The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete and Aaron Reading James Burnham - Complete

Episode Date: January 4, 2025

140 MinutesPG-13Here are two episodes in which Pete and Aaron from Timeline Earth read and commented on a James Burnham chapter and Sam Francis' explanation of the Machiavellians.James Burnham on the Death of CapitalismSamuel Francis' Review of The MachiavelliansTimeline Earth PodcastPete 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 Twitter

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is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Aaron. What's happening, man? We don't seem like the kind of guys who really like to read a lot. So this is getting weird. Yeah, I don't read so good. them words is hard.

So you had the idea for doing this one. I will read it. So tell me, why did you want to do Chapter 3 of James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution? So I knew that we wouldn't have enough time or willpower to do the entire thing. I would. I would make that my life's work and my magnum opus. But chapter three really stuck with me, mostly because of my background and my near group and in group, you know, in the libertarian sphere. And I never really considered the fact that, you know, I've always had that binary brain of it's either capitalism or socialism.

And, you know, I've kind of adopted the way of thought that socialism isn't croaching. and, you know, it's not, it's not anywhere near what, like, somebody like Lenin would view as socialism. But, yeah, I mean, and particularly for this book, when we were reading, uh, state revolution, the sheer amount of things that Lenin called, like just called it, I mean, throughout that reading, it was like, he was spot on with a lot of things. And throughout my incomplete reading of this, I'm still in the middle of it, every page has something that I can immediately point to a tangible aspect of something I deal with every

day and be like, yeah, Burnham called it. Yeah, I read it this afternoon because it's only seven, nine pages, seven, eight or nine pages. And yeah, I was stopping constantly because I was just like, oh, man, I have to ponder that. I really have to ponder that. So, all right. Well, I mean, we usually do like 25 or 30 pages in it goes. So stop any time. I'll start reading it, okay?

Absolutely. All right. Chapter 3, the theory of the permanence of capitalism by former Trotskyite James Burnham. During the past century, dozens, perhaps even hundreds of theories of history have been elaborated. These differ endlessly among themselves in the words they use, the causal explanations they offer for the historical process, the alleged laws of history which they seem to discover. But most of these differences are irrelevant to the central problem with which this book is concerned. That problem is to discover, if possible, what type, if indeed it is to be a different type, of social organization is on the immediate historical horizon. I will pause to say that this book was released in 1941.

So he's positing what's going to happen. And he probably wrote this in 1940. And he's kind of setting you up, especially, you know, us, us libertarians or former libertarians, of what I'd consider myself to be. So when you're reading this, whatever definition of capitalism he's using, he knows it's not real capitalism, bro. And he doesn't care. It's capitalism and its totality, whatever your definition is. That's what he's talking about. With reference to this specific problem, all of the theories with the exception of those few

which approximate to the theory of the managerial revolution, boil down to two and only two. The first of these predicts that capitalism will continue for an indefinite but long time, if not forever. that is that the major institutions of capitalist society, or at least most of them, will not be radically changed. The second predicts that capitalist society will be replaced by socialist society. The theory of the managerial revolution predicts that capitalist society will be replaced by managerial society, the nature of which will be explained later, that, in fact, the transition from capitalist to managerial, society is already well underway. It is clear that, although all three of these theories might be false, only one of them can be true. The answer that each of them gives to the question of what will

happen, what will actually happen in the future, plainly denies the answers given by the other two. If then, the theory of the managerial revolution is true, it must be possible to present consideration sufficient to justify us in regard to other two, in regard the other two theories as false? They're all mutually exclusive. Right. Such demonstration would, by itself, make the theory of the managerial revolution very probable since, apart from these three, there are at present no other serious theoretical contenders. I propose, therefore, in this and the following chapter to review briefly the evidence for rejecting the theory of the permanence of capitalism and the theory of the socialist revolution. And we're off.

Oddly enough, the belief that the capitalist society will continue is seldom put in theoretical form. It is rather left implicit in what people say and do and in the writings and sayings of most historians, sociologists, and politicians. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the majority of people in the United States hold this belief, though it has been somewhat shaken in recent years. When examined, this belief is seen to be based not on any evidence in its favor, but primarily on two assumptions. Both of these assumptions are flatly and entirely false. Here we go. The first is the assumption that society has always been capitalist and structure, and therefore, presumably always will be.

In actual fact, society has been capitalist for a minute fragment of the total of total human history. Any exact date chosen as the beginning of... Go ahead. How many times have you seen people cite instances of, I guess, right-wing anarchism, anarcho-cal capitalism throughout history. I mean, it always seems forced, but. Yeah, extremely like, you really got to. Yeah.

Medieval Iceland. Medieval Scotland. Yeah. I mean, Ireland. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. Those are the two, two ones that come to mind as well. And, or like, yeah.

So I guess what I'm getting at is, it's always forced. capitalism has only existed since maybe the late 18th century. I mean, some people may say the Hanseatic League, which goes back further, but I mean, on any grand scale in the West, yeah. Yeah, if you compare it to what's that, mercantilism, it's very hard when you start differentiating between capitalism and mercantilism, it's always kind of a, there's There's shades of each when you get into that 16th, 17th century and before. All right.

Moving on. Any exact date chosen as the beginning of capitalism would be arbitrary. But the start of capitalist social organization on any wide scale can scarcely be put earlier than the 14th century AD, and capitalist domination must be placed much later than that. The second assumption is that capitalism has some necessary kind of correlation with human nature. That's, man. Yep. Yeah, I've been, I was reading John C. Calhoun's disquisition on government.

Got it down here somewhere. And his argument for why government is necessary is the exact same. interest is the exact same argument that anarchists or laissez-faire economists make for why laissez-faire would work self-interest yep self-ownership private property or private property is an extension of self-ownership and that's kind of an appeal to human nature that i i hear a lot all right so the second assumption is that capitalism has some necessary kind of correlation with human nature This, as a matter of fact, is the same assumption as the first, but expressed differently. To see that it is false, it is not required to be sure just what human nature may be.

It is enough to observe that human nature has been able to adapt itself to dozens of types of society, many of which have been studied by anthropologists and historians, and a number of which have lasted far longer than capitalism. I don't think that's unreasonable to kind of impart into your belief system, their interpretation of history. Yeah. Yeah. With these assumptions dropped, the positive case for the view that capitalism will continue doesn't amount so much. In fact, has hardly even been stated coherently by anyone.

But apart from this lack of positive defense, we can, I think, list certain sets of facts which give all the grounds that a reasonable man should need for believing that capitalism is not going to continue, that it will disappear in a couple of decades at most and perhaps in a couple of years, which is as exact as one should pretend to be in these matters. These facts do not demonstrate this in any way that a mathematical or logical theorem is demonstrated. No belief about future events can be demonstrated. They simply make the belief more probable that any alternative belief, which is as much as can be done. This is in parenthesis.

In what follows for reasons which will become evident later, I do not include references to Germany, Italy, or Russia. Okay. The first and perhaps crucial evidence for the view that capitalism is not going to continue much longer is the continuous presence within the capitalist nations of mass unemployment and the failure of all means tried for getting rid of mass unemployment. The unemployed, it is especially significant to note, include large percentages of the youth just entering working age. Let me pause you right there. Is that applicable to today? It's applicable to every moment of every conscious moment of my life. Yeah. Yep.

Mass unemployment. Now, not in the traditional sense that people are looking for work and they just can't find jobs because there's no productive positions for them to fill. But if you look at today, this call for universal basic income, universal health care, this emphasis on work-life balance, I think that's in response to not so much people being unemployed through no fault of their own, but this general drive towards not having to work for your basic necessities is stemmed from the fact that there's just not a whole lot of people working. and at the same time, there's not a whole lot of people looking for work.

Yeah, I mean, I would, yeah, I don't know if I have anything to add to that. Yeah, okay. Cool. I'm going to move on. Continuous mass unemployment is not new in history. It is, in fact, a symptom that a given type of social organization is just about finished. It was found among the poorer citizens during the last years of Athens, among the urban proletariat, as they were called in the Roman Empire, and very notably, at the end of the Middle Ages, among the dispossessed serfs and Villains, who had been thrown off the land in order to make way for capitalist views of the land. I pronounce that right, Villains.

I recognize that from Marx. I think so, yeah. Yeah. What is a villain? Hold on. I'm trying to remember now. I looked it up once. I read

A feudal tenant entirely subject to a lord So basically Close enough to a surf Mass unemployment means that the given type of social organization has broken down That it cannot any longer provide its members with socially useful functions Even according to its own ideas of what is socially useful Hey Uncle Ted How are you doing

It cannot support these masses for any length of time in idleness, for its resources are not sufficient. That's where the Marxists would disagree. They would say, no, no, we have the resources. They're just not being diverted to it. They're being diverted to socially unnecessary production. Right. The unemployed hover on the fringe of society, on the one hand, like a terrible weight dragging it down and bleeding it to death. On the other, a constant irritant and reservoir of forces directed against the society.

That is brutal, man. Experience has already shown that there is not the slightest prospect of ridding capitalism of mass unemployment. Remember, this is 1941. So 80 years ago. 81. This is indeed becoming widely admitted among the defenders of capitalism as well as many spokesmen of the New Deal. Even total war, the most drastic conceivable solution could not end mass unemployment in England and France, nor will it do so in this country. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite

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Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Every solution that has any possibility of succeeding leads directly or indirectly outside the framework of capitalism. That right there, like, just really hit home. When you have an ideology and you're trying to apply an ideological solution to reality, let's say you're an anarcho-capitalist, for instance, you're trying to, game out ways to apply solutions, the law of unintended consequences will take effect. And there's really nothing in the anarcho-capitalist toolbox that can fix mass unemployment. Well, I mean, they will say that the freer of the market, the more jobs will be created and you will have 100% unemployment.

I mean, you'll have 0% unemployment, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. And the only people who, at that point, the only people who won't work or people who can't work. Yeah. I mean, I think that's pine in the sky, but. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. The solutions applied to reality.

If you take it, if you're in a capitalist framework, all of your solutions that are within that capitalist framework, there's no there's no solving it within it well i think some may argue that because you're in an anarcho-capitalist society and there are no entitlements no welfare no nothing like that that people will be compelled to work that they'll be forced to work yeah yeah that's true um kind of envisioned not not not trying to straw man but an anarcho capital society is like that 10,000 Liechtenstein's more more of a corporate structure where uh you know the hans harmon hop covenant communities i if you take the idea of a covenant community will there be unemployment in a covenant community and depends on it depends on the care of the constitution of

the covenant community Exactly. Yep. Yeah. So, I mean, either way, it's, it's a nice, I love it. That's where I come from. And I would love to see that implemented. But I guess what constitutes mass unemployment would depend on the Covenant community. Two, capitalism has always been characterized by recurring economic crises by periods of boom followed by periods of depression. Until a dozen years ago, however, the curve of total production always went higher in one major boom period than in the boom proceeding. It did so not only in terms of the actual quality of goods produced, but in the relative quantity of the volume of goods compared to the increased population and plant capacity. Thus, in spite of the crises, there was a general overall increase in capitalization. production, which was simply the measure of the ability of capitalist social organization to handle its own resources. Since the world crisis of 1927 through 29, this overall curve has reversed.

The height of a boom period relative to population and potential capacity is lower than that of the preceding boom. The new direction of the curve is in its turn simply the expression of the fact that capitalism can no longer handle its own resources. And again, for all the Misesians listening, that boom and bus cycle, we know it's due to the expansion of credit. But, you know, Burnham incorporates central banking into his view of capitalism. Well, he's also living in the real world. He's talking about what's happening now.

And, you can already hear people screaming, well, that's not real capitalism. Yeah, and that boom and bus cycle, I mean, again, like I love, I love ANCAP theory, but there's really nothing inherently, there's nothing to inoculate, say, a covenant community with a bank, with a currency from a boom and bus cycle, because credit, credit in and of itself isn't tied to any type of ideology. What I would like to say here is that it looks like Burnham is making, like, he did say, he did make an immediate kind of prediction. The first sentence of part three here is the volume of public and private debt has reached a point where it cannot be managed much longer. Okay.

So some people would say, okay, how are we still, how are we still going? Well, I mean, maybe they adjusted. They bring in a Paul Volcker or someone like that to get it through. But what I want to say more about these timeframes is it's hard to predict when you know something is going bad, when you know something is going wrong, there could be somebody out there who has already figured out how to let, how to keep that wrong going for a long time. There were a lot of people talking about the fall of the Roman Empire in the first and second century. It took a couple more centuries. It does not discount the arguments that they were making.

No, not at all. And applying it to now, if you view the United States as the beacon of capitalism and enlightenment values and all that, you can you can see it's evolution or de-evolution from its from its inception to right now and um you know capitalism even you know even when deregulation and all these good libertarian policies were applied sparingly throughout history it wasn't enough to to manage the decline I'm going to read the first sentence again and keep going. The volume of public and private debt has reached a point where it cannot be managed much longer. The debt, like the unemployed, sucks away the diminishing bloodstream of capitalism, and it cannot be shaken off.

Bankruptcies, which formerly readjusted the debt position of capitalism, hardly make a dent in it. The scale of bankruptcy or inflation, which could reduce the debt. to manageable size would at the same time, as all economists recognize, utterly dislocate all capitalist institutions. Yeah. And, you know, going back to Hoppa, any institution, whether it's a nation state or a company or a covenant community, any institution is prone to just that high time preference culture, which leads to that racking up of, um,

unmanageable debt. And that kind of segues nicely into why I'm right-wing. All right. The maintenance of the capitalist market depended on at least comparatively free monetary exchange transactions. The area of these, especially on a world scale, is diminishing towards a vanishing point. This is well indicated by the useless gold hoard at Fort Knox and the barter methods of Russia, Germany, and Italy. I believe, if you wrote this in 40 or 41, and it was released to 41, we get Bretton Woods in five years, right? I think Bretton Woods is 46.

Come on. Hold on. Yeah, that's the mortal wound to the whatever gold standard. we had left. Oh, yeah, it was a 44 summit. So, yeah, the, try to explain Bretton Woods the best I can is basically what it meant was that, okay, so the delegates agreed that the gold standard would create a fixed currency

exchange rate. So there'd be no fluctuation. No market. The agreement also facilitated the creation. of immensely important structures in the financial world. The IMF, the International Bank for Reconstruction, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which is known today as the World Bank.

So that's your Bretton Woods. And yeah, you're right. There's no, what did you say? There's just no more market, no more, yeah, no more market forces affecting the exchange rate. Yep. All right. Four, the maintenance of the capitalist market depended on at least comparatively.

I already read that one. Since shortly, this is part five, since shortly after the First World War, that there has been in all major capitalist nations a permanent agricultural depression. 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 reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs,

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Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Agriculture is obviously an indispensable part of the total. economy, and the breakdown in this essential sector is another mark of the incurable disease afflicting capitalism. No remedies, and how many they are that have been tried, produce any sign of cure. The farming population sink in debt and poverty, and not enough food is produced and distributed, while agriculture has kept barely going through huge state subsidies. I don't know if today we have a problem of not enough food being produced, but I know that I just don't know a whole lot about the agricultural industry right now.

But I know one thing I do know is that it is propped up entirely by state subsidies. Yeah. Now, somebody is screaming right now, though, that FDR had them destroy food in the 30s so that he could keep – keep prices high to affect supply and demand. But that's what you have under capitalism. Yeah, that is a solution well within the bounds of capitalism. You know, a private entity can do that just as well as a public one can. No, man, only the state's evil.

Only the state's evil, dude. Capitalism is no longer able to find uses for the available investment funds, which waste an idleness in the account books of the banks. The mass unemployment of private money is scarcely less indicative of the death of capitalism than the mass unemployment of human beings. Damn. This mass unemployment of private money. That's a really good phrase.

Yeah. And it strikes at, I know it strikes at my Messian sensibilities. Both show the inability of the capitalist institutions any longer to organize human activities. During the past decade in the United States, as in other capitalist nations, new capital investment has come almost entirely from the state, not from private funds. Yep. And even now, I mean, with the literal trillions of dollars sitting in futures and investment portfolios,

and assets and all that, can we honestly say that it's being employed in any sense in a beneficial way to society? And this is where you get kind of people veering off and going towards Marxism. Seven. The continuance of capitalism was, we saw, dependent upon a certain relationship between the great powers and the backward sections and peoples of the earth. One of the most striking developments of the past 15 years, which has been little noticed, is the inability of the great capitalist nations any longer to manage the exploitation and development of these backward sections. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the relations between the United States and South

America. The United States, in spite of its imperious necessity for the nation's very survival, has not and cannot devise a scheme for handling the economic phase of its hemisphere policy. Though during the past few years and above all during the war, the road has been wide open, nothing gets done. Here again, the only workable schemes are compelled to leave the basis of capitalism. Which is war and color revolutions and banana republics and all that. This is why if you ask somebody, you know, how did the United States get out of the Great Depression?

They've been taught to say, well, World War II. You know, because, I mean, honestly, if war is the greatest thing for the economy, we should just be blowing up our own buildings and bridges just constantly. Oh, yeah. Infrastructure, man. Capitalism is no longer able to use its own technological possibilities. One side of this is shown by such facts as the inability of the United States to carry out a housing program, when the houses are needed and wanted and the technical means to produce them in abundance or on hand.

This is the case with almost all goods. But an equally symptomatic side is seen in the inability to make use of many inventions and new technical methods. Hundreds of these, though they could reduce immeasurably the number of man-hours needed to turn out goods, and increase greatly the convenience of life, nonetheless sit on the shelf. In many entire economic sectors, such as agriculture, building, coal mining, the technical methods today available make the usual present methods seem stone age, and nearly every economic field is to some degree affected. Using the inventions and methods available would, it is correctly understood,

smash up the capitalist structure. Technological unemployment is present in recent capitalism, but it is hardly anything compared to what technological unemployment would be if capitalism made use of its available technology. He's talking about achieving post-scarcity through automation and all that. And, you know, we have that today. We have the means to automate almost every facet of the, production process in any industry.

And, you know, this is where we get into the managerial state. Yeah. These facts also show that capitalism and its rulers can no longer use their own resources. And the point is that if they won't, someone else will. Nine. As symptomatic and decisive as these economic and technical developments, It as symptomatic and decisive as these economic and technological developments is the fact that the ideologies of capitalism, the bourgeois ideologies have become impotent.

Ideologies, we have seen, are the cement that binds together the social fabric. When the cement loosens, the fabric is about to disintegrate. and no one who has watched the world during the past 20 years can doubt the ever-increasing importance of the bourgeois ideologies. Yeah, impotence. So already humble bragged about this on Twitter. I was hanging out with Yarvin, who basically has gotten people to read Burnham. And I asked him about this quote because this is a quote that a lot of people use to say that

Burnham was not against ideologies. He says ideologies we have seen are the cement that binds together the social fabric. So what I asked Yarbon was are ideologies for the plebs and the people who are in power, who desire power, who understand power, understand that ideology is handcuffs. Yeah. He seemed to agree with that. He seemed to agree that the powerful will push ideologies upon people and say, this is what's going to hold you. This is what holds us together while they are, while they are, have no ideology whatsoever, even if they're telling you they have the same ideology as you. And they're just doing as they wish with the power that's been granted them.

Yeah, particularly bourgeois ideologies like monarchism or liberalism or liberalism or, uh, You know, any of those, those, those, I'm not saying that to, you know, as a, as being mean or anything. But, you know, if, if your middle class abides by a general ideology, like, say, liberalism in the United States, and then they have, you know, different disagreements and factions scattered throughout, you could still have a cohesive society. If half your society is communist and the other half is liberal, then that's when you're going to see things like Russia, things like Germany, things like Italy, China. Yep. I'm going to read that again. Ideologies we have seen are the cement that binds together the social fabric. When the cement loosens, the fabric is about to disintegrate. And no one who has watched a world during the past 20 years can doubt the ever-increasing impotence of the same. the bourgeois ideologies. On the one hand, the scientific pretensions of these ideologies have been

exploded. History, sociology, and anthropology are not yet much as sciences, but they are enough to show every serious person that the concepts of the bourgeois ideologies are not written in the stars, are not universal laws of nature, but are at best just temporary expressions of the interests and ideals of a particular class of men at a particular historical time. That was a punch in the gut to me, too. Yep. We're all just dust in the wind, man. It does not matter how non-scientific or anti-scientific an ideology may be.

It can do its work so long as it possesses the power to move great masses of men to action. This the bourgeois ideologies once could do as the great revolutions and the imperial and economic conquest prove and this they can no longer do. Ready for huge savings? We'll 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

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Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland That's so spot on It's ridiculous Are you going to die for libertarianism? Are you ready, comrade? I'm ready to die. die to end these lockdowns.

When the bourgeois ideologies were challenged in the Tsar and the Sudetenland by the ideology of Nazism, it was Nazism that won the sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the people. All possible discounts for the effects of Nazi terrorism must not dilute us into misreading this brute fact. Man, that's a paragraph right there. Oh, yeah. Jeez. Only the hopelessly naive can imagine that, France fell so swiftly because of the mere mechanical strength of the Nazi war machine.

That might have been sufficient in a longer run, but not to destroy a great nation with a colossal military establishment in a few weeks. France collapsed so swiftly because its people had no heart for the war, as every observer had remarked, even through the censorship from the beginning of the war. And they had no heart for the war because the bourgeois ideologies by which they were appealed to no longer had power to move their hearts. Men are prepared to be heroes for very foolish and unworthy ideals, but they must at least believe in those ideals. Man.

Yeah. He's just throwing haymakers. No, I was, I was, it's kind of a, like a, you know, a blue collar trope that like the French are pussies and cowards and all that. But, you know, when I read that, that paragraph, I was like, you know what? He's absolutely right. There's, they're no different than anybody else. They just weren't moved.

They didn't have leaders worth following. They didn't have beliefs that resonated with them. And, you know, that's why we're having a retention crisis right now in our military. Yeah. Yeah. Say the French were pussies in 1789. Well. Nowhere is the impotence of bourgeois ideology is more apparent than among the youth and the coming world.

After all, will be the youth's world. The abject failure of voluntary military enlistment and Britain in this country tells its own story to all who wish to listen. It is underlined in reverse by the hundreds of distinguished adult voices, which during 1940 began reproaching the American youth for indifferent, unwillingness to sacrifice, lack of ideals. How right these reproaches are and how little effect they have. Man, do you see?

how inconsistent your thinking is? Yeah. Come on, man. It's like telling a leftist. It's like telling a leftist that they're inconsistent. I just think when I read that, I was like, just wait a few months when, you know, Pearl Harbor happens.

Then I, like, I honestly don't know if we would have even needed a draft. Yeah. But that's not so much them being motivated by any type of patriotism or, you know, love of liberalism and democracy and all that. That's, it was a revenge thing. Yeah. Yeah, it has nothing to be with ideologies. Yeah.

That's what they've been able to manufacture with the, with the terror wars. Oh, yeah. They saw how effective Pearl Harbor was. And, you know, depending on, depending on where, where you sit on that, they created more or they, you know, literally created more. Yeah, I mean, it. If you can't sell love of country or anything anymore, then let's sell that, you know, the commies are encroaching Korea and Vietnam. You know, the commies are croaching, encroaching Grenada.

Yeah. The radical Islamic terrorism, Iraq War I, one, one and a half, two, three, Afghanistan, 9-11, wherever you stand that 9-11. In truth, the bourgeoisie itself has in large measure lost confidence in its own ideologies. The words begin to have a hollow sound in the most sympathetic capitalist ears. This, too, is unmistakably revealed in the policy and attitude of England's rulers during the past years. What was Munich and the whole policy of appeasement but a recognition of bourgeois impotence? Oh, man, going after Chamberlain bad, huh? The head of the British governments traveling to the feet of the Austrian house painter

was the fitting symbol of the capitalist loss of faith in themselves. Let me read that again. The head of the British government's traveling to the feet of the Austrian house painter was the fitting symbol of the capitalist loss of faith in themselves. The Austrian house painter. Wonder who that is. Every authentic report during the autumn of 1939 from Britain told of the discouragement and fear of the leaders in government and business.

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Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading is Cooper Financial Services, is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. And no one who has listened to American leaders off the record or who has followed the less public organs of business opinion will suppose that such attitudes are confined to Britain. All history makes clear that an indispensable quality of any man or class that wishes to lead to hold power and privilege in society is boundless self-confidence. Other sets of facts could easily be added to this list, but these are perhaps the most plainly symptomatic. Their effect, moreover, is cumulative.

The attempted remedies for them experience shows only aggravate them, sorry. They permit no other conclusion than the capitalist organization of society has entered its final years. Let me read that last sentence of the body of that again. All history makes clear that an indispensable quality of any man or class that wishes to lead to hold power and privilege in society is boundless self-confidence. I mean, is there any way you can argue with that? Not at all. Not recently now. And, you know, whether you're talking about Trump or you know, the four horsemen or whoever else, I mean, boundless self-confidence, like just having the ability to be persuasive to the masses, you could be speaking Chinese and, you know,

they'll follow you. Well, I mean, it's one of those things that I remember a middle school teacher telling me And we didn't have the internet at this time. So it was kind of hard to find, but he's like, if you can find a video of Hitler speaking, you won't even have to know what he's saying. You will be moved. Yeah, absolutely. That's hard for, you know, to hear when you're in middle school and you've already had,

you know, a good 10 years of indoctrination into the, you know, that, oh, my God, Hitler. No, no, there's no way. And then you like listen to him to speak and you're like, holy crap. And then it becomes the joke like, say what you want about Hitler, but, you know, fantastic orator. Say what you want about Mussolini, but those trains ran on time. Yeah. And, you know, if you, if you kind of apply that, that idea to our sphere or former sphere or whatever,

it's something that even even the leadership like at the top can't can't really make that happen like the whole boundless self-confidence thing I mean when you're in a leadership position and you're trying to move people like you can't you can't be self-deprecating you can't be speaking a language like, you know, that comes off to normal people like you're some type of bug man. You know, that's that's why populism's taking a grip, both left wing and right wing populism is taking a grip right now. It's because they have fantastic, relatable, persuasive orators. Yeah. Or tweeters.

What was the last time you saw Anthony Sabatini put something out that was like slightly cringe? I don't remember. Oh. People who don't know Anthony Sabatini is a state senator. in Florida, who would be nice to see on the big stage just because he has no filter whatsoever. What's going on with Matt Gates? I don't know. They're trying to take him down with that whole thing and everything.

Tho was mentioning something this weekend about that, about Matt. Yeah, he. you can tell that it's bullshit because the Republican Party as a whole has not at all distanced themselves from him. Right. The people that have, like, said anything were like the, you know, the anti-Trump Republicans that didn't like them to begin with. Yeah.

And libertarian. Yeah. Yeah. And them too. But that's how I can kind of gauge what's bullshit or not because, you know, the top leadership of the party isn't saying anything. They're treating them exactly the same as they were before. So you can be rest assured that they don't have anything.

This is a hard-hitting essay because when you define capitalism properly, because there is no free market laissez-faire and there is not going to be a free market laissez-faire, at least not in our lifetime. And people can make, you know, you can make the argument that when I was reading it, I was thinking, oh, well, you know, if you're in the black market, it's free and everything. It's like, well, it's really not that free. I mean, you're like literally might have to protect yourself with a lot of firepower to protect your business. And, yeah, you never see best by running drive-bys on Brandsmart.

Yeah, yeah. Capitalism, if you're going to use the term capitalism now and you're going to use it in any other way than something that is pure theory. Just use it. It's amazing to me that the same people that will say, you know, well, real capitalism hasn't been tried, will argue that capitalism has gotten out, gotten a billion Asians out of poverty in the last 30 years. Yeah. And that I say, well, that was neoliberalism. Yeah. And then it becomes like, oh, I don't like that, though.

Because it was neoliberalism. It really was. I mean, stop. I mean, neoliberalism is horrible when you look at idea, you know, when you look at it from an ideological perspective. But they did get a billion people, a billion Asians out of,

out of poverty in the last 30 years. Yeah. If you view the onset of capitalism as, you know, the old school medieval burgers, literally seizing power and solidifying private property rights from the king. that that kind of gives you a historical perspective. And eventually that system of private property rights,

you know, seizing private property rights, seizing free markets, you know, that came at a cost. And now we're entering an era where, you know, it's evolving into something else, whether it's socialism, fascism, or as Burnham pause, it's a managerial state. it regardless it is it's fundamentally departed from you know the the liberal ideal of what capitalism is well what we did find was that managerial the managerial state is a lot better than what south

korea had before yeah yeah able to drive able to drive a lot of people out of capital out of poverty Yeah. And, you know, it's it's another thing like, you know, I would rather have a managerial state that, you know, I share values and a culture with than a libertarian utopia of like blue-haired obese trannies that, you know. Yeah, that, yeah. Yeah. That just reminded me I need to ask just Jeff Dice the question. Hold on. I got right this now. Do you still believe? I was just thinking of his famous, one of his famous quotes from a few years ago. And I want to see what he has to say now that COVID and everything is completely insane. But the, yeah, I mean, Burnham, man, there's something in every friggin reading. And what's funny is this is, I'm doing this with you.

And very well, I'm going to release this next, is my next episode. The very next episode may be myself and Buck, Buck Johnson, reading Samuel Francis's chapter out of this, his review of suicide of the West by Burnham. This is Sam Francis, thinkers of our times, James Burnham, where he basically does a commentary on every James Burnham book. Oh, wow. It's, it's, it, I have, I went and bought another one of these because I'm tearing this up so bad. I just wanted to have one because this is right now, this is the book I can't put down.

Yeah. No, um, I'm, you know, going from Lenin to Burnham, it, you can tell that he was kind of in that sphere at one point because he has the same polemical writing style. And, uh, like, it, it's actually very easy to read. You know, you have to kind of learn a different language when you're reading like the, the, the orthodox Marxist. But with Burnham, it's kind of more, you know, there's a lot less learning curve. No learning curve for me, really. Yeah, I would highly recommend any Burnham content, but I'm just happened to be reading the managerial revolution right now.

Yeah. After you read, if you can get Lenin down, you don't have to get it down perfectly, but just understand, you know, have a good grasp of it. Reading Burnham is a lot easier. He was a Trotsky. He was head of like a Trotsky organization or something like that. I mean, the guy was deep in it and then just took a, did a huge 180. Yeah.

And in the next chapter, it's like on the coming transition to socialism or whatever. 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 reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design, they move you even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon and Terramar,

with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro, search Coupra and discover our latest offers. Coopera, design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited, subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited, trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. He goes into the fact that workers as a class are very very, very malleable ideologically. There's no guarantee that they're going to fulfill their Marxist destiny of, you know, seizing power and bringing about a communist society. They might seize power, but it'll look like, you know, either Nazi Germany or Russia or, you know, something else.

Well, even Lenin knew that, and that's why Lenin wasn't an internationalist like Trotsky. Yeah. Yeah, he, it was for, and Stalin picked up on that, that too. And then, of course, later things got, things went awry after, you know, certain people got into power. And then we're like, oh, we got to, we got to expand this a little bit. Good luck with that. That's when you, that's when you realize the world doesn't want this. And when I say the world, I'm talking about the people.

People of this world do not want this. You know, it was like when, what's his name? I can't remember the American journalist. He's like the only American who's buried in the Kremlin or in the tomb. there. He, John Reed, I think it was, when he went to Russia pre-revolution and he was telling Lenin, he's like, the American workers will, we'll stand with, with the Russian workers. And it's like, no, they won't. Yeah. That's smoking crack. Yeah. Well, it's not smoking crack. It's like you're, he's literally lying to him. Yeah. To get, you know, to get him to, you was trying to get him to go

forth to push harder in what he was doing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some of those Americans that went over there were way more hardcore than a lot of even Lennon's inner group. Because you know, Lenin had guys in his inner group where we're like, is this going to work?

All right. I don't know. Yeah. Just go back to my farm. Everything will be fine. Or we could just go back. Let's get this war over so we can go back to Germany and Switzerland, you know. They were living the good life there for a decade and a half.

Oh, yeah. German intelligence agencies were fucking, like, rock stars. Just fucking making it rain. Anyway, got anything to plug? Yeah, you can find me on not the latest episode of Timeline Earth due to a scheduling dispute. But, yeah, you'll eventually find me on. Timeline Earth. And I hope to keep doing little tidbits like this.

I'm kind of entering a transition phase in my professional life and taking a step back from content creation. But, you know, I'm always available for a guest spot and especially for you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanino show. Is this guy ever been on the show before? Oh, Aaron from Timeline Earth. Yeah, many times. How you doing, man.

You're my co-host. That's so awesome. All right. Let's get to it. I asked you on today so that we could talk about Sam Francis. This is actually the book, the print version of Sam Francis. Basically, it's a review of every James Burnham book. So every book that James Burnham wrote, he has a, it does 10 to 15 pages on it to

explain what it is. And what are we looking for today? We're going to do the Machiavellians. Nice. And I know you read it. And also you said that you thought about when you when you started reading this review, which was, what's it called Crisis of Modernity? Yeah. So the crisis of modernity by

Augusto del Noche. He's an Italian philosopher born in 1910, died in 76, I think. And he's just another one of those people that basically called it well before anybody else was calling it. He identified the, pretty much the flow of history from liberalism into kind of what we're experiencing right now, which is its logical endpoint. And it really resonated with me. I've also, in preparation for this episode, I also read a lot of Heidegger. And I also went back into the managerial revolution just to get me into a Burnham mindset.

Cool, cool. All right. Well, let's get this up on the screen and start reading. All right. So this is taken from, I don't even know what this text takes it from because this text actually, I can't find in PDF anywhere. It was never made into a PDF. I mean, maybe if someone has it, they can send it to me. But I just found this on archive, and it had this section of the Machiavellians in it.

So, yeah, let's just go and stop any time. So this is Sam Francis reviewing the Machiavellians by James Burnham. I think Machiavellians written at 41 or 42, a year after Manager of Revolution. So, all right. The managerial revolution has grown out of Burnham's dispute with Trotsky in the 1930s and was an answer to Trotsky. Stalinist Russia was not a deformed worker estate, but a new kind of society that Marxism had not anticipated. Managerial society. yet despite Burnham's political and intellectual break with Marxism,

significant fragments of Marxist ideology remained with him and seriously marred his statement of the theory of the managerial revolution. In the Machiavellians, defenders of freedom, Burnham eradicated many of his remaining Marxist preconceptions, formulated a general theory of human political behavior, and restated the theory of the managerial revolution in terms of this theoretical. theoretical framework.

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

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

political theorists of the 20th century whom he described as Machiavellians the foundations of a realistic method of social and political analysis. Contrasting the theological and metaphysical political philosophy of Dante Alagheris in de Monarchia, with the historically and empirically grounded approach of Machiavelli, Burnham developed a fundamental distinction between the formal and the real meaning of a statement. The formal meaning of a statement is the meaning which is explicitly stated,

but which serves to express in an indirect and disguised manner what may be called the real meaning. It's an interesting metaphysical development. I love it. This is quoting. What, good? Oh, no, no. Keep going.

Quoting, by real meaning, I refer to meaning not in terms of the fictional world of religion, metaphysics, miracles, and pseudo history, but in terms of the actual world of space, time, and events. Yeah. I mean, metaphysics is like the lens in which we view reality and truth. So, I don't know, like, just the managerial revolution is something I really got into of Burnham's and I was about 75% satisfied with it and not just because it's a little outdated. Yeah, yeah.

No, that's what most people think. Most people say that it's a great book, but a lot of people complain, well, he didn't get his predictions correct and everything. It's like, well, I mean, you're in the middle. A war had just started. It's kind of hard. Cut them some slack. Yeah, yeah.

All right. The real meaning, then, is the empirically discussed. and verifiable meaning, the only meaning that has value for expressing the truth. In Machiavelli, Burnham argued, there is no distinction between the formal and real meanings, because Machiavelli explicitly stated his goals and meaning, did not attempt to disguise them, and took pains to verify them empirically, and to make them clear. Whether this is an accurate presentation of Machiavelli or not is not particularly important to the political theory that Burnham developed.

His purpose was not to write a learned treatise on Renaissance history and philosophy, but to elaborate on empirically sound method of analyzing human political affairs. The tradition of political thought by Burnham labeled Machiavellian did indeed derive many of its ideas from the 16th century Florentine, but whether this was an accurate derivation and whether Machiavelli himself would have endorsed Machiavellianism are separate and secondary questions. Ready for huge savings We'll mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th Because the Lidl

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The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale 28th to 30th of November Liddle more to value I've heard that critique before would Machiavelli have agreed with Burnham? And I don't know enough about Machiavelli, the actual person, to say whether or not he would. But I do know that, you know, he did see the usefulness in veiling your agenda. The four thinkers whom Burnham discussed in detail in the Machiavellians were George Sorrell, Robert Michels, Gatano Mosca, and Vofredo Paredo.

to at least some extent all four saw themselves as the heirs of Machiavelli. Like him, they were all concerned with the problems of political power, not with how to justify power, nor with the external forms and appearances of power, but with how men actually use, pursue, attain, and lose power. Like Machiavelli, all four were profoundly conscious of the radical discrepancies between the formal disguises of power in rhetoric, ideology, and institutions, and the terrible realities of power in the actual history of men. It's something that I can't stress enough, is that people can talk about their ideology, their political ideology, all they want. But when it

comes down to ruling, and there's a great quote from Francis in the book, in the review of suicide of the West where he says, ideology never makes it into, never exists in reality because it's formed in a vacuum outside of reality. So basically once it's introduced to reality, it just gets punched in the, you know, it gets punched in the mouth and everything goes out the window. No, it's a transcendent end goal to point to channel revolutionary

or reformist energy. into a transcendent goal that's all that's all ideology is it's uh like like you said it doesn't exist in reality is purely metaphysical yeah and another thing that he that francis says in suit in the review of suicide of the west is that um basically ideology is there for the masses they need to concentrate on something while the machiavellians are actually ruling Yeah. So it gives them something to feel good about it. It gives them an identity, you know,

something that I've been talking about on the timeline a lot today is how people make their political, their political ideology, their identity. So it gives them something to feel good about. But then they wonder their whole lives, how come what, you know, this guy was talking about my ideology when he was running for office. And then he gets into office and my ideology doesn't materialize.

Why? Well, a really useful tidbit that I got from Burnham from the managerial revolution is that, you know, in order for an ideology to become dominant, people, the masses have to be willing to die for it. And that's kind of how you know that capitalism or liberalism or even socialism slash Marxism will not be the dominant ideology at any point in time, because it's been a while since people were willing to die for it or willing to kill for. it even at least not in mass not in any not in any great extent but um you know that's that's kind of the lens that i view acceleration trying to predict accelerationism from is what are some things that are pop that are popping up now that maybe might be inspirational enough to for people to kill or die for Zionism and uh well well but sure the the the Machiavellians are are definitely willing to die for it or at least try to send people to die for it.

But yeah, nowadays, I'm talking about in Israel itself, you know, what we've seen since October 7. Yeah, willing to kill for it, absolutely. Yeah, I don't think they're willing to die for it. I think they're definitely willing to drop bombs for it. Yeah. But it seems like the Houthis are willing to die for what. Yeah. Yep. I mean, any, any sect of Islam is you can usually find some some flowers in there to pluck. Thirdly, like Machiavelli, they believe that through the observation and study of the history of power relationships, a set of generalizations about power and men's usage of it could be formulated. In other words, that a historically grounded science of power, not a philosophy

or ethical theory, was possible. That's why whenever you have these libertarians I was dealing with today on the timeline who are like, oh, so you believe in an imaginary line and you don't want people to cross it. Why do you love violence? Because I do. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like, and then I realized when they were, when people are making that, asking that question, why do you have a problem with this? It's very feminine. It's, it's long, it's like literally long housing. It's like they've, they've been completely long, long house. and it's created their ideology and their questioning. Well, since the 20s, we've kind of,

since we started getting into psychoanalysis like Freud and all that, have you noticed that everything is posited as a psychoanalytical diagnosis? Yes. Yeah. Why are you? It's always, it's never about, are you doing this for, you know, did you do this to acquire land? Did you go to war to acquire land?

Did you go to a war to do this? It's always what's wrong with you? Why would they do this? Yeah. Even like in the, even like the etymology of words like transphobe, that sounds like a mental illness that, you know, 80 years ago would have got you put into an asylum. And that's where we're still looking at that today. That's still the norm today is everything is psychoanalytical.

Everything is scientific. And, you know, when you when you talk about good and evil to a leftist or a really committed liberal, it's not that they don't believe in it. It's just that that exists outside of their metaphysics. And because they don't believe, but this is something I learned from Denoteur. This isn't, believe it or not, this isn't an original thought I had. But they don't, they don't have in their metaphysics anything that exists outside of science or psychoanalysis. So when you talk about good and evil or, you know, these these things that we always have understood, we white people have always understood as universal metaphysics that you and I can engage in a conversation to be reasonably assured that, you know, we're going to abide within a certain framework.

That's completely out the window with them because they just, it doesn't compute. They're like, why are you talking about that? Why are you asking that question? It's like you, by asking the question, you have a mental illness. you're there's just nothing you can say isn't it isn't problematic yeah it either elicits a confusion or a disgust response which you know we kind of get from them too so all things being equal yeah i was noticing um you know stone sauce got doxed and yeah yep and when i saw there are people openly celebrating it on twitter and i'm like this is the most feminine thing i've ever seen

Yeah, yeah. Yes, Queen. Yeah. A 99 post thread. Yeah. Yeah, I saw that. Oh, my. Could you imagine taking this?

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

Quoting, the recurring pattern of change expresses the more or less permanent core of human nature as it functions politically. The instability of all governments and political forms follows in part from the timeless human

appetite for power. I really need to make my neck, after Teal, I really need to read disposition on government by John C. Calhoun because he talks so much about stuff like this. Because of the recurrent patterns of change, history moves in cycles and is not a uniliner linear progression.

The repetitive cycles make possible a science of human political behavior. What men have done before they will do again in the future, and within the limits, it is therefore possible to predict their behavior through analogies drawn from history. Yeah, I mean, unless you believe in, like, that we exist in post-history. Machiavelli and his followers saw men in general as evil.

Quote, all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature whenever they may find occasion for it. The Machiavellians depicted human beings as insatiable in their desire for power, wealth, and preeminence, but also as irrational, prejudice, ignorant, and easily deceived by others as well as by themselves. Yeah. Mosca specifically criticized and rejected the optimistic progressivism of Rousseau. It reminds me of who is it Spangler or optimism as cowardice. Yeah. Pareto devoted much of the six volumes, six volumes, six volumes.

Paredo devoted much of the six volumes of the mind and society. to exposing human irrationality and appetitive motivations. I'm not going to lie to you. I've tried to read original works by Pareto, and I could not. He's really tough to read, man. I have a couple books, a couple smaller books on the elites, and man, it's a slog sometimes. No, you just, it's like he introduces a bunch of mathematical concepts,

and I can't do it. Like, I can't follow that. I'm not that smart. Sorry. Sorrell explicated the role of myths and falsehoods in providing a unifying force for political action, especially violent action. Michelle's throughout his work on political parties showed how minorities continually monopolized power by deceiving and coercing the mass membership. A lot to be said about that right there. The emphasis on human evil and irrationality is central to the Machiavellian argument.

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

didn't give any attention to the more abstract things like, you know, what he just mentioned. You know, language, symbolism, institutional forms, culture, religion, and just things that exist outside of, you know, empirical science. science. There's other ideologies that we may be, another ideology we may be familiar with who fails to do the same thing, I assume. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, there's, I hate to say, I hate using this word, but it's nuanced, which doesn't

really say anything. Driven by insatiable appetites and irrational beliefs, men seek to dominate each other or to escape domination by others. struggle invariably results in a minority coming to power, monopolizing as much as possible political, economic, military, technical, and honorific resources, and excluding and oppressing the majority. Thus is formed an elite, Pareto, ruling class, Mosca, or oligarchy, Michelle's, that rules the majority and exploits it for its own benefit through force and fraud. The rule of elites in human societies is inevitable, and the

And therefore oligarchy is the only possible distribution of power, what what Michelle's called the iron law of oligarchy. I mean, if you had asked me if I agreed with that five, ten years or, yeah, ten years ago now, I would have would have called you a statist. Now you just, you become a realist. And then in the eyes of some, that means that you're immoral. Yeah, I mean, this is, this is scientific. It is, it is an observable fact that power is always concentrated and select few individuals, and they're not very nice people. We know science. They're not libertarians.

We know science is racist. Yeah. There is no end to oligarchical rule. Although one elite may lose its power in power, indeed always loses its power sooner or later, minority takes its place through what Pareto calls the circulation of elites and the record of this unending rise and fall of ruling minorities in human is human history. So one thing I wanted to pick your brain on, having listened to your episode with a catgirl Kulak today is I wanted to ask you, what do you suspect will be the circulation of elites

if or when his his predictions of a full on collapse by 2030 what does that circulation of elites look like i mean i think it is it may break down regionally you may have new elites stepping up or you know most of the time it's um it's existing release um elites you just they just you know it's like people have said um because we've been talking about the PayPal Mafia and how, you know, we see them as trying to make a move right now and push the elites out and take over. And, you know, someone made the comment, well, they're already a part of the elites, you know, T. Lone's Palantir, all these countries. So, but I think Orrin McIntyre made a really good point today. He said,

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

outside. But I mean, at the national level, at a government level, at a oligarchical level, it's always going to be from the existing elites. They're just going to move in and they're just going to switch them out. And you're just going to hope that it's going to be, they're going to be more in your favor than the previous elites. But if everything does fall apart at 2030, I mean, all I see is people will be begging for anybody. And I think that the person, you know, whoever has set themselves up with the most, with the rhetoric of we're Americans, we should be proud of our heritage. We can take our heritage back. We don't have to put up with it.

We don't have to put up with this. I think that is that's the person who is more going to be to circulate in and out and who somebody, who they may potentially look to in order to try to get them out of that situation. Yeah. I mean, the reason why this would be so unprecedented if, I mean, one of the reasons why, the main reason I think about is when I think of a collapse, I think, and I think of a power vacuum and who fills that power vacuum. It's whoever has the most hard power and whoever has the most energy behind them. And right now, well, you know, if theoretically a few years before a collapse, there's a lot of

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

Yeah. But then again, like, this is a fine. This would be, uh, the, the match point would be a financial collapse, which implies that the dollar doesn't really have any value anymore. So now it just becomes like, you know, depending on how hard it is, a barter system, who has the most assets to barter, who has the most, who has the most to trade. Well, here's the thing is the people who are going to rule, the people who would roll after a collapse are the people who've already been planning for the collapse. And I would assume that there are people already in elite positions who already have an idea of what a new currency would look like and things like that.

So, I mean, I think that's where it goes. Boy, that doesn't go well for us. No, no, not at all. From my suburban ass. All right. These conclusions are bleak, and the Machiavellians saw little ground for hope of democratic emancipation. Modern democracy, they interpreted as a special kind of disguised oligarchy based on commercial and industrial power, and not fundamentally different from early kinds of elitism. Mosca and Pareto, in particular, saw socialism as no more than an illusion that threatened to subordinate all of

society to an elite based on the power of the state. To Michelle's, oligarchy was an inherent part of social and political organization. A doctrine that was most common to most of the Machiavellians in which Burnham emphasized was the concept of what Moscow called the political formula, Pareto called derivations, and Sorrel called myths. According to these writers, elites do not hold power simply through force and intimidation. They formulate doctrines that rationalize or justify their control in logical, moral, theological, or philosophical terms. These doctrines, political formulas, derivations, or, as Burnham called them, in the Menager of Revolution, ideologies, act as social and politically integrative forces and are often quite sophisticated and complex in their structures.

most members of a society, elites as well as non-elites, believe them and to at least some extent, take them seriously. Nevertheless, I think less than less. Don't you agree? Don't you think people, I would say elites more so than any, but I think more and more people even just walking around

basically are just at the end of their rope where they're just, when it comes to ideologies, and they're just like, I'm just, got to take care of myself. I think what separates maybe our side from the normies and from the other side is that we don't view ideology as an ends. We view it as a means. And that's that, I don't know.

I got nothing else on that. But yeah, pretty much that's it. It's a means to an end. You know, pointing the masses in a direction, propaganda. and you know, channeling energy towards a certain outcome. That's all going towards a means to a desirable end that we would like or we hope happens. Or we hope to get somebody in there that can make it happen. You know, if it happens to be of a particular ideology, like, it's really of no consequence to us.

Call it Christian nationalism. Call it fucking white nationalism, ethno, whatever. Like, as long as most of our. desired ends are going to be fulfilled. Like, we know that we don't have the luxury to pick and choose. Most members of a society's elite as well as non-elites, I believe them. Nevertheless, despite their sophistication and large number of adherents, these ideologies are not to be regarded as scientific in purpose or content.

Their purpose is not to express or explain reality in a way that can be proved or disproved, but to provide a rationalization for the existence and power of the dominant minority. The fact that ideologies are not scientific and that those who believe in them do so for non-rational reasons means that it is useless to criticize ideologies in terms of verifiable facts or logic. All you have to do is just make fun of them, mock them. Dehumanize, other eyes, whatever you want to call it. I do it. Yeah. Ideology is impervious to such criticism because,

belief in it is dependent on non-rational factors such as self-interest or emotion. The fact that an elite itself usually believes in most or all of its own ideology also means that no elite can be entirely scientific in its own thinking and behavior. Any elite must always, to some extent, be the victim of its own myths. Burnham argued that the Machiavellian science of power could provide a non-ideological framework for an elite, but he was highly skeptical that any elite could for long make successful use of this science. Yeah, good on his part, because I mean, when you think of any great man that ever arose, it's exactly what I said. They talk the talk as far as ideology

goes. They may have even believed some of it, but, you know, take any great man and none of them were purely ideological in practice. Well, well, think about this. And I know, people are probably sick of me bringing him up but boo kelly i only know two things about but kelly i know that he hates crime and crack down on it and he likes bitcoin yeah it's the only i mean i know that he's not an ideology which is no great yeah so he doesn't i don't know that he has an ideology he first ran for president in a far left party he got kicked out of that had to go and he bounced all around, you know, it all, all I can judge him on is what he's done. Yeah.

You know, I mean, he's kissed the wall. Yes. His wife has some Sephardic in her. Yes. Yeah, I know that that's that that means that you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. He's going to disappoint you because he did that. All I can judge him on is what he's done so far and everything he's done so far looks pretty damn good to me.

Yeah, we don't, we don't have the luxury of. having the expectation of even a somewhat pure great man that comes and, you know, sweeps, sweeps whatever this is away. We know, like take Musk, for example, he's probably the most likely candidate to fight the current regime and maybe win out. He's on the right track, but, you know, he's definitely not ideological. He wants to get to Mars. That's about it.

And anything that stands in between him and that goal needs to be swept away. that's not an ideology either. No, no, that's, he has a goal. That's it. All right. Burnham and the Machiavellians tended to interpret all of social and political reality in terms of the doctrine of the elite. For them, the nature of the elite is largely determinative of other social, economic, political, and cultural institutions. Institutions that are not consistent with the perceived interests of an elite are abolished or discouraged.

while those that are or would be consistent with its perceived interests are created or promoted. Quoting from the book. From the point of view of the theory of the ruling class, a society is the society of its ruling class. A nation's strengths or weaknesses, its cultures, its powers of endurance, its prosperity, its decadence, depend in the first instance upon the nature of its ruling elite. more particularly, the way in which to study a nation, to understand it, to predict what will happen to it, requires, first of all, and primarily an analysis of the ruling class. Political history and political science are thus predominantly the history and science of ruling classes, their origin, development, composition, structure, and changes. The importance that the Machiavellians attach to the elite or ruling class resembles and to a degree parallels, Marx's emphasis.

on economic forces in interpreting history. Yet the Machiavellian theory of elites is a broader doctrine than that of Marx and allows for consideration of non-economic and non-material forces in understanding men in history far more than Marx did. Yeah, which is very difficult when you factor in all of the other, you know, non-scientific factors that go into studying the history of a, of a nation, a culture of people. You know, it gets so far beyond dialectics.

It's insane. It's hard. That's why predicting things is so fucking hard. There's too many goddamn factors. Nevertheless, because Burnham and the Machiavellian saw politics in terms of a struggle for power and the struggle for power was central to the nature of an elite and to all other social relationships, it would not be inaccurate to the disqualification. describe Machiavellianism as a kind of political determinism paralleling the economic determinism of Marx.

Let me ask you this. Do you think there was really a struggle for power? I think it's roundly agreed. Somewhere around 2012 is when we kind of had this turning point into what we have now, which is just like gay, trans-Soviet Russia. But before that, I mean, we we took that there's been a lot of talk about how great the 90s was and how, you know, how basically unified we were, how basically free and prosperous we were and how happy we were. I think there's something to that. The culture was definitely different. The ruling class, do you think the ruling class was different then? And then we had maybe not even a struggle that got us to where we are now. And that kind of defined the nature of why they're so incompetent because they didn't have to struggle for it.

Well, I think Thomas makes a really good point about the early 90s is the 90s, especially the first half of the 90s, is that it was kind of anarchy. There was, and, you know, I know the anarchist watching, they want me to make an argument that anarchy is good because it means without ruler. That's what the, it means without rulers. Shut the fuck up. No, we mean the normal definition. Yeah, we mean the definition that everybody agrees upon. Oh, but that's democracy. Yeah, go fuck your mother.

I mean, people getting, the amount of crime, people get, I mean, there's a reason why basically Giuliani had to unleash an army onto the streets to stop crime in New York. Yeah. It had reached. And here's the thing. the people who talk about the 90s being this great they're usually leftists they're usually people from the left side well why was the 90s great because they could get away with doing all the degenerate shit that they wanted to they weren't judged for it it was fine i mean i knew people who

it was live and let live but also live and let live to like to be you know kind of kind of more on the right than you are allowed to be now well and And not even that because you think about the Patcon movement where they would go, they were going after right wing militia groups. And they don't even talk about that like half of those militia groups that they took down were black. You still couldn't be that far to that. It's still illegal to be that far to the right. But you know, you could call your friend a fag or you could like, you know, you could say the N word and nobody would like, nobody would freak out about it amongst your peer group. Now, not so much.

I mean, but it was it was heaven for someone like James Lill. Lindsay. He got away with doing all the degenerate shit he wanted to and far right wingers were being cracked down upon. Yeah. Yeah. And the other question I have is, do you think that would be the defining factor of, say, the 80s and Reagan years into the 90s was the switch between tough on crime and then, you know, prison and mandatory minimum sentencing, prison reform, mandatory minimum sentencing, this, this transfer over to a softer approach, a more I don't know, socially informed approach. It's hard for me to say that, you know, in the 80s, I was not, that wasn't something that I

would have been able to really pay attention to. I have to think about history and, you know, I'm not going to be able to give a personal opinion on that. But, yeah, I mean, really, the problem in the 80s was, I mean, it was just the crime was. insane, and it was just so matter of fact. Yeah. It's just you accepted the fact that there was all this crime going on, and it's not like now where, you know, you have social media, everybody's like, look, you got these Soros DAs, and they can go out and commit crime all they want. If you try and stop them, you go to jail. You know, you have people who, you know, put up flyers who get two years in jail.

Someone rapes a 12-year-old. They get, you know, 15 months probation. you can talk more about that now. You can learn more about it because of social media, but back then it was harder. You really just have to go back into books and study the history on that. But I can't really answer that question properly.

But being an adult in the 90s and living through the 90s, yeah, I mean, I knew people who were OD, you know, who OD killed themselves, got hung up on, got hung up on, on Oxy really early. I knew people who got hung up on meth real early. early on in the in the whole game. I knew people in, I mean, from when I was a kid, I knew people, like, my dad worked with the guy whose wife was the first recorded crack victim in New York City.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Huh. And they were white. Huh. Yeah. Yeah. So it is, it is pretty great.

All right. It should also be. understood that Burnham and his mentors were not arguing for elitism in the sense of aristocracy. They were not arguing that elite should rule the majority because their members are better, more virtuous, stronger, more intelligent, or wiser than most men. They were arguing for the sociological inevitability of minority domination for the impossibility of majority rule and democracy in any literal or meaningful sense. I mean, democracy now to me, when people ask me what democracy means now, I just tell them either.

whatever the regime is pushing, sodomy, transgenderism. I mean, that's basically what democracy is. Yeah. And it's great to see, you know, the inherent contradictions between democracy and liberalism kind of play itself out on the left, especially with this Palestine, Israel thing going on. It's, if you view it through that lens, democracy versus liberalism, you can, you can, if you view it through that lens, democracy versus liberalism.

it's just amazing to see and it's only going to get better. The fact of oligarchy, they argued, was founded on an empirical and comparative study of history on the biological and psychological realities of human beings and on the nature of human societies. It was a fact that could be neither ignored nor altered and moral approbation or criticism of the fact of oligarchy is irrelevant to its truth. yet elites are not permanent. And the laws they govern the change in the composition and the rise and fall of elites were an important theme for Burnham and for Mosca and Pareto,

to whom he devoted most attention. Mosca had recognized in all elites an aristocratic tendency by which they tend to restrict or encourage entrance to or exit from their ranks. Yeah. That's another battleground is everybody wants to be. everybody's chasing status. That's why you have people going into $200,000 in debt to go to Harvard. That's so that they can have that degree and enter the ranks of the elite,

or at least the near group of the elite. And it's going to be really funny if we have a collapse. When the restrictive aristocratic tendency is predominant, society is stable and may begin to stagnate. When the democratic tendency is predominant, society is in flux with many innovations, social and political crises, cultural ferment, and perhaps disorder, chaos, and revolution. Yeah. Speaking of the transition between the 90s to the early aughts. Paredo himself went further and developed a psychology of elites that is at the root of his theory of the circulation of elites.

Paredo distinguished between derivations of ideologies, and residues, which are constant universal psychological instincts or impulses. Among the six classes of residues that Pareto recognized the two most important were those of class one, the instinct for combinations, and class two, group preference, group persistence. And then there's four more, and that's why I couldn't read Pareto. Well, if you read AA's book on the one I read on the one I read on, the populist illusion, he does a really good job of summing it all up in very fast, very short, in very short chapters.

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

Class 1 residues include behavioral patterns such as those of magic, philosophical system-making, and financial manipulation. Elites that contain primarily verbalists, intellectuals, and administrators will exhibit a high proportion of Class 1 residues and will try to preserve their own power and resolve problems through verbal,

administrative and manipulative behavior rather than through the use of force. They thus correspond to Machiavelli's foxes, quoting from the book, Machiavellians. They live by their wits. They put their reliance on fraud, deceit, and shrewdness. They do not have strong attachment to family, church, nation, and traditions. They live in the present, taking little thought of the future, and are always ready for change, novelty, and adventure. They are not adept as a rule in the use of force. They are inventive and chance taking.

We'll talk a little bit about that in a second. I remember an episode from way back where I forget if it was you or your guest implied that our elites are entirely comprised of foxes. There are no lions. And maybe it was Trump. Maybe it's Elon. But they're definitely, they're the lions right now. The only two.

right well i mean you do have the people in power now who are using force i mean yeah yeah true so Biden it's still pretty soft yeah i mean i mean you're throwing people in jail and yeah it's you're destroying people's lives in their livelihood and everything yeah you know you a lot of people would rather be dead than that that happen to them but the you know you have to wonder what stage in civilization, what stage in elite theory you are when the foxes start to use? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, exiting the animal analogy, it's when they're sufficiently

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

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

That's what we're seeing now. That's what it is now. Because the ones who would be, the ones who would commit violence would be the lions, and they have no lions. Yeah. It's all foxes. Yep.

If two- Throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks. Yeah. Basically, yeah. If too many class two residues accrue in the elite, it will rely excessively on force and will fail to innovate and adapt to changing circumstances and challenges. If too many Class 1 types come to predominate, as Paredo believes, was happening in the late 19th century,

the elite in its society will become soft, unstable, corrupt, and disorderly, although the society may produce a very high level of cultural expression. No, I'm saying that. Worst of all, however, the society will be unwilling and unable to use force to protect itself from either internal external challenges. Yeah, I don't think we're anywhere like that. Yeah, that's, yeah, this, that's not here. While the foxes of Class 1 predominate in the elite,

the Lions of Class 2 are concentrated in the non-elite and may use force against the foxes in rebellion and other forms of violence. External enemies may also commit aggression against the societies ruled by foxes, and in any case, because of the lack of, qualities of group persistence, a society led by class one types will have few psychic resources for mustering endurance and sacrifice. Yeah, that's that.

There's no energy to direct in any type of revolutionary social change. Elites that are imbalanced by too many class one or class two residues are unstable and are likely to be overthrown or replaced. They tend to create the conditions that lead to their fall from power. the rise and fall of elites and changes in their composition, Pareto called the circulation of elites. Normally, a healthy elite will be in continual but slow circulation, admitting new members in expelling or ostracizing old and decadent elements. When the circulation occurs too rapidly or when one elite is suddenly and entirely replaced by another,

the result is revolution. The theory of... Yeah, I guess that... Yeah. I mean, before this, I'd never heard it. place that way. I've heard a lot of explanations for what constitutes and what causes revolutionary social change. But I mean, I guess you can you can explain it in many different ways and still come out with the same, you know, right answer. I think what we may

be seeing now, and this isn't an original idea. I don't remember who may be heard it from Orrin is you have an overproduction of elites because and I would say it's because the money supply has been increased and expanded so far that you have so many people that have acquired insane amounts of wealth. Yeah. And they basically become elites, but they are not the kind of, they're not impressive at all there. If you have too much of something, if you have, if you produce too much of something and it happens too fast, you know, a lot of time you're just going to have defects all over the place. Yeah, if everybody's an elite, then nobody's an elite, and you go from there. The theory of elites as developed by Moscow and Pareto and endorsed and expounded

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

All societies, according to Moscow, are composed of contending social forces. groups that have interest and values associated with particular kinds of activities, agriculture, industry, education, religion, the army, etc. Within these social forces, there are hierarchies and differentiations of power, wealth, merit, or geographical location. The most significant social forces become part of the elite and pursue their particular interests and values within it. Yeah, I guess to a degree, I don't know if that's particularly, applicable now. But yeah, there are, the hierarchies have been flattened so much because, like you said,

we're over manufacturing. I mean, other than like, you know, the top levels of the state or the deep state or whatever, or the Illuminati, like, you know, the, everything below that is pretty much, there's not a whole lot of difference other than, you know, what industry they're in or geographic location, that there's not really a whole lot of difference in what defines them. When according to Mosca, there is a multiplicity of independent social forces within the elite or ruling class such that no one force has sufficient power to exclude or exploit the others, then a de facto condition of juridical defense obtains.

Mosca's concept of juridical defense is approximate to, what is more generally known as the rule of law. Because of the mutually balancing and restraining action of the social forces in the ruling class, no single force or faction can accumulate or exercise arbitrary, irregular power. Each social force, and the groups and individuals composing or attached to it, protects itself from exploitation by the checking power it holds against the others. even though this system of socio-political checks may not be formally reorganized in law, it can still exist and be a substantive restraint on tyrannical power.

Yeah, there is kind of a parallel rulebook for when you hit a certain amount of asset value. Mosca's concept of juridical defense owed much to both Machiavelli and Montesquieu, as well as to the exponents of the classical theory of the mixed constitution. Unlike Montesquieu, however, Mosca did not limit his idea of checks and balances to the formal and legalistic component of the government, but extended it to the substantial concrete or real component social forces within a ruling class. So that's another thing I see. And I don't know to the degree that it affects, you know, really rich people that we would probably call elite. But the, what is it, the mixed constitution idea where you have, you have the rule. rule of law, but there's also other rules that everybody kind of agrees to follow. That has been just withering away on the vine on purpose. Everything is legalistic. Now, everything is,

everything has to be codified into an employee handbook or an HR department or something like that. And I think that's a function of just managerialism. Yeah. Managerialism is so, I mean, there's nothing more managerial than lawfare. We were talking about how pernicious lawfare is and just how how it's so common now for people to weaponize bad faith interpretations of contracts, of laws, of agreements, even informal ones. And that was kind of never the case before. And I suspected as something to do with demographic changes and, you know,

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

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

In Burnham's words, juridical defense can be secure only where there are at work various and opposing tendencies and forces, and where these mutually check and restrain each other. The product of juridical defense is liberty. The specific forms of juridical defense include the familiar democratic rights, security of private property, security against arbitrary arrest, freedom of religion, discussion, and assembly. Moreover, the multiplicity of social forces participating in sharing power in the ruling class

leads to a high level of civilization and an efflorescence of cultural life. Yes, because in order for that to flourish, there has to be something outside the state. And I think that's the commonly accepted definition of liberty, which is kind of anything outside of the public, anything in, like any informal actions you take is an act of liberty. And like there's, you know, it may not,

it may not be formalized into law, but it's, it's definitely a, a cultural change where that particular type of liberty, the important type of liberty that we like is, just going away in an informal manner. By way of contrast, the monopolization of power by one social force leads to its unchecked power and to a low level of civilization

as other social forces with other resources, values, and skills are excluded and exploited. Using the concept of juridical defense and its antithesis, Moscow was able to evaluate different kinds of polities depending on the internal structure and composition of their elites. The worst kind of government would be the uniform regimes in which the unrestrained power of a single social force prevents all others from obtaining power and distributing to the public culture.

The best kind of government to both Moscow and Pareto was the representative middle-class aristocratic parliamentary governments of the mid to late 19th century. This type, however, was threatened by the rise of mass democracy, see new classes of wealth and power and socialism. Yeah. These forces to both Mosca and Pareto threaten to upset the delicate balance

that underlies to juridical defense and to impose a monolithic regime on modern society. It should be noted that this normative measure of governments is fundamentally modern, and as such, it follows Machiavelli and Monoskew. The best regime to Moscow and Pareto is not that in which the virtue of the citizen is most developed, but that in which the security and liberty of the citizen and

the Commonwealth are best protected. Although Mosca and the Machiavellians were influenced by Aristotle Cicero and the pre-modern tradition of political thought, their primary concern was not, as with the earlier school, the ethical realization of man and society. The special contribution of the Machiavellian tradition, however, is the establishment of a criterion of normative judgment of regimes is based on empirical rather than on transcendental grounds. Yeah, I think Del Noce would disagree with that slightly. Burnham accepted this Machiavellian formulation, and it's fundamental to his entire career as a political thinker.

His primary concern, like Machiavelli's, was to establish a verifiable methodology for the analysis of social and political affairs, but he was also concerned to discover a realistic means, of evaluating and judging political institutions and behavior. Oh, nothing. This is just explaining kind of the etymology of like how we came to regard regimes. He found both in the Machiavellians and it was the limitation of power that remained for him the primary political ideal. Quoting, the Machiavellians are the only ones who have told us the full truth about power,

The primary object in practice of all rulers is to serve their own interests to maintain their own power and privilege. No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of goodwill, no religion will restrain power. Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leaders nor businessmen, neither bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in the basic use which they will seek to make of power. Only power restrains power. When all opposition is destroyed, there is no longer. any limit to what power may do. A despotism, any kind of despotism, can be benevolent only by accident. Yeah, we'll see. I think this assumes that, you know, it assumes a base human nature, even amongst the elites

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

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

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

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

It is drawn to humanitarian and irrationalist ideologies that undermine its own rule, and it shows an increasing reluctance and inability to use force effectively. The Class 1 or fox-like residues of Pareto are accumulating too heavily, in the entrepreneurial elite. In opposition to these signs of decadence is the aggressive, efficient, dynamic, and sometimes fanatical character of the rising managerial class,

itself a new social force. Quoting from the Machiavellians. The production executives and organizers of the industrial process, officials trained in the manipulation of the great labor organizations and the administrators, Bureau chiefs and Commisars,

developed in the executive branch of the unlimited modern state machines, and that the managers may function, the economic and political structure must be modified, as it is now being modified, so as to rest no longer on private ownership and small-scale nationalist sovereignty, but primarily upon state control of the economy

and continental or vast regional world political organization. Yeah, I mean, I don't know about all that, but I think we were talking about this yesterday. The line between ownership and control is continually being blurred. And that's one of the ways you know that we live in a managerial state is, you know, the owner of my business has very little control over it other than the hiring and firing of me. And like I pretty much make command decisions every day in his stead. And he gives me the, like, his only function is to provide capital and give me. the thumbs up or the thumbs down. And that's not a capitalist definition of ownership at all.

Vivek has been talking about this when it comes to the president. He said that anybody who gets elected should be in charge. So the person who gets elected, I mean, and let's face it, he uses the term managerial all the time. He talks about, you know, how we're a managerial state. He's red burn him. He knows all of this. And yeah, it's just how. When you have such a complex, technologically complex and personnel, I guess, humanly complex entity like, you know, the executive branch, how does the president exercise ownership? Well, he has to be able to basically be able to hire and fire whoever he wants. Yeah, yep.

Yeah, that's part of it. Absolutely. I think that's the best you can do. you know going back to uh charles haywood's episode on on Elon Musk will walk walk around a plant and uh make it no less than a hundred command decisions during that visit and like that's how he he actually exercises ownership to whatever degree you know the the physical limitations of time give him and um so like he's kind of a different beast too yeah no The person needs to be in charge.

FDR is the perfect example of it. FDR was a king. He was a dictator. All the power in the government rested in him. Nobody did anything. Nobody did anything without his say so. This vast reorganization will require the use of force, military machines, and soldiers far more than did the old capitalist society.

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

Yeah, and it doesn't have to, because most normals. aren't ideological either they just don't know this we need to we need to wake them up bro and like not not because you know we we hope to seize power or anything but just because it's it's the right thing to do well a makes makes a makes a point in his book that um if you wake up that if the normies get get woken up too much and too many of them get woken up then you suffer the you suffer revolution yeah yeah and we're not talking we're talking about France, not American. Yeah.

The tendency of bona partism and of the managerial class is totalitarian. The managers want, need, and find valuable, a state that is unitary and all-powerful. Intermediary and non-political institutions and groups are denounced and undermined if they do not support the rising managerial powers. Not only does the managerial class need an extended and unipotent state for its own internal and international policies and goals, but also the crisis of the Depression and the Second World War, gives it the opportunity to create one. Hence, managerial propaganda denounces the entrepreneurial class and its supportive institutions, churches, non-politicized labor unions,

small businessmen, schools, the opposition press, local political institutions, the Congress itself and seeks to portray them as reactionary, parochial, and responsible for the present crisis and its misery. Only by destroying and moving beyond these obsolescent forces can the crisis be resolved. Burnham was not happy. Do we stop there? I mean, you just describe reality, bro. Yeah. was not happy about the totalitarian vector of managerial society. Private capitalist ownership of the economy, he wrote, quote, meant a dispersion of economic power and a partial separation between economic and other social forces in a manner that prevents the concentration of an overwhelming

single social force. Today, the advance of the managerial revolution is everywhere concentrating economic power in the state apparatus, where it tends to unite with control. over the other great social forces, the Army, education, labor, law, the political bureaucracy, art, and science even. This development, too. Science especially now, yeah. This development, too, tends to destroy the basis for those social oppositions that keep freedom alive. Yeah.

The entrepreneurs are therefore correct to argue that the New Deal and other managerial policies were a threat to freedom, but the entrepreneurial formulas of market capitalism, a limited state, and national sovereignty, had lost their credibility. In any case, the debate between the conservative... See, that's something that people just don't realize. People who are for market capitalism, a limited state, and national sovereignty, they're not willing to accept that it's lost their credibility. and they think that

they don't understand where we are right now in history they don't know where they're at where we're past that where you're now and like those days are over they're not coming back yeah and to constantly

you know it's like well no this is the way things are done this is the way things should be though this is what guarantees the most individual freedom bro we're beyond it yeah freedom my favorite question freedom to do what

freedom to do what I had I won't even say who it was but I had a libertarian in my DMs today who's just freaking out he's like why are there so many libertarians who argue for like that the most heinous stuff and stuff that's illegal and not only illegal but would be considered immoral by the majority of the West at least is is okay well they they took a legal theory and turned it into an ideology. Yeah. But somebody said that in one of the threads. I was like, yeah, pretty much. Dave, Dave had a thread today said that. Yeah, yeah, it was Dave.

Yeah, you took a legal theory like a dry, what's supposed to be a dry, not fun legal theory and turn it into your entire identity. Like, good job. You are just a piece of human trash that will never about that. And you will. Until you stop. And the inevitable end of your, of your, um, theoretical whatever is talking about whether possession of child porn is a crime.

Yeah, and that's why like if they were, I shouldn't say they're pieces of trash that'll never amount to anything because then I just wouldn't care. But it's the, the proactive part of libertarianism is making sure that you and more importantly, your children are propagandized to that. And they're just, you know,

they're not as bad as leftists because they don't hold any power whatsoever. They're just, like, I wouldn't, I wouldn't let them babysit my kids. Well, I think the biggest problem with it is, is that these free market principles and these, these free principles are so easily, the language of that is so easily adopted by people in power. And then it's, it's so Jewish. It's so easily adopted by people in power who will say, oh, look, we have free trade. And it's like, well, no, but that's not real free trade. We're shipping in, yeah, we're shipping in sex toys for your toddler.

Yeah, and then free trade has never been tried. Why are you using that term? And it's like, well, because it's so easily everything, everything you come up with can and will be used against you. Yeah, yep, everything will be manipulated, which, you know, if they want to know how, then they should watch this episode. In any case, the debate between the conservative spokesman for the old-line capitalist class and the Marxist and the Democratic totalitarians who defend the rising managerial class as a debate in ideology and myths that express a contest for control over the despotic

and bonapartist political order, which they both anticipate. The apologists for the managers would destroy all liberty and juridical defense in pursuit of utopianism and the apologists of traditional capitalism are simply whistling in the wind for, quote, it is in any case impossible to return to private capitalism. See, yeah. I mean, one thing I have to hand it to, you know, whether conscious or not, Malthusians, is that they're not utopian. I got to get, I got to respect them for that. But everybody else seems to be.

That made the quote of the episode. All right. Hey, at least they're not utopian. Yet Burnham was not entirely pessimistic about the survival of some liberty. He suggested that some social opposition might persist or develop that would create a balance of forces in the managerial elite. And he also hoped that the principles of the Machiavellian science of power would inform the new ruling class of its real interests and of the utility of liberty. Now, anybody who's like, there anybody who's out there promoting liberty and everything just read that and went

that's me yeah it's uh it's very much limited to utilitarianism and that's also kind of a a product of um the the shift to utilitarian um i guess utilitarian metaphysics is up as a a product of the rise of revolutionary Marxism and that energy being transferred, the revolutionary energy being transferred into the managerial class. It's all utility. How many utilities will you generate if I give you a stimmy check? Oh, more utils. Okay, you're getting a stimmy check. How many utils will I generate if I put a bullet in your head? He developed a brilliant defense of liberty and juridical defense on the grounds that they actually enhanced the cohesion, strength, and flexibility of a society rather than limited.

The Machiavellians is probably Burnham's most widely misunderstood book. George Orwell appears to have seen it in a blueprint for the Doublethink of 1984. The sociologist David Spitz took a similar view of the book and included Burnham as an anti-democratic ideologue. The very subtitle of Burnham's book, Defenders of Freedom, should be sufficient to refute this misinterpretation, and it may be that some critics of the book have not read far beyond the subtitle. That's me. That's me with every book. It is true that Burnham described the coming society in the starkest language, yet this style is typical of Machiavelli and his disciples, and is appropriate to their claim to realism and

disavowal of ideology and sentiment. So I've actually never read the Machiavellians, but does Burnham adopt a different style than, say, the managerial revolution? Like, is there, is it a noticeably different tone? Well, no, he has a very distinct way of writing. I mean, if you, if you read the managerial revolution, you read suicide of the West. You know it's the same person writing it. All right, all right.

I thought he switched up his tone, which, would be insane. That would be nuts. It is difficult to see how any familiarity with the contents and arguments of the Machiavellians could overlook Burnham's exposition of the theory of juridical defense, his criticism of managerial political tendencies, or his own defense of liberty. The fact that many critics have missed these points suggest that Burnham's discussion of ideology applies to the authors of such criticism. And that's what Mr. Samuel Francis had to say about the Machiavellians. Yeah. No, I mean, it's, I like these kind of critiques that aren't really critiques.

It's just an exposition of it. And I try to do that myself with some original works, and it never works out well for me because I'm just not that eloquent. No, it's, um. I do podcast reviews and Milwaukee Tool reviews. It's one of those books that when you read it, you're going to have, it's one of those books that if you're a, if you're a hardcore ideologue,

you may not read, you may not get it the first time. Yeah, you may have it. It's one of those things that a couple years down the line, maybe something else. It's like somebody told me at the beginning of 2019 to read Yarvins, why I'm not a libertarian,

and I read it. And I'm like, there's a couple good points in here. I don't care. 2020 rolls around. Yeah. 2020 rolls around. Everything happens. We start getting into the summer.

You know, and, you know, cities are on fire. And, you know, I'm like, yeah, let me read that again. And I'm like, oh. Oh, yeah. Okay. And then I read it again like a year ago. And I was just like, this is, this makes more sense than anything than anything I've ever read as far as a critique of, uh, critique of libertarianism.

I did try to I did try to crack the manager not the Machiavellians back in the day when Yarvin was talking about it and I couldn't get through it because I was in that same face like this none of this resonates with me none of it's particularly

interesting or prescient and now as we're reading this I'm like all right I wish I talked more but like I'm too busy agreeing with it yeah no it's there's a way there's a way you want politics to be in there's where what politics is and if you want politics to be a certain way you're gonna have to take you have to take power and do it you at the at the very least you have to acknowledge that the

the only form of of society that you're ever going to be in is some form of an oligarchy which is a huge hurdle for a lot of people yeah it's well there may be a white pill in there. If you really understand elite theory, if you embrace it, if you realize that it's always a small group of people in charge, there's a chance that you could actually be a part of a group that gets those, that helps to get those people in charge, people who are on your side, who at least, you know, it's like we've been talking about the PayPal Mafia. It's like, do I think the guys in the PayPal Mafia agree with me? Probably not. I mean, there's probably maybe a couple of them.

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

circulation of elites proof. Like not recession proof because we're done with, we're probably done with recessions. But circulation of elites proof. Well, and there are a lot of those. You know, I have people who contact me all the time. now and say you know it's like finally got myself to the point where I'm pretty sure that um you know no matter what would happen I'll always be able to earn an income and everything you know I mean that's that's important yeah I mean yeah a certain level of self-sufficiency and uh prepared this absolutely I am woefully and you know I'm trying to have a kid and all that too and you know that I'm telling you that episode I listened to listen to today with a cat

Cat Girl Kulak kind of broken my just putting me in a real bad mood all day. Yeah, you came into the group. I really recommended to the listeners. Yeah, you came into the group chat and you were like, all right, I'm going to kill myself now.

Yeah. Oh, man. All right, well, let's end this. Where can people find your work when you do work? So you can find me at BTWA underscore returns on X, formerly known as Twitter, and you can find me every single Wednesday live on Timeline Earth.

All right. Thanks, Aaron. Appreciate it. Yep. Thank you for having me.