The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1297: The Tribal Future of the West w/ Mike Maxwell of Imperium Press

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

71 MinutesPG-13Mike is the founder of Imperium Press dot org and the proprietor of the Imperium Press Substack.Mike and Pete discuss the contents of Mike's book, Tribal Future of the West, which he wrote for his publishing company, Imperium Press.Tribal Future of the WestThe Cultured Thug HandbookImperium PressMike's SubstackPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Antelope Hill - Promo code "peteq" for 5% off - https://antelopehillpublishing.com/FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% off - https://www.foxnsons.com/Support 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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Everything's there. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignonez Show, Mike Maxwell from Empirium Presses back. How are you doing, Mike? I'm doing very well. It's been a little while. since we've talked. And I'm really looking forward to this one. Well, it seems that we talk when you put a book out personally put a book out. I think that probably was the last time we talked, actually. And so let's just jump right into this. You have a new book out, tribal future of the West.

As soon as I, as soon as I got the overall theme, I was like, oh, yeah, this is definitely something I want to talk to Mike about. So if you don't mind, I'm just going to, I'm just going to start because there was a bunch of, there's a bunch of topics we can hit here. So let's start with this. Basically, it seems like the overriding theme is that Western sovereignty is under strain and it's evolving. There's an evolving nature of it. So how did you start noticing this? Well, the book has quite a long prehistory actually. One of our guys, who's actually a co-host of mine on Harth Fire Radio,

which is a podcast network that we built. He said to me, you know, this is sort of the culmination of a lot of what Imperian's been doing for a few years, putting out books like the Gaetano Mosca book about the mafia, putting out the, I mean, the ancient city, that's one we put out ages ago, you know, Chris Bond's nemesis. That's another old one. A lot of the stuff has sort of been moving in this direction. And I think what I've tried to do here anyway, what I've tried to do is to put the pieces together.

So it really started as a series of observations over a course of years, little things, little cultural cracks that turned out to be the edges of a much bigger pattern, I suppose. So the first one I've been blogging about on my substack for a long time. call it the archaic revival. And for years, I'd been seeing the return of, like, primitive and Gothic aesthetics, the reappearance of pre-axial age forms of thinking. So this is, like, before the era of, you know, the Buddha and Zoroaster and everything, like these very ancient tribal forms of thinking, the decline of abstraction, universalism, and even aesthetically, too, like things like,

the rise of modernist aesthetics in the 20th century. This is not something that just started happening yesterday, right? Like Picasso to me looks very primitive. The vortices and even to a degree, surrealism, looks very archaic and primitive to me. So I've noticed that first. And then, of course, I came to grips with Carl Schmidt. And his friend-enemy distinction completely rejects this idea of,

liberal idea of a global village. He is kind of like a 20th century thinker that describes a very ancient political reality, which is that politics is about who you stand with and who you stand against. And once you see this, I mean, basically what he's doing is he's giving us the analytical framework through which we can understand tribalism, ultimately. Another thing I started noticing and reading the Moscow book was a big eye-opener for this, but I sort of noticed it a little bit earlier too is that criminal organizations have been acting kind of like many states. There was a sort of aha moment for me, realizing that these sub-state actors actually wielded what you might call sovereign functions. And my understanding of sovereignty comes

out of absolutism. That would be a little bit of a digression for now, but basically, yeah, the idea is that the sovereign stands above the law. And I noticed that there were certain non-state actors that basically do that. They decide the exception in their own little remit, their own little geographical area. And the tipping point for me for understanding this was a documentary about the Golden Dawn in Greece, there was a woman that was being interviewed, and this was during the Eurozone crisis around 2015, and she said something that stuck with me. She said that during this Eurozone crisis, the police stopped responding because there was too much going on. And then she said, so we started calling the Golden Dawn. And that line kind of hit me. It appeared to me that even

in a supposedly modern European democracy, sovereignty had actually devolved overnight, not to the state, not to an NGO, not to a technocratic bureaucracy, but to a local and straightforwardly tribal organization. And then this was kind of the beginning of really the thesis crystallizing in my mind over a period of years, that sovereign functions appear to be leaking down. downward and outward and just everywhere away from the center. The center, that is to say, the official power in society, the sovereign, is losing capacity. And you see these archaic forms of order resurfacing, of which the dissident right is one, in terms of its, the revival, identitarianism seems to me that's something very ancient

coming back. And you get what can really only be described as tribal authority, filling the vacuum. Now, by this I don't necessarily mean guys running around in loincloths with spears and things like that. But what I mean is a personalist face-to-face loyalty to a set of people or a loyalty to a concrete group as opposed to a loyalty to an idea, loyalty to an abstraction, including an abstraction of the nation. the nation is somewhere between tribalism and liberalism, but we might get into this. It's sort of an unstable halfway house between one and the other.

And now it seems like we are moving away from this globalized, abstract, propositional identity politics towards a more straightforwardly tribal politics. So when I started talking about this, because I've been talking about retribalization for about two years now, people thought it was like kooky or larpy or overblown or whatever, and maybe Mike's just being metaphorical about tribes. But I really wasn't. And this view that I've come to is not based on, like it's not a nostalgia for the ancient world. This is about hard analysis of long term trends. of elite fragmentation, of the collapse of our shared realities, what I've called the epistemic divorce, of just the physical and material capacity that has declined, and the rise of what I call in the book, these paratrovereigns, paratrovereign actors. There's a huge, like, what we're seeing today is essentially a perfect storm building to devolve. like power and command and sovereignty and imperative away from the nation state.

And I think that this is something that is going to come on astoundingly fast. A lot of people are going to be taken by surprise. And what I want is for people to see it before it happens. So that's really what this book is about. What would you say to people who would point to civilizations that still exist that are somewhat cohesive, like China. Whenever tribalism is brought up or secession or city-states, people always point, well, China is not falling apart over there.

They're not splitting up. They will just, with them being a juggernaut, they will just roll over you and eat you up. Right, yes. And China is what I would call a centripetal force, right? They're a force that is pushing things back to the center in the West because an external foe is a very, very strong force to muster people together. It's a big part of why nation states came into being in the first place at a feudalism. And China itself is obviously very cohesive.

It's on the rise. Um, and yeah, it's, it's a good, you know, counterpoint here. Like, because at first glance, China kind of looks like the anti-tribal future itself. It's this hypercentralized leviathan with a cohesive elite, right? They've ironclad discipline in the CCP, a powerful surveillance state. They've got a deep industrial base and many other things, uh, going for them. Now, I would point out, first, that China is strong today because it never really liberalized, right? Like, there was a sort of, there were overtures made towards this in the 1980s with Deng Xiaoping. But much of what is eroding the West is the product of liberal individualism. And this forms a big portion of the analytical framework of the book. China does not have what we might call the epistemic divorce, this idea of no shared truth, like the collapse of grand narratives and the fragmentation of people into epistemic silos. They don't have that. They also don't

have elite fragmentation. Their elite is very cohesive. They don't have mass migration. They don't have minority politics. Their national identity is quite strong. So it never really accepted the premises of liberalism, but rather it maintained a single elite narrative, a very high degree of censorship, and a strong bureaucratic oversight, and a very, very limited degree of pluralism. So this delays the devolutionary pressures that are hitting the West, because they're going to hit the West first, but doesn't actually eliminate those pressures. China is facing its own centrifugal forces. These are the forces pushing outward and pushing things away from each other.

China is still in its high centralization phase, maybe where the West was in the early to mid-20th century or something. But there are several factors, I would say, that would indicate future strain in China. China's social contract, you might say, I don't like that term, but in any case, that's maybe just a vestigial libertarianism thing for me. I just don't like the idea of the social contract. But anyway, everybody knows what I mean.

Their social contract is based on prosperity. And in China today, growth is starting to collapse. And the middle class is under substantial strength. they've got a property bubble that kind of makes puts ours in the shade it is absolutely like I was in China I did a what what do you call like a layover in Guangzhou a couple of years ago and for various reasons the flight was delayed so we had to we had to go get a hotel in the in the city and this is like you know this is not Beijing. This is like, you know, there's not many people that speak English in the city, right?

It's like, it's a gigantic megalopolis, but it's a very Chinese place. And I noticed, you know, they gave us a one, like a 24-hour visa to leave the airport because they're a serious country and you have to follow the rules. So they gave us a 24-hour visa and we went, we did a little bit of exploring around this city. And I noticed that there was just an absolutely colossal, colossal amount of building. This was about, now that I think about it, was, yeah, about three years ago, something like that. And there is just, it's, the property bubble there is absolutely astounding. And there, and economic factors or economic indicators are showing that there's a slow down happening. And just like our property bubble, it depends upon perpetual asset

inflation and things. There is just their economy doesn't add up, basically. They're doing amazing things and I have great respect for what the Chinese are doing, but it is not a healthy economy nor is ours of course now also china has a demographic problem it's a somewhat of a different problem than the west has but um their birth rates are catastrophically low and because of the one child policy china is aging faster than any society has in history it has a huge huge um you know uh like you look at that population curve, it's got a huge top heavy curve at the very top. And it's got this China actually, I believe their population is now shrinking. And they have an elderly population, which, you know, this feeds into the economic problems because they have lower

productivity. They have higher welfare costs. And they have younger cohorts that are restless and overburdened. And so this is a potent centrifugal force. And the other thing about China is that they are quite regional. The coastal China is effectively its own world, right? It's not that different from the West. I mean, it's different in many ways, but it's still, it's rich, it's globalized, it's connected. It's, yeah, it's not Davos Man, but they have their own sort of version of that. Whereas inland China is poorer, it's very much.

much more rural and more tribal. Effectively, there are two Chinas economically and culturally. So this creates a kind of social cleavage, which is going to be very hard for them to paper over. And also they have ethnic cleavages as well. Within China, this huge country with billions of people, there are powerful ethnic nations. They have the Hui, they have the Tibetans, they have the Uyghur, And these people have never fully assimilated. And these are latent tribal identities that are really only held in place under coercive pressure. And China also has a problem that I call elite overproduction. It's not my term.

It comes from Peter Turchin. And this means that China, and this is a problem in the West too, is producing much, much more, many more educated aspirants than elite positions. And this is a civilizational warning sign. It's almost a predictor of fragmentation, of elite fragmentation, and that means societal fragmentation. So this centralization today that they're undergoing may actually mask, does mask, quite a few forces that will later yield fragmentation. And even at its most centralized, China still has built-in tribal elements. There are clan networks there. There are regional patronage systems. Wealth structures are concentrated still in families very much. They have their own local criminal syndicates,

some of which govern in tandem with the central state, right? And they still have like informal governance at the village level, especially obviously in the rural inlands. So they do have tribal substrates that are kind of sitting underneath the surface of this, what looks like a very modern state. And China's authoritarian strength, The thing about authoritarianism is that it doesn't fragment slowly. What we're seeing in the West, which is a kind of authoritarian, but it's a very soft authoritarianism.

Hard authoritarianism tends to splinter very suddenly when the strong center breaks. When that happens, and actually I go into this about ancient China in the book, you get the reassertion of power by regional bosses. These factional alliances will harden very quickly into sovereign actors. Ethnic minorities will begin to push for autonomy. You'll get criminal underworld elements that flourish and then become actual governors in their own right. This happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And this has happened repeatedly in Chinese history.

This is not something that is hypothetical. It happened with the end of the Han dynasty, the end of the Tang dynasty, the collapse of the Yuan, and the warlord era, even in the 20th century after the Qing dynasty fell. And even after that, even after the imperial period with the fall of the nationalists on the mainland, with Mao himself, that was an instance of a kind of tribalism. So China's political cycle has always oscillated between this imperial center and warlordism. And so anyway, I'm kind of going on for a long time here. But in the big picture, China looks like a very anti-fragmentation power. And it may actually, as I say, act as a centripetal force pushing Western states to unify out of fear of their rise. In the medium term, China is facing a lot of the same pressures that we are in the West.

Demographic collapse and elite overproduction and things like that. But it will face these same pressures later and perhaps more violently. In the long term, I don't think China is at all exempt from this cycle of sovereign devolution. If anything, it embodies this classic imperial pattern, maybe better. as well or better than any other society. So it's under the surface, you get these deep structural vulnerabilities. And I think it's only looking at it

in the short term where it looks strong. That was a good diversion though. I think that helps a lot when you can look at something that's different from the West and see that it's suffering the same issues. So I wanted to move on to institutional decay in the West. And one of the things that you brought up was it's just bureaucracies are inefficient and technocracy has limitations. I think the bureaucracy is pretty clear to people.

But when you say technocratic limitations, that seems to butt up against the people who are screaming about Palantir and Peter Thiel and a panopticon, which may be. something that they try to go towards but are you saying that you you doubt whether they're going to even have that ability at this point yes yeah I I definitely do now in framing this thesis I have tried to be very very careful because the title and the general scope and thesis of the book can very easily sound alarmist, and that is absolutely not what I, it's not what I want, right? But, and so as a result of that, what I've tried to do is I've tried to consider, there's a whole chapter on, you know, on counter arguments and there's a separate chapter on

like centralizing forces. So, you know, maybe we should talk a little bit about technocratic governance and what it is, actually, and why it works. And also, and then I think we'll be in a position to understand why it will actually fail, right? So the man in the street tends to think that the West is run by politicians, but in reality, it's handled by technocrats, right? This is something that James Burnham explained, gosh, like 80 years ago. go now or something like that, right? This is the Weberian administrative state that's run by regulators and scientists and financial experts and bankers and things like that, right? It's the whole idea that no matter who's elected, you still have this machinery that keeps

society running. And for decades, it did actually keep things running, right? But in the long arc of history, technocracy is a temporary phase. it was really powerful in the 20th century, right? Because you had these huge bureaucracies. Institutions were fairly stable, at least in our backyard. They were fairly stable. You had like expert-based governance and things like that. And technocracy's strength came from, like,

technocracy is something the Jordan Peterson's and Stephen Pinkers and those folks of the world, they think of technocracy as like the ideal form of governance or just like what good governance looks like. Because of course you will listen to the experts. Of course we want to have the smartest guys in the room running the show. But technocracy is actually, it's really a luxury. It's actually something that we can afford. And you You need a lot in place to make technocracy work. You need to have high trust. You need to have a society of very, very high trust so that people believe in the experts,

so that when Anthony Fauci says something, people listen instead of viewing him as an enemy or a mouthpiece for their political opponents or for their ethnic opponents or something like that, right? So you need that. High trust is very important. You also need a very complex society because just by the very nature of technocracy, you need specialists. Essentially, that's what it is. It's the rule by specialist. So you need a modern economy. You need very large and well-maintained infrastructures and things like that. And you also need prosperity. this is really important uh you know prosperity is like you know when technocracy delivers prosperity this you know feeds into high trust right like when when things are good uh people will

trust the experts and trust the science and they'll get vaccinated and they will um you know they'll be happy with very large and expensive public works projects and things like that I guess what else do you need here? You need, fundamentally, you need a coherent elite. You need a managerial class that all speaks the same language. So, like, technocracy is kind of like the centripetal heart, really, of the modern state. It binds society together through competence and predictability and this continuity, no matter who comes in, even if it's a evil Trump.

you know that the deep state is going to keep things rolling. Now, there are some problems. The main problem is that we have declining competence. And this is being driven by factors that are, it's not just that we've made bad decisions. It's not just that we have put the wrong people in positions of power. There are systemic pressures that are pushing down competence over time. This is something that Dr. Ed Dutton talks about in his books, which is the decline of intelligence.

We are now, on average, 15 IQ points less intelligent than we were in the Victorian age. That's like the difference between, well, a technocratic elite and a school teacher or something like that. You know what I mean? So, and this is, according to him, and I actually agree with this, driven by the relaxation of Darwinian pressures. So basically we've just, like, it's too easy for us. There's no competition and all of that, right? So we are objectively getting less intelligent, whatever the cause is.

And not only that, but the bureaucracy is now drowning in its own proceduralism. It's too big. It's too rigid. It moves too slowly. and it is now basically unable to deliver basic results. And this corrods its moral authority. So, you know, we have this declining legitimacy that is coming in. And because as their performance worsens the trust that I mentioned up front declines.

And people are no longer just willing to accept what Anthony Fauci says, right? Because, well, we can see what happened. in 2020. Whatever, whatever that was all about, it was not about public health. So this citizens no longer accepting what the technocratic elite, the managerial elite says, brings in this epistemic divorce thing. And the question comes up, who's like, whose data are we looking at? What experts do we mean? When you say trust the science, which science, right? Because quite obviously there are certain their entire branches of science which are now effectively fiction right like things like you know sociology and well genomics is still pretty hard

science but even it is well it's it's too dangerous you know what i mean like whose models are we following following and this has led to the replication crisis which i think it's very interesting It was a huge story about two or three years ago, but nobody's talking about it anymore. But that's not because it's been solved. It's just because of the very nature of academia itself, which is essentially they fetishize novelty. They want the newest. And like anything that is overturning, like established norms gets funding and whatever

is like, you know, proving what we've known forever is ignored. So anyway, uh, the. competence is declined. And as a result, the legitimacy is declined. And the decline of legitimacy moves into this epistemic fragmentation. And meanwhile, the bureaucracy as it has matured has become too complex. There's too many agencies. They all have like overlapping mandates and they compete with each other. And they're all careerist. And they have the wrong incentives. and this is driving internal factionalism within the elite. These bureaucracies have become totally sclerotic.

They have competing priorities. And when these agencies, like the bureaucratic agencies, when they pursue these competing agendas, this is when the center dissolves. You know, like our guys tend to look favorably, or at least less unfavorably upon the Third Reich. You know, but they also, they had this idea at the time where what you would basically do is set a number of different agencies to try to achieve the same goal and sort of let them fight it out and made the best man win. It was a kind of application of Darwinism to bureaucracy.

And that didn't turn out very well because you need to coordinate. So this is driving, these, you know, overlapping, competing priorities are driving elite fragmentation. And once elites fracture, the bureaucracy becomes this battlefield. It no longer is about governing. It's about maintaining and protecting sinecures. And even AI itself, which is supposed to be this panacea, like AI is supposed to solve all of our problems. It doesn't actually do that with this man. Nigeria priesthood.

And so anyway, they have basically lost the public mandate and they cannot out-compete these para-sovereigns, these smaller, more agile paratrovereigns that govern on the ground because they're slow and they're rule-bound. These parisovarens are more agile and adaptive and they can improvise and things like that. The bureaucracy has no legitimacy. It can't really operate very well in this most. mosaic environment of different factions, different peoples, different folks, different paratrovereigns, and it will never survive an elite civil war. And it also cannot survive

a collapse of material capacity or like essentially us becoming less wealthy over time. But that's a whole other tangent. So anyway, to wrap this up, there's a number of converging factors that will overcome technocracy. As these parasoverns become local providers in their neighborhood, identity will become primary again, and elites will turn against each other. This is already happening. The administrative state is losing its capacity, and as a result, its legitimacy is evaporating. And so I really don't think that technocracy is going to fix the problem. Well, let's stay on para Sovereigns. How do you see this tribalism that's growing? How do you see technology helping them to protect themselves? Because, you know, like I mentioned, if you have a

small, a smaller state is more vulnerable. I mean, you could argue Switzerland and places like that who are just friendly with everybody and, you know, they have some businesses that other countries don't house. But how would you see them protecting themselves? And because I think that is the way you get people to embrace your vision and your leadership is you have to be able to feed them and you have to be able to protect them. So how do you see that working out in the future? Right. So in terms of protection, what we're talking about fundamentally is one of the most important sovereign functions, and that is monopoly of force, right? Or perhaps slightly more dramatically, we could say the ability to wage war. One of the important elements here, I think, to understand is how war has changed over time. And this is a whole chapter in the book because it is so important. I mean, this is basically how how we monopolize force in the 21st century is very different than how we monopolized it in the 17th century or whatever. So just very quickly to kind of sprint through this idea of the generations of warfare,

security experts recognize five generations. And obviously the first generation came first. This was in the You know, the 1600s and lasted until about the Napoleonic era, the Napoleonic wars were really the high point of this form of sovereignty, which is line and column, where you get this rigid battlefield geometry. You get, you know, men lining up in these massive formations. And this kind of warfare required a very large state. So this was one of the material factors that began the centralization process, the move from feudal baronies and things like that to nation states. Because only nation states can mobilize and coordinate force at a scale that was required to win these battles. Now, this changed a little bit, but it kind of changed. It changed in some interesting ways, right about World War I,

which is when we get the second generation of warfare, which is trench warfare or artillery warfare. The name of the game for first generation, so again, going back to this Napoleonic era, was maneuver. The better you could maneuver, the more you could win. All of a sudden, when this new style, of warfare comes in this like heavily mechanized uh style of warfare in world war one it's no longer about maneuver in fact maneuvering becomes very difficult and that's exactly part of the problem

it becomes about attrition all of a sudden now the war is about grinding people down instead of outflanking them and it's also and this is kind of the decisive thing about the second generation It's about having an industrial base. The only way that you can fit out these armies and supply them with what they need is by having industrial capacity. So this drove further centralization because, of course, you know, you need to, not only do you need a nation state, but you need an industrial nation. So that's the second generation of warfare. The third generation comes in late World War II, and this is Blitzkrieg warfare. And so very interestingly, again, we go back to maneuver as being decisive, just like it was in the first generation.

This is still very mechanized, but now is about speed and outflanking the enemy and gaining the initiative and everything like that. And of course, technologically, it requires a yet larger state. So it's even more centralizing in some ways. But also, a change starts to happen in warfare here. Because it is more improvisational, the command structure now has to be a bit more flexible. Now you have to basically give more decisive power to the, maybe not at the level of the general, but at a much lower level, like, you know, commanding on the ground, people that are actually just giving direct orders to, you know, lower level units.

So the monopoly of organized violence is starting to loosen a little bit. And it loosens very, very much in the next generation, which is the fourth. And that is guerrilla warfare, right? The paradigm here is Vietnam. Of course, everybody thinks of that when they think of guerrilla war. warfare. But this is where, I mean, for the first three generations, the central state was favored asymmetrically. Now it starts to go in the other direction and favor these smaller non-state actors. Because of course, in guerrilla warfare, you don't really actually know

who the enemy is. I mean, the enemy could be that civilian that's just standing over there with an IED. So the battlefield becomes more abstracted. It could be anywhere. It's in the cities. And what's more in guerrilla warfare, now legitimacy becomes really, really decisive. Part of the reason why the US was unable to win in Vietnam is that people just were sick of it. People just said, you know, what are we even doing here? And this sapped the will to fight and it was a big, big problem. So legitimacy becomes much more important than it has been before. And paratrovereigns, these smaller scale forces, thrive because they don't need tanks or air

forces. And in fact, having a tank doesn't actually help you at all against a guerrilla insurgency because you don't know who, you don't know who people are or they're agile. and they can disable these things very, like, you know, the material very easily. Tanks don't work that well in urban terrain, right? So things are starting to change. Again, it's very interesting. We go back to attrition as the main strategy of how you win war.

You don't need to win. You just need to not lose, right? Which is very easy for these decentralized groups. So the centralization actually becomes a bit of a vulnerability here with fourth generation warfare. And even so with lawfare and bureaucracy because these things are slow and they're a bit of a drag on states and being able to act. Now, the fifth generation warfare is something even more decentralized. more abstracted away from the battlefield because this is informational warfare this is warfare as economic warfare this is warfare as misinformation and sapping the the the opponents will to fight

and polluting his informational environment with subversive propaganda and things like that and this is really the way that warfare is kind of waged today. It's, it's, you know, very, very different now. So it's kind of evolved in a way that actually asymmetrically favors small guy and even anonymized actors. This is the reason why the security state is so worried about misinformation, because misinformation is actually a threat to state security. Because misinformation can and cause cascading effects in the economy and things like that. You know what I mean?

And, you know, also when people don't believe the same things, when you get the rise of like AI, people, take, for example, those horrific revelations about Trump in the Epstein files that we've all heard about, terrible stuff. All that's going to happen is that his base is just going to say, oh, that's fake, they lied. And even if there was like video that came out about like what he was supposedly up to, they're just going to say, oh, well, that's a deep fake.

So it's like impossible for the central authority to make itself decisive, essentially to force people to believe what it needs them to believe. It's impossible for them to gain control over narratives and things like that. And this is because of the way that warfare has changed. Warfare is now more abstract than it ever has been. Of course, it still requires force. It still requires violence. It still requires men with boots on the ground, wielding guns and things like that.

But even that is, even that in terms of like these guerrilla insurgencies, that is the central state no longer really. has this decisive power like it like it once did so I mean the like just the fact that the state has like military power and reserve doesn't actually necessarily make it it doesn't necessarily make it the one that's going to be able to exert sovereign authority because that now the way that you monopolize violence has changed. So you're going to see the rise, and you are already seeing the rise of these parasoverine threats. These, you could imagine something like criminal sovereigns. We just saw this week in Mexico an explosion of violence over corruption relating to the cartels.

Because the cartels are a paratrovereign, and the Mexican government can't really do anything about it. And people are sick of it. And so the legitimacy of the state, is collapsing. This, you know, the problem ostensibly is over corruption, but really what the problem is, is over the retreat of the state. People feel like the state has abandoned them to these cartels. So that's one paratrovereign that can straightforwardly go toe to toe with the state. There was actually an instance a few years ago where the son of a cartel world, Lord El Chapo was the state tried to arrest him and the cartels basically said, no, you're not doing that. And they essentially sprang him, not from jail, but they were

able to push back and prevent him from being arrested, which is quite a striking turn of events. I mean, could you imagine something like that in the 1950s in America? I certainly they couldn't. Now, of course, Mexico is not America, but all the same structural factors are converging. So criminal sovereigns are going to increasingly take bites out of the state's sovereign capacity. You've got ethnic enclaves, religious enclaves, take something like, what's it called, Dearborn, Michigan or whatever, what would it take to remove those people and to turn that back into what it looked like ethnically in the 1960s, it would take a degree of force that I just don't think is possible today.

So those people are effectively able to, you know, they're able to rule and decide the exception in their own little area. And then you've got like smaller things like militias or volunteer battalions or armed factions and things like that. And we haven't even really talked about things like, you know, cyber criminal syndicates, which themselves cost the state billions of dollars annually, hybrid sovereigns, like alliances between political and criminal elements with like, you know, communal elements and things like that. I just, you know, the idea of centralization or the nation state, the Westphalian nation state coming back, That's a real, that's a real bare market, in my opinion.

I guess the question would be is how do you break people of nationalism, the idea of nationalism? With populism comes nationalism, and populism has swept. And I think populism is just a bridge to what you're talking about, a more tribal future. But what do you do? do you describe nationalism as something smaller remind them it has you know a nation is its people it's not really a structure yeah what has to happen this do we need a like a serious crisis in order to help people to understand that um you know a nation of 350 to 400 million people is insanely, you're an insane person if you think it's possible even right now or especially in the future.

Well, this is something that goes outside of the scope of the book because the book is essentially a map for, as it says in the title, for the future, right? It's a descriptive work. It doesn't give prescriptions. Here's what we should do. But that's a good question. That's a fair question. And so, I mean, nationalism, so we have to understand kind of like where nationalism has gone and where it's gone wrong. It was the great centralizing force of the modern era. From the 18th to the 20th century, it fused millions of strangers into these unified continent-spanning nations. it replaced what we had before, which were these local loyalties. And it replaced those with a single national community, really in some ways an imagined community.

I know nationalists won't really like that because, you know, they are fighting back. And here's the thing. I'm not a nationalist. I'm a post-nationalist. But I'm not anti-nationalist because I think that the vision of nationalists. vision of nationalism is good. I think that, I mean, we've published, we published works by Martin Selner, we've published works by other nationalists. It's a noble and good thing. But nationalism only works when society shares the same narrative world, right? Once you get

this loss of shared truth, once elites begin fragmenting, once demographics become too heterogeneous than the central narrative no longer holds. So what as mass nationalism declines as the era of large unified national cultures declines, the nation state loses its integrative power and people fragment into essentially what you might call micro-nationalisms. People become more regional in their nationalism now they might think of themselves not as British but as Scottish or not as American but as Texan or not as Spanish but Catalonian so that might be they might break into these regional nationalisms well Spain is Spain has had

that for centuries that's yeah yeah one of their problems yeah it may it may formalize right they tried they tried to formalize. They had those Catalonia, they had the referendum, right? So people may see themselves more as like regionally nationalist or they may see themselves as ethnically nationalists, like in a more Balkan style micro-nation environment. They might become more ideologically nationalist, but I think that that's actually waning. essentially what's going to happen and what has been happening is that nationalism is shrinking into what we at Imperium call focusness, right? This is essentially the preferencing of more on-the-ground identities, the more fundamental pre-political identities over the less fundamental. So Fokishness is the preference for your family over your clan.

It's the preference for your clan over your tribe and the preference for your tribe over your nation. And it's also the preference of your nation over humanity. So Fokishness is essentially a more ontologically fundamental kind of nationalism. It's like the precursor to nationalism, right? it's it has it's about this deep sense of belonging to a particular people and this is not just ethnic it's also to the land to the stories to the customs and to your ancestors ultimately so it is also ethnic it's a way of being and it's a way of orienting yourself and organizing yourself into this long intergenerational chain that inherits things like ways of speaking, symbols, seasonal rituals, communal memories, and ancestral reverence, and things like that. This is the most personalist, situational, embodied, and non-amstracted ideology imaginable. And in fact, it's hard to even think of it as an ideology.

It's as much an ideology as like loving your own mother over some other person's mother is an ideology. It's really just natural. It's just nature. You know what I mean? So this is what's, this is the future. I mean, this is the tribal future because there are structural determinants that are moving us in this direction. People want to belong to communities. They want to have continuity with the past.

They want to keep their stories and pass their stories down to their children. They want to have a connection with their ancestors. They want rootedness, ultimately, is what they want. They want to be rooted to a place, rooted to a folk. And as abstraction, like the abstraction of the nation, but also conceptual abstraction, collapses, people turn inward to this more folkish layer. So when as states fail, you're going to see the rise of this patchwork mosaic of folkhoods. And people are returning to these smaller, older, and really more human units of identity.

So I think like for us, like, you know, as we see the writing on the wall, as we see the way the direction that the wind is blowing, it's really imperative for us to purposefully and just to turn in this direction before others do, because it is really those small-scale, agile factions with extremely high solidarity and in-group identity and preference that are going to be the most anti-fragile. in what I'm calling the tribal future. So I think we just basically need to become more focus. And because the ones who do will be the ones to survive. These focus tribal units are kind of like the hardy pioneer species

after a forest fire that sprout early and become the beginnings of these great oaks that will eventually grow up into nations because it is a cyclical model. It's a cyclical vision. So the people who embrace that first, I think, are going to do the best in the end. Well, to something practical, while we still have, what would be term like hybrid sovereignty, where formal states still exist, but people are breaking off into their tribes. What do you think is the best way to avoid, you know, that, existing monopoly on violence coming down upon you to, um, to crush you? Um, well, yeah, I mean,

how, how can you avoid the eye of, of Sauron? That's a tough one because kind of really the more, uh, consistent you are in doing these things, the more it's going to turn its eye toward you because, of course, the Imperial Center sees what direction things are going. I believe that what I'm saying here is known. And in fact, from what I understand, you know, listening to some of the interviews with David Betts, I actually just, I devote a chapter in the book to David Betts, who is a security analyst, has gone on a lot of podcasts this year to say some very similar things to what I've been saying for years. they're aware.

The security state is aware that this tribal future is coming, and they obviously don't like it. They would like to avoid it, but there's really very little that they can do because things are moving at the structural level against them. So if you stick your head up too far, then you're going to get batted down, right? And I think that there are some very well-meaning guys and very noble men. in our midst who are copping it right now because they are essentially coming out to you know they're basically coming out with it they're there being that um they're being the angle the eternal

anglo that believes that open debate and um saying things plainly will uh is is the way to go but i'm afraid that i think that we have to be a little bit more uh closed about it right but anyway building So as for like avoiding trouble, I think you just have to be sensible. You have to be not terribly public about doing these things and building intentional communities. But that's ultimately what you have to do is build those intentional communities to establish kindreds in your local area. to really just truly try to be, try to like just get to know your neighbors. And ultimately, I mean, this is part of why I myself am a pagan.

Not only do I believe in the myths and the, you know, not only do I accept the commands that come out of it, but also I think it has a practical use. because establishing these kindreds is ultimately going to allow us to, like as our children grow and intermarry with each other, this is what new folkhoods are built out of. I think we're going to go into a period of time that is not technologically, but perhaps socially analogous to the migration period after the fall of Rome,

where all of a sudden you've got all these new peoples that came into being. But what normal people can do to survive in this future is to basically strengthen their immediate circle of kin and friends and neighbors. Because in a devolutionary world that I see on the horizon, the most important resource is trust. local networks are going to matter more than, you know, distant affiliations. So normal people must invest in family relationships. You've got to get to know your neighbors. You've got to build those reciprocal friendships that can then grow into these intermarriages

later on, like intergenerational. So you've got to take part in local community groups. I think what everybody who isn't contaminated with a public profile should be doing is essentially infiltrating low governance at the local level. I think people should be trying to run for mayor, getting into your local council, these sort of things, and cultivate those mutual help networks with everybody that you can because an intact social circle will outperform any institution in a crisis, right? Another thing that you need to do is to develop practical competency. And this is something that, you know, I myself having, you know, learned Latin or done all these like esoteric, like weird things, maybe this is kind of, I should be taking more of my own advice here. But I think you really, you need to do that. You don't need to become a prepper, but you absolutely need to take a basic first aid course.

Sorry, you need to take a basic first aid course, which is something that I've done as a parent. I think everyone should do that. You need to become financially literate. You need to learn how to save. You need to obviously become solvent. You need to maybe you need to downgrade your living standards. Maybe you need to like, you know, if you are not financially solvent, you need to get that happening. You need to learn how you need to learn some basic.

maintenance. You should learn how to garden. You should learn how to grow some food. You should develop some basic self-protection skills. You should learn how to fight and wield force and become situationally aware as well, which is just as important. You should maybe log off the internet a little bit more often and learn how to network face-to-face and should shake hands and look people in the eye and get them to trust you. Because then you'll be able to organize men. And organizing men are very, very, this is essentially the main skill, right? Because that is the best resource.

There's a really wonderful anecdote of a clan chieftain in like early modern Scotland, I believe it was, that went to visit a noble or something like, that and here he is like walks into the nobles you know estate looks around and sees all this wonderful you know glassware and everything that's you know all these big beautiful accoutrements and things like that and he looks around and he says I've got much nicer candle holders than you at my place and you know they exchanged words and and then the noble came to visit him at one point and he said would you like to see my candle holders and you know he snapped his fingers and out came his retinue of

50 guys each holding candles right that is the most important resource men are the most important resource so you need to learn how to organize people how to command respect how to how to give orders and very importantly how to take orders what else can you do if if you can try to not rely upon a single point of failure. So, as I said, be financially solvent. Get yourself out of debt as quickly as you can. That's going to be harder than for most people.

It's going to be hard for most people because most likely, like if you're lucky, you've got a mortgage, but, and some people not even. But try to get out of debt if you can or as much as you can. Try to diversify your income streams. Try to get some side hustles going. That's essentially what I did with Imperium Press, and now it's my job. Try to get some savings, if you can. At least keep small emergency reserves of cash, of funds, of food, and things like that.

Having redundancy for the essential items is really good. Medical stuff, food, communications, things like that. You don't have to be a survival. and like I don't have a problem with guys who are you just need to be somebody who has options you know what I mean so and yeah just like try to embed yourself in a local community you try to join local associations join a religious community whatever that happens to be I mean if you're a Christian join a church start going to church start going to their events Start participating, start getting to know people, attend the local events, support your neighborhood institutions, or build them, or at least just introduce yourself to your neighbors, you know what I mean, and volunteer. Volunteering, like, you know, I mean.

A friend of mine, let me interject, a friend of mine said one of the easiest ways to do it is if you live in an area that has a historical preservation society, volunteering with them. especially if you're young, they're probably all going to be over 60. They're going to be excited for you to be there and they'll have plenty for you to do. Yeah. And perhaps, in fact, more likely than not, these are going to be guys who are connected, who have resources, who are somebody, you know what I mean? So that's really good. Volunteer at places like that in meaningful ways.

And be careful. be very careful about being publicly labeled in like digital tribal extremism. I know that this, I don't regard myself as an extremist at all. In fact, I think what Imperium Press is doing is historically the center. We are historically normal and it is the managerial class that are the extremists. but if you are not already participating in the conversation publicly, then don't make yourself into a public target. But if you are, you know, if you are a brave person, if you are charismatic and you can, you don't have to be Brad Pitt, but if you can like dress yourself look nice, present well, that we need you. We need you to join us here as, you know, as media personalities on our side of the fence.

But some people, in fact, most people should probably not be doing that. Most people should not be binding their identity to those, like to these kind of networks, at least not publicly. You should be listening to what we have to say because we almost uniquely know the score, unlike, you know, anywhere in the mainstream, essentially, right? So yeah, do all those things, do all those things. Strengthen your immediate circle, develop your practical abilities, reduce your vulnerability to institutional failure, get into your local community, and invest in the next generation. Have children and have many of them and have them early and teach them to be resilient and emotionally stable and teach them who they are, where they come from,

teach them who their ancestors are, what their heritage is, have rituals, tell stories, don't give them too much access to screens, build these institutions close to home, and stay mobile and be adaptive and flexible. And being tribal doesn't mean being violent. It doesn't mean getting a bunch of tattoos and going out and training as a militia in the woods, although tattoos are awesome. But in any case, you don't have to form yourself into a war band roaming the street. You just have to identify at the more local level, establish tighter communities, and, you know, establish personal ties over bureaucratic ones.

So hopefully some of that advice is useful. That's awesome. That's probably where we should end it. remind everybody about Imperium Press and where they can find the book. Yes. Well, thank you very much, Pete. I really appreciate you having me on here. You guys can find the book at Imperiumpress.org. And if you like podcasts, check out my podcast platform, hearthfireradio.com. I also have a podcast, CultureDads. That's Culture with a K. CultureDads.com.

Those are all my links. And once again, I'd just like to say, Heartfelt thanks, Pete. It's been awesome talking to you. And I hope guys get something out of the book. I appreciate you, Mike. Thank you. Take care. Thank you.