right? So the individual can move within this new giant sphere of freedom. Whereas subsidiarity like is the inversion of that and says, no, human beings actually move and live at that smallest level of intimacy. And those things that are larger are there to protect

and maximize that. Gotcha. Okay, so it's, there's a, it's an almost exact opposite in a lot of ways. So I think that what happens with Christian society is that the form of subsidiarity is not something that is instituted. The form of subsidiarity is the form that emerges.

Yeah, naturally. Naturally. It has to be respected. Out of loving relationships. Okay. Right. So like, for example, you, you know that the relationship you have with your kids is not the same as the relationship that your neighbor has with your kids. What I mean is if he behaved towards them the way you do, yeah, that would be troubling. That would be troubling to you,

but you don't need some constitutional articulation of that. It's merely the fact that you're a family and so is he that you know that to be the case. If the mayor of the town came into your living room and started disciplining your children, you wouldn't need some constitutional rule about the relative relationships between mayors and fathers to know that that was not the right order of things. Do you know what I mean? Mason the liberal view that both seem to be saying the same thing, namely, leave them alone. Yeah, sort of. Right? Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, the Christian view isn't...

Like, we want the state out of our business. Isn't that what we're saying? The Christian view is a little different. I mean, I know what you mean by that. What you mean is, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, is that you want the liberal state or that you want the higher powers to stay out of your business. That is true when they're abusing their power. But the Christian view is different in that it understands those higher levels of authority to be necessary for the happiness of the family. All right? So like- And so does the liberal? The liberal believes the state- Understands those higher levels of authority to be necessary for the happiness of the family

All right, so like your so does the liberal the liberal only the highest level only the state and Not what what's the interval? So for example, you think no doubt I or this I think that the authority of the parish priest is essential to the happiness of My family right like my my in order for my my family to be happy I must be integrated into the type of thing that has the authority of my family. Right, like in order for my family to be happy, I must be integrated into the type of thing that has the authority of the priest. Golly, I am ashamed to say that I've never thought that before and that I would like to live in a parish where I could fully give myself, I'm not being,

I don't mean to be so smart here, but I would like to kind of live in that world where I give myself over to the authority of my priest in certain respects, but I don't feel that way. But you would at least admit that it ought to be that way. I haven't thought this through. Why would I want that? Because the priest integrates, so the priest brings into your family the, or it's not even

that he brings into your family. He elevates your family. He's the conduit through which your family is elevated out of the domestic church into the church. And the sacraments and the preaching and the community of the parish is the way in which your family is elevated out of its self-containedness and brought into something greater.

Mason Being brought into that greater thing is the perfection of what your family is. It's not adding layers. It's not like stacking, right? Your family is perfected as itself in its elevation. So the love, so my point is that the Christian understanding of subsidiarity is not merely negative. It's not merely that the higher powers are there to intervene. It's also positive and that the higher authorities are there to elevate that which is below. Right?

And so they have real authority. Mason- Isn't that true of a town in a secular sense as well though? Jason- Well it ought to be. And maybe it is true inevitably because of human nature, that the liberals can't ever make true what they're attempting. And so human nature is always, this is something that people have remarked on that human nature being what it is. Human beings are always attempting to reconstruct solidarity. They're trying to build friendships. They're trying to build networks that have some kind of authority because that's what makes them happy. Right.

But here's like I think like a farmer's market is like illustrative of a group of people who wish to be in community with each other. And I would bet you that it's the more liberal Progressive towns in America that have more of them and that might just because there's a greater population But I don't think so. No, I don't know more kind of conservative town. Well, that's certainly that's certainly that about that certainly was the case But I think it still is I think it's probably still I bet you there's a crap town in Portland, Oregon Oh, I think that's still the case on but not in Houston, Texas. I think that's probably still on. I bet you there's a crap town in Portland, Oregon. Oh, I think that's still the case on. But not in Houston, Texas.

I think that's still the case generally. So I guess what I'm asking is. But it's changing. Doesn't that contradict your idea though? No, no, no, the contradictions are everywhere. Okay. Okay, so the whole system contradicts. Okay, so you have, why is it, right,

that, why is it the case that the farmers market is that way? Like it tends to be with the liberal. Yeah. Okay. Well, what is it? Um, it's more expensive. There's a certain aesthetic that people like. There's a desire for this to be part of a community. I think that's right. I think there's a desire to be part of a community. There's a knowledge of that. Right. Now the, all of those things are good. I think,'s right. I think there's a desire to be part of a community. There's a knowledge of that. To know your neighbors. Right. Now, all of those things are good, I think. I mean, the aesthetic side, the desire to be part of your neighbors, those are good things, right?

So human beings aren't totally depraved and there's always pushing back and they push back in different places. Where, and human nature pushes back in places where there's an opening. So, one of the things that characterizes contemporary politics is the way in which one formulates or imagines his opponent

is largely, is an integral aspect of how you imagine yourself. Okay, so I'm this way because the bad guy's that way. Right? Okay, so when you had the bad guys on the right, being in favor of globalization, the big corporate stuff, more profit, more money, more corporate stuff, then there was a reaction in favor of small stuff, local stuff, less stuff.

Okay. What I'm saying is that in being that that's changing because things are shifting in a different way. Well, how do you think the liberal perceives their enemy today? Well, now increasingly people who emphasize local stuff are the enemy. So, increasingly- Interesting. So, like when I was a kid, when I was a kid, say, and I grew up in Western Washington,

Seattle area, there were the giant protests in the 90s, what year was that? 90, whatever, against the World Trade Organization that was meeting in Seattle and they were left wing protests against globalization, right? now now The left the so-called left wing is who's radically in favor of globalization Whereas the so-called right wing are the ones who are against the globalists. Okay. Right. The global elite globalization, the global, I mean that has now become something that right-wingers say. That's interesting.

Um, immigration happened in the exact same way. Like when I was a kid, the Republican party was the open immigration party and the Democrats were the closed border party. Oh yeah. Because the Democrats protected the unions and the Republicans were the free trade guys. They wanted labor, right? protected the unions and the Republicans were the free trade guys. They wanted labor in, right? So the inversion of that, that started to occur in the early aughts and then was finished with Trump, right? Has created an entirely different, like an entirely different configuration that is as much about what my opponent says and about what I think. You see, like Donald Trump's,

people often forget this, right? But Donald Trump's hard line against illegal immigration was the motivation for the left to become radically pro-illegal immigration. So maybe we should be pro-abortion. Well, I mean, it's like a trap, you know? You can't really get out of it. But so when you point out those inconsistencies, right?

I think those are always there. And there are, but they are, and they are, I mean- I'm thinking of 1984, where I forget the exact countries, but has always been at war with East Asia. Yeah, so things just change, and we can't explain why they change. And we've forgotten that they changed to begin with. They've changed radically.

I mean, the leftists, I mean, think about like the COVID years and the role. I'm so glad that we're talking about it as in the past. Think about those COVID years. The dramatic role reversal, where the left wing was the submit to authority, do what you're told, the government is to be trusted. What? We probably didn't fund weapons research in China.

It's like, man, my memory of the left was that they were the ones who thought the government was always up to no good. They were the ones who thought we shouldn't trust authority. They were the ones that thought the government was always up to no good. They were the ones who thought we shouldn't trust authority. They were the ones that thought, well, of course, the military industrial complex is designing chemical weapons overseas. What else would the military industrial complex do? They were the ones who were against all that.

They became the ones who were in favor of it all. I mean, very, very peculiar things like that that are really fascinating to watch right where the left So called left is Adopted something like say the American support for the Ukraine war which doesn't I don't want to get into the details of that But but it's odd that the left wing becomes the most rabid supporter of an American proxy war against Russia, where we are funding nationalist rebels against the Soviet, I mean the Soviet Union against Russia. It's like, yeah, that's something, that's a, that's a sort of model of conflict that we've been down before.

And it used to be the left that was against it, right? I mean, that used to be the case. So this is the incoherence and contradictions you're talking about. These contradictions, they, they,ictions, they're moving, right? And there's an incoherence in it where human beings feel that and are always looking for- Can I offer an analogy? You know, kind of like what in the Republic where Plato tries to show that, OK, let's look at it at a larger scale because that's easier to see what it's like in the video. But if we did the opposite here.

OK, OK. So maybe is it like to make it into a person? Is it sort of like the person who's tossed to and fro by his passions without a coherent worldview or faith? Totally. So he's just one day he wants this. The next day he's tired of that and wants that. And there's no real reason for it. And he's giving you his argument for why he wants or doesn't want that thing, depending on how he feels.

Yeah, completely right. Now what's it's, I think that's completely right on the, on the level of the population. Right. So the population we've gotten to a point, I think, where the population is that soul that you're talking about, that disordered soul. I think there's more coherence at higher levels of order. I mean, I think there are people, a lot of people who want to make as much money as possible. Yeah.

So it's not very complicated. And have as much power as possible. You know, and they're not, they couldn't care one way or the other about immigration or Ukraine or farmer markets or whatever. I mean, those things are all just means towards an end and they're willing to do whatever. But again, I think that that that is predictable. I mean, I think that's highly predictable, given the liberal premises,

that that's what would occur. So what's a Christian to do now? Like wait for it to burn down, to ignore the whole thing. No, the beauty of it, the beauty of the Christian position and of subsidiarity in this idea is that it doesn't rely upon higher levels of order in order to to be built. It actually the point of it is that it doesn't rely upon higher levels of order in order to be built. It actually, the point of it is that, well, no, the most important part is the most immediate. Like the most important thing is you and your family.

The second most important is you and your family and the families that they're friends with. The third most important is the town that you live in. The fourth, what I mean is it inverts, because it inverts the power structure, you have the opportunity to act in an efficacious way underneath that umbrella that we were talking about earlier. Yeah, you don't have to wait for the government to give you permission to live a Christian life.

You can have friends and actually have friends, like really have friends and treat them as friends. And the government not only can't initiate it, the government can't even see it. Like it doesn't even know, like those aren't, there's no mechanism for even observing it, friendship. Right? Right.

That's right. So because the whole structure is built for the opposite, the whole structure is built for the opposite. The whole structure is built for non-personal interactions, impersonal interactions, right? And so the whole bureaucratic and commercial structure is built for that. Personal interactions are beneath the radar. So you can build friendships,

and the thing that's really fascinating about it from a political theory point of view is that the construction of real communities is the undoing of the liberal order, right? The liberal order, its construction relies upon the destruction of communities, but it can't, but there's like a paradox in it where it destroys the communities, but it can't, but there's like a paradox in it where it destroys the communities, but not through other communities, right? It's through non-community apparatus.

And so you can build the interpersonal relationships underneath it, and they can't stop it. I mean, they could stop it militarily, I guess, but they can't stop it. I mean, they could stop it militarily, I guess, but they can't stop it within the structure itself. What that does, when I say it undermines their order, I mean that quite literally. I mean, when you think of communities of friends, people who are really bound together

in relationships of care, those people are less anxious, less scared, less susceptible to propaganda, less they have leadership within the communities that they trust who love them. They're less susceptible to marketing. They're less susceptible. All the pressures that the atomized individual falls under,

which is actually the basis of the power that the atomized individual falls under, which is actually the basis of the power of the hegemonic entity, right, are undermined as that atomized individual becomes less atomized, in exactly inverted way that they were built as he became more atomized. And so if you look at, there's a theorist,

very interesting political theorist, Hannah Arendt is her name, mid 20th century. She wrote a book called the origins of totalitarianism, which was a really wonderful book. And she, she was, had seen German, Nazi and Bolshevik firsthand. She was there. And so she wrote this book about, about the total. And she, it was somewhat counter-intuitive to Americans because what she argues is that totalitarianism is built on, only on atomized population.

Okay, so the prerequisite to totalitarianism is the destruction of communities of solidarity. Because communities of solidarity aren't susceptible to the tools of tyranny, right? Because the people who are within them aren't scared to death. The people that are within them have support. The people that are within them have confidence

that they're not crazy, right? Like gaslighting doesn't work when you've got a community of people who all go, yeah, that's nuts, right? It's only when you're by yourself that you go, man, I wonder if that- Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong. Yeah, yeah.

Right? And- And if I have community with you, I need the government less. Way less. You're not as vulnerable. I mean, this is what the argument was, is that vulnerability, and it's not just physical vulnerability,

but that is a part of it. Like you need, as society becomes atomized, not just culturally, but economically, we become increasingly dependent upon large structures for our sustenance, right? And that has a psychological impact where we are afraid of disruption of the status quo, because we know that the status quo

is what puts food on the table. We know that we serve these big entities. Do you know what I mean? Mason- I want a specific concrete example so I can then know what you mean. Kline Well, I mean, don't you think that people, say, who work for a large global corporation have within them a mental check on entertaining theories that would suggest the large global corporation is evil. Yes, if I worked for, well, not even just that, right?

But if I worked for Amazon, I even have to be careful what I say on YouTube. So in a sense, I work for YouTube. And so I at times feel myself mental checked. And now that's a very explicit, but it can be much more subtle. It can be like, it can be, um,

the human beings want to don't want to feel like they are, um, they are a part of a cog in a machine that's doing evil. And so the rationalization that backfills, okay, this is what I'm doing. I'm a part of this mechanism. And then we are inclined to then backfill the rationality we need in order for that to be okay, right? Again, this is a part of the structure that builds, that maintains and builds those power structures.

Is that, and when people are less dependent on the larger structures, they become more open to questioning them. Say that again, when they are less- Less dependent on the larger structures, they're more open to questioning them. Say that again, when they are less? Less dependent on the larger structures, they're more open to questioning their legitimacy. Yeah. So, I mean, the argument – I mean, if you look at something like – so Hannah, in her book, she talks about things like the purges in the Soviet Union where you get just crazy stuff like the the secret police would be given

Quotas and it's like okay You need to come up with two thousand people from this neighborhood or something and it's just like random quotas, right? like the secret police you have to make this number of arrests and And and she's like well that it's outsiders that seems crazy. Like why? Like just random arrests. I mean, it seems so bizarre and she's like well look because to outsiders, that seems crazy. Like why? Like just random arrests? I mean, it seems so bizarre. And she's like, well, look, because the point, the randomness is the very point,

because the point was to destroy solidarity. So if you have a neighborhood and at any given point, anyone can be arrested and you never know why, and you never know if it's because your neighbor said something or you said the wrong thing to somebody or whatever. What happens is everybody retreats as far as possible from each other because they're terrified. And that retreat into isolation, into atomization, was the purpose of the terrors. So is this why people suspect that COVID lockdowns had to do with that? I remember in Canada, people were calling on each other, calling the police.

Absolutely. Right. I mean, the, the, the. And do you think that's an intentional thing that's coming from top down? I think that, no. Or is that like a happy coincidence for those in power? I think that there is, human beings are more, are often more psychologically complicated than just intentional action. Like often, often our actions and the, and the rationalization for them are, are complicated by, by, by, um, sort of pre-rational intuitions. So, so

people, like, I think that when, when, say during the COVID years, when, year or whatever, when say some families got together and had Thanksgiving, say, and that like made some people mad. Resentment, probably. Exactly. Why does it make them mad? Yeah. Right. It's like, it makes them, it's not the theory of I want to destroy families or whatever, but there's some sort of resentment or anger towards them where you think your family's more important and it's like, well, yeah, I do, you know, but, oh, well that, that, that is something that is now repulsive. Do you know what I mean? Like, because it, it's, it's, I think it literally becomes repulsive to people. Right. And so they they find that which they're ideologically opposed to, aesthetically displeasing. And so they go after it.

Right. I don't know. It doesn't always have to be. It doesn't always have to be thought out. Yeah, that's good to hear because. Well, I kind of like the idea of there being an evil group of men in a bunker plotting the demise of. Yeah, I don't think that's the way it has to work. I know it's unfortunate. That would have been so cool. I think those I actually do

think those groups of men exist. OK, but I think they often don't succeed in their whatever their plan is. Do you know what I mean? Well, yeah, they don't actually they don't actually control enough to get what they want. Part of part of why they may not succeed is because as you say like our beautiful humanity Fights forth in these little farmers markets and things that they accidentally. Yeah, you can't dental virtue This is the last one right because if if if tyranny is predicated upon fear

Then it's always secondhand in the sense that you're always threatening something that the tyranny doesn't provide. Do you see what I'm saying? So like, fear of what? Fear of dying at the most fundamental level, the simplest level? Okay, but life is something that the tyranny did not provide me, right? Fear of disrupting my family,

fear of whatever the fears are that are motivating obedience are secondhand, they're not positive, they're negative. So the tyrannies then find themselves in a very tricky situation where they have to be parasitical upon human goods that they don't create. But the human goods are always a threat to their tyranny. So it's like, that's the reason why tyrannies

are unstable. It's the reason why they're paranoid in their nature, because they see everywhere the bubbling resistance. You know? Mason- I'm thinking about during the second world war where Carol Voitiwa and his friends would get together in secret and perform poetry and plays for each other to keep their culture alive. So it's kind of like what you're saying. We're trying to band together so that the tyranny doesn't atomize them. I'm also thinking of Christ's words to Peter, Satan has desired to sift you as wheat. Yeah. Or in the persecution, the beginning of the persecution of the Christians under

the Romans, the original offense that they were persecuted under was illegal gathering. That had nothing to do with religion. It was, it was illegal to gather together in a house and they were doing that. Why was it illegal to gather together? Because it was a threat to the state. Is that the explicit reason they gave? Absolutely. It wasn't, they weren't, they weren't particularly against Christians. Any sort of gathering was that wasn't sanctioned by the state

was a threat and so outlawed. This is, and the Christians wouldn't not gather because of course they were celebrating the liturgy. And so they were, that's the beginning of the persecution. How bizarre that gatherings of humans weren't allowed in private houses. Yes, unsanctioned gatherings. so you could gather, you know, for the official Colton things. Wow. But that, but that it's the same reason.

I mean, it's the same reason because human interpersonal relationships resist the tyrannical construction of power and build solid subsidiarity. So like that's it's not implemented. It's the way human beings order themselves. If you leave them alone and that they were good. And if they're good, that's right. So to the degree that they're virtuous, this is what emerges. All right. So could you tell me what you think?

We are doing well here in Steubenville. To. Oh, yeah. galvanize humanity against. I think that we're doing. There's a lot. And just for those at home, I'm not saying this as if to say, so many places is happening, but this is our reference point. You know, you live in Steubenville. And there's there's a lot of there's a lot going on here with

like we've been talking about with the construction of the building of of real relationships there's what's weird about Steubenville at least large sections of it here I think is that it's people know what they're doing I mean there's a lot of intentionality like we need to turn away from the big and look at the small give the example Give the example of the grocery box that just went in downtown Yeah, so mark Barnes and Greg started this and it's it is exactly what we're talking about Like like the attempt of a grocery store downtown that has local more local produce produce local food local stuff and it's not

It's not merely the point is not that it's a commercial venture. The point is that it is the attempt to move what has become highly commercialized into a less commercialized space, right? Like the space of friendships. And there's a commercial component to it, but it's not merely a business. Right? So there's an attempt, I think, in Steubenville to do that, to try to actualize that. There's also a lot of, I mean, I'm more involved

in the thinking side of things, and there's a lot of thinking going on, a lot of theoretical work, a lot of stuff along these same lines. So it's a real center for that as well. You know, Steubenville, I mean, I can give an example, I guess, where we go to Mass or we're parishioners at St. Peter's here, sometimes people will visit and they'll say,

or it'll be here and there, like, there's no like parish events or there's no, like they look at the Bulletin and there's like no there's no Like stuff going on Bible study was yeah I'm like and then it takes me a minute to realize and it's like well That's because the people at mass are a community like it's wow like we see each other every day like we don't Like everything every barbecue I have is just a St. Peter's get together. Every, the homeschooling co-op is the, you know, it's not that it's bad

that other parishes attempt to become a place for community. They ought to do that. But the goal would be to have it so natural that it doesn't need to be documented. So natural that it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be like organized. It just is. It doesn't have to be like organized. It just is.

So, I mean, that's great. I don't know the long-term outcome of it. I think that places like here are cropping up all over the place. I mean, I think there are communities, you know, not just Catholic, but all different kinds that are popping up and the acknowledgement. I mean, you hear it even sort of in mainstream discourse sometimes about the acknowledgement that the solutions to our problems are small, not large.

Like you've got the solution to the problem is in your town, in your neighborhood. It is not the next presidential election. So I think this is probably true of me and most people watching. Why are we then surely the goal if we want to? We're going to act where we put our love. But we love we seem to love. The kind of inverse of what we should love. But we love, we seem to love the kind of inverse of what we should love. So I'm more interested in global politics than national politics and more interested in national politics

than local politics. Like who watches the local news? And then I show by my behavior that even though I would not wish to admit it, that I may be more interested in politics than my own family if I'm spending an hour a day listening to them, but not my children. Right. So how do we actively and violently change our? I don't know the answer to that. I mean, I fall prey to the same thing. I think that's an act, an act of will that I myself am still struggle with, but I think we just have to force ourselves

to care about the small thing. You know? And I'm gonna go back on what I just said there because it seems to me that like the more you invest in your small town, the more interested you are. Then you become more interested. Like the cigar lounge we saw, I'm now to go back on what I just said there because it seems to me that like, the more you invest in your small town, the more interested you are. Then you become more interested. Like the cigar lounge we started. I'm now interested in that. And the little Melkite community I'm invested in. Okay. We're in, you know.

That sounds right to me. Um, is there a good battle plan on how to be a human? I don't think so. Okay. I mean, I'm sure there is. I just don't know it. There's an excellent book called Out of of the ashes by Anthony Eslam. Yeah, I heard about that. I've heard I mean I think that we are in a period right now of extreme confusion. Yep, and disruption Because we're witnessing We're witnessing the end of one regime one civilization and the birth of another and that's a very

regime, one civilization and the birth of another. And that's a very confusing time. Yeah. A world is ending. A world is ending and a new one is emerging. And it's not the categories that used to hold don't hold anymore. The alliances that we used to be able to count on, we can't count on anymore. I mean, like things are crumbling.

Yes. And it's really hard to see your way through that. I don't know. So what do we do? So I guess what do we do while we're confused while the country burns, while the center has fallen out and everything falls apart? I'll tell you what I, people sometimes accuse me of being pessimistic and I guess I am, but I think that the way I think about this is it's no longer about winning. Okay. Like that's, I don't, that's so helpful. It's no longer about winning. What it's about now is surviving. And I don't mean like, you know, eating. I mean, surviving as Christians and as a, as a culture.

And I don't, I mean, like, like, what do we pass on to our children? How do we explain what has happened to them? How do we, how do we, you know, and, and how do we rebuild the church when we're so used to the church being this big thing, just like everything and it's like now we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that the church is actually a very small thing. I mean, like the church is the parish, the community, the right, like in rebuilding that, which is something we used to know. So the tradition is full, has all the resources we need. And then weathering the storm and then converting it. I mean, like weathering the storm isn't pessimistic. It really is like what happens, you look at something like the Roman Empire where the Christians,

the Christians are presenting to the Romans, to the pagan Romans a different way of life. And the, the reaction to that, because it's truly a different way of life, there are a lot of the pagans view it as a threat. It's a threat because it's really different. It's actually, it was a threat. It was in fact subversive, subversive, right?

Yeah. So there's a persecution, the persecutions are launched against it. But the persecutions only make its difference more obvious and more clear, right? It only shows ever more clearly that this was in fact different. This isn't just another iteration of the same thing. This is actually a different way of living.

This is actually a different way of living. This is actually a different, a different form of life. And so the ramping up of the persecution is simultaneous to the growing of the Christian community. Right. And, and you have, and, and so you see what I'm saying? Like there's the thing that attracts the pagans to the Christians, their love, their peace, the idea that there is in fact a society of peace that's real. That is the exact same reality that allowed the Christians to weather the persecutions, right? The fact that that was real. And so, so the conversion of the empire occurs. So, so what I'm saying is like us becoming ever more authentically Christian in our smallness

is actually the thing that will eventually convert the empire. I mean like because we'll be different, you know, like visibly. And when they come to persecute we'll be different then. And then, you know know and so I think That's actually hopeful right do we need to believe that we'll convert the Empire in order to get to weather the storm Or can we just can we assume that the Empire will always? deter it continue to deteriorate and will never convert and that's okay to Convert it. Yeah, I think this is this is very speculative

I don't know, but I think that history church it. Yeah. I think, this is very speculative, I don't know, but I think that history, church history in particular, moves in these big cycles of corruption and reform and that the corruption, like what emerges out of the period of corruption is at a higher level than what went into the period of corruption. Like there's a sort of, you know,

sometimes people will say things like the corruption of the best is the worst. That there's a, like as the church sort of ascends through history, there are openings for greater levels of corruption, okay, within it. And it circums to that and Then the the eventual reform out of it is now It's like it's like if you're an alcoholic or something and then you reform out of it and you've now defeated

Mmm alcohol. Do you know what I mean? Like you're you can become higher Yeah, yeah, okay So yeah, but do institutions conquer things? Because I get, I get how it works on an individual level. Like, you know, cause the individual now knows the evil that he doesn't wish to go back to. But a church in a thousand years from now, but I think that didn't exist now. They just I think that or structures put in place. I think modernity, I think the modern world is corrupt as a core is the corruption of the church.

I mean- What does modernity mean? Well, I mean, we're witnessing the end of it. So the modern world, you know, the end of Christendom, Christendom is replaced with the modern world, right? The modern world has many different facets to it that we could describe it with. And that's what's meant by modernity. But, I mean, you could describe it

through, you could just try to describe it with secularity. You could try to describe it with scientific arguments. You could try to describe it with the way states work. I mean, there's many different ways to describe it. But one thing we know is it's not Christendom, right? It's the, it's. Yeah. And, but it didn't come from anywhere else but Christendom.

What I mean is like, Christendom, medieval Christendom wasn't invaded. There wasn't, there were space aliens didn't land. It wasn't an outside force. Like Christendom did this to itself. Christendom did modernity, no one else did it. And so it's a period of corruption in the church. Mason- Modernity is a period of corruption. Yeah, that was birthed by the church.

Bouth by the church. I mean, the church understood in the broadest sense, right? Of the civilization, not, I'm not talking about the Episcopal hierarchy or something. I'm talking about the civilizational sense. And so the reform out of modernity is, I mean, I'm hopeful that eventually that will be the reform exactly of the church. I mean, and in a thousand years, if the world's still here, there'll be a looking back at this period as a period of very profound corruption within Christendom right like so I I Think that that's a possible trajectory is very speculative. Of course, who knows but but but I think that's a possible

Way that this plays out in the long run, you know one way One way I see I see hope is that when I was a teenager we would never dance with anybody or if we did it didn't look like it looked like gesticulating or having a seizure. It wasn't. But you know my son went to a dance last night. Right. He had dance practice and they do swing dancing here. Yeah I know.

I know my kids are a part of the same thing. Isn't that awesome? I just want to give another shout out for Steubenville If you can live anywhere and want to live in a little rundown town with friends It's pretty good place to be we would like to have you I think well. I can't say that for sure those kids are great And the teenager Lee shot the teenagers the world that they have yeah Yeah, yeah Teenagers the world that they have yeah, what am I? Yeah Yeah, yeah Yeah, they're they're they're growing up in a better a better environment than I did right

That's for sure and that doesn't seem to make sense in one sense because it seems like the world's gotten much worse America's got much worse in a sense, but that was don't you think that was part of the problem? gotten much worse. America's got much worse in a sense. Mason- But that was, don't you think that was part of the problem previously was that there's a certain clarity that's emerging. Mason- Yeah, there's a line that's been drawn. Mason- And when, you know, in our generation, there was- Mason- Our parents put us in front of MTV and friends. Mason- There was still this sort of sense that American society-

Mason- Is a Christian society. Mason- Is pretty good. And it's like, we have this fault and that fault, but overall we're pretty good. And if we just stopped doing that bad thing and stopped doing that bad thing, we'd be all right. I was watching old reruns of WWF the other night. I'd never do this, but I watched that growing up. Yeah, me too.

And that I was listening to the intro song for Hulk Hogan, I Am a Real American, Fight for What's Right. Fight for your life. I know it's great. But that was maybe the understanding, hey, like, I think to be American is to be Christian. Yeah, totally. Totally. I mean, that was very, very strong. I mean, I think, I think that there's, I think that we, maybe we can rewrite that history in a way that's not quite accurate. I mean, a lot of that is post-World War II and early Cold War, like nationalism and, you know, like America was less Christian in the 30s

and then became a lot more Christian in the 50s. So, you know, like when you ask the question, if someone asks the question, well, how did it collapse so fast? And it's like, well, it was built pretty fast too. Like, yeah, that kind of. Interesting. 1950s.

So even American kind of Christianity could be thought of as a response to our enemies. Yeah. A kind of reaction to our enemies. Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't think we want to be too cynical about it, right? Because it can be, Christianity can be quite sincere. So if you look at the post-war situation

and you say what characterizes post-war sort of suburban life, and it's like, oh, nuclear family, hard work ethic, practicing Christians, all these sorts of things. And it's like, well, it's true that they had nuclear families and cared about them. It's true that they worked hard and had a good work ethic. It's true that they were Christian.

I mean, we don't have to be cynical about it and say it was insincere. But you can say, but it was derivative of, I mean, what I mean is you can say things like, in the war, in the fighting, the war, there became a, what it meant to be an American, right? Like a good American and being God fearing was one of the things that, that it meant to be a good American. And so for people who intended to be good Americans, that's something they did. Yeah. Right.

And that's not bad. But you can see why in the next generation, maybe it doesn't anymore. Yeah. Right. Why it can collapse so fast. You know, who's going to win the next election? Should we even care? I love that we came here to talk about Louis the Ninth. We have not spoken about him once.

I gave you the opportunity. At one point I asked about the medieval church to talk about Louis the ninth. We have not spoken about him once. I don't think I even said his name. I gave you the opportunity. At one point I asked about the medieval church thinking that you would get there. We're not going to get there now. Let's not even worry about it. I don't. I don't. I don't know. I mean, I don't. Do you not care? Oh, that wouldn't. It wouldn't be fair to say I don't care. I don't. I no longer think that the system works in a way where the question can be answered. No one does.

So I know, you know, it's like- That's why outsiders are now elected. Now if you ask me, if someone said, who do you think will be in the White House in two years? What would you say? Not Trump. Really? Okay.

Why? I think they're going to put him in jail. Okay. I have no idea who it'll be. Yeah. But that's just what I think put him in jail. Okay. I have no idea who it'll be. Yeah. But that's just what I think. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

As we wrap up, tell us about your book. I want to give you a little softball there and you can tell us about your book. Okay, well, I have two books, I guess. Oh, sorry, I'm thinking about the... Before Church and State is a big one. Okay. That's about Louis IX and the 13th century France and how their society was structured

very different than our own. So it's a combination of history and political theory. Heavy on the history. And then I have another one called The Two Cities, which is a history of human society, human civilization. I really start with Adam and Eve and I go to Benedict the 16th. And it is it's a history, a political history. So it's about how the church was political from Eden all the way through to the through the modern.

So through the Romans, the Middle Ages, the biblical history, the Romans, the Middle Ages, the modern construction of the modern period. And yeah, all the way through the construction of the ideologies and how that all occurred. So what book would you like someone to say they had read if they could, if you could choose one, I'll tell you what the, the, the before church and state is much more academic, academic, probably much more boring. The two cities I think as people say is more engaging and more of it. The two cities is that a throwback to city? It's a city of God. So would those be?

Those are the protagonists in the story is the city of God and the city of man. Fantastic. And so trying to retell history out of away from the liberal narrative of progress And so trying to retell history away from the liberal narrative of progress and into a Christian narrative of salvation history. So what do we see if we look at history through our lenses rather than modernity's lens? That's what I try to do. Very good. Where can people learn more about you other than those books?

Are you part of the New Policy? I'm very involved with New Policy. The podcast or the? The podcast, the magazine, just all the activities, the conferences. So that's my kind of group intellectually. I work at Franciscan of course, and teach there. And I'm involved with the new College of St. Joseph the Worker that's coming on. So what's Politics of tyranny? That's what oh politics of tyranny was a podcast Series that new polity that we did with you probably sorry that mark Barnes and I did a long series

We'll put links to all of this on the politics of tyranny the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Hey as we wrap up I want to look at you right in the eyeballs the camera Not you know you and ask you to please subscribe to this channel We've got about 70% of people who watch this channel who aren't yet subscribed So if you like what we do and you want to support us I would really appreciate you clicking subscribe clicking the bell button turns out it's free and It helps. Thanks Thank you. Thank you was really fun