The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1047: The Futility of Debating Your Enemies w/ κρῠπτός

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

65 MinutesPG-13Kruptos writes at the Seeking the Hidden Thing Substack.Kruptos joins Pete for a discussion about the futility of not only debating those with whom you have core differences but also sharing a polity with them.Seeking the Hidden ThingKruptos on TwitterVIP Summit 3-Truth To Freedom - Autonomy w/ Richard GroveSupport Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Hey, Cryptos, how are you doing? I am excellent. Thank you for having me on. I've been really looking forward to this time to chat with you. Yeah, me too. Everyone who comes on the first time, I ask him to do a quick little introduction, however much information they want to give. Well, yeah, I'm just sort of a normal nobody with some education.

and I'm a former pastor. I do other things now that pay the bills. And during COVID, my journey began probably in 2008 when the eyes began to open as to sort of what was being done to us economically. And then from 2008 up to COVID, it was sort of a slow burn dropping, you know, your typical trickle-down economics and that type of stuff. And then COVID really opened my eyes up. And I started reading more dissident stuff, as they say. And I started listening to actually Charles Haywood's book reviews after he was on Michael Anton's interviews. He did a series of interviews for Claremont and the American Mind.

And I thought I'd check these out. And I started listening to them and I was doing this big house renovation during COVID. because there was nothing else to do really. And I went basically through the whole catalog of Charles book reviews. And I started emailing. I mean, he's very gracious, gave me time. And he says, you know, these responses are really good. You should maybe see if you can get them published.

And he says, you know what, maybe better before you approach somebody with that, why don't you try posting them on the internet? And that way you can kind of proof of concept people. And so that's sort of what I did. And I thought, well, how do I promote my article? I got a substack page and started promoting them on Twitter. and then realized that people weren't, there were certain things I had learned along the way,

reading Jacques Allul and other things and said, hey, you know, you can apply the things that Allul was saying to political analysis, which I'd never really done before. And then I got kind of known as an Allul guy. My account took off and sort of the rest of history, as they say. So I've been, I think I've written 70 pieces now and I've been doing this for a couple years.

So what's the name of your substaff? It's Seeking the Hidden Thing.com. All right. Well, let's get into this. There's a couple ways we're probably going to go with this, but the first thing I wanted to talk about was something that coming out of libertarianism, I noticed after I stopped looking at libertarianism as a viable option for, maybe it's a viable option for living in a society,

but it's definitely not a viable option for, Getting to that, it doesn't have the power considering the managerial state that we live in, all the technological advances that have happened since libertarianism was, you know, this penopticon that seems to be, is going to be the hardest thing to break. And it just doesn't have the tools for that. So, but one of the things I noticed when I was a libertarian was libertarians love to debate. They are truly what I call the debate me bros. And I've come up with this theory that one of the reasons why, if you see somebody who is eager, the first thing they want to do is debate is they hold to an ideology or beliefs

that are not going to exist in reality. So they're just basically trying to get more people to come to their side so they feel like they're not insane, or they're just trying to have, they feel like the debate gives them some form of legitimacy. But the whole idea of debating without any of that, to me, seems insane because I'll let you riff off of this. It seems to me really the only person that it's really efficacious to debate with that there'll be any kind of efficacy. is somebody that you probably agree with, like 98%, and that 2% is what you'll debate,

and it'll just be a fun little time, and, you know, you're, you know, it's just total theorizing and you're having a good time. But debating, you know, like a communist, you know, a real communist, like a tankie, debating like an anarcho-capitalist, makes absolutely no sense to me. So what do you think about what I just said?

Oh, that's, yeah, that makes perfect. sense. It's also, you know, the basic argument for why, things like why you need Christian schools or sectarian schools, I guess, anyways, you know. It comes down to a function that in order to resolve disputes peaceably, and that's really what a debate is, you have to have a shared set of premises with the person you're debating with. You have to sort of agree on the foundational items. That's in a sense how a syllogism is built. You have to accept. There's a certain premise that you have to accept. And then once you've accepted that premise, you can build off it or you can argue about it or you have a way of resolving, even resolving the debate over the

premise. So in order to even have a debate, you have to have a shared culture. You have to have a shared set of rules on how you're going to resolve that debate. So, for example, if you are in a Christian worldview, you could say, well, we're going to use the Bible as our reference point. Now, you might argue, well, what does it mean that you're going to use the Bible as your reference point? But at least now you have a shared culture, a shared agreement between two people that says, well, we need to use the Bible as the means of resolving our dispute. Well, what does that do? And how do we best use that, right? It comes down to a sense of constitutionalism. We're going to rely on the constitution to direct us in our legal disputes. Well, then you can have a whole series of arguments

about what's the best way to interpret the constitution in new situations, but you at least come together agreeing that there is a shared mechanism for that. Now, often these are more complex because, again, the idea of, say, for example, a constitution is that you then have a set of persons who you say okay we have this constitution we have this set of persons and when these persons rule on the meaning of the application of of the constitution in this particular situation we as a society whether we agree or disagree are going to accept that ruling and move on we're going to set aside our conflict and move on it's settled now you might revisit it at a future rings but you revisit it within the context of this set of rules

So, for example, too, again, in the Christian context, you might say, okay, the Bible is going to resolve it. But then what happens if you can't resolve it? So then you would say, well, we have an ecumenical council. We get together a group of church leaders. And if the church leaders come together and they're relatively humanist on the subject, that will settle it. Or we might say the Pope will rule on it.

You know, this idea of papal infallibility comes out of this sense. So if you have a dispute about the interpretation of scripture, or moral law, Christian teaching, whatever, and it goes all the way up to the Pope, and the Pope makes a ruling, well, then that's settled, it stands. And then everybody within that rule set, that quote-unquote game,

accepts the results that way. So this is, and this was something that was introduced to me by a philosophy teacher in undergrad, is what the term he used is what's called a first-order disagreement. So on a first-order disagreement, you basically agree on the mechanisms by which you, withdraw or which you resolve disputes. Now there's another kind of of agreement in which you don't agree on the mechanisms by which you resolve the disputes. So then there's no real way to have a good

faith argument because nobody accepts any of the premises. So I say, well, we're going to look to the Bible for answers. And you say, well, I want scientific research to decide the results. Now you have a dispute because we don't have an agreed upon method of resolving the disputes. And in the, you know, the ancient world, so to speak, this becomes a kind of, to use archetypes, it becomes a clash of gods, so to speak. So it really works out to power and violence. And you might almost say like a trial by by combat. And so whoever wins the combat, their God must have obviously been stronger. their case must have been more right and therefore they in defeat they get to assert truth over the defeated and and the majority person now this comes down to you can see there's you know there's

dovetailing and all this kind of things this is largely the the essence of say Marxist analysis right that the dominant economic player in a society decides what's right and wrong and that becomes truth. And so Marx would argue, well, there's no truth outside of that particular right and wrong. It's just whoever's dominant in society, whoever's dominant economically in society decides what truth is, and they impose that on society. Now, as long as you're operating within that, then, you know, and that's basically, I mean, today we live in the bourgeois truth order, right? So this is that kind of thing. And so if you stand, if you don't have a mechanism for disagreement or for resolving your disagreement, the only way to resolve that is for one side to,

defeat the other or for one side to make the other side yield, so which is in sense a form of defeat. You know, there can be only one. And this really is the essence of of the culture war in that way. And that's really what's playing out in our society is a kind of religious war where you have two sides that don't agree on the fundamental mechanisms for resolving disputes anymore. Yeah. And yeah, just to go back to when you're saying that one wants to to go by the Bible and another one wants to go by science. It seems like the person who, you know, I guess what Vox Day would term a midwit, like 150 in IQ, their answer to that would be, well, they need to debate.

Those two needs to debate, and the Bible person needs to convince the science person why their way is better and they should abandon their way or the science person. let's look at the history of debate. Let's look at the history of anything. How often does that change? How often do you see one side yield to the other voluntarily? Well, no, because it comes down to fundamental question. You really, as you bore down into these things, you get into sort of the fundamental people's fundamental belief systems. So at a certain point in time, there, you know, you basically would have to almost, it's a kind of like forced conversion almost or you would have to convert. So in order for somebody who say on the science side of things,

and now people will say that doing science and the Christian faith are compatible, they are, as long as you're doing science within the rule structure of how do we resolve disputes, right? So that's as long as you're accept that you're examining the created order within a defined religious world and life view, this kind of religious order, then everything works fine. But once you go out and you challenge that and say, well, I don't believe the Bible is historically accurate or real. These people didn't exist. It's all made up stories. It's all fantasy. Well, okay, well, now you've got a problem because you can't really resolve that, because you're the scientists to say, well, all I have to do, all I can answer is what I can

observe and measure and theorize about. And I might come back and say, well, that's all fine and good, but you can measure and observe and so forth, but that still doesn't tell you what you have to do. And the science says, well, no, the science makes it obvious what I have to do. And I said, well, no, it doesn't because it masks your fundamental commitments, right? And I, so then I can go through and show the person and say, hey, listen, you have a religious worldview, you know, like I say, like you talk about things like evolution. This is how, you know, the scopes monkey trials and so forth. And I said, well, evolution is really just basically an origin story when you dispense of like what happens if you get rid of the Christian God and have to now

are now faced with the reality of explaining how we as humans got here and and so you begin with that presence there is no God and you know so you say well it must have all just sort of happened big bang and then randomly over billions of years we just something happened and we evolved into persons and and then we came to be and we've randomly evolved into higher orders and what you can look at when you see this is you're talking about going from disorder to order, lower order to higher order, and you're talking about progression of something over time. And you realize that basically evolution is just the origin story that explains the idea of human progress. And it is no more valid than the biblical story that said God created the world in six days. Now, this is, in a sense,

you get into the sort of the whole postmodern destruction. of everything, but for many they don't realize the degree to which postmodernism is your friend because it lays off, it sort of pops the hood on all of this stuff. And I can still argue that I believe my Christian faith is the correct faith, but there's no way that I can prove that to you. And that's the thing that the scientists are missing in a sense there's no way that they can prove their thing to me. So something's got to give there. You catch them in the corner of your eye, distinctive by design they move you even before you drive the new cupra plug-in hybrid range for mentor leon and terramar now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro

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they're mad, aren't they? Like, proper mad. Brenda wants a television and she's prepared to fight for it, if you ask me. It's the fastest way to a meltdown. Me, I just prepare the fastest way to get stuff and it doesn't get faster than Appliancesdelivered.aE. Top brand appliances, top brand electricals,

and if it's online, it's in stock. With next day delivery in Greater Dublin. Appliances delivered.e. Part of expert electrical. See it, buy it, get it. tomorrow or you know fight brander where does this idea that we if we just win a debate if we just have better ideas you know the let's call it the marketplace of ideas where does that come from to you like when you when you look at history where do you where do you see that coming from well i see

that and again that it i would look at that as as rising up um within the context of um the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and just part and parcel. It's an idea of a changing notion of truth that we can establish and uncover truth through through dialogue and that if we just keep dialogue and talking about it and always aim ourselves towards truth that we can uncover truth. And the essence of democracy is built upon this. So it is in part, I think, historically you could look at it as occurring with the rise of the merchant classes, the idea of contract negotiation. You know, two businessmen can get into a room and work out a settlement.

That's good. So if you can get into a room and work out a settlement, why can't you then do the same thing with ideas where you can get in, hash it out, work out either a compromise or a settlement, or you can move towards. the truth and as you keep talking about it, keep talking about it, that eventually the truth will emerge. And it's, this was something again too that that Carl Schmidt talked about in his, you know, the crisis in parliamentary democracy is that unfortunately the idea of the marketplace of ideas is itself never subjected to the marketplace of ideas. It's just sort of assumed a priority that this is a good, a good thing to do. And so you move forward with it, but no one has ever actually, and it can't be established because you can't,

um, nothing within the system can be used to, to demonstrate that the system is, or to prove that the system's validity. So you have to do that from without outside of the system. Um, and if you need something outside of the system of discussion, then discussion can't, um, bring about a proof of the value of discussion for the pursuit of truth. And the ancients, I, of understood this, that truth was recognized and the idea that you could suppress certain ideas that were terrible was more or less taken for granted. I mean, this is written into the old biblical stories of Adam and Eve in that sense, right?

You know, God says there are certain things that shouldn't be known. You want to pursue the good. Don't eat the fruit that gives you knowledge of evil. But, you know, we thought, hey, we need to know what eat. evil is all about. And so we took the fruit. And now, you know, we know both good and evil. And now you have a problem is that now you know both good and evil. So and really this again comes down to that sort of difference in worldviews is that from a Christian perspective, going back to the very beginning, we would argue that no, there are some ideas that just shouldn't be talked about because

they're bad or evil. And we should pursue the good. And you, you find out what's and true by pursuing what's good and true, not discussing it, if that makes sense. It's just a, it's a, and it's, in that sense, they're two incompatible worldviews that are almost incommensurable. Well, who would have figured, who could have figured out that when you decide that you can have debates over ontology, that, you know, things would get to the point where you have, you know, 10,000 different beliefs in, you know, in the nature of being? I mean, who, who could have guessed that? That's where we're, we'd end up. Yeah, you, yeah. Or that that your society is riven with all kinds of

terrible ideas that seem appealing. You know, who could have thought? Well, it also seems like that inevitably leads to like into the teleological world where everything is, um, everything's cause. And, you know, the, the truth that based upon or, or, or, the quote-unquote truth is based upon how, you know, the reaction and the outcome rather than what the, you know, I like to go to the Industrial Revolution. Okay, the Industrial Revolution and technological revolution, sure. Mankind has, mankind's life has gotten easier. Mankind has more free time now. Mankind can, has more free time. time to pursue things that could improve his what.

Where has it taken us? What is that left man? What is all that free time? What is that technology? What is that produced for us? It's produced us a bunch of free time in which we pursue nothing that our forefathers pursued in the pursuit of truth, and the pursuit of God,

and the pursuit of, is there a God? Is there a, what is God like? And now we pursue, what, video games? And empty banalities. Yeah.

It's, and, and that's really, this was something that Jacques, Alul noted in, um, technological bluff. He made the case.

It's, as you say, a lot of the advances in, quote, advances in technology are, pitched to us as saving us time. And he asked the question, well, what do you do with that time? When was the last symphony that you wrote? And that kind of underscores the fact that many of us with the time that we're given, we either fill it with more work or the things that we do

are empty and banal and they they don't amount too much of anything and that's why when you get you know from my perspective when you get back to to the ancients they had a much better grasp of these things than we do and they understood very clearly that you you must begin how do you put it you begin with a set a set of shared beliefs and then you move forward forward from there. What is it? I think it's on some. One of the medieval theologians, you know, I believe, or maybe it was Augustine, I believe so that I can understand.

And this idea that you have to step into a worldview and embrace it in its entirety, and then after you've embraced it in its entirety, you can then begin to understand it and wrestle with it. In a sense, you have to sign the bill into law before you can understand the bill that you've just signed into law. You know, there is, there is some truth to that. It also seems like when you have all this free time, you know, elites, social engineers can figure out that, you know, we have this

managerial revolution. We have this, this thing where we're going to, where the state is going to become all about the managers. Sure, there will be faces out in front to make you believe that one persons in charge or 545 people are in charge. But we're really going to have these managers. But what we're going to do is we're going to give you this term democracy. And what this term democracy is going to allow you to do, it's going to allow you to participate, feel like you're participating in politics. And, you know, as Uncle Ted called it, over-socialization, where, it seems there's a certain personality type out there that is attracted to politics, thinks that politics is to be all of the end all. And all of this free time, they're using to become

active politically where really they don't have much, they're really not moving the needle much. What they're doing is they're getting their marching orders from the state. They feel like it's their idea, like they're moving culture, and the state is using this to just basically distract everybody from their managerial pursuits in that really there is no way that any one person or any large group of person. Maybe one person could change it. We know a small elite can change it, but these people are convinced that if you just get enough people to come in, if you get a million in people to organize, which is impossible, then you could possibly change something. It seems like there's a group out there that has been able to manipulate people with all

this free time into perpetuating and even making this managerial state not only continue, but to grow. Yeah, that this idea that we can participate or that we should participate in politics. again, I think, arises historically as the merchant classes, you know, ascend onto the center stage politically. It mirrors in many ways the way that businesses run well. I mean, there is a certain degree of hierarchy in business, but there's also a fair degree of, you know, horizontality. like, you know, meetings negotiating, managing that operate very horizontally rather than vertically. And so everybody, you know, this idea that ideas come up from the shop floor up to the management.

And you listen to the shop floor and for ideas. A lot of these, this dialogue comes out in and through the rise of the merchant classes. and this idea that everyone should have a say in the running of the affairs of society. And it arises, I think, partially alongside of a shift and a diminishing in Christian teaching at the same time. So there was prior to the rise of the merchant classes a very strong sense, that there was only so much you could do in society to fix various problems. And the rest had to be kind of accepted. And really, we didn't need to fix society anyways because Christ had already done that in

his death and resurrection. And we are waiting for Christ to return to initiate sort of the end days and the new heaven and the new earth in which all things will be made right, sort of the end of revelation there. On behold, all things are made new. And there, I forget where I heard it read, but around the year 1000, there was a crisis when Christ didn't return. Many people expected him to. And following that, you know, him not returning, there were many who began, you know, a shift began to occur. That, well, if Christ isn't going to return immediately, then we need to get about the business of managing our affairs as human beings. And so you begin into the high middle ages.

There's this new merchant class asserting themselves and they are, you know, fixing things, solving problems, running towns. And they want to flex. They have money. They have growing power. And one of the vehicles by which they assert this power is through this notion of democracy, through conversation and shared conversation among ourselves, we can run things without the old noble classes. We don't need the Pope. We don't need the king telling us what the law is. We can work it out for ourselves because we're smart merchantmen.

And that was, I think, historically, that's kind of an oversimplification. But I think that's largely where you end up where we are now. And so with machines and coming of machines, more and more people are encouraged to be involved in politics. and I think they should be involved in politics. And so you end up where we are today. And we don't really actually even have democracy per se

because the merchants are still running everything, but you give you the sense that you're involved and you're participating. Yeah. Because the politics actually works backwards from the way that people think. The most part, we think that, you know, things trickle up from the voting public,

up to our politicians and they represent us. But really, the politicians represent the administrative class to us. And then we vote yes or no one their ideas, kind of a plebiscite rather than an actual true democracy. Well, you mentioned people getting involved and after the first millennia. But it also seems like, especially I would say in the last hundred years with the reformation of the state of Israel, that a lot of Christians, a lot of good people, have turned into, I think, what, who wrote the book on Christian nationalism? What was his name? Wolf?

Stephen Wolfe. Yeah, Stephen Wolfe. You know, what he calls the we lose down here people, that there's real, no real use to be involved in politics because, you know, Christ is coming back soon because Israel's back together. also, you know, we're meant to be persecuted, things like that. So, you know, a lot of good people have just completely, you know, not only do you have these people who are like hyper involved in politics who will perpetuate the state, perpetuate this managerialism, perpetuate the merchant class, but you also have this group who could possibly do things even locally and on the state level.

who have completely dropped out because, you know, Christ is coming back soon and we lose down here anyway. So, you know, why should we even bother doing anything? Well, this, yeah, the problem of dispensationalist theology has been an Anabaptism in general. You know, the idea that because the politics is inherently corrupting, you know, we live in a sinful world. And this is also, you know, this is one of these things where, again, you talk about political divides between the progressive and a true conservative is this idea of human sinfulness. You know, you go back to Rousseau, the blank slate, you know, we're born good or neutral. And it's really up to us to make the world better. And so if we fix the world out there,

those who are born neutral will just naturally emerge and become good people. Whereas if you say, well, no, we're born flawed. And it doesn't matter how many improvements you make. Every generation is going to be as flawed, born as flawed as the last generation. It's just the way things are. You've got a fundamental divide that really can't be crossed. And that's, you know, a lot of politics comes down to that basic divide. But if you have a group of Christians who then say, well, politics is inherently corrupting and no Christians should get involved in it because it will corrupt you. And then you have some of these prophetic documents. Again, like you say, the building of the temple, the restoration of Israel, Christ's return must be right around the corner.

So now we doubly have a reason not to be involved in politics because, you know, we're, you know, Christ's return is imminent now because Israel has been reestablished. and it's just a matter of time before the temple's built, and then all the prophecies in Revelation are going to come true historically, as they're written, literally. And so once you're in that kind of posture, you know, you get this weird thing where, you know, you must absolutely unequivocally support the state of Israel without question,

and we're not allowed to be involved in politics on the local level, because it's inherently corrupting. And then you still, though, at the same time, go out and vote. And our political leaders have largely prayed on this. They've garnered the votes of these folks and have gotten fat, shall we say, on not supporting their interests other than being whole gung-ho for supporting Israel. And but on pretty much every issue other than that running down the board have largely ignored them and have zero interest in actually addressing their real material interests

either, but they do still expect them to come out and vote because they'll say, well, the alternative is worse. And now, even within the Christian community, you have those who are saying like, hey, wait a minute, there's another whole tradition of Christianity that has absolutely zero problem with the idea of being involved in the state and actually see it as a calling to be a magistrate and to grapple with this idea that being a magistrate is fundamentally corrupting, and yet you can still do this as a Christian calling. And so within the Christian community, now you have this conflict. And again, almost two incommensurable worldviews where one has to be converted to the other

or one has to be defeated by the other, but this is also sort of one of these brewing contests. And you really can't debate it out because there's a shared set of, you know, Even within the Christian community, you have shared sets of assumptions that, you know, there's a divide that stand between the two, and they almost become second order disagreements even though they're both Christian communities. Pst, did you know, those Black Friday deals everyone's talking about? They're right here at Beacon South Quarter. That designer's sofa you've been wanting. It's in Seoul, Boe Concept and Rocheburoix. The Dream Kitchen, check out at Cube Kitchens.

Beacon South Quarter Dublin, where the smart shoppers go. Two hours free parking, just off the amy. 50. Exit 13. It's a Black Friday secret. Keep it to yourself. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design. They move you. Even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Cooper. Design. that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial

Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Those people who love going out shopping for Black Friday deals, they're mad, aren't they? Like, proper mad. Brenda wants a television and she's prepared to fight for it, if you ask me. It's the fastest way to a meltdown. Me? I just prepare the fastest way to get stuff and it doesn't get faster. than Appliances Delivered.aE. Top brand appliances, top brand electricals, and if it's online, it's in stock.

With next day delivery in Greater Dublin. Appliances delivered.aE, part of expert electrical. See it, buy it, get it tomorrow. Or you know, fight Brenda. I was working, doing some work for the Southern Baptist Convention back in 1999, and I was really up on their politics and watching what they were doing.

and, you know, basically they picked a war every year. They'd be like, oh, this year we're going to criticize the Muslims. This year we're going to criticize the Mormons. This year we're going to, you know, back and forth, these kind of things. And watching them succumb to the pressures of the world and basically become woke now, where, you know, they're, the convention, the biggest argument they had a couple years ago, or their discussion for the year at the convention,

was female pastors. You really start to understand that this managerialism, all of these, you know, everything that leads up to this managerial state, this managerial form and idea. And what did, what is it, Pernel? Was it Pernell's law that, about the iron law of oligarchy? Or the iron law of, not the iron law of oligarchy, the iron law of, Oh, it's a conquest law.

Any organization that's not intentionally conservative eventually becomes liberal? Well, there was also the one about how the managers will always, will always the iron law of bureaucracy where the bureaucrats will always take over and become the louder voice than the ideologues. Yes.

Now you're starting to see that and you see that in government. You know, our government technically, if you want to believe it, United States government was founded on some principles and founded on some morals and you see this bureaucracy now being to

taken over this managerialism going into everything, even what you would suppose would be the most ideological institutions out there, which include the church. Well, and this is, I think, this is one of the reasons why I have found Jacques Alouille and authors like Marshall McLuhan to be intensely about. valuable when dealing with political analysis because people don't understand. They look at technology and they see the devices. And they assume that the devices, the important thing is how you use the

devices. If you use it for good ends, it's good. If you use it for bad ends, it bad. And now there are those who will say that, you know, all technology is a good thing. And there's those who'll say all technology is a bad thing. But we both, you know, everybody kind of realizes that's not a sophisticated opinion, then, you know, the sophisticated opinion is supposed to be, well, technology is neutral, and really what the important thing is to make people moral so that they use technology in a moral way. And what Alul argued and McLuhan and others with him is that Alul especially, though, he said technology doesn't care. Technology comes, every time you introduce new technology, new technique, it comes with both goods and ills. And generally, the good.

are front-loaded. That's why you can sell the introduction of the new technology. And the price that you pay for it, the ills that come as a result of it are usually not realized until later towards the back end. And there's also a lot of unexpected effects that you see. And what Alul argued, he says, more important even than the devices is that technique is a way of thinking about the world, in a sense, thinking about the world technologically, and that every solution has a, you know, an abstracted systems-based technique-oriented solution to it. And once you understand technology and technique as a way of thinking, you begin to realize that it's at its heart, it's, it is itself an ideology. So, and this is where, you know, in this sense, all technique is

technique. There isn't like, it just is what it is. So when you're introducing an abstracted technical solution to solve a problem, and basically what technique does, it allows you, primarily this is a merges out of the merchant classes. It allows you to grow and manage businesses at scale. So you use management techniques to grow and manage businesses at scale. But you also use technique to grow any organization at scale, whether it's government or a nonprofit or a church. So if you want to, so this is where the church growth movement grabbed onto technique and said, well, hey, we can use technique. We can build almost like franchise churches.

We can use technique to grow churches and make them successful. And it seems wonderful on the surface, but all technique is technique. And when you realize that that technique has in itself a certain progressive bias in a sense of like a feedback loop. So you introduce a technique and then you watch it play out. and then you realize there are certain problems. So you go back to the drawing board and you tweak it, you fix it, you layer it with another new technique,

and you continually do that. And the idea is that if you keep improving, improving, improving against you get to the point where you work out a kind of best practice and the technique is perfected and you can end up with sort of finally solving the problem. But what Allul argues is that you never get there because every new layer of technique creates more problems. But while this is happening, because technique is used ideologically to solve problems, the problems you're solving, whether you're solving a problem of poverty, racism, global peace, whatever it is, pollution, every solution has only one answer, and that is a technological

solution. So whether your solution is, how do we bring unbelievers into the church, or how do we correct racism or how do we solve poverty, every solution or every problem has the same answer. It's a technical solution. And so all problems. And really, and this is what Marshall McLuhan argued, he says that the important thing is not so much the content anyways. He says, the important thing is the fact of the technique. So in a sense of, say, a television, the fact that you're watching television is more important than any one particular show that you watch, or the fact that you're using a car is more important than any one trick that you have, or the fact that you're running the affairs of your country or your business using administrative systems is more important

than the content of those systems. So whether you're using it to make widgets or you're using it to administer the affairs of the country, the content of the system doesn't matter. because the nature of bureaucracy, the nature of systems will determine, just like a television has its own effect. You turn into a couch potato with a three-minute attention span, right? The mobility of the car breaks down communities because now people can go wherever they want, whenever they want at the rate that they want to, and they're not stuck within their locale, these types of things. So the use of administrative systems, and this is like Conquest Law, generally tends to push things along

because it's really something born out of liberalism, as we've, we talked about earlier, is the result of the rise of the merchant classes? The merchant classes use administrative systems. So they're all kind of tied into with the same ethos, the same mindset. And administrative systems are the means by which you perfect society. And really, it's the, the architecture. So the broader goal is this constant perfection of things. The content within that really is less important than the broader message of that we're improving things. and fixing things and solving problems, which is the real ideology of the administrative state. And so if you are using technique to run your churches, they will eventually become liberal

because you've basically adopted the same ideology as the liberal state. And this is really why people misunderstanding the nature of technique and technology has largely led to and is leading to the liberalization of churches. then you look at who our pastoral class are. They're all trained with masters of divinity, the vast majority of them. So they have the same education as lawyers, doctors, engineers, the same level of it. And they see themselves as professionals. And so they're attuned to wanting to be a part of the professional classes. So they're often taking their cues from the other things that the professional classes want. So they will say, well, we have to solve racism.

but they'll say, well, we won't do it in the same way as those woke ideologues do, but we're going to solve racism here in our church communities. But what they don't realize is that they're basically using the same methodologies and techniques that the woke crazies are using. They're just, they just seem more sane, but they're basically the same thing. And this is what a lot of people don't understand is that, you know, whether you're a woke crazy or you're a sane professional, they're both using the same means and mechanisms for trying to solve the problem.

So they're really basically the same thing. That's been a long bit, but yeah. No, no, that's fine. And it seems that when things don't change, then instead of looking to see if there's a root problem as to why it didn't change, the technique needs to be tweaked, or you need more of it.

So if you have this problem in your organization, instead of trying to figure out exactly what is the root cause of that problem, you blame it on, well, we tried this way to fix it. Now we just have to, we have to fix, instead of fixing the problem, we're fixing the way that we're fixing the technique that we're using and we're adjusting that and we're concentrating on that, instead of actually concentrating on the problem, we're concentrating on the managerial technique that we're using to try to fix it. Yeah. And this is something that Allul notes as well, too,

and you see this say with COVID, is that this is why nobody ever gets punished for failings, because the people in the system, like you say, they're important and they matter. But when something goes wrong, the people don't bear the responsibility. You right away have to say, oh, there's something wrong with the system. need to go back and fix the system. And nobody thinks the sense of, I need to take personal responsibility for how it failed because they don't see themselves as personally responsible. The system and the technique are what's the matter. And so the problem is always outside of yourself. There are no moral problems. They're all technical solutions. I as a person never have

to fix anything about myself because every problem has a technical solution. So this is really where the fundamental divide comes in is what happens if you say, well, is there a way of addressing our shared concerns as a society in a way that isn't technical? And this question, and we talked about this, goes back to the very beginning, first order, second order disagreements. This question is so far outside of bounds that most people can't even begin to think about the world outside of a world where there's technical product, like technical solutions. It's almost impossible than for even conceive of a world in which you would address an issue in society without using technique. And this is what Alul says, you know,

that basically the technological society only allows one solution for everything, and that is a technological solution. Now, there are other solutions, I guess, even that even talking about solutions is a tech, is a way of, is technological thinking. There are other ways to address society's concerns and the, and the problems and challenges they face that are non-technical, but they scare the willies out of it. So you might say, well, why don't you put somebody who is competent and good in charge

and just let them do it on their own? Because right away, you're thinking, oh, you're basically wanting an authoritarian dictator. I'm like, well, maybe,

but maybe every organization needs an authoritarian dictator. But then you also run into the problem of, And this is really the challenge that we face is that there's a limit to how much an authoritarian dictator can manage things without having to lean on administrative technique in order to scale up the extent of his power. So if you wanted to say run the United States, for example, with an authoritarian dictator without technique, it's an impossibility cannot be done. The United States only exists as it is because of the introduction of technical management.

You cannot operate. I mean, I guess you could, but it wouldn't be the United States that you would know today. You would probably institute, let's say, if you break it down, like, what, it's a, you know, maybe three to five million people might be manageable with a dictatorial control. So you're looking at maybe 70 provinces in the, you know, or whatever or states within the larger United States geographic area. And then you just basically let the governors have complete control of, of those territories. And every governor just sort of does his thing this way.

When you have a new governor, you basically throw it all the old plans and they don't survive one governor to the next. And for us today, we think that's crazy. You have to have policies in place for when there's a transition of power. And we just, it's so natural to us that it just, it's hard for us to fathom a world that doesn't exist on policy and technique. And this is really one of the problems that we face is that, you know, we have only one set of solutions and that is technological solutions for everything. Yeah, the whole idea of one man rule when you look at it historically, to compare it to something that we're seeing today is. when you had a king over his kingdom,

he normally didn't sell it out to a foreign power. Well, no. Yeah. And that's, you know, if there was some issue, he may sell his daughter to, or his son to marry a foreign adversary's, you know, son or daughter. Yeah. But he didn't sell it out, like what we see today in the United States where,

I think it's become painfully obvious to people in the last six months, but especially in the last two weeks, that the United States has been sold out to, you know, especially one foreign power, but you know, you could look at, you could definitely see a couple of them. And that was just not something that kings did. Now, there were there were kings that went authoritarian and even totalitarian, but they never sold out, sold you out to somebody else. They might get into a war. get conquered, now you're under somebody else, but then that person's not going to basically sell everything that you have, all of your wealth, all of your future wealth out to some merchant class that we keep talking about. I mean, how do people not get this? Go. It sometimes I don't think is necessarily obvious until you are past the point where, like, everything is bad, and how do you get this way? But you look writing in the 20s, 30s and 40s,

Carl Schmidt saw it. He looked at the way that the United States had been put together and the general ethos of how it had been founded. And he looked at this and said, well, it's not even really a state. It's an anti-state. You know, you like people, and he would, this is why Carl Schmidt is wonderful, despite, you know, sort of some of his, his, his, his,

his icky associations is he was genius at pointing these basic ideas out. You know, you think to yourself, oh, we need smaller government, right? And you think, well, that's a good idea. We want the government but he asked the question, well, why do you want the government out of your, well, so you can manage your business affairs without anybody pestering you, which is, okay, that sounds great, right? Well, but he argued that who then is looking out for the interests of the people. And Schmidt says, well, an effective state really emerges and must emerge as an extension of the interests of the people. And he sort of kind of goes back to more of like almost like a clan base type of thing. So you have a group of people. And that's why the, you know, his concept of

political between friend and enemy, you have a group of friends that are all gathered together. They have a shared sense of interest, a shared existential set of, you know, survival instincts, us versus them. And they say, well, you know, let's put a few people in charge to manage the affairs of us against them who threaten us. And he says, well, basically the state

emerges out of this need to, in some sense, specialize and you put a few people in charge. And those people are supposed to manage the affairs of and the interests of the people as a whole. And he says, well, if your whole idea of government is based, on it being as small as possible and keeping out of the affairs of people. He says, you have nobody looking out for the interests of the people.

He says, you don't actually have a policy. You don't actually have a state. And this is one of the problems that has really, as it as it metastasizes over time, early on, it worked well because the culture sustains society for a time. But as that culture weakened in the face of an ever-growing state that really had no interest in looking out for the interest of the interest of the, the citizen, but was much more interested in the business interests of, because, you know, it was only inevitable that they would be sold out for, you know, once you understand the

dynamic of how the whole thing was supposed to work, it makes complete sense that America was sold out for business interests and not the interest of the people itself, because that's the way it was designed from the very beginning. Yeah, it was clearly designed by a merchant class. I mean, these men were merchants. they were smugglers. They, you know, Patrick Newman has a book called cronyism in the United States, and it starts in the 1600s and goes to the Spanish-American War.

Yeah. Or the Mexican-American War. But, yeah, to not understand that if you, and this is what libertarians don't get, people who, these are people who think, if we just have the right economics, everything will work itself out. as economics, the religion is private property. If we just have the right economics, everything will be fine. No, when you turn everything over to a merchant class, there is no thought of, oh, is this

good for my fellow countrymen? Because they don't think about themselves as countrymen. They think about themselves as individuals. No, it's going to be, which corporation is this best for? and which corporation can get the most power. And then we go back to our discussion, the beginning of who decides the rules by which things are run. So this was something that Nick Land noted in his argument about capital acceleration, is

that once capital breaks free from the moral restraints of society and becomes its own morality, you now have a second order disagreement between society. and capital. That's irresolved because capital will want to do what capital wants to do. And society, if it wants it, and the same thing with technology, technology works along the same way. So once it breaks free from the moral and religious and social restraints of society and and accelerates that way, it now has no moral restraints other than its own impulse to continually iterate more technology or to continually expand the impact. influence of capital. And so now you have and, and, you know, when you look, and once that moral

framework is gone, or it's, it's challenged, basically all there is then is, you know, is it good for making money or is it good, is this, you know, does this seem like a good advance to do? Somebody's going to do this new technology. This is where you end up with like, in, in terms of technological stuff where people are cutting up, you know, viruses to make super virus, so that way they can then make the next antidotes for those viruses. I mean, this is what they were doing in those Wuhan Lops, you know, because they could, because technology had broken free from moral restraint and it just needed to be done. And the same thing with capital, capital is doing the same thing.

And so the libertarians like, yeah, if you set these very powerful forces free and don't contain them within, you know, social, religious and moral constraints, You know, and where do those social, original, moral, constraint? Well, they come from basically a sense of rule of law. It's imposed upon you socially, religiously, you know, spiritually, morally and legally to restrain actions. And once you throw off all those restraints and everything accelerates, you know, all the stuff that used to manage the affairs of, you know, how people behaved in the world

of economics goes right out the window. People become amoral. And once it become immoral, they just, you know, the bad, the worst impulses, you know, greed and all the rest of it just begin to take over. And that's sort of what you live. And this is really where libertarianism requires a moral culture within to operate, but it can't say where that moral culture came from. It just sort of magically appears. And so libertarianism always is a form of magical thinking because it can never explain how a moral culture arrives that then, you know, operates and controls capital just sort of magically on its own once you take away all the rules. not having a proper understanding of culture.

Religion, law. Yeah, all of these. I mean, I put all of those under the same, the umbrella of culture, that you don't understand how, you know, it's why libertarians are like, you know, and you have these anarchists, are like, we got to get rid of the state. The state doesn't look out for us. Well, there's a reason, if you had a culture,

if you had a cohesive culture, a Spanglarian-Yaki type of high culture, there would be people looking out for you. But since you don't have that, you think, oh, we just have to destroy everything and go towards radical individualism where I'm going to be the only one looking out for me. Which is a kind of utopian thinking.

If we just eliminate the state, then, it's a variation of kind of Marxist thinking. If I sweep away the current order, then utopia will magically emerge. And so libertarianism is in the same class of ideas as Marxism, basically. And people don't want to realize that because it's a form of future utopianism. You know, just as many, well, the whole return idea, you know, we sweep away the present order and reinstatiate an older order from 1776 and the world will be all good.

Well, you can't do it. And once you swept away the current order, you know, orders don't just magically appear. And that's part of the problem that, you know, once you get rid of a religious moral and worldview framework operating to restrain things like capital and technology and moral behavior and so forth, once you get rid of all of these things, it's very hard to put that genie in the bottom. and sweeping them away doesn't result in utopia just magically appearing. And anyone that tells you otherwise is just fooling themselves and trying to fool you. Yeah, the whole idea that you can have a cohesive culture when, you know, what is it? What was the terminology second order? Second order disagreement.

Second order disagreements. And basically what that is is you have different cultures. And then people look at the United States and people are like, Well, you know, we could just save the United States if we just had, you know, this one, the United States could be saved, you know, if we just have this, that. So do you realize how many cultures there are in the United States? So do you realize how many second, do you realize how many groups there are? Yeah, multiculturalism is a sign.

Yeah, you're going to have second order disagreements with how many groups, how many groups, but multiculturalism is a sciop gone. Oh, it is completely. And people don't realize this, that, you know, there was one of the things that prevented some of these global conflicts from happening was that people were stuck in their own localities. Now that you begin mixing everybody up everywhere is like a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, and the various other forms of belief systems, you get them all in a room and you say, well, resolve all your disputes. I'm sorry, the only thing that resolves all of those disputes is power. And, you know, it may be that right now there's enough slush in the system, enough prosperity in the system that everybody can set aside their disagreements

to kind of, hey, let's all milk the system for, you know, let's all lift fat off the system and everything will be good. But if the fat from that system ever goes, it's not going to be pretty because these groups will go back to being very tribal. And they'll be going back to their core loyalties. and then it really results in, you know, there can be only one. And that's, you know, this is going to be one of the unfortunate realities going forth is that we've brought, you know, I mean, this is in a sense, in part what ended

the Roman Empire, is that, you know, you thought you could bring in barbarians to fight your wars for you. How did that work out for them? You know, and so you think that you can bring in, you know, people from Asia to pay for your retirement benefits. Well, we'll see how that works out for us over the long term. But my, my, my thoughts are probably not going to be well. All right. Well, let's leave it. Good. No, good. If you need to say, if you had something else, go ahead. No, and I was just going to say this, this is, you know, to be clear, you know, the thing is I have nothing against any of these people

personally or whatever, right? They're just, they're caught up in this same kind of ideologies as well, too. And that's the unfortunate thing is that these conflicts are going to be brought upon us by, you know, the, the, the, the, our elites. trying to impose their ideology on a global scale. Yeah, Thomas 777 talks about how that, you know, not only in this country was the original, the founding culture, deracinated, but every other culture that was brought in here was deeracinated and, you know, tried to turn it, try to turn it into just this homogenous pile. And it was unfair to them, too.

They should be somewhere where they can have their own culture, you know, where we, we should be somewhere here where we can have our own. culture and it's just basically a it's very devious and it's uh extremely unfair to you know these these groups but you know more so for the the group that was already here yes all right let's get out of here remind everybody where they can find your stuff and i'll uh and this yeah thank you for having me on p and um you can find me on twitter at under and also on substack, um,

www. Seeking the hidden thing.com. Seeking the hidden thing.com. And that's where I do most of my serious writing. All right, Cryptos. I appreciate it. And until the next time.

Thank you. Until then.