The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1026: Samuel Francis' Review of The Machiavellians w/ Aaron from Timeline Earth

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

88 MinutesPG-13Aaron is one of the hosts of the Timeline Earth podcast.Aaron joins Pete to read and comment on Samuel Francis' review of James Burnham's classic, The Machiavellians.Timeline Earth PodcastVIP Summit 3-Truth To Freedom - Autonomy w/ Richard GroveSupport Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on Twitter

There's so much rugby on Sports Extra from Sky. They've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end. Here goes. This winter Sports Extra is jam-packed with rugby. For the first time we've got every Champions Cup match exclusively live, plus action from the URC, the Challenge Cup, and much more. Thus the URC and all the best European rugby all in the same place.

Get more exclusively live tournaments than ever before on Sports Extra. Jampact with rugby. Phew, that is a lot of rugby. Get Sports Extra on Sky for 15 euro a month for 12 months. Search Sports Extra. New Sports Extra customers only. Standard Pressing applies after 12 months for the terms apply. On the many days of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee.

A visit filled with festivity. Experience a story of Ireland's most iconic beer in a stunning Christmas setting at the Guinness Storehouse. Enjoy seven floors of interactive exhibitions and finish your visit with breathtaking views of Dublin City from the home of Guinness. Live entertainment, great memories and the gravity bar. My goodness, it's Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at Guinness Storehouse.com. Get the facts. Be Drinkaware. Visit drinkaware.com.

Have you recently purchased a new vehicle from Frankine Volkswagen? If so, you may be at risk for an exciting condition known as new car joy. Symptoms may include spontaneous smiling, sudden increases in confidence and uncontrollable urges to take the scenic route. If you experience any of these symptoms, don't worry. The only known treatment is enjoying your new vehicle. Side effects may also include great value and exceptional customer service. Talk to a friendly professional at Frankine Volkswagen today and see if upgrading your car

is the right prescription for you. If you've thought about support in the show, head on over to freemamie on the wall.com forward slash support. You can see the many ways that you can support me there. The best way is right on that website. You can send me something in the mail. P.O. Box 413, Lineville, Alabama, 36266. I look forward to trying to do a lot more this year with the show,

and any support you can give me helps with that. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanino show. Is this guy ever been on the show before? Oh, Aaron from Timeline Earth, yeah, many times. How you don't know? You're my co-host. That's so awesome.

All right. Let's get to it. I asked you on today so that we could talk about Sam Francis. This is actually the book, the print version of Sam Francis's, Sam Francis's basically it's a review of every James Burnham book. So every book that James Burnham wrote, he has a, it does 10 to 15 pages on it to explain what it is.

And what are we looking for today? We're going to do the Machiavellians. Nice. And I know you read it. And also you said that you thought about when you, when you started reading, this review which was uh what's it called crisis of modernity yeah so the crisis of a modernity by augusto del noche um he's an italian philosopher um born in 1910 died in 76 i think and um he's just

another one of those people that basically called it um well before anybody else was calling it he um identified uh the pretty much the the the flow of history from from liberalism into kind of what we're experiencing right now, which is its logical endpoint. And it really resonated with me. I've also, in preparation for this episode, I also read a lot of Heidegger. And I also went back into the managerial revolution

just to get me into a Burnham mindset. Cool, cool. All right. Well, let's get this up on the screen and start reading. I love it. All right. So this is taken from, I don't even know what this text takes it from because this, this text actually, I can't find in PDF anywhere. It was never made into a PDF. I mean, maybe if someone has it, they can send it to me. But I just found this on archive. And it had this section of the Machiavellians in it. So yeah, let's just go and stop any time. So this is Sam Francis reviewing the Machiavellians by James. Burnham. I think Machiavellian's written in 41 or 42, a year after managerial revolution. So, all right. The managerial revolution has grown out of Burnham's dispute with Trotsky in the 1930s and was an answer to Trotsky.

Stalinist Russia was not a deformed worker estate, but a new kind of society that Marxism had not anticipated, managerial society. Yet despite Burnham's political and intellectual break with Marxism, significant fragments of Marxist ideology remained with him and seriously marred his statement of the theory of the managerial revolution. In the Machiavellians, defenders of freedom, Burnham eradicated many of his remaining Marxist preconceptions, formulated a general theory of human political behavior, and restated the theory of the managerial revolution

in terms of this theoretical. radical framework. Yeah, there's definitely a not so hidden critique of Marxism. You can definitely tell he's 100% away from Marxism right now, even though that's kind of where he started. Yeah, it's good to have you on here if we're going to talk about Marxism because, yeah, I think we've probably done a bunch of episodes on Marxism together, haven't we? Yeah, a few books, a few readings.

Yeah. All right. In his first book, which had begun with a long, epigraph from Machiavelli's letters, Burnham had revealed a scathing contempt for what he called ideology. Although he recognized a social need for ideologies as sets of beliefs that hold societies together, he had dismissed them as unscientific beliefs that were uncontrolled by facts, manager of Revolution page 185. This discrepancy between logic and reality, between the verbalized form and the concrete meaning is one that is a persistent,

theme in all of Burnham's writings and one that he explicitly developed in the Machiavellians. Burnham found in Machiavelli and in the four political theorists of the 20th century whom he described as Machiavellians the foundations of a realistic method of social and political analysis. Contrasting the theological and metaphysical political philosophy of Dante Alagairis in de Monarchia with the historically and empirically grounded approach of Machiavelli, Burnham developed a fundamental distinction between the formal and the real meaning of a statement. The formal meaning of a statement is the meaning which is explicitly stated, but which serves to express in an indirect and disguised manner what may be called the real meaning.

It's an interesting metaphysical development. I love it. This is quoted in the book. good. Oh, no, keep going. Quoting, by real meaning, I refer to meaning not in terms of the fictional world of religion, metaphysics, miracles, and pseudo history, but in terms of the actual world of space, time, and events. Yeah, I mean, metaphysics is like the lens in which we view reality and truth. So, I don't know, like, just the managerial revolution is something I really got into of Burnham's and I was about 75% satisfied with it and not just because it's a little outdated.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's what most people think. Most people say that it's a great book, but a lot of people complain, well, he didn't get his predictions correct and everything. It's like, well, I mean, you're in the middle. A war had just started. It's kind of hard. It's kind of hard. Put him some slack. Yeah, yeah. The real meeting then is the imping. empirically discoverable and verifiable meaning, the only meaning that has value for expressing the truth. In Machiavelli, Burnham argued there is no distinction between the formal and real meanings, because Machiavelli explicitly stated his goals and meaning, did not attempt to disguise them, and took pains to verify them empirically, and to make them clear.

Whether this is an accurate presentation of Machiavelli or not is not particularly important to the political theory that Burnham developed. His purpose was not to write a learned treatise on Renaissance history and philosophy, but to elaborate on empirically sound method of analyzing human political affairs. The tradition of political thought by Burnham labeled Machiavellian did indeed derive many of its ideas from the 16th century Florentine, but whether this was an accurate derivation and whether Machiavelli himself would have endorsed Machiavellianism are separate and secondary questions. I've heard that critique before. Would Machiavelli have agreed with Burnham? And I don't know enough about Machiavelli, the actual person to say whether or not he would. But I do know that, you know, he did see

the usefulness in veiling your agenda. The four thinkers whom Burnham discussed in detail in the Machiavellians were George Sorrell, Robert Michels, Gaitano Mosca, and Velfredo Paredo. To at least some extent, all four saw themselves as the heirs of Machiavelli. Like him, they were all concerned with the problems of political power, not with how to justify power, nor with the external forms and appearances of power, but with how men actually use, pursue, attain, and lose power. Like Machiavelli, all four were profoundly conscious. So the radical discrepancies between the formal disguises of power in rhetoric, ideology, and institutions, and the terrible realities of power in the actual history of men.

It's something that I can't stress enough is that people can talk about their ideology, their political ideology, all they want. But when it comes down to ruling, and there's a great quote from Francis in the, in the book, in the review of suicide of the West where he says, ideology never makes it into, never exists in reality, because it's formed in a vacuum outside of reality. So basically once it's introduced to reality, it just gets punched in the, you know,

it gets punched in the mouth and everything goes out the window. No, it's a transcendent end goal to point to channel revolutionary or reform energy into a transcendent goal. That's all ideology is. It's like you said, it doesn't exist in reality as purely metaphysical. Yeah. And another thing that he, that Francis says in the review of pseudos suicide of the West is that

basically ideology is there for the masses. They need to concentrate on something while the Machiavellians are actually ruling. Yeah. So it gives them something to feel good about. It gives them an identity, you know, something that I've been talking about on the timeline a lot today is how people make their political, their political ideology, their identity. So it gives them something to feel good about. But then they wonder their whole lives, how come what, you know, this guy was talking about my ideology when he was running for office. And then he gets into office and my ideology doesn't materialize. Why? Well, a really useful tidbit that I got from Burnham from the managerial revolution is that, you know, in order for an ideology to become dominant, people, the masses have to be willing to die for it.

And that's kind of how you know that capitalism or liberalism or even socialism slash Marxism will not be the dominant ideology at any point in time because it's been a while since people were willing to die for it or willing to kill for it. even, at least not in mass, not in any, not in any great extent. But, you know, that's, that's kind of the lens that I view acceleration, trying to predict accelerationism from is what are some things that are popping up now that maybe might be inspirational enough to, for people to kill or die for? Zionism. Well, well, but sure, the Machiavellians are definitely willing to die for it. Or at least try to send people to die for it.

But yeah, nowadays, I'm talking about in Israel itself, you know, what we've seen since October 7. Yeah, willing to kill for it, absolutely. Yeah, I don't think they're willing to die for it. I think they're definitely willing to drop bombs for it. Yeah. But it seems like the Houthis are willing to die for what. Yeah. Yep.

I mean, any sect of Islam is you can usually find some flowers in there to pluck. Thirdly, like Machiavelli, they believe that through the observation and study of the history of power relationships, a set of generalizations about power and men's usage of it could be formulated. In other words, that a historically grounded science of power, not a philosophy or ethical theory, was possible. That's why whenever you have these libertarians I was dealing with today on the timeline who are like, oh, so you believe. believe in an imaginary line and you don't want people to cross it why do you love violence because i do yeah i mean it's like and then i realized when they were when people are making that asking that question why do you have a problem with this it's very feminine it's it's long it's it's like literally long housing it's like they've yeah they've been completely long long housed and it's created their

ideology and they're questioning. Well, since the 20s, we've kind of, since we started getting into a psychoanalysis like Freud and all that, you've know, have you noticed that everything is posited as a psychoanalytical diagnosis? Yes. Yeah. Why are you? It's always, it's never about, are you doing this for, you know, did you do this to acquire

land? Did you go to war to acquire land? did you go to a war to do this? It's always what's wrong with you? Why would they do this? Yeah, even like in the, even like the etymology of words, like transphobe, that sounds like a mental illness that, you know, 80 years ago would have got you put into an asylum.

And that's where we're still looking at that today. That's still the norm today is everything is psychoanalytical. Everything is scientific. And, you know, when you talk about good. and evil to a leftist or a really committed liberal. It's not that they don't believe in it. It's just that that exists outside of their metaphysics. And because they don't believe, but this is something I learned from denoteur.

This isn't, believe it or not, this isn't an original thought I had. But they don't, they don't have in their metaphysics anything that exists outside of science or psychoanalysis. So when you talk about good and evil or, you know, these, these things that we all, always have understood, we white people have always understood as universal metaphysics that you and I can engage in a conversation and be reasonably assured that, you know, we're going to, we're going to abide within a certain framework. That's completely out the window with them because they just, it doesn't compute. They're like, why are you talking about that? Why are you asking that question?

It's like you, by asking the question, you have a mental illness. You're, there's just, nothing you can say. Isn't, it isn't problematic. Yeah. It either elicits a confusion or a disgust response, which we kind of get from them too. So all things being equal. Yeah, I was noticing, you know, Stone sauce got doxed. And when I saw there were people openly celebrating it on Twitter. And I'm like, this is the most feminine thing I've ever seen. Yeah, yeah. Yes, queen. Yeah. A 99 post thread. Yeah. Yeah, I saw that.

Could you imagine taking this? I can't wait until he does a comic about it. Yeah. All right. Behind these common beliefs was a body of common assumptions about the nature of political man and human history. The Machiavellian saw political life as constantly in flux. The process of change is repetitive and roughly cyclical.

quoting, the recurring pattern of change expresses the more or less permanent core of human nature as it functions politically. The instability of all governments and political forms follows in part from the timeless human appetite for power. I really need to make my neck, after Teal, I really need to read disposition on government by John C. Calhoun because he talks so much about stuff like this. because of the recurrent patterns of change history moves in cycles and is not a un not a uniliner linear progression the repetitive cycles make possible a science of human political behavior what men have done before they will do again in the future and within the limits it is therefore possible to predict their behavior through analogies drawn from history yeah i mean unless you believe in like that we exist in post-history. Machiavelli and his followers saw men in general as evil. Quote, all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature whenever they may find occasion for it.

The Machiavellians depicted human beings as insatiable in their desire for power, wealth, and preeminence, but also as irrational, prejudice, ignorant, and easily deceived by others as well as by themselves. Yeah. Yeah. Mosca specifically criticized and rejected the optimistic progressivism of Rousseau. It reminds me of who is it Spangler or optimism as cowardice. Yeah.

Paredo devoted much of the six volumes, six volumes. Six volumes. Pareto devoted much of the six volumes of the mind and society to exposing human irrationality and appetitive motivations. I'm not going to lie to you. I've tried to read original works by Pareto, and I could not. He's really tough to read, man. I have a couple books, a couple smaller books on the elites, and man, it's a slug sometimes.

No, he just, it's like he introduces a bunch of mathematical concepts, and I can't, I can't do it. Like, I can't follow that. I'm not that smart. Sorry. Sorel explicated the role of myths and falsehoods in providing a unifying force for political action, especially violent action. Michelle's throughout his work on political parties showed how minorities continually monopolized power by deceiving and coercing the mass membership. A lot to be said about that right there. The emphasis on human evil and irrationality is central to the Machiavellian argument.

Burnham and the Machiavellian saw politics and to a large extent of human condition in terms of the savage and incessant struggle for power at all levels of society, regardless of how this struggle might be disguised by language, symbolism, and institutional forms. And see, this is where I think Burnham kind of retained a little bit of his Marxism, or at least his Hegelianism, is, you know, when you're talking about, What does that say? Regardless of all of this struggle might be disguised by language, symbolism, and institutional forms. I don't think that Burnham took too much, didn't give enough account for things that exist outside the dialectic, especially in his critique of socialism. It was still very scientific and it was still very focused on, you know, material and economic, economic dialectic struggle. just not not resolving in a way that Marxists prescribed it would, you know, with dialectical materialism.

But another thing I learned from DeNoja is that they really didn't give any attention to the more abstract things like, you know, what, what he just mentioned, you know, language, symbolism, institutional forms, culture, religion, and just things that exist outside of, you know, empirical science. And there's other ideologies that we may be another ideology we may be familiar with who fails to do the same thing, I assume.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's, there's, I hate to say, I hate using this word, but it's nuanced. Which doesn't really say anything. There's so much rugby on sports extra from Sky, they've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end. Here goes.

This winter sports extra is jam-packed with rugby. For the first time we've got every Champions Cup match Exclusively live, bus action from the URC, the Challenge Cup, and much more. That's the URC and all the best European rugby all in the same place. Get more exclusively live tournaments than ever before on Sports Extra. Jam packed with rugby. Phew, that is a lot of rugby. Get Sports Extra on Sky for 15 euro a month for 12 months.

Search Sports Extra. New Sports Extra customers only. Standard pressing applies after 12 months for the terms apply. On the many days of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee. A visit filled with festivity. Experience a story of Ireland's most iconic beer in a stunning Christmas setting at the Guinness. Storehouse. Enjoy seven floors of interactive exhibitions and finish

your visit with breathtaking views of Dublin City from the home of Guinness. Live entertainment, great memories and the Gravity Bar. My goodness is Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at ginnestorehouse.com. Get the facts. Be Drinkaware. Visit drinkaware.com.

Have you recently purchased a new vehicle from Francine Volkswagen? If so, you may be at risk for an exciting condition known as New Car Joy. Symptoms may include spontaneous smiling, sudden increases in confidence and uncontrollable urges to take the scenic route. If you experience any of these symptoms, don't worry. The only known treatment is enjoying your new vehicle.

Side effects may also include great value and exceptional customer service. Talk to a friendly professional at Frank Heen Volkswagen today and see if upgrading your car is the right prescription for you. Driven by insatiable appetites and irrational beliefs, men seek to dominate each other or to escape domination by others. This struggle invariably results in a minority coming to power, monopolizing as much as possible political, economic, military, technical, and honorific resources, and excluding and oppressing the majority.

Thus is formed an elite, Pareto, ruling class, Moscow, or oligarchy, Michelle's, that rules the majority and exploits it for its own benefit through force and fraud. The rule of elites in human societies is inevitable. And therefore, oligarchy is the only possible distribution of power what what Michelle's called the iron law of oligarchy. I mean, if you had asked me if I agreed with that five, 10 years or, yeah, 10 years ago now, I would have would have called you a statist. Now you just, you become a realist. And then in the eyes of some, that means that you're immoral. Yeah, I mean, this is, this is scientific. It is, it is an observable fact that power is always concentrated and select few individuals, and they're not very nice people.

We know science. They're not libertarians. We know science is racist. Yeah. There is no end to oligarchical rule. Although one elite may lose its power in power, indeed always loses its power sooner or later, another. minority takes its place through what Pareto calls the circulation of elites and the record of this unending rise and fall of ruling minorities in human is human history.

So one thing I wanted to pick your brain on, having listened to your episode with Catgirl Kulak today is I wanted to ask you, what do you suspect will be the circulation of elites if or when his predictions of a, full on collapse by 2030. What does that circulation of elites look like? I mean, I think it may break down regionally. You may have new elites stepping up or, you know, most of the time it's, it's existing release elites.

You just, they just, you know, it's like people have said, because we've been talking about the PayPal Mafia and how, you know, we see them as trying to make a move right now and push the elites out and take over. And, you know, someone made the comment, well, they're already a part of the elites, you know, T. Elone's Palantir, all these countries. But I think Orrin McIntyre made a really good point today. He said, the elites always come from within. I mean, Caesar wasn't an outsider.

Yeah. You know, Pinochet. You know, when you have radical change, you know, Pinochet was not, I mean, he didn't come in from another country. He was in the military. He was somebody that everyone knew. The circulation of elites always happens from the inside. So if you're thinking that your neighbor, you know, is going to be an elite, unless you, you know, do like Hoppa teaches and you do it locally and you know, find a natural elite and you raise them up to, you know, take over and help to change a local. a locale, then you'll know that this person is coming in from outside.

But I mean, at the national level, at a government level, at a oligarchical level, it's always going to be from the existing elites. They're just going to move in and they're just going to switch them out. And you're just going to hope that it's going to be, they're going to be more in your favor than the previous elites. But if everything does fall apart at 2030, I mean, all I see is people will be begging for anybody. And I think that the person, you know, whoever has set themselves up with the most,

with the rhetoric of we're Americans, we should be proud of our heritage, we can take our heritage back. We don't have to put up with, we don't have to put up with us. I think that is, that's the person who is more going to. to be to circulate in and out and who somebody, who they may potentially look to in order to try to get them out of that situation. Yeah, I mean, the reason why this would be so unprecedented if, I mean, one of the reasons why, the main reason I think about is when I think of a collapse, I think, and I think of a power vacuum and who fills that power vacuum,

it's whoever has the most hard power and whoever has the most energy behind them. And right now, well, you know, if theoretically a few years before collapse, there's a lot of energy stored right now and it's just waiting to burst. So if his prediction is correct, man, that's going to be crazy because I think people right now are just, you know, the only thing stopping them right now is, you know, they have a job. They get to, you know, they have a family. They may not have access to a whole lot of hard power. But, man, like, wouldn't that be just historically unprecedented collapse? Well, you know, Charles Haywood believes that with the way the regime is attacking Elon Musk, he said at the end of a recent podcast he did, he thought that Elon Musk may turn to basically creating his own private security force,

which would be his own private army. Yeah, but then again, like this is a fine, this would be, uh, the, the match point would be a financial collapse, which implies that the dollar doesn't really have any value anymore. So now it just becomes like, you know, depending on how hard it is a barter system, who has the most assets to barter, who has the most, who has the most to trade. Well, here's the thing is the people who are going to rule, the people who would roll after a, um, after a collapse or the people who've already been planning. for the collapse. And I would assume that there are people already in elite positions who

already have an idea of what a new currency would look like and things like that. So I mean, I think that's where it goes. Boy, that doesn't go well for us. No, no, not at all. From my suburban ass. All right. These conclusions are bleak and the Machiavellian saw little ground for hope of democratic emancipation. Modern democracy, they interpreted as a special kind of disguised oligarchy based on commercial and industrial power and not fundamentally different from early kinds of elitism. Mosca and Pareto, in particular, saw socialism as no more than an illusion that threatened to subordinate all of society to an elite based on the power of the state. To Michelle's, oligarchy was an inherent part of social and political organization.

A doctrine that was most common to most of the Machiavellians in which Burnham emphasized was the concept of what Mosca called the political formula. Paredo called derivations and Sarel called myths. According to these writers, elites do not hold power simply through force and intimidation. They formulate doctrines that rationalize or justify their control in logical, moral, theological, or philosophical terms. These doctrines, political formulas, derivations, or myths, or, as Burnham called them in the Menager of Revolution, ideologies, act as social and politically integrative forces and are often quite sophisticated and complex in their structures. Most members of a society, elites as well as non-elites, believe them, and to at least

some extent, take them seriously. nevertheless I think less than less don't you agree don't you think people I would say elites more so than any but I think more and more people even just walking around basically or just at the at the end of their rope where they're just when it comes to ideologies and they're just like I'm just got to take care of myself

I think what separates maybe our our side from the normies and from the other side is that we don't view ideology as an ends, we view it as a means. And that's, I don't know, I got nothing else on that. But yeah, pretty much that's it. It's a means to an end. You know, pointing the masses in a direction, propaganda, you know, channeling energy

towards a certain outcome, that's all going towards a means to a desirable end that we would like or we hope happens. or we hope to get somebody in there that can make it happen. You know, if it happens to be of a particular ideology, like it's really of no consequence to us. Call it Christian nationalism, call it fucking white nationalism, ethno, whatever. Like, as long as most of our desired ends are going to be fulfilled,

like we know that we don't have the luxury to pick and choose. Most members of a society's elites as well as non-elites, I believe them. Okay. Nevertheless, despite their sophistication and large number of adherents, these ideologies are not to be regarded as scientific in purpose or content. Their purpose is not to express or explain reality in a way that can be proved or disproved, but to provide a rationalization for the existence and power of the dominant minority. The fact that ideologies are not scientific and that those who believe in them do so for non-rational reasons means that it is useless to criticize. ideologies in terms of verifiable facts or logic. All you have to do is just make fun of them, mock them. Dehumanize, other eyes, whatever you want to call it.

I do it. Ideology is impervious to such criticism because belief in it is dependent on non-rational factors such as self-interest or emotion. The fact that an elite itself usually believes in most, or all of its own ideology also means that no elite can be entirely scientific in its own thinking and behavior. Any elite must always, to some extent, be the victim of its own myths. Burnham argued that the Machiavellian science of power could provide a non-ideological framework for an elite, but he was highly skeptical that any elite could for long make successful use

of this science. Yeah, good on his part, because, I mean, when you think of any great man that ever arose, it's exactly what I said. They talk the talk as far as ideology goes. They may have even believed some of it, but, you know, take any great man and none of them were purely ideological in practice. Well, think about this. And I know people are probably sick of me bringing him up.

But Bukkelly. I only know two things about But Kelly. I know that he hates crime and crack down on it, and he likes Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, I know that he... That's not an ideology, which is great. Yeah. So he doesn't...

I don't know that he has an ideology. He first ran for president in a far left party. He got kicked out of that, had to go and he bounced all around. You know, all I can judge him on is what he's done. Yeah. You know, I mean, he's kissed the wall. Yes. His wife has some Sephardic in her, yes.

Yeah, I know that that's, that means that you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. He's going to disappoint you because he did that. All I can judge him on is what he's done so far and everything he's done so far looks pretty damn good to me. Yeah, we don't, we don't have the luxury of having the expectation of even a somewhat pure, great man that comes in. you know, sweeps, sweeps whatever this is away. We know, like take Musk, for example, he's probably the most likely candidate to fight the current regime

and maybe went out. He's on the right track, but, you know, he's definitely not ideological. He wants to get to Mars. That's about it. And anything that stands in between him and that goal needs to be swept away.

That's not an ideology either. No. No, that's, he has a goal. That's it. I said. All right. Burnham and the Machiavellians tended to interpret all of social and political reality in terms of the doctrine of the elite. For them, the nature of the elite is largely determinative of other social, economic, political, and cultural institutions.

Institutions that are not consistent with the perceived interests of an elite are abolished or discouraged, while those that are or would be consistent with its perceived interests are created or promoted. Quoting from the book. From the point of view of the theory of the ruling class, a society is the society of its ruling class. A nation's strengths or weaknesses, its cultures, its powers of endurance, its prosperity, its decadence, depend in the first instance upon the nature of its ruling elite. more particularly, the way in which to study a nation, to understand it, to predict what will happen to it, requires, first of all, and primarily an analysis of the ruling class.

Political history and political science are thus predominantly the history and science of ruling classes, their origin, development, composition, structure, and changes. The importance that the Machiavellians attach to the elite or ruling class resembles and to a degree parallels, Marx's emphasis on economic forces in interpreting history. Yet the Machiavellian theory of elites is a broader doctrine than that of Marx and allows for consideration of non-economic and non-material forces in understanding men in history far more than Marx did. Yeah, which is very difficult when you factor in all of the other,

you know, non-scientific factors that go into study. the history of a, of a nation, a culture of people. You know, it gets so far beyond dialectics. It's insane. It's hard. That's why predicting things is so fucking hard. There's too many goddamn factors. Nevertheless, because Burnham and the Machiavellian saw politics in terms of a struggle for power

and the struggle for power was central to the nature of an elite and to all other social relationships, it would not be inaccurate to describe Machiavellianism as a kind of political determinism, paralleling the economic determinism of Marx. Let me ask you this. Do you think there was really a struggle for power? I think it's roundly agreed. Somewhere around 2012 is when we kind of had this turning point into what we have now, which is just like gay, trans-Soviet Russia. But before that, I mean, we, we took, there's been a lot of talk about how great the 90s was and how, you know, how basically unified we were, how basically free and prosperous we were and how happy we were. I think there's something to that.

The culture was definitely different. The ruling class, do you think the ruling class was different then? And then we had maybe not even a struggle that got us to where we are now. And that kind of defined the nature of why they're so incompetent because they didn't have to struggle for it. I think Thomas makes a really good point about the early 90s is the 90s, especially the first half of the 90s, is that it was kind of anarchy. There was, and, you know, I know the anarchist watching, they want me to make an argument that anarchy is good because it means without ruler. That's what the It means without rulers

Shut the fuck up We mean the normal definition Yeah we mean the definition That everybody agrees upon Oh but that's democracy Yeah go fuck your mother I mean people getting The amount of crime

People get I mean there's a reason why Basically Giuliani had to Unleash an army onto the streets To stop crime in New York Yeah It had reached And here's the thing

the people who talk about the 90s being this great they're usually leftists they're usually people from the left side well why was the 90s great because they could get away with doing all the degenerate shit that they wanted to they weren't judged for it it was fine i mean i knew people who yeah it was live and let live but also live and let live to like to be you know kind of kind of kind of more on the right than you are allowed to be now well and And not even that because you think about the Patcon movement where they would go, they were going after right wing militia groups. And they don't even talk about that like half of those militia groups that they took down were black. You still couldn't be that far to that.

It's still illegal to be that far to the right. But you know, you could call your friend a fag or you could like, you know, you could say the N word and nobody would like, nobody would freak out about it amongst your peer group. Now, not so much. I mean, but it was, it was heaven for someone like James Lerner. He got away with doing all the degenerate shit he wanted to and far right wingers were being cracked down upon. Yeah. Yeah.

And the other question I have is, do you think that would be the defining factor of, say, the 80s and Reagan years into the 90s was the switch between tough on crime and then, you know, prison and mandatory minimum sentencing, prison reform, mandatory minimum sentencing, this, transfer over to a softer approach, a more. I don't know, socially informed approach. There's so much rugby on sports extra from Sky. They've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end.

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have been able to really pay attention to. I have to think about history and, you know, I'm not going to be able to give a personal, a personal opinion on that. But, I mean, really, the problem in the 80s was, I mean, it was just the crime was insane. and it was just so matter of fact. Yeah. It's just you accepted the fact that there was all this crime going on. And it's not like now where you have social media,

everybody's like, look, you got these Soros DAs, and they can go out and commit crime all they want. If you try and stop them, you go to jail. You know, you have people who, you know, put up flyers who get two years in jail. Someone rapes a 12-year-old. They get, you know, 15 months probation. You can talk more about. that now it's you can learn more about it because of social media but back then it was you know

harder you really just have to go back into books and study the history on that but um yeah i can't really i can't really answer that question properly but you know being an adult in the 90s and living through the 90s yeah i mean i knew people who were od you know oded killed themselves got hung up on got hung up on um on oxy really early i knew people who got hung up on meth real early on in the in the game. I knew people in, I mean, from when I was a kid, I knew people, like, my dad worked with the guy whose wife was the first recorded crack victim in New York City. Oh, wow. Yeah. And they were white. Huh. Yeah. Yeah. So it is, it is pretty great. All right. It should also be understood that Burnham and his mentors were not arguing for elitism in the sense of aristocracy.

They were not arguing that elite should rule the majority because their members are better, more virtuous, stronger, more intelligent, or wiser than most men. They were arguing for the sociological inevitability of minority domination for the impossibility of majority rule and democracy in any literal or meaningful sense. I mean, democracy now to me, when people ask me what democracy means now, I just tell them either whatever the regime is pushing, sodomy, transgenderism. I mean, that's basically what democracy is. Yeah.

And it's great to see, you know, the inherent contradictions between democracy and liberalism kind of play itself out on the left, especially with this Palestine, Israel thing going on. Um, it's, if you can, if you view it through that lens, democracy versus liberalism, um, it's, it's just amazing to see and it's only going to get better. The fact of oligarchy, they argued, was founded on an empirical and comparative study of history on the biological and psychological realities of human beings and on the nature of human societies. It was a fact that could be neither ignored nor altered and moral approbation or criticism of the fact of oligarchy is irrelevant to its truth. Yet elites are not permanent.

And the laws they govern the change in the composition and the rise and fall of elites were an important theme for Burnham and for Mosca and Pareto, to whom he devoted most attention. Mosca had recognized in all elites an aristocratic tendency by which they tend to restrict or encourage entrance to or exit from their ranks. Yeah. that's that's another battleground is everybody wants to be um everybody want everybody everybody's chasing status um that's why you have people going into 200 000 in debt to go to Harvard that's so that they can have that degree and enter the ranks of the elite or at least

the the near group of the elite and um it's it's going to be really funny if uh if we have a collapse When the restrictive aristocratic tendency is predominant, society is stable and may begin to stagnate. When the democratic tendency is predominant, society is in flux with many innovations, social and political crises, cultural ferment, and perhaps disorder, chaos, and revolution. Yeah. Speaking of the transition between the 90s to the early aughts. Paredo himself went further and developed a psychologist. of elites that is at the root of his theory of the circulation of elites. Pareto distinguished between derivations of ideologies and residues, which are constant, universal psychological instincts or impulses.

Among the six classes of residues that Pareto recognized the two most important were those of class one, the instinct for combinations, and class two, group preference, group persistence. And then there's four more, and that's why I couldn't read. read Pareto. Well, if you read A.A.'s book on the one I read on the populist illusion, he does a really good job of summing it all up in very fast, very short, in very short chapters.

So these were... Excellent. Yeah, yeah. It's a great book. It's explained it to me like I'm retarded. These residues, Pareto, specifically correlated with Machiavelli's distinction between the fox and the lion among rulers. Just as the ruler who is a fox relies on cunning, deceit, and verbal and intellectual skills, elites whose members are driven by Class 1 residues tend to synthesize arbitrary elements of their experience.

Class 1 residues include behavioral patterns such as those of magic, philosophical system-making, and financial manipulation. Elites that contain primarily verbalists, intellectuals, and administrators will exhibit a high proportion of Class 1. residues and will try to preserve their own power and resolve problems through verbal, administrative, and manipulative behavior rather than through the use of force. They thus correspond to Machiavelli's foxes, quoting from the book, Machiavellians. They live by their wits. They put their reliance on fraud, deceit, and shrewdness. They do not have strong attachment to family, church, nation, and traditions.

They live in the present, taking little thought of the future and are always ready for change, novelty, and adventure. They are not adept as a rule in the use of force. They are inventive and chance-taking. We'll talk a little bit about that in a second. I remember an episode from way back where I forget if it was you or your guest implied that our elites are entirely comprised of foxes. There are no lines.

And maybe it was Trump. Maybe it's Elon. on, but they're definitely, they're, they're the lions right now. The only two. Right. Well, I mean, you do have the people in power now who are using force. I mean, yeah, true. Yeah. So Biden. It's still pretty soft, though. I mean, I mean, you're throwing people in jail and, yeah, it's, yeah, you're destroying people's lives and their livelihood and everything. Yeah, a lot of people would rather be dead than that, than have that happen to them. But the, You know, you have to wonder what stage in civilization, what stage in elite theory you are when the foxes start to use.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, exiting the animal analogy, it's when they're sufficiently threatened or when they're sufficiently fragile. I think it's a fragility more than anything. Yeah. The residues of class two, group persistence, correspond to the lions of Machiavelli. For those who exhibit a high proportion of class two residues, quote, are able and ready to use force, relying on it rather than brains to solve their problems. They are conservative, patriotic, loyalty, tradition, and solidly tend super individual groups like family or church or nation. Where are these people?

I know. Who's going to cut the Gordian knot, please? is. I don't know who these people are. I've heard about them from... Class two residues are psychic forces that tend to sustain and perpetuate existing combinations. They are sociologically conservative, while those of class one are sociologically innovative. That's an interesting word. A healthy elite, according to Pareto, will have an equilibrium in the distribution of these psychic types within it,

but under certain conditions and imbalance will result. That's what we're seeing now. That's what it is now. Because the ones who would be, the ones who would commit violence would be the lions, and they have no lions. Yeah. It's all foxes.

Yep. If two- Throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks. Yeah. Basically, yeah. If too many class two residues accrue in the elite, it will rely excessively on force and will fail to innovate, and adapt to changing circumstances and challenges.

If too many class one types come to predominate, as Pareto believes, was happening in the late 19th century, the elite in its society will become soft, unstable, corrupt, and disorderly, although the society may produce a very high level of cultural expression. Oh, I'm saying that. Worse of all, however, the society will be unwilling and unable to use force to protect itself from either internal external challenges. I don't think we're anywhere like that. Yeah, that's, yeah, this, that's not here.

While the foxes of Class 1 predominate in the elite, the lions of class 2 are concentrated in the non-elite and may use force against the foxes in rebellion and other forms of violence. External enemies may also commit aggression against the societies ruled by foxes. And in any case, because of the lack of qualities of group persistence, a society. led by class one types will have few psychic resources for mustering endurance and sacrifice. Yeah, that's that. There's no energy to direct in any type of revolutionary social change. Elites that are imbalanced by too many class one or class two residues are unstable and are likely to be overthrown or replaced. They tend to create the conditions that lead to their fall from power. The rise and fall of elites and changes in their composition, Pareto called,

the circulation of elites. Normally, a healthy elite will be in continual but slow circulation, admitting new members in expelling or ostracizing old and decadent elements. When the circulation occurs too rapidly, or when one elite is suddenly and entirely replaced by another, the result is revolution. The theory of... Yeah, I guess...

I mean, before this, I'd never heard it placed that way. I've heard a lot of explanations for what constitutes and what causes is revolutionary social change. But I mean, I guess you can explain it in many different ways and still come out with the same, you know, right answer. I think what we may be seeing now, and this isn't an original idea, I don't remember who maybe heard it from Orrin, is you have an overproduction of elites. And I would say it's because the money supply has been increased and expanded

so far that you have so many people that have acquired insane amounts of wealth. Yeah. And they basically become elites, but they are not the kind of, they're not impressive at all. If you have too much of something, if you produce too much of something and it happens too fast, you know, a lot of times you're just going to have defects all over the place. Yeah. If everybody's an elite, then nobody's an elite and you go from there. The theory of elites as developed by Moscow and Pareto and endorsed and expounded by Burnham was

no, by no means, an argument for the monopolization of power and privilege by an established few. Indeed, Mosca and Pareto were emphatic that healthy elites should alter in composition slowly and regularly and that they should not become homogenous or monolithic. Mosca in particular, is well done these points and developed a method that went beyond the descriptive analysis of Machiavellianism to a normative mode of analysis by which elites and the societies they ruled could be evaluated. Although the rule of elites, unelected and unrepresented, is inevitable. Mosca argued that the internal structure of elites is an important means of distinguishing them. All societies, according to Moscow, are composed of contending social forces, groups that have

interest and values associated with particular kinds of activities, agriculture, industry, education, religion, the army, etc. Within these social forces, there are hierarchies and differentiations of power, wealth, merit, or geographical location. The most significant social forces become part of the elite and pursue their particular interests and values within it. Yeah, I guess to a degree, I don't know if that's particularly applicable now. but yeah well yeah there are the the hierarchies have been flattened so much because like you said we're over manufacturing i mean other than like you know the top levels of the state or the deep state or whatever um or the or the illuminati like you know the everything below that is pretty

much there's not a whole lot of difference um other than you know what industry they're in or geographic location, that there's not really a whole lot of difference in what defines them. When according to Mosca, there is a multiplicity of independent social forces within the elite or ruling class such that no one force has sufficient power to exclude or exploit the others, then a de facto condition of juridical defense obtains. Mosca's concept of juridical defense is approximate to what is more generally known as the rule of law. Because of the mutually balancing and restraining action of the social forces in the ruling class, no single force or faction can accumulate or exercise arbitrary, irregular power.

Each social force, and the groups and individuals composing or attached to it, protects itself from exploitation by the checking power it holds against the others. even though this system of socio-political checks may not be formally reorganized in law, it can still exist and be a substantive restraint on tyrannical power. Yeah, there is kind of a parallel rulebook for when you hit a certain amount of asset value. Mosca's concept of juridical defense owed much to both Machiavelli and Montesquieu, as well as to the exponents of the classical theory of the mixed constitution. Unlike Montesquieu, however, Mosca did not limit his idea of checks and balances to the formal and legalistic component of the government, but extended it to the substantial concrete or real component social forces within a ruling class.

So that's another thing I see. And I don't know to the degree that it affects, you know, really rich people that we would probably call elite. But the, what is it, the mixed constitution idea where you have you have the rule. rule of law, but there's also other rules that everybody kind of agrees to follow. That has been just withering away on the vine on purpose. Everything is legalistic now. Everything has to be codified into an employee handbook or an HR department or something like that.

And I think that's a function of just managerialism. Yeah. Managerialism is so, I mean, there's nothing more. more managerial than lawfare. We were talking about how pernicious lawfare is and just how how it's so common now for people to weaponize bad faith interpretations of contracts of laws of agreements, even informal ones. And that was kind of never the case before.

And I suspected as something to do with demographic changes and the ripple effect of them affecting cultures that were otherwise, you know, not exhibiting that behavior. But even amongst our social class, you know, it's still, it's so pernicious now where even five, 10 years ago, at least in my experience, everybody kind of agreed, functionally agreed on, you know, what like what makes for an agreement or a contract or, you know, an address of grievance. Yeah. Once you start getting into, you start importing all sorts of different cultures.

You're just, you're not, you're not going to have any unanimity. And, and I think it's also a function of just the, the true economic state that we're in, that despite what the graphs say, I don't have the luxury of, you know, risking a $5,000 deposit with a shittily written contract that I may or may not get back if you don't show up. Because now I have to worry about that. This departure from the formal to the real was part of the Machiavellian tradition, and Mosca thus welded it to the classical tradition of mixed constitution. In Burnham's words,

juridical defense can be secure only where there are at work various and opposing tendencies and forces, and where these mutually check and restrain each other. The product of juridical defense is liberty. The specific forms of juridical defense include the familiar democratic rights, security of private property, security against arbitrary arrest, freedom of religion, discussion, and assembly. Moreover, the multiplicity of social forces participating in sharing power in the ruling class leads to a high level of civilization and an efflorescence of cultural life. Yes, because in order for that to flourish, there has to be something,

outside the state. And I think that's the commonly accepted definition of liberty, which is kind of anything outside of the public. Anything in, like any informal actions you take is an act of liberty. And like there's, you know, it may not, it may not be formalized into law, but it's, it's definitely a, a cultural change where that particular type of liberty, the important type of liberty that we like is just going away. in an informal manner. By way of contrast, the monopolization of power by one social force leads to its unchecked power and to a low level of civilization as other social forces with other resources, values, and skills

are excluded and exploited. Using the concept of juridical defense and its antithesis, Moscow was able to evaluate different kinds of polities depending on the internal structure and composition of their elites. The worst kind of government would be the uniform regimes in which the unrestrained power of a single social force prevents all others from obtaining power and distributing to the public culture. The best kind of government to both Mosca and Pareto was the representative middle-class aristocratic parliamentary governments

of the mid to late 19th century. This type, however, was threatened by the rise of mass democracy, see new classes of wealth and power and socialism. Yeah. These forces to both Mosca and Pareto threaten to upset the delicate balance that underlies to juridical defense and to impose a monolithic regime on modern society.

It should be noted that this normative measure of governments is fundamentally modern, and as such, it follows Machiavelli and Monoskew. The best regime to Moscow and Pareto is not that in which the virtue of the citizen is most developed, but that in which the security and liberty of the citizen and the Commonwealth are best protected. Although Mosca and the Machiavellians were influenced by Aristotle Cicero and the pre-modern tradition of political thought, their primary concern was not, as with

the earlier school, the ethical realization of man and society. The special contribution of the Amachiavellian tradition, however, is the establishment of a criterion of normative judgment of regimes is based on empirical rather than on transcendental grounds. Yeah, I think Del Noce would disagree with that slightly. Burnham accepted this Machiavellian formulation, and it's fundamental to his entire career as a political thinker. His primary concern, like Machiavelli's, was to establish a verifiable methodology for the analysis of social and political affairs,

but he was also concerned to discover a realistic means, of evaluating and judging political institutions and behavior. Oh, nothing. This is just explaining kind of the etymology of like how we came to regard regimes. He found both in the Machiavellians and it was the limitation of power that remained for him the primary political ideal. Quoting, the Machiavellians are the only ones who have told us the full truth about power, The primary object in practice of all rulers is to serve their own interests to maintain their own power and privilege. No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of goodwill, no religion will restrain power.

Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leaders nor businessmen, neither bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in the basic use which they will seek to make of power. Only power restrains power. When all opposition is destroyed, there is no longer. any limit to what power may do. A despotism, any kind of despotism, can be benevolent only by accident. Yeah, we'll see. I think

this assumes that, you know, it assumes a base human nature, even amongst the elites that I don't know if is applicable today, especially, you know, given the, just a radical

departure and competence from his time to ours, and then also kind of the growth of, you know, AI, AI assistance. In the managerial revolution, Burnham had developed a model for explanation of current world events, the Depression, the rise of totalitarianism, revolutionary changes in social and economic structure, political behavior, and intellectual and cultural fermentation. The chief problem with his presentation of the theory of the managerial revolution was its over-reliance on Marxist economic determinism and analogies drawn from the Marxist interpretation of history. The Machiavellians, however, were not economic determinists, and their interpretation

of history was far more flexible than that of Marx. Burnham, therefore, undertook to restate the theory of the managerial revolution in term of the Machiavellian analytical framework. According to the Machiavellian model, an elite or ruling class suffers a crisis of power, under certain circumstances. Burnham retained in the Machiavellians the essentially economic definition of the old elite as a capitalist, bourgeois,

or entrepreneurial class that owned and operated the means of production. However, the economic forces and relationships were not the central factors in bringing about the crisis of the old elite and the rise of a new one. The rise of new social forces, especially technological developments,

over which the capitalist or entrepreneur elite has no control, has made its institutions and ideologies obsolete and less useful for preserving its power. The old elite has also undergone a psychological, intellectual, and moral degradation. It shows little faith in its own ideology and institutions, and it exhibits Mosca's aristocratic tendency and a crystallization of its membership, interests, and activities instead of a dynamic, innovative, expansion. Finally, the entrepreneurial elite is tending to

abandon political and professional pursuits in favor of cultural and leisure activities. It is drawn to humanitarian and irrationalist ideologies that undermine its own rule, and it shows an increasing reluctance and inability to use force effectively.

The Class 1 or fox-like residues of Pareto are accumulating too heavily in the entrepreneurial elite. In opposition to these signs of decadence is the aggressive, efficient, dynamic, and sometimes fanatical character of the rising managerial class, itself a new social force. Quoting from the Machiavellians The production executives and organizers of the industrial process, officials trained in the manipulation of the great labor organizations and the administrators, Bureau Chiefs and Commisars developed in the executive branch of the unlimited modern state machines, and that the managers may function, the economic and political structure must be modified,

as it is now being modified, so as to rest no longer on private ownership and small-scale nationalist sovereignty, but primarily upon state control of the economy and continental or vast regional world political organization. Yeah, I mean, I don't know about all that, but I think we were talking about this yesterday. The line between ownership and control is continually being blurred. And that's one of the ways you know that we live in a managerial state is, you know, the owner of my business has very little control over it other than the hiring and firing of me. And like I pretty much make command decisions every day in his stead. And he gives me the, like, his only function is to provide capital and give me.

the thumbs up or the thumbs down. And that's not a capitalist definition of ownership at all. Vivek has been talking about this when it comes to the president. He said that anybody who gets elected should be in charge. So the person who gets elected, I mean, and let's face it, he uses the term managerial all the time. He talks about, you know, how we're a managerial state. He's red burn him. He knows all of this. And yeah, it's just how. When you have such a complex, technologically complex and personnel, I guess, humanly complex entity like, you know, the executive branch. How does the president exercise ownership? Well, he has to be able to basically be able to hire and fire whoever he wants. Yeah, yep. Yeah, that's part of it.

Absolutely. I think that's the best you can do. You know, going back to Charles Haywood's episode on Elon Musk, Elon Musk will walk around a plant and make no less than 100 command decisions during that visit. And that's how he actually exercises ownership to whatever degree, you know, the physical limitations of time give him. And so like he's kind of a different beast too. Yeah.

No, you need, a person needs to be in charge. Nisa, FDR is the perfect example of it. FDR was a king. He was a dictator. All the power in the government rested in him. Nobody did anything. Nobody did anything without his say-so. This vast reorganization will require the use of force, military machines, and soldiers

far more than did the old capitalist society. Hence, the ruling class of managers will include more lions or class two residues than did the entrepreneurial elite. The political formula of the managers will be democratist and will appeal to the emotions and material ones of the masses, but the political reality will be autocracy. What Burnham calls Bonapartism, represented by the Nazi Stalinist and New Deal political style and ideologies, will prevail over the constitutionalist, decentralized parliamentary governments of the capitalist era. Yeah, that's, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. of managerialism as the defining feature of our time right now is really the biggest obstacle towards getting the normies to at least a little bit closer to being able to effectively analyze reality.

I know, that ideology stands in the way of that. Yeah, and it doesn't have to because most normies aren't ideological either. They just don't know this. We need to wake them up, bro. And like not not because you know we we hope to seize power or anything, but just because it's it's the right thing to do Well, A.A. makes a point in his book that if you wake up that if the normies get get waking up too much and too many of them get woken up then you suffer the you suffer revolution. Yeah. Yeah. And we're not talking we're talking about France not not American. Yeah. All right. The tendency of Bonapartism and of the manager class is totalitarian. The managers want, need, and find valuable, a state that is unitary and

all-powerful. Intermediary and non-political institutions and groups are denounced and undermined if they do not support the rising managerial powers. Not only does the managerial class need an extended and unipotent state for its own internal and international policies and goals, but also the crisis of the Depression and the Second World War gives it the opportunity to create one. Hence, managerial propaganda denounces the entrepreneurial class and its supportive institutions, churches, non-politicized labor unions, small businessmen, schools, the opposition press, local political institutions, the Congress itself, and seeks to portray them as reactionary, parochial, and responsible for the present crisis and its misery. Only by destroying and moving beyond these obsolescent forces can the crisis be resolved. Burnham was not happy. Do we stop there?

I mean, you just describe reality, bro. Yeah. Burnham was not happy about the totalitarian vector of managerial society. Private capitalist ownership of the economy, he wrote. quote, meant a dispersion of economic power and a partial separation between economic and other social forces in a manner that prevents the concentration of an overwhelming single social force. Today, the advance of the managerial revolution is everywhere concentrating economic power in the state apparatus, where it tends to unite with control over the other great social forces. the Army, education, labor, law, the political bureaucracy, art, and science even. This development, too.

Science especially now, yeah. This development, too, tends to destroy the basis for those social oppositions that keep freedom alive. Yeah. The entrepreneurs are therefore correct to argue that the New Deal and other managerial policies were a threat to freedom, but the entrepreneurial formulas of market capitalism, a limited state, and national sovereignty, had lost their credibility. In any case, the debate between the conservative...

See, that's something that people just don't realize. People who are for market capitalism, a limited state, and national sovereignty, understand... They're not willing to accept that it's lost their credibility. And they think that... They don't understand where we are. are right now in history. They don't know where they're at. We're past that. Where where you're now.

And like those days are over. They're not coming back. Yeah. And to and to constantly, you know, well, no, this is the way things are done. This is the way things should be. This is what guarantees the most individual freedom, bro. We're beyond it. Yeah, freedom. My favorite question. Freedom to do what? Freedom to do what? I had, I won't even say who it was, but I had a, a libertarian. in my DMs today who's just freaking out. He's like, why are there so many libertarians who argue for like the most heinous stuff and stuff that's illegal

and not only illegal, but would be considered immoral by the majority of the West at least is okay. Well, they took a legal theory and turned it into an ideology. But somebody said that in one of the threads, I was like, yeah, pretty much.

Dave, Dave had a thread today said that. Yeah, yeah, it was Dave. Yeah, you took a legal theory, like a dry, what's supposed to be a dry, not fun legal theory, and turned it into your entire identity. Like, good job. You are just a piece of human trash that will never amount. Yeah, and you will.

Until you stop. And the inevitable end of your, of your theoretical, whatever, is talking about whether possession of, child porn is a crime. Yeah. And that's why like if if they were, I shouldn't say they're pieces of trash that'll never amount to anything because then I just wouldn't care. But it's the the, the proactive part of libertarianism is is making sure that you and more

importantly, your children are propagandized to that. And they're just, you know, they're not as bad as leftists because they don't hold any power whatsoever. They're just like I wouldn't, I wouldn't let them babysit my kids. Well, I think the biggest. problem with it is, is that these free market principles and these free principles are so easily, the language of that is so easily adopted by people in power and then. It's so Jewish.

It's so easily adopted by people in power who will say, oh, look, we have free trade. And it's like, well, no, but that's not real free trade. we're shipping in yeah we're we're shipping in sex toys for your toddler yeah and then and then free trade has never been tried why are you using that term and it's like well because it's so easily everything everything you come up with can and will be used against you yeah yep everything will be manipulated which you know if if they want to know how then they should watch this episode in any case the debate between the conservative spokesman for the old line capitalist class and the Marxist and the Democratic totalitarians who defend the rising managerial class

as a debate in ideology and myths that express a contest for control over the despotic and bonapartist political order, which they both anticipate. The apologists for the managers would destroy all liberty and juridical defense in pursuit of utopianism, and the apologists of traditional capitalism are simply whistling in the wind for, quote, it is in any case impossible to return to private capitalism. See, yeah. I mean, one thing I have to hand it to, you know, whether conscious or not, Malthusians, is that they're not utopian.

I got to respect them for that. But everybody else seems to be. That may be the quote of the episode. All right. Hey, at least they're not utopian. Yet Burnham was not entirely pessimistic about the survival of some liberty. He suggested that some social opposition might persist or develop that would create a balance of forces in the managerial elite. And he also hoped that the principles of the Machiavellian science of power would inform the new ruling class of its real interests and of the utility of liberty.

Now, anybody who's out there, anybody who's out there promoting liberty, and everything just read that and went, that's me. Yeah, it's very much limited to utilitarianism, and that's also kind of a product of managed. The shift to utilitarian, I guess, utilitarian metaphysics is a product of the rise of revolutionary Marxism and that energy being transferred, the revolutionary energy being transferred into the managerial class. It's all utility. How many utilities will you generate if I give you a stimmy check?

Oh, more utils, okay. You're getting a stimmy check. How many utils will I generate if I put a bullet in your head? He developed a brilliant defense of liberty and juridical defense on the grounds that they actually enhance the cohesion, strength, and flexibility of a society rather than limited. The Machiavellians is probably Burnham's most widely misunderstood book. George Orwell appears to have seen it in a blueprint for the double-think of 1984. The sociologist David Spitz took a similar view of the book and included Burnham as an anti-democratic ideologue. The very subtitle of Burnham's book, Defenders of Freedom, should be sufficient to refute this misinterpretation, and it may be that some critics of the book have not read far beyond the subtitle.

That's me. That's me with every book. It is true that Burnham described the coming society in the starkest language, yet this style is typical of Machiavelli and his disciples and is appropriate to their claim to realism and disavowal of ideology and sentiment. So I've actually never read the Machiavellians, but does Burnham adopt a different style than, say, the managerial revolution? Like, is there, is it a noticeably different tone? Well, no, he has a very distinct way of writing.

I mean, if you, if you read the managerial revolution, you read suicide of the West. It's the same, you know it's the same person writing it. All right, all right. I thought he switched up his tone, which would be insane. That'd be nuts. It is difficult to see how any familiarity with the contents and arguments of the Machiavellians could overlook Burnham's exposition of the theory of juridical defense, his criticism of managerial political tendencies, or his own defense of liberty. The fact that many critics have missed these points suggest that Burnham's discussion of ideology applies to the authors of such criticism. And that's what Mr. Samuel Francis had to say about the Machiavellians.

Yeah. No, I mean, it's, I like these kind of critiques that aren't really critiques. It's just an exposition of it. And I try to do that myself with some original works and it never works out well for me because I'm just not that eloquent. No, it's, um, I do podcast reviews and Milwaukee Tool reviews. It's one of those books that when you read, read it, you're going to have, it's one of those books that if you're a, if you're a hardcore ideologue, you may not read, you may not get it the first time. Yeah, you may have it. It's one of those things that a couple years down the line, maybe something out. It's like somebody told me at the beginning of 2019 to read Yarvins, why I'm not a libertarian, and I read it. And I'm like, there's a couple good points in here. I don't care. 2020 rolls around. Yeah, 2020 rolls around. everything happens. We start getting into the summer.

You know, and, you know, cities are on fire. And, you know, I'm like, yeah, let me read that again. And I'm like, oh. Oh, yeah. Okay. And then I read it again like a year ago. And I was just like, this is, this makes more sense than anything than anything I've ever read as far as a critique of, a critique of libertarianism. I did try to, I did try to crack the manager, uh, not, the Machiavellians back in the day when Yarvin was talking about it. And I couldn't get through it because I was in that same face. Like none of this resonates with me.

None of it's particularly interesting or prescient. And now as we're reading this, I'm like, all right. I wish I talked more, but like I'm too busy agreeing with it. Yeah, no, it's there's a way you want politics to be and there's what politics is. And if you want politics to be a certain way, you're going to have to take, you have to take power and do it. At the at the very least, you have to acknowledge that the only form of society that you're ever going to be in is some form of an oligarchy, which is a huge hurdle for a lot of people. Yeah. It's, well, there may be a white pill in there.

If you really understand elite theory, if you embrace it, if you realize it, it's always a small group of people in charge. There's a chance that you could actually be a part of a group that gets those, that helps to get those people in charge, people who are on your side, who at least, you know, it's like we've been talking about with the PayPal Mafia. It's like, do I think the guys in the PayPal Mafia agree with me? Probably not.

I mean, there's probably, it may be a couple of them, but do, are they, do they hate me? No, I don't think so. And if you're young enough, especially now where everything is politicized and you're young enough, you can orient your life towards, at least your material life, towards, you know, getting involved in industries that no matter who's in charge, like, especially if it's the elites you think are going to be in charge or you like, you can be a beneficiary of a circulation of elites if not from the current ones that's kind of my whole schick is like get get into an industry

or a career that is circulation of elites proof like not recession proof because we're done with we're probably done with recessions but uh circulation of elites proof well and there are a lot of those you know i have people who contact me all the time now and say you know it's like finally got myself to the point where I'm pretty sure that, you know, no matter what would happen, I'll always be able to earn an income and everything. Yeah. I mean, that's important. Yeah, I mean.

Yeah, a certain level of self-sufficiency and preparedness, absolutely. I am woefully, and, you know, I'm trying to have a kid and all that too. And, you know, that I'm telling you, that episode I listened to today with a cat girl Kulak, kind of broken my just putting me in a real bad mood all day. Yeah, you came into the group. I really recommended it to the listeners. You came into the group chat and you were like,

all right, I'm going to kill myself now. Yeah. Oh, man. All right, well, let's end this. Where can people find your work when you do work? So you can find me at BTWA underscore returns on X4. normally known as Twitter, and you can find me every single Wednesday live on Timeline Earth. All right. Thanks, Aaron. Appreciate it.

Yep. Thank you for having me.