The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1267: Continental Philosophy and Its Origins - Pt. 15 - Werner Sombart (cont.) w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

67 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas continues a series on the subject of Continental Philosophy, which focuses on history, culture, and society. In this episode Thomas continues his talk about Werner Sombart. He begins by talking about the Charlie Kirk assassination.Thomas' SubstackRadio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Buy Me a CoffeeThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete'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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unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump Dunebeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Doonbiog, Kush Farage. If you want to get the show early and ad-free, head on over to the piquinez Show.com. There you can choose from where you wish to support me. Now listen very carefully. I've had some people ask me about this, even though I think on the last ad, I stated it pretty clearly. If you want an RSS feed, you're going to have to subscribe through substack or through

Patreon. You can also subscribe on my website, which is right there, Gumroad, and what's the other one? Subscribe Star. And if you do that, you will get access to the audio file. So head on over to the Picanueno's show.com. You'll see all the ways that you can support me there. And I just want to thank everyone. It's because of you that I can put out the amount of material that I do. I can do what I'm doing with Dr. Johnson on 200 years together and everything else. The things that Thomas and I are doing together on continental philosophy. It's all because of you. And yeah, I mean, I'll never be able to thank you enough.

So thank you. The Pekignano Show.com. Everything's there. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekino Show. Thomas is here and I was going to talk a little more about the work of Werner Sombart. How are you doing, Thomas?

I'm doing well, thanks for hosting me. I realized it kind of looked like a hobo. I didn't do anything crazy yesterday, but it was my birthday. So I had a couple of drambouis, then I ate a bunch of ice cream, and I was in like a coma. So my birthday present to myself

is I just, like, chilled the last 48 hours and caught up on correspondence. I didn't really put anything in on the manuscript. So, I mean, I've just been being kind of a schlub, so. Well, I wish you happy birthday privately, but happy birthday. Oh, yeah, no, thanks. I, yeah, no, I wasn't fishing for praise or well wishes, but I, like I said, I try not to be a fucking hobo, like, when I do these things, because I'm not out of vanity.

I just think it's a bad look, so forgive me for it. But I did want to, I don't want to derail our discussion from the dedicated topic, but you know obviously this has been a kind of a rough week for the country you know along to the assassination of Charlie Kirk

and there's a lot of disinformation as well as just ignorance around the man himself but also around the political climate that what I believe facilitated is murder you know I

I don't believe there's some specific like then conspiracy of discrete actors in the deep state or Israel or something to whack Charlie Kirk. But a psychological environment where this sort of thing is common, it has been purposefully curated. And there's all these pundits popping off as well as just internet guys and content creators saying stuff like, oh, these trans movement is Marxist or these people ascribe

to this blah, blah, blah ideology. They really don't. You know, the whole thing is that there's a deliberately cultivated moronism to this. I don't even mean that pejoratively. I mean literally. You know, that Tyler Robinson kid, you know, what he supposedly was scrawling on his shelves with stuff like, take that fascist, L.O.L. You're gay. That's the level these people are on.

They're almost barely sentient. You know, and when it derives from the reason why there is such, this huge emphasis on sexual identity and sexuality of supposedly this essential mode of catharsis that have sublimated leads to all these social pathologies. You know, that was basically the, that was basically the primary thesis of Marcuse. Okay. And that's not accidental. Don't get me wrong. I think Marcusa actually believed that. You know, he, Freud and Marx very much informed his ideological paradigm. But the reason why, sex and this sort of pre-rational instinct and the alleged relationship of that to the essential dignity

and core of the person looms so large is because that's the whole point. The whole point is that there's this sort of pre-rational rage that can be accessed whereby for reasons of egoism that have no rational relationship but we think of as, you know, ideological imperatives. or higher reason, you know, this is what animates these people. And that's important to keep in mind, you know, not just for the sake of clarity, but this isn't something, it's not like we need to have some dialogue to neutralize this radicalization tendency or something. It's sort of the opposite of a substantive ideology, you know, and that's important to consider, I think, because this is something that contributes to rendering the conceptual landscape of peg when people refuse to accept that? any sense. Ready for huge savings? Well mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all

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Yeah, you know, I know, I suppose too, like some people might respond to that and say, well, why should I give a shit? These people are scum. Yeah, they are, okay, but correctly identifying the nature and character, the threat is important. You know, and like I said before, too, I know I, I know some people have been saying, too that people like Sam Hyde are being disingenuous when they claim to have been like moored by the murder of Kirk like look I I was not a Charlie Kirk guy I think people know

that I would read my content you know but the guy was a white man he was a white Christian he was a Calvinist you know from right here like a little bit west of me and he was uh the kind of guy he want as a neighbor, you know, whatever his flaws and his shortcomings and his conceptual blind spots, the guy wasn't, not only was he not an enemy, but, you know, he, for better or worse, he was a symbol for white America and that kind of normalcy, okay? And it's really, really bad that this happened, you know, and I think people need to acknowledge that. you know um i was saying i was saying today to some of to some of our comrades that um privately that charlie kirk was like on the path like headed towards where we are and the scary

thing is he's 31 years old a lot of people i know you you bought you didn't buy into this you discovered it and you realized what it was um at a much younger age but he was 31 years old had come had come a long way in 10 years, come a long way definitely in the last two years. And there was potential in the future that he could be the kind of leader that we would hang out with. Oh, 100%. Well, it's also too. I think a lot of people don't fully realize, you know, Kirk, when he started turning point for all practical purposes, he was a kid. He was like 19 years old.

So Kirk, and recently he turned down some big. donation from APEC. You know, he basically's like, I don't want your money. And I mean, obviously, that's fed speculation by people that they said to do with his murder. I don't believe that. But the point being, he's some teenage kid, you know, he's, uh, he, all these important and powerful people say, hey, we like what you're doing. We want to fund your pack.

You know, I mean, what's he going to say? Like, you know, oh, you know, go F yourself because you're a Jew. you know i've got to take a stand against zionism like don't get me wrong like i am not being flippant but most teenage kids in that position they're not going to be thinking that way especially not some guy who grew up in arlington heights you know goes to church goes in a two-parent home you know he knows something's wrong but he's not exactly immersing himself an esoteric political theory and he's not an outlaw like this isn't a flex but i've always been an outlaw i okay i don't need to i'm not saying that people should emulate that

or that makes me better, smarter, like, more cunning than anybody. But when you've always been on the outside, it's easier to accept some of these realities, okay? So you've got to consider that, too. But point being, yeah, as Kirk was maturing, as his brand developed its own kind of momentum, it was clear that he was discriminating in who he was willing to take money from, you know, because obviously that money comes with a price, and you're expected to be a mouthpiece. and um you know so yeah i i i mean people can people can think whatever they want on this i'm not saying you've got i'm not saying that if you didn't care about charlie kirk or if you found his

viewpoints to be trivial or or or corrosive to you know the the advancement of a revolutionary imperative i'm not saying you got to pretend to like him or something i'm saying i don't think Hyde was lying or do what we're saying this for clout and in my own case I mean I'm a nobody but I I'm not this is why I made the statement I did about his murder there's nothing cool about it and I mean it's not cool if anybody's murdered if it's got to be done it's got to be done and you should be a man about it but that still doesn't make it cool but in this case not only is it not cool it was a very tragic thing and a very horrible thing but I just wanted to get that out there. And yeah, but the main

thrust is, like I said, the sociological phenomenon and of these disturbed people like this Robinson guy, it's not a traditional process of radicalization.

You know, don't compare these people to the kinds of guys who join ISIS and become Mujah they're not anything like that. It's way more banal. It's way more like literally moronic. It's way more infantile. And that's the whole point.

You know, it's a detonation strategy. It's not the regime saying, we've got to curate cadres of people who have this deep ideological vision of how things should develop. It's saying, how do we make human torpedoes? That's it.

You know, and this kind of, I mean, you see this too, and I promise I'll get into the substance of what of the of the top. I want to end you at a question before before. No, go ahead. Okay. Well, I guess what I would ask is what someone would ask is when you see, you know,

40,000 people that they've taken information on that they're targeting for some kind of retribution about celebrating his death. I mean, literally millions of people celebrated his death. And not only millions of people, but like, people on the news, talking heads, people who have audiences that are hundreds of thousands of people, and millions of people even. What does that say about where we are? What does that say about what we should be doing?

You know, considering that, you know, the odds that this, you know, this government, this regime is going to do something about cracking down on these people. What should we be doing? The same thing we've been doing. I mean, these people expose themselves when they do this. this kind of stuff. And the regime's weird reaction to it, like on the one hand, you got guys like Prisker and like Bill Mocker who are obviously happy that Kirk is dead, but they're overselling this kind of pretend somberness. Okay, that's them playing their hand. And these

talking hits, too, they don't even really know Charlie Kirk is. They just think he's some like Donald Trump, too, or something. Like, you can tell by the way they talk about him. They've never watched his content. You know, because, again, he was a very mainstream guy. but I've heard some of what these fools are saying it's obvious they've never listened to his debates or listened to his talks. They got just because it's conceptually off base like what they claim he thought or said.

You know, they're saying, some people are saying he's like a white nationalist. Other people are claiming he's some like trad Catholic type guy. Like it's obvious they don't, or just some like super Trump mega supporter. And like, don't get me wrong. He very much was a Trump show. But, you know, he also was talking about the Epstein thing

and saying that, you know, the 80, literally saying the EDL is anti-white. Okay, so it's more nuanced than that. And that's also why, you know, the regime and its adjacent elements curating these kinds of, this kind of political homicide. And then, like I said, it's the actors within the regime pretending this is some somber moments. That's part of the whole point. So like these fools like seal clapping like they're they don't get it they're they're selling the regime narrative wrong and that's one of the reasons they're being punished because it's like what are you doing you fucking idiots you know like that's not there's like a tone deafness there but that's part of the thing that's but it's part of the whole narrative too because I've made this point again and again and recently I I dressed down somebody for it in like in real life

there's this Greek chorus of self-styled intellectuals and academic types and they love this cliche of saying, well everybody knows fascists are anti-intellectual. No, the cliche, even among the

ops of the right, is you're a bunch of disturbed freaks who spend all your time with esoteric ideologies and artistic movements that nobody cares about because, you know, know, you think that ideology trumps human dignity. Hitler was literally an artist.

Okay. The NSTAP was populated by guy who sat around reading Dietrich Eckart. Like, in contrast, the left are people like, my body, my choice. What I do with my penis is the most important thing in the world. You know, you're a racist. It's literally dumb, dumb, moron, bumper sticker stuff. you know, hedonic narcissism passed off as some kind of ideology. It is literally the definition of anti-intellectualism, you know, and that's being exposed. Like, people are realizing among

other things, there's like nothing to this. It's Charlie Kirk made me mad because I like this kind of pornography and he said that's bad. Or I don't go to church. I have no ethnic background. I have no culture, you know, to me, life is sex and buying stuff. And he said women should get pregnant. It's my body. Fuck him. It's literally on that level. Air grid. Operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say online or in person.

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They don't find Harry Potter and pornography. Yeah, there's, there's, it's so funny that people think that they're like, oh, they were, they went to college and they wouldn't, you know, I saw a leftist saying, that he went to college he wouldn't you know in college he would have learned i'm like what what would he have learned in college yeah reading reading some book by some lady from north africa who's a self-identified radical lesbian talking about the taliban is mean so like that that means that he's he's educated but i mean it's like the i mean it's also too i mean i'm old enough i you know i'm almost 50 years old. I spent my youth

debating guys who were like actual mouse, you know, who like threw a Molotov cocktails in the 60s because they were insane. But they also were very smart people. And being in Chicago, that was at ground zero for that kind of stuff. So I'd run into these guys. You know, like when Loyola would have some

symposium for political theory students and there'd be some crazy Jewish guy University of Chicago, you know, trying to dress down me and the other guys he identified as right wing. All right, these guys were incredibly bad people, but they were also very smart, and all they were did was sit around, when they weren't raising hell, they were sitting around reading Hegel and reading, you know,

Das Kavanaugh, and they had this whole, they had a very nuanced worldview, which was premised completely on fallacious epistemic priors, but they weren't morons whose life revolved around their kines who had the mentality of a retarded baby and saying, you should die because you said bad word. I mean, that's the difference, you know? It's like, where is this left-wing intellectualism? Like some white trash girl who was like in college learned that men are trying to make her get pregnant so she's outraged. Or some guy who decided he's like a sports team mascot, transsexual, who has... hates conservatives and who, oh, well, you're gay.

Yeah, okay. Real, real, real weighty stuff there. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it was one of those things that I didn't think it would, you know, affect me, something like that. And I was actually had just finished recording with Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson. And we had just cut the recording and his wife jumped in the room and was like, Charlie Kirk got shot.

We're both like, what? Why? I thought this, a friend of mine, he was on the road, like one of the fellas. You know, he was passed into Chicago, so I told him to dinner. We hung out. And then, like, I bid him farewell, like, that Tuesday. And then on Wednesday, he texts me and he's like, Charlie Kirk got shot. Like, I thought he was talking about some guy. I'm like, who's Charlie Kirk?

I mean, I knew about the famous Charlie Kirk. I thought he meant, like, some dude we know. And I'm like, who? He's like, no, you know, Charlie Kirk, turning point. I'm like, no. way like why I'm like why would somebody shoot him and then like I'm like wow that's yeah it was surreal man you know like you know it it really points to the fact that I mean this is this is what they think is radical they think what Charlie was out there so I mean Charlie was willing to have conversations

with anybody well even the people I'm not willing to have conversations with everybody no no that's why I mean obviously he was looking ahead do um I think I think I think Had he continued on this trajectory, I think he very well could have become president. And media is where you come up through these days. Okay, and he, yeah. But the, but I, I don't know. Like I said, these people who are seal clapping over his murder, I don't even think they ever consumed his content.

I mean, even like the Trump derangement syndrome people, they say really weird things that tells me like the, it's just, it's like a, it's like an, I mean, I realize, or really metaphors overstated, but it's like in the movie version where Goldstein is on the screen and these people go berserk, like this one

who leaves like throwing her shoes, this one guy is like shaking because he's like flying into the house, Idle rage. But you can't even hear what Goldstein saying. It's just like there's Goldstein. It's like he's responsible for, you know, the reason why you can't afford a gallon of milk. Like he's, he's why, you know, you've got to

take cover from missile attacks in the city. He's why, you know, you're, you don't have good health care or whatever. Like it, or whatever these people prioritize. Like, TDRs, TDS is the same thing. It has nothing to do with Trump himself. I mean, maybe Trump's a piece of shit. Maybe he's not.

I don't think highly Donald Trump, but it's some, he's some stand-in for the curated rage objects within these people's pre-rational mind. You know, and I mean, frankly, no American president is really that important these days. you've got something wrong with you if you're becoming literally enraged at a political figure, especially Trump. He's the guy's a game show host, you know, quite literally.

You know, like I, his campaign was significant for what he represented and I'm not saying he's a trivial figure in the historical process because he's not. Okay. And a lot of time guys aren't particularly good people or deep thinkers or people who exhibit great moral fortitude do play a significant role in this role of process he's one of those people i'm not saying he's not but if he's if he's literally triggering rage within you you've got something wrong with you and it has nothing to do with him it has to do with a curated response in a psychological environment where people have this abject need to externalize this negative emotional energy

almost almost like expelling body fluids like i'm not kidding. And that's cultivated, this kind of pressure cooker, emotional and psychic violence that people are subjected to day and day out, and that has a poisoning effect on their sensibilities and emotional intelligence, but also this psychotic rage that's curated. You know, it's all part of the same process, and it makes no rational sense to respond that way to some political figure. I don't even respond the way to Nettonyahu and without

saying dumb things, they're going to get me a visit from the police or something. I don't think highly of Mr. Netton Yahoo. I wouldn't be sad if something bad happened to him, okay? But when I see his face on TV, I don't go berserk. Okay, I don't find

to rage as if the mention of his name. You know, so we're talking about something that really has nothing to do with, with ideological commitments or political assemblies as we know it. But yeah, we can get into this subject matter in a minute. I just wanted to, I thought that was important. Why does a peacock shimmer blue and green?

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and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the... 25th of November. Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash Northwest. At best people like Netanyahu deserve an eye roll, just like, uh, uh, him again. No, exactly. And it's, and it's also, I mean, uh, I mean, don't get me wrong. I, I, I feel very strongly about the fortunes of our people and those and our political allies and I know that some people don't understand that and that makes them mad I mean I don't care about that but

you know I'm not saying you should be some totally dispassionate robot or something but I you know but this kind of targeted rage at public officialdom is not rational now plus these people don't have skin in the game man I mean that's the whole point it's it's people It's pure narcissism. You know, you're in a rage at Donald Trump because you feel he hasn't validated what you do with your penis enough. You know, you're, he's said bad words. He's not, he's not genuflecting before, you know, before the corpse of George Floyd adequately. I mean, like, he's not, Trump didn't rape your mother.

He didn't burn down your church. He's not, he's not, he's not commanding a battalion of, of, of, uh, of, of, uh, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, you know, volunteers who are ethnically cleansing your village. You know, you're literally enraged because he transgressed some matter of ego, often

relating to sexuality or some parapheria, or something you identify as like some core part of yourself, and that enrages you. I mean, like how any normal adult would be embarrassed at the prospect of appearing

that way in the eyes of others. You know, it's quite literally a kind of mass mental illness. You know, and that's important to keep in mind. And that is also why it's important. These people don't weren't engaging with. You know, they don't have a position that deserves a hearing or anything like that. You know, I mean, in contrast, some of our enemies do. You know, these people do not.

they're the scum of the earth. And like I said, they're literally functioning on the level of monkeys. If monkeys could talk, that's what they'd be. Without the malice. I don't think monkeys are malicious like that. But, you know, otherwise I stand by it. All right. One jump in?

Yeah, I think, I think last time I was discussing Wagner's law. Yeah, I realize I pronounced Wagner, but in American academic nomenclature, it's Wagner, Adolf Wagner, Adolf Wagner, Adolf Wagner, and Gustav Bunch smaller, we're probably the most relevant German economists of the 19th and early 20th century. And like Schumpeter, a lot of Sombard's work product was dedicated to discussing the relationship between state activity, public expenditures, national income, and GDP. You know, increasing state activity and public expenditure related to or facilitating that activity increases as national income rises. That's Wagner's law. Sheparder made the same point in capitalism, socialism, and democracy. And this appears to be the case. Like I said, if you read mainstream economics textbooks,

basically Milton Friedman adjacent stuff, and most of what's considered the essential canon of neoliberal theory, it'll say that the jury is out in Wagner's law. There is a lot of empirical data subsistency. particularly this one broad-based study like I mentioned from 1891 to 1951 approximately the focus was on the United Kingdom but there was a lot of parallel data curated about the United States from the Gilded Age onward and this seems to be the case okay I but people can argue if people in the comments want

argue about that that's fine and i'd be willing to engage anybody who wants to do on a debate of a wagner's law but i i don't want to get into that right now um but there's a sociological aspect here that can't be denied okay the wagner's law like all these principles that are discussed in causative terms relating to socialism and it's closely tied to industrialization the the development of an industrial economy it's going to be a company it's going to be a company buy an increase share of public expenditure and gross national products. There's never an instance where that didn't happen. It changes people's conceptual horizon of economics as well as the role of the state.

Okay. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, people make a lot of, especially not just von Mises. And I know I bring up Von Miesians a lot as people representing a counterpoint. I don't want people to think I'm straw manning the Vondisians or something, but it's relevant to this discussion especially. A lot of Amnesians as well as free market types, like neoliberal free market advocates, they like to claim that people like Schumpeter and Bernard Sombard were social, or people like Schumpeter and people like James Burnham,

like, oh, they were these hardline socialists. You can't invoke them in discussing capitalist economics because they've got conceptual biases. They're not understanding. Everybody was some kind of interventionist. this era. You know, and to be fair, Sombart, like Schumpeter, he wasn't saying this is a good or a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, he had a spanklerian view of the German model of socialism. That's why he qualified it by talking about German socialism, which was a stand in terminology really for what

Spanago called ethical socialism, repression socialism. But this was a structural reality, okay, and there were there were there were no parties in western europe that didn't have some socialist aspect and structural terms to their program okay and even in america and we'll get to this a lot of the sources of tension that somberg predicted in the american situation in you know the first years of the 20th century these things were very much taken up by the new dealer and by Huey Long and by others. And a lot of the, however performative of a lot of the New Deal program was, and so in macroeconomic terms, I think a lot of these initiatives actually prolonged the depression.

You know, I agree with Murray Rothbard in that regard. But that didn't matter. It was a matter of perception, okay? And the fact of the matter is even doctrinally anti-socialist America in the the era, you know, the first half of the 20th century, this was a defining characteristic of electoral politics. Okay. So it can't be denied. And Wagner's law, which was accepted essentially in totality by Sombart, was that there's basically three causes of this phenomenon and the trajectory of political economy and industrialized states. There's sociopolitical causes, there's

truly economic causes, and there's physical causes. So what are we talking about? Socio-political we're talking about as state social functions expand over time, you know, whether we're talking about old-age pensions, a tax regime, you know, that is dedicated in comparatively disproportionate terms relative to previous epochs towards things like military readiness, you know, responses to natural disasters, you know, be of a fiscal and market nature or, you know, like a literal natural disaster, you know, that plays into the equation. Economic, we're talking about scientific and technological advances that increasingly become incorporated into the repertoire of, you know, available resource at the state's disposal,

which then in turn can be said correctly or not or accurately or not to eliminate uncertainties and thus promote efficiency and state intervention rather than the contrary, which obviously, you know, efficient allocation of capital and the inability of the state or any public actor to predict these things, you know, which are spontaneously emergent variables at the macro level in economics, you know, that that's obviously an issue. And the physical state of the government's ability to intervene fund and otherwise maintain this welfare apparatus. You know, the sum total of government debt expenditures, interest rates, things like that, the fixed capital, and how these things can be utilized to realize these things, all that plays that obviously

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conclusively identified what institution was emergent from but Alan T. Peacock and Jack Weissman were credited with that project. The you know and there's also a major one of the reasons why the aforementioned study was commissioned related to Wagner's law is a concept in a political economy called the displacement effect and it's almost axiomaticly related to warfare and national mobilization the displacement effect refers to when an earlier and lower tax and expenditure levels are in a punctuated in a sudden way replaced by new and higher budgetary expenditures and allocations,

you know, those tend to remain owing to people becoming sociologically habituated, but also outlays of a way of becoming permanent because there's not at scale of a national government with all these attendant sort of lesser bureaucracies serving it in a top-down way. there tends to not be an expedited way to call these things. You know, that's obviously that was, I mean, Elon Musk didn't phrase it that way, but that was, the core theory behind something like Doge wasn't misguided. I mean, we can argue over whether those kind of initiatives from the Reagan era onward have been correctly implemented or not, but it's an arguable.

the displacement effected and arguable. I don't see how anybody could say otherwise. But, you know, that's one example, too, Frank. Sombart and Wagner having an enduring relevance because they were really the first to take on these issues in a consistent way where, you know, there was a modeling methodology that would be accepted in the present as legitimate.

and appropriately rigorous and falsifiable. Interestingly, I mean, in the Anglosphere, not just in America, but throughout the English-speaking world, Samar's book on America, why is there no socialism in the United States? That's his most famous

Tomé, but his magnum opus, was their modern capitalism. Modern capitalism. And the term late capitalism, it was, I can't remember if I mentioned this the other week, but it was quite literally coined by Sean Bart. Because he divided capitalist development within his conceptual paradigm into four discrete stages or phases of development. You know, the earliest iteration being feudalism, which develops into proto-capitalism, as productive means become, you know, applied to value-added manufacturers rather than agrarian products exclusively or near exclusively,

then to, you know, early, pro-door early capitalism gives way to high capitalism, what we'd think of as the gilded age here in America, and then finally late capitalism. you know and in the post World War I era that many people identified 1918 as the onset of late capitalism you know and that that that resonated with a lot of people but I find that very interesting there's a lot of Sean Bart concepts even people who identify as Marxists or I mean actual mercs. I don't mean

I don't mean Berkeley goofs or internet people or something. I mean, I mean, guys like Jackson Hinkle and some of these people who identifies world systems theory proponents, you know,

Immanuel Ballerstein kind of stuff. Late capitalism is not just a term, but a concept that frames their conceptual paradigm. I mean, I know a lot of them don't realize it's a Berners-Sombard concept. They think it's a Marxian concept.

But that's significant. That's also one of the reasons why congruess with Wagner's law, the displacement effect, the sociological inputs that shape these proximate causes, you know, that's why a lot of people don't understand that state intervention or this odd interdependence, between public officialdom and regulatory mechanisms and, you know, private capital, the lines become

totally blurred. It's not just cronyism. It's not just state capitalism. It's not just some variant of, you know, what they called in the Japanese system, picking winners and losers. All those things are part of it, but structurally, you know, if there's a deliberate effort to maintain a discreet, kind of barrier between these two loci of power that's not realistic. You know, and this is why Burnham, I mean, obviously Burnham was a sociologist, not an economist, but modern political economy is axiomatically sociological. And when Burnham was talked about the managerial state, that's got profound implications for political economy.

Okay. And so it's neither here nor there whether that's a good or a bad thing. I mean, yeah, obviously it's well placed to talk about insidious aspects of modern government, but this idea that there's some alternative mechanism where the modern state would be structured differently. That's not realistic. And it's also, I mean, yeah, we'll all be, you and I and I and everybody watching this right, now will be dust by the time this comes to full fruition, but as is the subject and part of my manuscript I'm working on now, and as I'm always saying, and I'm sure people are sick of it, the Westphalian state, and maybe more probably the post-Westphalian state, that entire system

is ceasing to exist. It will not exist in two, three hundred years. Okay, so it, the problem, if you're a Hegelian is at least, or if you've got, a tolerance for long timelines that you will not live to see, as I would hope everybody does who's, you know, engaging with this material. The problem is going to take care of itself. You don't need some reform package to dismantle the managerial state. Anywhere they need to plot to murder a man who's dying of terminal cancer, you know. Employers, rewarding your staff?

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Visit OptionsCard.i.e. today. Could it, let me, I've always wanted to ask you when you, when you mentioned that, could technology hasten that end? Yeah, technology is always the wild card input. You know, future shock's a real thing. And I think, I mean, people don't realize it. I think because obviously the 20th century, the future shock was quite a bit more disruptive and punctuated.

I mean, in the 20th century, you literally had guys who spent their childhood, you know, growing up in a house and often didn't even have an indoor bathroom. And people got by, you know, in horse drawn carriages. And by the time, they were not even all that elderly, there was jet airplanes that, you know, was the preferred mode of travel. That's totally insane. Nothing like that's happened in the 21st century, but the information revolution and it's changed everything. And that's having a massive psychological impact at scale.

And that's directing political economy in all kinds of ways. And the most critical thing, and not enough has written about this, even among guys who are way smarter than me and deal in macroeconomic analysis for a living, even guys who are technology experts, you know, who understand macroeconomics and also understand high finance, the degree to which uncertainties can be eliminated in terms of market events and to the second informational awareness has eliminated the potential. potential for panics, you know, like in 1987, for example, that is huge. So you have this market, you know, and for the record, too, I mean, this doesn't mean, this doesn't mean shilling with Trump, but it's interesting how markets just like continue to boom when supposedly tariffs are going to like make us all poor and starving and having to eat dirt or something. But, you know, the degree to which, I mean, don't be wrong. Like, growth can't go on forever. I'm not saying that but the degree to which uncertainties have been eliminated and which in turn not only allow for

efficient allocation and capital in a way that's never before seen which in turn obviously facilitates profitability in plenty but also it means you know panics born of aggregate uncertainties that's a thing of the past and that changes everything and that continues to change everything. You know, and I mean, that's just one example. Okay. So, yeah, I don't claim to be an auger or anything, but these sorts of historical features,

the very bare bones historical features of humans and how they behave politically, and, you know, based on the precedent of the preceding, you know, 10 centuries, if we want to use the Spanglarian timeline of, you know, the West is a coherent culture form being emerging around 1,000 AD, based on all those things, based more approximately on the present of the 20th century, globalism is replacing the post-Westphalian order in a way that's comparatively rapid,

and this will be fully realized within a couple of centuries, in my opinion. Maybe more like three centuries, but I think it'll probably have on about two. And yeah, obviously there's some sort of punctuated event, whether it's like a true natural disaster or something, or whether it's some sort of game-changing technological innovation, or neither. But something that for whatever reason is the ability to impact, you know, either the availability of essential commodities that fuel the economy. the number of which you're increasing too I mean things are yeah there's a great that that's that's the part of the dichotomy of economic development you know efficiency it's like you can make okay you can get like more power out of like a four-cylinder engine now than like you used to get out of like a top of the line V8

it's insane you know like the amount of horsepower you can squeeze out of that only more efficient engineering you know and obviously you know the switch to electric and stuff is, you know, sparing, you know, the need for petroleum. But there's this voracious need for other commodities and the need to exploit

resources in greater depth and at greater scale to facilitate these things. That's just inevitable. You know, so it's, but at the same time, you know, and I'm not, I'm not some neoliberal

economist. I mean, I think anybody knows and I'm certainly not somebody who has some abiding faith in the experts to model solutions to everything in any endeavor or subject area. But I

do believe, and don't be wrong, modeling is not some end-all be-all in economics, but there is a place for it in some, in terms of devising some predictive metrics. And that makes it easier to negotiate a true crisis than before.

You know, but again, I don't, something like the Great Depression isn't possible anymore. That doesn't mean there couldn't be some utterly catastrophic event. You know, and I think a shortage economy, especially in some places on this planet where logistical structures are tenuous at best and are susceptible to breakdown, that's going to become a reality in a way that people aren't really used to in the developed world. You know, but I, there's not going to be, and there could be some catastrophic political event. You know, I mean, obviously everything changes in the globalist paradigm because you're not talking about states facing off its scale and all that entails, but there could absolutely be some catastrophic political event of a war in peace

kind of nature that causes some huge disaster. You know, like, I don't, even if, I don't see this happening, but it's not impossible. Let's say there was some sort of mass escalation in, you know, the, you know, in the border, in the nomad land between India and Pakistan or something, and there there's some sort of substantial nuclear exchange you know and uh like 40 million people are wiped out and uh there's a big chunk of uh the subcontin that's now is irradiated wasteland that would totally fuck everything up you know like make no mistake um and again i don't see that happening but you know there's not there's not going to be some catastrophic market event like the Great Depression and where you know in one day all this uh all this fluid capital is just

wiped out and you know there's a this kind of top down uncertainty as the crisis is underway I mean that that's not possible anymore and unless somehow you know the the contemporary communication grid just suddenly got wiped out I mean that's interesting counterfactual too I promise I'll stop this derailment in a second. But, you know, in the latest, in the final phase of the Cold War, it was a foregone conclusion of SAC, NORAD, and the Pentagon and war planners, or guys who'd game scenarios like Thomas Schelling,

that if the Soviets launched a Baltimore Blue assault, the first salvo would be a submarine launched ballistic missile at depressed trajectory which wouldn't trigger early warning and it'd be airburst and the EMP would basically blind the East Coast and knock out early warning and telecom you know and then presumably you can saturate the target area with with uh with new player strikes and you know and one fell swoop and and essentially knock out the kind of the United States the ability to blind the kind of global communications grid you could uh you could really foobar the world economy that way if days went by and they

couldn't get it back online I'm sure there's backup systems I'm sure there's terrestrial backup systems that I don't understand because I'm not an engineer or a tech guy, but that wouldn't mitigate if you truly, if you truly sabotage the ability of, you know, America to communicate with Europe and Asia and the Near East and vice versa for, say, like, a week. You know, you could, like that in and of itself would be bad, but, you know, it wouldn't be catastrophic, but within that operational environment, you can really mess a lot of things up. And that's something that's not often talked about. I mean, maybe in part because nobody wants to give anybody ideas, but I, you know, I don't, I don't, that's definitely not impossible, man. You know, it's certainly not just like

info wars kind of stuff. But failing something like that, there's not going to be just some spontaneous market collapse. You know, and I'll die on that hill. And I know some people claim that that's, you know, not thought out, but I'm going to assure you it is thought out. But in any event, you know, the, and for context, too, Sombart was viewed in his day and even a bit beyond as being radically left-wing. and he was considered to be something of a social activist

as regards the fortunes of working people and he made these things a priority and he in his youth when he uh you know he started out at the university of Bresla which at the time was considered somewhat of not so much a lesser institution and it was kind of out of the way.

It didn't have the same kind of prestige behind it, but he made a lot of waves with even his early work product. And at that time, he couldn't be called an orthodox Marxist because he was too committed to a true Higalian perspective. But he did, at the very beginning of his career, identify as a Marxian economist. You know, he quickly stepped back from that,

in his more mature works and then ultimately he broke altogether he's saying you know Marx made fundamental errors on on critical points of importance you know but he getting into the getting into the subject matter that I intended to why there is no socialism in the United States It's really interesting because we're fairly early on in the book. He takes on Weber's theory head on. You know, and he says conventional wisdom is that the Anglo-Saxon race is uniquely averse to socialism and even the proletariat within Anglophone societies and particularly ones founded by where the majority of the founding stock was, you know,

dissenter Protestant and culture, that the, the individualism of these people and their hostility to central planning, you know, defeats any prospect of anassant socialism emerging. Sombart didn't accept that. The first, he said, you know, there's, He said if you look at the history of England, particularly, you know, in the 1830s and 1840s, there was a strongly socialist flavored everything that was happening there, and that continued to the then-present, you know, which was the early 20th century. You know, and by the late 19th century in America, the urban proletariat was overwhelmingly German, Irish, and the big cities, I mean, you know,

Slavic, Italian. I think the data that Sombard cites, you know, I think the urban American population of around the turn of the 20th century, I think only about 7% of people were anglophone. You know, they were either Protestant English speakers of, you know, an Anglo or Anglo Irish or Anglo-Skottish heritage or English heritage or, you know, immigrants from England or Scotland in Northern Ireland. But they couldn't be said to have the numbers on the ground and be having a dispositive effect. You know, and especially in places like Chicago or Philly

or New York City, it wasn't a melting pot at all. It was, you know, communities and neighborhoods divided by ethnos. You know, it's not as if these people were somehow assimilated into some Anglo-Saxon, dissenter Protestant mode of culture. I mean, I don't think that kind of thing is really possible anyway. I, that, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a 20th century kind of mythos, civic mythos.

But, you know, there's, there's complexities of a sociological nature that Sombardum identified as, as the, as the psychological basis of resistance to socially. And there's a huge structural factor, too, that is interrelated to that. Some aren't made the point that public life in America is extraordinarily complicated, the size of the USA, the regularity of elections, the way federalism operates with local political concerns. he said that the reason why political machines emerged to advance policy initiatives is because otherwise there's no reasonable way even for an informed citizen to you know to to participate in the process in a way that advances a policy initiative and even people organized into what could constitute a political action committee and have capital behind them you know you essentially need a political machine to organize policy across dozens of offices, you know, some of which are going to be

abjectly hostile to each other during election season, even if they're on the same party ticket for, you know, budgetary reasons or for reasons of, you know, the duties they owe to lobbyists or bankrolling the campaign. So he said that single member districts, a couple of complexity, coupled with irregularity of elections, this essentially makes it an out. that political machines are going to develop. Okay. And the probability of some political machine taking on an overtly socialist platform at odds with the interest of, you know, the industrial patrons that, that are bankrupting

the machine, there's no chance of that happening, you know. But also, he made the point that in America, even working people, you know, true proletarians, he said that if you're paid living wage in America, you can essentially partake of the same stuff that a rich man does, I mean, within reason. You know, not somebody like Andrew Carnegie, but, you know, he's like,

there's not the same relationship between producers and employees in America that there is in Europe. You know, and in Europe, you know, he said working people not only weren't respected, but the familiar forms of feudalism were taken on really by the new capitalist elite, but it wasn't templed by nobles obliged. But at the same time, one thing that was retained was this, frankly, oppressive sensibility whereby workers were expected to maintain the distinctions between themselves and their social betters. You know, something's really interesting to me, and this might seem like a peculiar example, but it's illustrative.

You ever wondered why the Swiss guards, you know, guard the Pope, they wear these really wild harlequin outfits? Do you know why that is? I don't. Okay. Traditionally in Europe, throughout the feudal era, there was what's called sumptuary laws. If you were a peasant, you could only dress a certain kind of way. You can only wear certain colors. You couldn't bear arms.

You couldn't, like, carry a sword or a blade on you. And there were certain articles of clothing that marked out, you know, lesser nobility, greater nobility, you know, knights, what have you. The people who eventually these laws just kind of faded, you know, as the modern age set in in earnest. But during the 30 years war and the Swiss guards, they trace their heritage of the 30 years war because the Swiss. produced the best mercenaries. If you were a man under arms in the 30 years war, it was almost certain you were going to die.

And also, there had to be incentives to join up and basically serve as a mercenary because privateers were the core of infantry in the 30 years war, like some Duke or some baron raising a battalion or whatever. You were exempt from the sumptory laws.

So 30 years wore mercenaries. They basically were like, they dressed like mob guys or like Yakuza for the day. They'd wear, like, really wild, loud clothes, basically to mark themselves out. And because they could, you know, so the Swiss guards took to wear in these crazy harlequin outfits, and that kind of became their trademark. You know, so the guys guarding the Pope, they still, like, wear those kinds of clothes. Like, those guys are badasses.

They're, like, tear you apart. If you, like, make fun of them, be like, you're dressed like a fig or something. I'm going to hope nobody would. would do that anyway because that kind of you know guys in that role is their respect but you know they uh i like that they uh i like that they carry mp5s yeah yeah no they're just cool i think i read this whole i read this whole thing on them because it became i think it was uh when ratsinger became the pope he was an interesting guy you know and uh i started reading about the swiss guards and like it's its whole interesting thing but uh like the vandigan city is interesting

like what goes on in there like i just think it's cool there's because like it's ealing to me because i'm i'm I'm this, you know, kind of anglophone, Midwestern prod type guy. In any event, that's just one example, whereby these distinctions of a hedonic and very, very personal nature were maintained to distinguish between class. And in Europe, this created real dysfunction as people tried to sustain that system for among other reasons, as a control mechanism, to mitigate the potential for a radical conscience.

and it's emerging in the proletariat, but this led to really bad outcomes. But the, you know, in America, obviously that wasn't an issue. So, and people wouldn't begrudge you having money. Like, if you had it, I mean, frankly, like, in America, it's good to have money. You know, yeah, there's, like, envy and stuff and some ugly sociological tendencies that were kind of ingrained in America. But I was going to look at a working guy who's doing well, who's, like, getting paid and being smart with his money, who buys nice stuff.

it'd be like, you know, that's out of order. Like, you shouldn't be doing that, you know, obviously. You know, but that's, um, yeah, I guess we're coming up on the hour. I'll, uh, as we, what's that? Do it a part three? Yeah, I, and I promise, well, I didn't mean to take up so much time on that sort of ancillary stuff, but it's thought it was important, but we'll, we'll wrap up Sombard next episode, and we'll get into the Frankfurt school and some of these things like

Gramsian Adorno, who, you know, I think a lot of people read stuff like Buchanan's Death of the West. It was telling me wrong. That's a good book. But they develop kind of an oversimplified view of the Frankfurt School and a lot of these post-Marxist radical ideologies. And they paid all sorts of tendencies with the broad brush of cultural Marxism. And that's not conceptually accurate. So we'll get into that.

And again, I apologize. I took too much time on discussing the, you know, the, you know, the tragedy last week and stuff. I just thought it should be acknowledged. No, I think people want to hear exactly what you have to say about it because, yeah, I mean, it affected me differently and I thought it would. So, yeah.

But anyway, give your substack and your website will get out of here. Yeah, the best place to find my comments on substack. it's real thomas 7777.substack.com my website's number 7h-h-M-A-S-777.com I'm on social media for the time being we'll see how long that lasts because they love to censor me but you know you can find my

you can find my Twitter, my ex from Substack, I'm on Instagram I mean I'm a lot of places but the best place to find you know my dedicated content like my long-form stuff and the podcast and other things is on substacks. So please visit there and engage.

You know, we've also got a pretty active chat community there too, you know. And if you're one of us, you're welcome. Thank you, Thomas. Until the next time.