TRASHFUTURE - The Bronze Age Collapse 2 ft. Patrick Wyman

Episode Date: September 27, 2022

Patrick Wyman joins the gang to discuss social collapse and legitimacy throughout history, as we try to apply some of the lessons to certain societies that have been thrown into chaos recently. Not naming names, but let's say United K. Or no, that's too specific - how about U. Kingdom. If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We are going to tour Australia in November, and there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Brisbane https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/trashfuture-live-in-brisbane-additional-show-tickets-396915263237 and Canberra: https://au.patronbase.com/_StreetTheatre/Productions/TFLP/Performances *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hi, everyone. It's TF. It's the free one. We're all here. It's Milo, Hussein, Alice, and Riley. We are back. I'm late. James, I cast him. Yes, that's right. We're all back from taking several weeks off, and what weeks they were to take off? What weeks they were? Let me tell you, when I'm taking off a week, I'm ready to take off. You're working ahead, right? We'll have a bit of a backlog, and nothing's going to happen. No, we got back to the studio, and we found that James A. Caster was sleeping on our sofa, and we were asking James A. Caster, why are you sleeping on our sofa? And he told us a story about how he got cucked by Mr Bean. I may have got the timelines wrong on that,

but I think that's generally what happened. Mr Bean cucked James A. Caster, and then the queen was so shocked by this news that she fucking died. James' mom kicked him out because he did quailudes on the day that the queen died. It was all terrible. Enough about good friend of the show. Definitely person who's been on the go, James A. Caster. I want to introduce our guest. You're definitely not someone who is being sent this by his friends every time this happens, and he's just sort of looking at his phone screen like... I want to introduce our guest, a returning champion, a true favorite of ours to talk to

whenever the topic turns to comparative history or indeed much else. It's Patrick Wyman of the Tides of History podcast. Patrick, how's it going? Hey, it's going fantastic. Thank you for having me. Patrick Wyman, coming at you live from the mists of time. Patrick Wyman, who is currently from your perspective in the past, where he talks about... That's all right. I am. I am. This is... It is... Time is relative. Look, I have no idea whether it's the Bronze Age, could be the Iron Age, some places. We may be dealing with a Paleolithic situation. I honestly don't know.

It's a podcasting microphone. Ever since they legalized weed in Arizona, much has been unclear to me. I'd like to top Alex's joke with a Patrick Wenman. Patrick Wenman. That's right. Yeah, Patrick Wyman is like specifically historiography as opposed to history. I have a couple of things to talk about at the top of the episode, but ultimately, what I'd like to get into as we go on is with the development of, let's say, things as they have been going in the UK especially, but the UK and the US, I think more broadly, mostly the UK. I've been pretty chill.

Half more of the grieving we've been doing, obviously. I've been increasingly interested in the idea of rapid collapses in the legitimacy of whether it's governments, ruling paradigms, whatever. We can put them around this paradigm of a sudden and unexpected collapse when some ruling idea, person, people stop doing things. It's very funny for Britain to open the door to the unexpected sudden collapse in state legitimacy room and find Iran in there as well, having got in by another door. Before we get there, I want to revisit a couple of old friends. We all remember Shemath Palahapatia, the King of Spacks. We do. We remember Spack very fondly.

The King of Spacks is something a school bully calls you when you're the attack. A couple of these we've talked about, such as Open Door and Clover Health, others we haven't, like Virgin Galactic. I forget. Virgin Galactic, also something a school bully calls you. As well as SoFi. Anything for that for school bullies? No, no. I'll take them all again. Come back to me on the next one. I have a checklist here. I have two major bits that I want to get into this episode.

So I'll let you know when I fucking, when I tick them off here. So these are all down from their debuts between 60 and 68 and 78 percent. So whoopsie-daisy. It looked like another of these great financial innovations was actually basically just a kind of byproduct of interest rates, yet another cargo cult thing. The podcast that told you so has told you so once again. It appears that a bunch of people thought that they have, with some whizbang new thing, managed to sort of generally kind of outsmart the rest of the world. When it turns out they were just in the right place at the right time to be carried up,

to be carried along by an unrelated rising tide that was lifting most boats. Well, it's a rather simple scheme in a sort of trapezoidal shape and order to keep producing money for all of its investors. Why? The only possible condition is a simple one, which is that money must remain free forever. Now, I don't see any problems with this here stratagem, do you, Colonel? Well, why this, this fast talking on the fast talking, this is a very relaxed, you call it Southern gentleman has a point. Yeah. This is Southern gentleman who's rolled into the studio with a bunch of just too good to wait, too good to be true business ideas has a point. Oh no, he's died.

Hi again. I'm Colonel J. G. A. Casto. No. I'm not saying let's crack off him. This is why they lost the fucking symbol. I'm never going on holiday again. Yeah. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. There's one more piece of top matter I want to discuss before we get into the meat of the episode. Yeah. I'm fully on board. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm back. I'm back. Top message. The first moon resort everyone. Let's go to Dubai. Are they building a moon? Yeah, they finally built the moon. Earth has been too long without a moon and Dubai has looked at this problem and said,

what if the moon was more like Dubai? What if Dubai was more like the moon? Fantastic. A great cultural interchange. Fantastic. What if, yeah, what if the moon had all the American fast food brands, but all the advertising was in Arabic? What if that? What if there was a five guys in the sea of tranquility? Sorry, Patrick, you were saying something. I was not. I was just thinking about how much I'd like to go to a five guys in the sea of tranquility. So this is, the designs are in front of me. You don't really need to see it. Picture the moon. Picture Dubai on the moon. And then picture.

Other way around. Other way around. It's picture Dubai and then where the Burj Khalifa is, because I assume in this universe of this proposal, they tear that down and then instead, picture a moon that is about a higher than any other skyscraper. It's a big moon. This is, this is from Dazeen. Designers Matthews and Henderson have created a concept for a 224 meter high spherical resort. Oh, so it's a moon on earth. It's not even the real moon. No, no, no. It's a, it's a, they built a moon in Dubai. Oh my God. Okay. Even better. And it's one of the least true things in Dubai. That is true. Named, named moon, the result imaginative of a spherical steel structure

enclosing a hotel and the moon surface attraction built on a circular podium. Henderson told Dazeen, quote, there is nothing remotely similar to the moon anywhere on planet. So we can't even make a joke about this. It's perfect. This was written by Chris Morris. This isn't a real article to which I might want to suggest. Have you considered the Atacama Desert and just building the Atacama Desert in Dubai? Because the thing about Dubai famously is that it doesn't have enough desert. No, not at all. It will be a fully integrated, contemporary, luxurious destination resort encompassing a unique signature attraction enabling guests to walk along the lunar surface

while exploring an authentic lunar colony. You know, an authentic lunar colony. It does speak to the sort of like narrowing of imaginations, right? That we've gone from, oh, maybe we'll go to the moon to maybe we can go to the moon in Dubai, which is just as good as the real moon, maybe. Well, it's kind of like, you know, Disney World versus Disneyland Paris, right? You've got the moon and then you've got the moon brackets, Dubai. Like, what if the moon was staffed by guys from Bangladesh? You've had a ton of like cultural franchises, right, that have like outposts in the UAE, like the Louvre has a thing in Dubai. I think the Guggenheim's a thing in Dubai. Why should not the moon have a thing in Dubai? It's a franchise.

The moon doesn't have a thing in Dubai because it has no capital. It has no need for capital. Like if it did, then the moon would have been represented in Dubai quite some time ago. But I have a question about Dubai as somebody who doesn't know very much about it. Is it like six flags for rich, dumb people? Yeah, kind of. I was there quite recently as like, you know, just as I could stop over a thing. It's changed a lot. So like part of the city, part of it is kind of like very like working class. Like there's lots of like sort of South Asian, like the South Asian working class, like they have like their shops and their communities around there. The stuff that like Dubai is now known for because they turf all the working class people

out of those areas is six flags for like rich influences. But it's also like, I don't know, it's kind of like having an insane experience on the internet because it can't really decide like what it is. So you just end up sort of getting a mishmash of stuff, which is mostly just like American brands and constant advertising. But, you know, you'll sort of walk, you'll walk on a street and you'll find a bunch of American fast food chains. And then you'll suddenly like see a mosque. And then you'll also see like a collect next to that mosque is like a giant, what like a rock climbing wall that no one can use because it's too hot. But for some reason, like it still exists. So you just like, yeah, it's just kind of this like

random rat, like they just take all the stuff that they think is cool and interesting and this like shove it in one place and they don't really think about how it's going to work. I recommend playing the documentary Spec Ops The Line, if you want to understand Dubai. What I see is Dubai as is if just doing cocaine normally isn't exciting enough for you and you want to do cocaine in a place where like it's kind of fine, but if you get caught, you'll be killed, then Dubai is the place for you. Also, if you want all your like NPCs in your game to like all have like, you know, British accents, but like Essex accents, then that's been is the place to go. You ever been in a fucking moon, you can. It's also a great place to go if you want to go to the

moon, but Virgin Galactic has unfortunately closed because it was funded in a stupid way. They've put fucking cycle lanes on the moon. So, so within the sphere, because remember, it's a gigantic sphere bigger than sort of several skyscrapers. There would be a 20 story hotel inside the moon sphere. Okay, so my crucial question about this is where they said you can walk on the surface of the moon, but they also said the moon gravity is still real. And I'm just magnet boots. Is it going to have its own gravitational field? What's going to go on? There's a large portion of inside the moon that you can that simulates a lunar surface you can walk on. So there's two lunar services, one that faces outside and one that's flat, but inside.

So really you're walking around a sort of big dirty moon. It says it will have 10 acres of authentic undulating lunar surface incorporating a highly detailed working lunar colony. Again, no such thing as an authentic lunar colony. It doesn't exist. Anything is an authentic lunar colony. It's not referring to anything. It's a sign without its signified. Yeah, I mean, Jason, it got his job over in Dubai building a sea of tranquility. So this specific area, this specific area will be utilized for guest visits and also astronaut training, which is very ambitious astronaut training. It will also isn't what you train astronauts for. They're like how to walk on some rocks. That is the difficult bit. It's all the

other stuff, like flying the spaceship and like the gravity and shit like that. All the stuff you can't do in a hotel in Dubai. The colony, they said will feature multiple global corporations in space agencies and a university campus requirement. Why will it feature those? It won't. Well, Alice, Alice, I have a response to that, which is they say, unlike many fantasy proposals featured on disease. Where are you getting this information from again? Unlike many fantasy proposals featured on disease, the moon will actually be built as it's entirely logical from a built environment perspective. And the business plan is extremely entirely logical from a built environment. Yeah, people want a mixed use.

I'm just cocking my head like a confused dog. Just like my head keeps tilting further and further to the side like I'm trying to make sense of this. And eventually my next just going to snap completely off. Like every single thing you said was somehow dumber than the thing that came before. And I just, yeah, I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. It feels every like the description of this feels like somebody is taking a like a meat mallet and going to work on my brain, like just just squeezing every logical thought out of it. They're going to build the moon and a Russian oligarch is going to sadly decides to commit suicide by jumping off of top of moon in Dubai while handcuffed to own ankles in suitcase. Very sad. Mental health

if only Prince Gary had spoken to him before this sad event. What just like a Russian version of talk to your bloke that's just like. I particularly enjoyed the HG on Prince Gary there too. Yeah. Oh yeah. Excellent. But look, I want to get to the meat. Yeah, we got to get to joke one. As fun as, as fun as moon is, I, and as much as I'm very excited to announce our new podcasting studio on moon. Yeah. Oh wait, actually no funny as possible thing about the moon is they accidentally build the moon too well. And it causes a huge tidal wave to subsume Dubai and also sets the periods of ruin in Hawaii all over the Middle East. Third funny thing that happened to the moon, someone 9-11's the moon, because like there's a lot of things in this world you can 9-11, right?

I'm not advocating that you 9-11 anything. However, some of them like a built replica of the moon, that's, that's an aesthetic, like that's a thing to, it's very 9-11-able. So, till look. I have one more moon question just before we go. Like guys, I'm not super familiar with astrology as a thing, but would astrology now have to account for the presence of the moon? So, when people talk about like Mercury being in retrograde and shit, yeah, you've got it, like that's got now have, that now has to be a factor in your calculations. Like that's, if you're wondering why you're feeling off as a Virgo, well, they could be. It's the long game, right? Nostradamus is going to start making perfect sense because all of his

shit was accounting for moon too, which hadn't been built yet. Ah, true. Guy in Dubai getting divorced because every day for three months, he turns to his wife at 6 p.m. and goes full moon tonight. Tell you what, it's going to be shit for Dubai werewolves. I'm, I mean, I'm looking forward to when Dubai like does, like Dubai will do like a mental health campaign where they get rid of the moon and you've got to like look at the thing and be like no moon. It's in a big box. Yeah. Oh no. Okay, so look, look, children. This is leading to what I want to talk about fundamentally, right? Which is to look back in history and to think about second, well, until recently, just the one history, but you know, now maybe two, we can finally

pluralize that list. It's been a one entry list for too long. And just like so many things, Dubai is something to say about it. More looves, for example, but no, I wanted to talk about this because as I said earlier, right, there is this, this long standing, I think, mission on the part of the British and an American, although in the British seem to be intensifying their quest to do this. Well, the Americans seem to be not pulling back necessarily, but also not intensifying as much of their mission to essentially wind down Britain as a growing concern. This is my theory, right, is that we've seen a rapid gear change has taken place. The office for budget responsibility has stopped publishing reports for the foreseeable future

of like how the economy is going to do, interest rates are way up. All of the sort of like interventions that the trust ministry has now instituted look more than anything else like a sort of a smashed grab, right? You try and do all of the thatcherite stuff you want to do as quickly as possible, as hard as possible, because, you know, six months time, there could be riots, Keir Starmer could be Prime Minister, and you know, he's not going to roll anything back. So instead of doing the like, instead of trying to do the like relatively softly, softly approach of even Boris, what we're doing is like, pedal to the metal. And my frame of reference for understanding

this is the movie heat. Now the movie heat you may be aware is about a crew of bank robbers, and it demonstrates a law about a crew of bank robbers, which is that every crew of bank robbers has to contain the crazy one in this in heat. That guy is called Wayne grow, right? Liz trust is the Tory party's Wayne grow, right? Because because much like the movie at the drop of a hat, they are ready to rock and roll and to do all of the extractive shit as quickly as possible and as violently as possible. At a certain point, the heat coming. And when you feel the heat, you got open market. So for just for to put this all into some context, right, that what's happened is as

trust has come in during a unprecedented cost of living crisis is essentially going to do things such as freezing energy bills by borrowing to subsidize the profits of the in fact, the private equity companies that own the energy, the generators. Why? What could possibly go wrong with such a scheme? Now, does he intend to repay this pray town? Now, that's being worked out. But of course, the the the scuttlebutt is that the but will be taken off your bills in the future. So you've basically taken out a mortgage on your power bill. Why? Additionally, make future bills more expensive. And there's no guarantee that energy prices will fall in the medium term. No. At the same time, though, we're looking at a sort of large package of tax cuts that are combined

with spending cuts, such as recently announced, kicking 120,000 people, more or less off of universal credit, unless they can like magically create more high paying. Grocery, you know, I'm not wrong. I'm not crazy. Yeah. And, you know, and this is all happening sort of in the context where and this is from from the FT from a story from John Byrne Murdoch that came out a few days ago, where in Britain, where you look at the income desiles, right? Desiles of earners. So bottom 10% one desile, top 10% the other desile, right? What's what has essentially happened is that the lowest earning brackets of the British households have a standard of living that is 20% lower than the same desile in Slovenia, for example. But this wasn't always the case. This

is a product of the last 10 years. And that's not to say that people in other countries ought to have a less of a standard of living than people in other certain countries, right? It's not as though there's an order here and the British poor ought to be better off than the poor of other countries. But rather that that impoverishing these people has generally been like in the Global South has been a choice made by wealthy people in the Global North. And until recently, there was a kind of, and I will turn to Patrick on this one, social contract where we say, look, you're going to have an okay standard of living. You're going to get Netflix. You're going to get, whatever junk food you want, all of this. And what's going to happen is that you're going to

keep consenting to being a part of this system in whatever way consent happens. And a lot of these sort of more brutal extraction is going to take place elsewhere. But what we've seen in the last 10 or 11 years is that increasingly brutal extraction, whether it comes from increased rent seeking, whether it comes from slash and grab privatizations, you talk about Alice, right? It's taking place increasingly here. Well, it seems right, as though what you're describing is the violence of the Imperial periphery. But surely we here in the Imperial court are insulated from such a large and a going zone. No, no, no. I want to sort of turn to Patrick, right? And be like, what do you make as a historian of

this kind of dramatic, you might say, rupture of an implicit social contract? I think that we have to that the answer to this question lies in making contingent the social contract that we're familiar with, right? So that is very explicitly a product of the first and second World Wars and mass mobilization, military action, right? Where you have to put the entire nation in arms in order to meet some sort of perceived external national threat. And so you as the elite of the country are essentially purchasing buy-in from the masses by means of social programs, by means of not cracking down on unionizations, as was the case during World War One, right? So they're just like, okay, we don't care, we're not going to have any

strikes, do whatever you have to do to make the strikes not happen in order for production to continue. If you need to have the whole nation involved in some kind of war effort, you're going to need to purchase their consent by means of including them in the state project. And so this is post-Second World War when you have two entire generations of people who have done military service on behalf of their country, you are rewarding their buy-in with social programs. This is the thesis, right? This is the Walter Scheidell and the great leveler, the idea being that one of the only things outside of disaster that reduces inequality is mass mobilization. And we're now 70 years past that. We're not living in a world of mass

national mobilization for any greater purpose anymore. We're living in a world where elites have kind of decided that they no longer need buy-in from the people, that that is no longer going to be the source of legitimacy that they rely on in order to get people to support government. And that's really, I think, the thing that I want to talk about as we zoom out and as we look in sort of comparator cases in history as well, right? Is this idea of legitimacy? Because the word is thrown around quite a bit, but I think that it's one of these things that it would we could do with a bit of a better definition of, a more precise understanding of it. And so when we talk about what previous iterations of the Tory governments did,

right, you mentioned this yourself, Alice, right? Like the Liz Truss government, the Wayne Grove Liz Truss government. With a big skull mullet. Yeah. As sort of cast aside any sort of pretension of the previous two Tory administrations, which saw sort of the, you might say, events of 16 as a kind of rearing of the... Warning signal, yeah. A warning sign, right? That things that we need to increase our legitimacy are perceived right to rule among people who have been left behind. And that resulted in Theresa May's burning injustices, which he obviously failed to remedy, and Boris is leveling up in agenda because, again, like,

they didn't really want to do it. They wanted to be seen to be doing it because it was essentially PR. And in relation to like being seen to do things, we can also talk about another great factor in legitimacy, which is sleaze, right? And there's sort of like various scandals of success of Tory governments. And I can get to develop my second theory here, which is that every British political party can be theorized within the concept of two, like, 2000s British youth TV programs. You're either a skins party or an in-betweeners party, right? And so my problem with Liz Truss, not my only problem, but I think the biggest like sleaze problem with Liz Truss is that she and her cabinet are having too much fun. This was also

Boris's problem, right? They're having fun, they're doing their own shit. It's depraved, sure, whatever. We don't care about that. Unnamed of them are having affairs or doing blows. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Having unlubed anal sex in their offices. Yes. They're all wearing neon hideous for some reason. Pretty much. I think genuinely you could fit the Truss cabinet into the opening of skins and it would work. And that's one of the things that like it grinds on people a bit, right? Like, you're not just immiserating me, but you're also you're having fun doing it. There's nothing the British public hate less than people who are having a good time.

That's true. Conversely, the in-betweeners sort of party is being miserable yourself, but also immiserating everyone else. Like, Labour has almost always been an in-betweeners party. The SNP has almost always been an in-betweeners party. Weirdly, there was a brief period under Corvin where Labour almost became a skins party where people were almost having fun, but people hated it too much. So now we're back to the in-betweeners. This is, I think, where we talk about the idea of legitimacy as being seen to do or be something. Why Boris lost so much of his legitimacy by being seen to not take the business of governing theories. You're French peasant sort of like covered in shit looking up at the palace and

being like, I think the king is kind of getting more of a skins vibe. But the thing is, I don't just want to talk about legitimacy here and now. I want to get back to it. I want to talk about ideas of legitimacy in history. So, Patrick, can you please explain the mandate of heaven? Patrick, what is history? Okay, so the mandate of heaven is great because it is the most, I think, coherent package and long lasting package that you get in terms of like putting legitimacy forth as a thing, right? So the idea is that over the course of the very, very long history of China that the mandate of heaven, the idea that the powers that be in the universe were granting the right to rule to a

particular dynasty or a particular group of people, that this could be withdrawn if that dynasty or group of people was no longer doing the correct things, if they were no longer observing the proper forms, if they weren't honoring their ancestors, if they weren't ruling correctly, whatever the criteria happened to be at that particular point in time. Stop wearing fluorescent hoodies. Calls himself emperor. When's the last time he built a moon? Sorry, please go ahead. Yeah, when was the last time he supped from the correct ritual bronze?

Like, these are all the right kind of things. So, like, so the definition of what makes somebody legitimate is going to vary at different points in the history of China, depending on who the constituencies are, whose approval actually matters for you to be a government, for you to be the governing dynasty, so on and so forth. But the key idea is that this is a coherent idea that people have and that it can be withdrawn if you no longer meet the correct criteria. The mandate of heaven can pass to a new dynasty, a new ruling group, and at that point, they become the legitimate rulers. Obviously, it's contested, like there's a lot of ins and outs and what have yous, but this is the key.

In this case, what happened is the mandate of heaven as an idea emerged in about 1050 BC, specifically to describe the manifest unfitness of the last Shang emperor, who was a bit of a drunkard and a loud and a layabout. Skin's empire, skin's domestic. Yeah. Yeah. And so, essentially, right, that yeah, the incoming dynasty claimed that the Zhou dynasty claimed that the Shang emperor was basically too cool. He's too cool to rule and for school. Chinese emperor Tony from skin. He was rude, crude, and full of...

And you basically, you get an even better in betweeners comparison, given the sort of like ubiquity of examinations in the Chinese empires. And you kept calling empress Michelle knit. That came later. Those came much later. But then, what's interesting, right, is that this claim then turned on those who claimed it when the state of... Yeah, they're called scholar hat wankers. Then made essentially the same claim, right, saying, well, now we have the mandate of heaven because you have proven to be ineffectual and feckless. And I mean, what I think is interesting,

right, is that there's a lot of assumptions I think people make that something like representative democracy, where people are informed by the media and so on and so on, is basically the best way to ensure that government works in the interests of the society. You're churchly and worst formed, apart from all the others kind of shit. But what we have here, right, is we have an example of an ideological package that is and was a quite effective way to maintain stability and effective government in a state that involved zero accountability to anyone who wasn't also a ruler. Or an accountability to the concept of the state itself.

It is a counterweight to rule, but from other rulers for the purpose of this idea of the state that is in abstract, you know? Yeah. What made the Shang legitimate to rule is something we can actually see it in the oracle bone texts that we have, right? So these are these are inscribed pieces of bone that were used in divinations. And the idea is essentially you're trying to figure out when something is not going right, or you're planning to do something like which ancestral spirit or deity is mad at you and is making bad things happen. So you write the question. I'm getting subtweeted. I feel like the trees are mad at me. Sorry, please. Patrick.

Yeah, it could be it's it is it is your your great grandfather's great uncle who was who was broadly known for having 17 wives. This guy is mad. And because he's mad, there are more. So this is this is the kind of thing we're talking about here, right? So you have you take like an ox shoulder blade or the or the shell of a tortoise and you put it in a fire and you see how it cracks and you read the cracks as an answer to your question. Then you write the answer then you write both the question and the answer to it on the bone and you're like, OK, now we've got to do whatever we think needs to be done here. We're going to sacrifice. We're going to cut in half 15 war captives with an axe. And that's that'll do it. Now. Now our great grandfather.

Oh, man, I hope nothing bad's going to happen to me. And the guy comes in holding the bone. He's like bad news. Come leave all those war captives ran off and picked up a grenade. Just a long, long fucking scroll that's like you couldn't make it up. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, this the the point is this sounds when we put it in those terms, we're like, huh, that seems kind of weird, right? But but this is the ruler's job. And this is the job of the state is to mediate between all of the forces that make the world go round and make things happen in the world that have agency. And this and the state is about as transparent as interest rates are, to be honest. So I'm not that weirded out by this.

I just love the idea of a guy in ancient China, like getting a thing and they're like, okay, you're going to need to write down the account number. I can read it to you. You've got something you can write that down. I'm just going to fuck and then just picking up an ox shoulder blade in a kitchen knife. Okay. Yeah. And but this is like, but so this is what makes the state legitimate. This is what makes the ruling dynasty legitimate is the fact that they can play this role, that they can that they can mediate between all of these like powerful forces that inhabit the world and the world of the living. And when you fail to do that, that's when you lose your legitimacy. When you're not ruling correctly, when you're not paying attention to these external

signs, when you're not making the sacrifices properly, like this is all this all means that you're unfit to rule that you're not doing your job and you can be replaced by somebody else. When we talk about legitimacy as well, like it's also it's easy. It's an easy word to use, but I think it's a it's a bit of a tricky one to define in the way that we're using it. Steepwing fingers. Now, I have I have a way I've been and been thinking about it in these terms, but Patrick, do you have do you have any ideas? Yeah, it's for to my mind, legitimacy is the the trust that people have in the impersonal forces that govern their lives, right? So if you I think it's best

illustrated by practical examples, but but basically, like, you don't follow rules, whether those are explicit or implicit, because you think about every single rule that you have to follow, you do it because you trust that those rules are in place for a reason or that there's going to be a penalty associated with them. And legitimacy in my mind is the thing that makes you trust that, right, that that things are as they're supposed to be. And that, but that I'm supposed to behave in these ways because this is how the world is supposed to work. And so it's it's just that kind of intangible quality of trust that you have in the forces that in the in the practical forces that essentially when we think about like the end of the Shang dynasty,

what we think about is a collapse of trust among people who matter, which were sort of fellow elites in China around the time that the relationship between the Shang emperor and the state such as it was, was one that could be trusted. We do not we not trust him to mediate between the spirit world and our world of the world of ancestors in our world. And so and so now because that trust has been lost, a change must be made, right? So yes, that's exactly right. I've got I've got something a little a little different to my mind. I think it's I think it's similar and I think it's compatible, which is I talk about it as I think about it as a a perform of both a performance of an equality of a relationship. So it's the relationship of

say me to the state or a ruling paradigm to another ruling paradigm or a person to another person. And it is it is our beliefs about that relationship. So my belief that my power over you is is well and good and my ability to make you do what I want to do is well and good. But your belief is basically the same thing. And we both have confidence that we both believe that and it's not like equally distributed ever. It doesn't like homogenize like you're more in the same way that you're more likely to obey a cop than a sign, right? It's the same difference there are different stakes involved in what some things legitimacy is likely to be to you. Well, that's also I think where the performance of it comes into play. It's the it's it's that the performance of the

relationship is and especially how how immediate it is to you, where if the if the cop is right there telling you not to run the red light versus just the red light itself, but you still don't run the red light, not just because you think that a cop might be there. But fundamentally, you kind of believe it's wrong to run red lights. And when we and I think when we when we talk about the unibom that comes when we think about things like when we think about things like why sort of success of Tory governments would announce a bunch of policies they had complete precisely zero interest in in following through on. I think it's because there was a belief, right, that there there was a belief that much like in the late Shang dynasty that they could not be trusted

to mediate with national insurance rights for the ancestors. Also, the thing about the unibom right is that he doesn't fit cleanly into the the skins or the in between is typology. And so I'm putting him in a third category, which I would call misfits. He's kind of a what's the guy from Parks and Rec called Ron Swans. Oh, yeah, you're right. Yeah. No, no. What I want to talk about though, right, is this where fundamentally, right, they come in, they put they put forward these policies, they have no intention of taking forward, because they understand that there has been a widespread lack of trust in them either to mediate between society and the economy, this thing that stands in the ancestors spirits. Yeah. Or that or the other thing, right,

there are other possibility. And this is where we get into the next question of legitimacy is who is the performance for? Who's watching who matters? Is it that they had to be seen by voters to be addressing these things, or they have to be seen by other people who matter to be addressing the imagined concerns of voters? And it seems like a kind of nitpicky distinction, but I think it's actually a quite important one, because it comes down to the other big thing in questions of legitimacy, which is who matters? Who decides whether you're legitimate with the Shang? It was their fellow Chinese elites, right? And when but with something like the modern Tory party, or the question is, is it press barons? Is it other members? Is it other MPs and ministers in

the Tory party? Is it Dan Hodges? Is it Paul Amos? Was it like a jujitsu situation where when enough of your bros get the vibe that you sort of get a belt grade up, then you get it? And then there's not really any system, it's more just like, yeah, you've been here for a while and you're a cool dude, so you get a promotion. Oh, the Andrew Tate of heaven. So I mean, Patrick, what's your view on this? This question of in a modern industrial democracy, this idea of who matters? Yeah, so I mean, I think that's what we're contesting right now, right? Because the standard answer to that is, oh, you're accountable to the voters, right? Now, that's the answer that we're all supposed to believe. That's the thing we're all supposed to buy into. And that in itself

is the basis of legitimacy of the modern state, right? The people who are in government are supposed to be working on behalf of the people broadly defined. So now, obviously, we know that's not exactly the case, right? Unless the people in the United States, for example, are like rich red state car dealership owners, like that's the, I mean, that is the people as far as a large segment of representatives are concerned. But we're supposed to believe in theory that they're working on our behalf. Now, the their arguments to be made that the I mean, politics itself is a fight over who the people are and who matters and who gets to divide and who gets to divide up the spoils, right? And now it seems like this administration has made the decision that

their constituents are just this one very particular group of people and everybody else can go fuck themselves. And that's fine. That's the that those people are not full participants in government or the benefits that membership in the body of citizens. Curiously, those people are the boards of governors of the state energy companies of other European countries, which is not necessarily the people you would have picked. Because when you when you talk about when you when you sort of speak about, you might say, like ancient state like entities, city, states, whatever, but mostly what you talk about is that the main power the state has, it's not just sort of the traditional thing you ascribe to the state, which is monopoly over

the use of force, but rather the ability to command and direct labor, right? And these and these beliefs in legitimacy of rule are sort of crucial to the ability to command and direct labor because that's what either makes the labor go do what you want it to do or makes the guy with the whips and the labor to do what you want it to do crazy, crazy idea. But what if what if the people doing the labor with the people just just just never work? Okay. And well, yeah, so this this is a really key point because the the thing that we ascribe as kind of the most important characteristic of ancient states, whether whether this is explicit or not is monumentality. It's just building really big shit. And you can't build really big shit without labor and access to labor

either means that you're going on massive slave raiding expeditions to pull labor in and you're just going to make those people work to build whatever your thing is. Or you're you have the legitimacy among the groups of people who matter to be able to make people do whatever the thing is, whether it's build your ziggurat or build your pyramid. Yeah. Yeah. Or build your build your lovely palace in Mycenaean Greece, build your moon. Yeah. I mean, these are all these are all examples. They're they're like kind of downstream examples of why legitimacy is supposed to matter. And so in an ancient state, when you have when you cease to build these things, that's generally agreed to be a sign that the state power that existed before whatever form that takes that

legitimacy no longer exists, that that there has been some sort of devolution of authority. And so you can so if you want to look at in the ancient world, right, if you want to look at I have a few examples of different versions of sort of legitimacy collapses, right, one in a sort of civilizational state level, one at an individual level and one at a ruling paradigm level. Right. So if you want to look at the collapse in a in sort of a civilization or state, which sort of brings with a kind of de facto collapse in legitimacy, you just have to look at the world in the late Bronze Age, where the I was going to say pre-Columbian collapse, but I enjoy talking about the Sea Peoples as well. Oh, those cursed Phoenicians.

I love the Sea Peoples. They're just just showing up to add insult to injury, you know. Incredible things are happening in China written in cuneiform. So essentially what I and again, Patrick can explain this better than I can, but you have this complex interconnected series of societies that do a quite a bit of trading with one another, quite a bit of command of labor. And then rather than just a so much as I see, right, is a sort of being conquered by anyone else really is the states stop being able to manage the complexities of the world around them, whether that's changing climate, changing trade relationships as other states or indeed the number of Sea Peoples.

Yeah. The number of Sea Peoples was zero. My capacity to adapt to the changing metallurgical situation in the Mediterranean is largely hindered by the amount I'm currently being stabbed. There's too many Sea Peoples. They're reproducing. They're coming over here. They're not equipped to deal with these Sea Peoples. So let's let's like, so when we talk about like the the ancient, the Bronze Age system collapse, I mean, I know we don't know tons about it, but would you say like, a lot of these sort of sets of rulers would you say that it's happening again now to us?

Would you say that essentially this complex system got sort of overly complex and couldn't be managed by these sort of local rulers? Yeah. So the idea of the of the late Bronze Age and what makes it what sets it apart is that it is that it is an interconnected world, right? It's that there are there are large amounts, especially of commodities, traveling back and forth across the Mediterranean. So the quintessential one, the one that matters the most is metal. This is the Bronze Age. So to make bronze, you need copper and tin. Copper and tin isn't found everywhere. So you need to ship large amounts of it. So the quintessential kind of aspect of this is that the Uluburun shipwreck found off the coast of Turkey, which has 10 tons of copper and one ton

of tin, exactly what you would need to make 11 tons of bronze. 11 tons of bronze is that's like that's a shitload of bronze. You can do a like that's enough to that's enough to make weapon full sets of weapons and armor for like 300 dudes. And so you imagine that this kind of traffic is happening all the time. When you when you're dealing with 10 tons of copper and a ton of tin, that you're dealing with book buyers and you're dealing and the people who are doing that, the centers of demand, motherfucker. The centers of demand are the palaces, right? They're they're these large state institutions that exist in Mycenae and Greece. They exist in the Hittite world. They exist in Babylonia. They exist in Syria. They exist in Egypt. Basically, the palaces,

whether they're exercising direct control of trade or not. And this is kind of a debate that scholars of the late Bronze Age have. They represent centers of concentrated demand for huge amounts of commodities. And the when the things start to fall apart in the in the late Bronze Age, when there are disruptions to these to these trade routes, when the commodities aren't flowing anymore, when the palaces don't have weapons with which to arm their guys, the whole system just completely falls apart. Right. So these palatial economies have existed for centuries. Like they've been they've fallen down before. Like in Mycenae and Greece, the palaces get destroyed a whole bunch of times, but they keep rebuilding them right up until the point where they don't.

And the reason for that is because the reason why you would build palaces no longer exists. The legitimacy of a system in which the palace represents a locus of authority for a particular ruling group that's now gone. Right. And so the late Bronze Age, the collapse of the late Bronze Age is first and foremost, I mean, people's lives got worse. And then there were fewer people afterward, like lots of people seem to have died, like just at a basic level. But downstream of that is the fact that the the kinds of ways of organizing political life that had existed for centuries just died in huge stretches of this world. So people no longer believed that the king sitting in the palace importing commodities from elsewhere was the

right way to do. And I think that's this is one of the and this is one of the reasons why I like to have these comparative history discussions, because in a in a world that the world we live in now, where it seems as though, you know, there is where there is this globe bestriding sort of colossus of the neoliberal consensus and gigantic port market. Yeah, one must must engage kind of fitted in a 11 ton suit of armor. It's important to remember that these things can collapse, that they depend that they are essentially domestic locuses of organization that interact with international pressures, and also other domestic pressures as well. And as we've seen with Iran, not the only setup that is currently under increasing domestic pressures, you know,

it is a vulnerable time for a lot of methods of governance. And and that if you if your method of governance is not able to manage those those interacting complexities, then at some point it will just fall apart. So I want to talk a little bit about Mycenae in Greece, because it's the best studied example of the late Bronze Age collapse. And trust me, it will be relevant. And I'll tell you what, I didn't want to talk about Mycenae in Greece. I wouldn't have you on the podcast, please go ahead. Okay, well, so there one of the big theories going on about the Bronze Age collapse right now is that it's tied to climate change, right? It's that it gets colder and drier and that's nothing like what's going on now. Yeah, relax, it's getting hotter and wetter.

If you're in agrarian state and you depend on and you depend on generating an agricultural surplus, well, obviously, it doesn't it doesn't take a genius to see how that can cause a legitimacy crisis on behalf of the ruling, the ruling political system. Well, I don't see how it could affect the underlying conditions which under being the social order of our agrarian state here in Mycenae in Greece. Patrick, I really want you to go on. You sound like Ben Wablon. I'm going to go on in a second. Milo, can you please explain this character to me, because all he seems to do is... All he seems to do is... Wow, I'm Colonel J.D.A. Castle. I was president at every pivotal moment in history to ask

seemingly rhetorical questions and then be shocked at the answers which I found. Marvel governmental psychopomp. No, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Colonel J.D.A. Castle. Patrick, please go on. Why? Who would keep their own son in a man's and feed him non-budget and so at this point? I thought you said he was present for all historical world events. Are you suggesting that the Minotaur was a guy who really existed? Like King Minos was a historical figure. Okay, Patrick, please go on. I'm sorry for the introduction. No, this is wonderful. Okay, so when you track the climate record in the places where you have the best data, though, it turns out that the disruptions you see in the archaeological

record, like burning the palaces and shit, like the things that you really associate with the end of this system, don't correlate with the most extreme climatic downturns. So where you have the best chronological resolution, there isn't a one-to-one correlation between, oh, no, the political system is falling apart and, oh, no, the climate is really bad. There are like these minor fluctuations, but the actual severe climatic episodes are on either side of the destruction. They're not there. It's not like, oh, the climate gets worse and things go bad. What the reason this is relevant is it shows us that even that, like, you can have a political system that weathers these seemingly huge shocks, right? Like, you can weather the actual great

recession or the actual pandemic, but then maybe something small comes along and it comes along at exactly the wrong moment, at exactly the wrong time when this other shit's going on. There's a crop failure and you happen to be at war with your neighbor and there's this group of pirates from Sicily who have shown up and all of this stuff happens simultaneously and it sets off kind of a chain reaction of events that lead to the end of a complex system. So, like, the really striking thing about the Bronze Age collapse, insofar as we can tell on the basis of the data that's available, is that the meat of it happens really quickly. It seems to happen over the course of at most about 30 years and you can really pinpoint the most intense episodes

of destruction to more like a 15 or a 20-year period. So whatever the kind of long-term stuff that's happening is, the most outstanding instances of the really bad shit happening seem to be compressed into a pretty short time. Because sea peoples got really drunk and decided to have a wild 15 years. Yeah, because the sea peoples, like, their victims were like, oh, is it the fifth year of it being 2016? No, the thing is, and that's what you said here about systems that can weather collapse, that can weather these difficult events, reminds me actually of an example as to why Canada seemed to suffer less political dislocation from the financial crisis than the US did.

And it's not to say the politics of Canada are good. In fact, I have a whole other podcast about the politics of Canada are kind of fucked. But if you want to just look at system stability, right? And again, it had the unintended consequence of house prices kept going up forever and didn't have a break like everywhere else in the world in 2007. Because the Canadian system was built, the Canadian housing insurance system was built in such a way that unlike in the US, where it was semi private, and then how the mortgage insurers needed to be bailed out. So I said housing insurance would be mortgage insurance. The mortgage insurer in Canada was fully publicly owned. It was a massive subsidy to essentially mortgage lenders, especially

American mortgage lenders that came in. But what happened was the conditions for TARP, right, the conditions for the bailout were already built into the system. They didn't need to be created. And so what happened essentially is that the Canadian housing market, it had more political flex built into it. It was able to bear more strain. And on the one hand, there was a more stable response to the financial crisis. But on the other hand, it then created a situation in which housing prices just never went down after 2007. They just kept going up. And that's why Canadian real estate has been in an unsustainable bubble since 2010. But I think that's just, to me, this is an example, right, of a set of institutions that

is more able to weather a crisis than another one. Why? Eternally increasing house prices and therefore mortgage debts couldn't possibly be a problem. Well, as long as wages increased at a proportionately similar rate forever, which I presume is what the Canadian government is playing. Is this what it was like when you first discovered jerk vander clerk? No, that was a very different time when we're not talking about the drop, no? I want to talk also. We talked there about entire states or state-like entities just dropping out of existence with these colossal losses of legitimacy that aren't necessarily just connected one to one with climactic events. But you can also look at individuals as having

legitimacy, not just states. The example I have here is, of course, everyone say it with me, Henry the Sixth. That's a wild per. Fuck! Henry the Sixth, I think, is just one of the most perfect examples of an individual ruler losing the legitimacy of the people who mattered. And also being closer to us in history, we can know things like the names of the people who mattered, what their actual opinions are. We can speculate as to what... How many Eaton colleges they found it. We can speculate. You think after the fifth time, they would have tried to go for different strats. Henry cracking strats. It was kind of a whole Marvel Cinematic Universe of Henry.

Phase three of the shooters is launching in like 1513, yeah? At the spin-offs, the stewards, it was the whole thing. Will I understand the stewards if I hadn't seen the tutors? So, you wouldn't understand anything about modern Britain if you hadn't done that. Trust me, I took the life in the UK test. But what we have is we have a ruler who is particularly ineffectual, and we know that everyone thought he was ineffectual. And so, unlike, say, in like ancient Mycenae, where we have to sort of evaluate, okay, well, looking at the climatic data here and when the Megaron was burned or whatever. Or even like, you know, ancient Egypt, where you're

looking at like list of kings and you're like, okay, well, why is this one scratched out? They really didn't like Akhenaten. I wonder why. Yeah, what's up with that guy? Instead, you have a bunch of like very flowery Elizabethans like calling him like a lack penis or whatever. So, Patrick, can you talk to us about Henry VI, the lack penis king and how he lost personal legitimacy? So, to understand why Henry VI was such an ineffectual figure, you have to understand like just one basic thing about the nature of how like English government worked in the 15th century, which is that it was like a whole bunch of wheels spinning around the king.

And the king didn't actually have to do very much. He just had to be seen to be making decisions. That was very helpful. Yes, that was an important thing. Like you had to fuck and do so with some measure of efficacy. The king like the king didn't have to like necessarily go out and lead armies in battle. The king didn't necessarily have to make good decisions. The king didn't really have to the king didn't have to like make policy or be an impressive figure. The king just had to be able to say, I want this to happen. I'm the one who's saying that this is supposed to happen. That's it. You just the king has to make decisions. Don't have to be good decisions. Don't have to be the right decision. Nothing. Just make a decision.

Henry VI could not make a decision. So, the reason why this fucked everything up is because the legitimacy of the whole system of all those spinning wheels depended on the decisions that were filtered through those institutions, whether they were financial, military, down through the ranks of the nobility, they had to be seen coming from the king. And when they weren't seen as coming from the king, that made them not legitimate. That opened a discussion about what who was wielding royal power, what their motives were and everything from there. When you throw in a little imperial failure. 500 warring barons period of British history. Yeah. Yeah. Because if it's not the king who's actually wielding power in the most abstract sense possible, then that raises

questions about who should be, right? So, that opens the door to people like the Duke of York and the King's wife, whose name escapes me. One of the Eleanor's, probably. And yeah. And all of the other people who end up placing themselves as contenders for the throne, it's just because Henry VI couldn't do shit. And it didn't matter whether the shit was good shit. You just had to do shit. In this case, right, what you see is you think of who matters, right? Okay. Well, it's the, like in ancient China, it's the fellow elites, but it's the fellow elites within the same state. It's not like the state kind of gets replaced with another one, but... Well, sometimes we get to that later on. There's a reason why this Dutch guy is very popular

in Northern Ireland. Right. But what we get is the idea of one person's manifest unfitness to rule, undermines this idea that he ought to rule. Because fundamentally, you ask, well, who's consent matters? How is it given? How might it be taken away? And in this case, right, you know, this being the lack penis king, sorry, I really tickled by that particular imaginary. Every Elizabethan insult is like this. It is like short of dick or something like that. Right. Yeah. There is this, but there is this idea that with you, again, much like in China, if you cannot bring stability, if you cannot interact with, in this case, rather than like the forces of the global economy versus the forces of like the domestic economy,

in this case, if you can't bring a regular length penis to the table. If you can't slap out a regular length penis on the table in the star chain. It was the problem with the Elizabethan system of government, you know, was the king had to basically answer all questions, yes or no, by doing a potato print of his penis in one box or the other. And if you didn't have a penis, it basically paralyzed the entire system. Yeah. But I mean, it's this survives in like sort of antique forms and various other like forms of governance. The papacy has the testicles thing still, you know. So we laugh about this. But right at the same time that the Wars of the Roses were going on

in England, there were a variety of civil wars going on in basically every major kingdom in Western Europe for a whole bunch of different reasons, some of which are connected and some of which work. But in Spain and in Castile, in particular, the civil war slash succession crisis that was going on was very explicitly about the king's dick and whether he was in fact the father of the woman or of the of the infant princess who was said to be his heir. And there was a whole bunch of stuff in there about how he was impotent. He had to fall through a funnel in order to get that this was this was literally the basis for why we know who Isabella of Castile is is because her predecessor on the throne was was said to have not fathered his heir because he had to

fuck through a funnel. This is literally too wide for the pussy. No, he in order these the semen was not powerful enough to move on its own. So they had to guide it with via a funnel to its final destination. I mean, I think the reason to bring this up right is partly because it's Henry the sixth is a very funny character as it's just a complete a lack wit. I wanted to talk about that a while. But also but also additionally right that it's some it's an example of someone who is a person a form of government in the form in the shape of a person who is unable in the form the vice of other people who matter to let's say mediate between them to dispense the king's justice.

But yeah, and something that quickly becomes like obviously ridiculous and unsustainable. The second Hobbes is fucking Leviathan lumbers into the room and one guy goes wait a second that guy has a funnel on the end of his dick that just breaks down doesn't work via funnel. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, but you also you know, we can we can talk about ruling paradigms is lacking legitimacy as well. So the example I have for this one is the opening of Japan in 1846 where what you where we have the the ruling paradigm of isolationist rule by a kind of feudal military dictatorship the Bakufu that where essentially we have only at this time we have only Dutch people are allowed into Japan. No, no, the horrible decision to look at every

possible European and be like these the world's first weeps the Dutch. They wanted to get the full length body pillows. Hey guys, I've got a body pillow you jealous. I've never been to a bar where women are pissing and shitting on the floor, of course you haven't not allowed into Japan. Nothing these guys have to teach us can possibly destabilize our internal politics. Anyway, time to let them proselytize. But right when when this when this happened, kind of gasham or what, you know, but I think like what like this is this because these things there are not tidy lines between them, right? The changing of a dynasty is as much like the

changing of a state, but and and and it can go back to like what is the Meiji restoration if not hold on a second, let's fucking reverse some of this shit, you know, it's not set in stone and this stuff collapsing doesn't necessarily mean it's gone for as well the loss of of an individual a state or ruling paradigm. There's not a clean line between them. I've just chosen some examples that emphasize different elements. What happened right is that when they allowed the non Dutch in well when the non Dutch forced themselves in via the gunboat in 1846, you know, and and the the Shogun realized, okay, well, we have to trade with these people so that we can continue our role as the feudal overlords and subdue all of the restless Damios. But that

ultimately that created the conflict that led to the Meiji restoration because the Damios were like the Shogun is no longer fulfilling his role as the expeler of the barbarians. He is letting the barbarians in much the opposite of what we expect him to do and what is in plot, what is actually literally implied by his name by his title Shogun. Yeah, just sort of like showing up at the Shogun with my long like my long list of like barbarian status and some queries about the barbarian status. Number of barbarians, if you look at if you look at sheet number three, number of barbarians quite high, number of barbarians expected by the title Shogun quite long.

Yeah, it's my wife, she's very bothered about the question of the barbarians. Why are the barbarians here? When will the barbarians be expelled? Very much. We've had quite enough of the Shogun, no longer hot. So right, but, but what happens here, right? If it's not just a government change or a dynastic change, it's an entire failing Tokugawa's bad government. What's wrong with a few barbarians? Can we have a few barbarians? Your name says no barbarians. He can't read his own name, folks. He can't read it. They won't let me say it.

I'm going to say it. He's a no good. Trump Trump would have thrived in warring states, Japan. This guy wants to rule all of Japan. Why the letter in the Dutch? Why does he want to fuck the Dutch? This guy, he's named after Amit Sabishi. You're going to, you're going to trust a guy like that? This guy gets driven around by soccer moms. I don't even know how to go back to this. No, sorry, named after Amit Sabishi. It's just fully destroyed me.

We'll wait for us to collect our composure again. We can edit out some of the Patrick laughing into his own hands. Rocking back and forth like it's simple. Patrick is going to need to press rex mode over there. Clutching at his eyes. All right. He's, he's, he's trying. He knows what it is, is you're like pentheus. You've come and looked upon the ritual that you had no business being near. I'm just going to pluck out my eyes at this point. No, that was, that was really good. I can die happy.

Wait, when we talk, when we talk about this with, sort of, I guess what like Bakamatsu Trump now, in my mind forever as a character. Folks, this guy's wearing wooden shoes and he expects us to take him seriously. Why are your shoes made out of wood, buddy? Get yourself some sneakers. What's, what's weird is that like Sengoku Trump is like a weird, like he's a traditionalist as well. Yeah, he's, he's, he wants the, he wants to restore the, maintain the power of the Damios.

Yeah. Restore, restore the Emperor, expel the foreign barbarians, preserve the Samurai as a cast, but also no wooden shoes because he's a cat. What we, what we ended up getting right after, after this, this battle, because was the loss of belief in the legitimacy of an entire paradigm. Not just a state, not just a person. Yeah, you can watch a documentary called The Last Samurai about it. And I mean, if I was to wonder, right, where, where we are, I would say that there is, and where, where we have been for quite a long time actually,

not just since 2016 or not since recently, but since like the, since the sort of mass waves of apathy that sort of crashed over. Since the first fish crawled out of the sea onto the island of Britain. Yeah. And then, and then just said, ah, it's shit. It's supposed to be shit. If you don't like it, you can fuck off back into the sea. But where we, where we've got that is, is, I think what we're experiencing is a kind of, a collapse of legitimacy of an entire set of paradigms. But before we go across, we go beyond that, of course.

Patrick, I want to ask, do you have any, any, any sort of any, anything to add, any insights or questions or comments about the Meiji Restoration as a kind of collapse of legitimacy of a whole system, not just a state or a person? Yeah. I mean, I think the Meiji Restoration is the example that it ties to most closely in my mind is the, is the French Revolution with the opposite outcome. Right. So instead of, so instead of you ending up with the, the total upheaval and like really rapid opening of horizons that you see with the French Revolution,

what you end up with is a backwards looking conservative, but still dramatically changed way of moving forward. Right. So maybe, I don't know, maybe the, maybe the restoration after the monarchy, after Napoleon's defeat is a good parallel for that. We're like, the world has quite obviously changed, but you're hearkening back to these extremely ancient forms in order to maintain at least the illusion of a connection to the past, in order to maintain some sense of kind of this ancient legitimacy.

And that's like, I think that's one of the interesting things about legitimacy is like, that it's constantly being contested and constantly being formulated. Right. So like, you can, things that seem irrelevant can, when turned to the correct purposes, suddenly become a source of legitimacy. Like the, in the, like the Tea Party in the United States 2009, 2010, like the Constitution was not a huge topic of conversation in American political life over the prior several decades. You know what I mean? And then all of the sudden, the Constitution this, the Constitution that, we're going to go back to the Constitution, this kind of like fundamentalist idea of, of political legitimacy on the basis of

bullshit interpretation of a founding document. Like that became a really important way for these people to justify who they were and why they should be, and why they should be in charge. And now you hear it all the time, that has once again entered the mainstream of American political. We can talk about post-Soviet nationalisms as a form of legitimacy for the new breakaway states from the Soviet Union. People who didn't, who like thought of themselves as, you know, Kazakh or Ukrainian or whatever, as a sort of a, you know, a trivial cultural point almost. And then it becomes, you know, part of the ethos of your state in a way that it wasn't as a Soviet citizen. Absolutely. Like legitimacy, like identity more generally, to your point, Alice,

is, is contextual. Right? It depends entirely on everything else that's, on everything else that's happening around you and what might seem incredibly salient at one moment. Like, let's say popular approval of government policies or the idea of being seen representing some sort of popular will. That might not necessarily be the thing that actually matters if your core issue later on is, let's say, foreign, like the perception of being invaded by foreign barbarians. Once again, the big number of foreign barbarians comes out written, written in Ukrainian. Exactly. Like that's, yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, take, take Zelensky as an example, right? Like, what's the core issue there? It's repelling the Russians. That's the thing that makes that,

that makes them legitimate. It's not necessarily some sort of connection to the popular will. That's a regime in the middle of a war, right? What makes you legitimate is that you're waging the war correctly. Like, so legitimacy, the basis of legitimacy can change and sometimes they can change very rapidly in ways that you don't necessarily expect as, as the, as you're trying to think ahead to the next 10, 15, 20 years. I have a question, which is, I think the thing that we're getting at with this episode, which is where is legitimacy to be found in Britain? How, how would we characterize it? How might it be changing? Not least as we are nominally, but I think also to some extent, structurally, there's some obfuscation over it

still. Hereditary monarchy that has just had a big fucking change in heredity, and which is going to change in popularity, I think, quite dramatic. Hereditary monarchy, but becoming increasingly like the film, heredity. Yeah. And I mean, I think what are my answers to that question really, I think coming back to it. Finally. One of the, one of the, what I come back to, right, something Patrick, you said at the very beginning, not after the moon stuff at the very beginning of this part, which is that the, fundamentally, that most people's, most people's assumptions about what makes a western state

legitimate is, are they, are they, are they protected from the vagaries of global capital in such a way they can expect to enjoy a better standard of living their parents and so on and so on? I, I have a theory about this, which is specifically focused on the treats. And I think that quietly, one of the most desperate moments in British government, legitimacy, were the two weeks when they like were worried that the food industry wouldn't be able to carbonate coke anymore, because the government fucking jumps on that faster than anything they have like before. We can't, we can't drinking that garbage. But I think that's, that's the thing I think most people think. And if you, and I know it's

Pat, right? Because, but when you're talking about mass ideas of legitimacy, it is these obvious Pat things that most people think. And I think really, you know, what, what has happened where legitimacy has gone is that after the financial crisis was kind of like our late Bronze Age collapse, the thing that, that the palace is supposed to do, or that most people expected of the palace, the palace sort of stopped doing. And it has sought legitimacy other ways since then, such by repelling the foreign barbarians from the European Union, for example. Yeah, it has also like tried to cast away the need for legitimacy and just grab stuff on the way out, which is the Wayne Grove mode of that. But also there's legitimacy within that system

as well, right? Where the, where the legitimate leader of the opposition must seek permission to govern rather than attempt to govern without the permission of the various elites, right? I welcome the C peoples, but I would encourage them to interfere with our trading arrangements in a responsible way, in a sustainable way, and in a way that allows us to come to a settlement which works for the people of this country. Right. And so what happened is that, is that when, is that that collapse in, that collapse in legitimacy that sort of happened in 2007 that no one is addressed has created this, has created a kind of vacuum, but that is being still effectively defended by a regime that is essentially homeostatic, a ruling clique that has sort of slowly, slowly,

slowly, slowly allowed that legitimacy to ebb away and replace it with coercion. That's where I see the story of legitimacy in Britain going. I don't know about you all. Oh, good. Yeah. If only we had some kind of kernel here to talk about how sustainable that was. Surely an entirely coercive mode of politics relies on a, on a well-supplied and armed violent arm of the state and an entirely docile populace. A state of affairs which surely cannot continue forever, especially if the conservative government remains intent on cutting the numbers of police officers they have access to. I mean, so it's worth spending a minute thinking about coercive force, right? Because the, the

reason, the whole reason why you invest time and effort in performing legitimacy is so that you don't constantly have to have recourse to coercive force, because coercive force is hard to maintain and it can very easily go wrong, right? Like it's very easy. Like let's say you send out that you, there's, this was something that you could have very easily seen happening in the United States during the, during the George Floyd protests, right? It was like three cops get separated from the, and three riot cops get separated from the rest of them. One of them pulls out a gun and shoots, and shoots somebody and all of a sudden they're just beating police officers to death, right? Like it's very easy when you're, when you're deploying coercive force to stop a populace from

doing things for that to go dramatically wrong very quickly. So smart governments don't want to have to do that all the time. So that's why you do surveillance and that's why you, you know, you grab people in the middle of the night. Because if you come to points where you have to face an armed mob, or face a mob, or face a riot, or face a protest, then it's very easy for that to get out of hand really fast. Like it's easy to see that, to bring it all the way back to the Bronze Age. It's really easy to see that as being like how the Mycenaean palaces burned down. Like, you know, the people came because they were, yeah, the people were mad and they came to the gates of the palace because they were, because they wanted to get at the grain stores that were inside that

it turned out that the palace didn't actually have. And so somebody throws a spear and the next thing you know, the whole palace is burning and you're like, well, don't need that fucking palace anymore. Like, and so that's, so when these things, these collapses and legitimate seem to happen so quickly, I think it's because of sequences of events like that where the legitimacy falls away. You end up in a violent confrontation and the whole underpinnings of the system that people just trusted where they're like, oh yeah, no, I can't drive 80 miles an hour in a 40 zone. They're like, well, who's going to stop me? I just, I just shot the cop who would have stopped me from doing it. In a kind of palace economy, but a highly like financialized and globalized palace

economy that's based on just-in-time supply chains, I think that there is such a, there is no, that's what the question, right, is what loses legitimacy? Because in my, in Mycenae or in Crete, you could say, okay, well, the palace has lost, has lost its legitimacy. But now with this, there is a sense of such, of distribution, atomization, there is the, these capabilities are, are networked and diffuse. You know, the question is, well, I have one suggested answer, which is what happens when people get very angry with who rules them, but they can't really identify who they're angry at. You have like a, a jackery, essentially, you know, people just burn a lot of stuff and hope that they get what they're looking

for, you know? And, and this is the kind of thing I suppose that it's, when you have a lot of people who's, let's say, life expectations have not been met and in fact have been revised downward very sharply. And you have a set of institutions that is resistant to doing anything about that, because they're so focused on their sort of, you know, Byzantine, I mean, we could have talked with the Byzantine Empire, I'm almost surprised we didn't. This is the problem when we have Patrick on, as I want to talk about all of history at once, which is not very convenient, because it all happened at different times. Colonel J.G. A. Castor in Constantinople going,

what? This interconnecting system of court, pleasantries and bureaucracy is so complex and unworkable, it's positively Byzantine. It's essentially, I think that this is the other point, is that these systems that lose legitimacy, they become homeostatic rather than interact with the rest of the world in a way that performs that legitimacy, that reinforces that relationship of trust, they instead interact with the rest of the world in such a way as to not do that, essentially. J.G. This is, I mean, everybody who talks about systems collapse as a thing is like, well, the more complex a system, the more pain points it has, right? The more like,

and to bring this back to the treats based way of viewing, you know, popular discontent. They could do with one of those, yeah. The treats, we come back to the treats index. Yeah, I mean, that's actually a really good idea. If each of the, if the supply of treats is vulnerable to disruption at a bajillion different points in complex supply chains, then that means that the system, the underpinning systems of that, which are political and not economic, are inherently vulnerable, right? So like, this was I feel like in the United States, especially this was the reason why people were so worked up about gas prices, not because gas is a huge amount of your household expenditure, though it, I mean,

it does matter. It's like, it's just important enough to matter, right? The reason why it matters is because everybody has to interact with the gas pump all the time. It is a constant thing, right? So, you know, you've got to fill up your tank of gas once a week or once every 10 days or once every two weeks. So you've, you're going to be constantly reminded of the fact that gas prices are going up and that you're spending X or Y or Z amount of money, even if in the grand context of your household expenditures, it's not that huge a deal. What matters is the fact that it's a thing that people share in common and that it's easy to blame political figures for it, even when they have effectively no control over what the gas price is. Listen, listen, Mac, I've been arming

the Saudis as much as I can. They won't take the gas price down. That's like, there's so in a world where the connections between, you know, what politicians can actually do and the economy is so amorphous in most people's minds. Like that makes the entire political system vulnerable to economic shock and disruption in a way that was, it was, I think would have been hard for people to understand. If you want to do British equivalent of gas prices, it's of course house prices and then also petrol prices, but also electricity prices. And of course, also gas brackets, British version prices. But also, yeah, we have the, we have like gas prices obviously at energy prices in general. We've talked about a lot. In fact, the don't pay campaign

can be seen as a kind of collapse in legitimacy of the idea that they should be able to charge what they can charge. But in terms of the treats economy, the British government's birthday boy rating is an all-time low. The sailor suit of the British public is tattered and the lollipop lies in shatters on the floor. Unfortunately for the don't pay campaign, the problem with any like, any jackery for that matter is, you know, what happens to Guillain-Carton or how it's the leader, right? And the answer is, you have to have a bunch of knights decide that the rules of chivalry don't apply to you. And therefore, we torch use of that kind of stuff. But what we can say in the UK, and again, I'm aware that we're sort of coming to time here,

is interest rates. Because what right now, you would make the same monthly payment on a sort of 350,000 pound house that you would have two years ago for a 600,000 pound house. That's the different. If you have a 30-year average rate mortgage, that is the amount that house prices have gone up. And this matters for renters as well, because as long as they're by now. And also a house that cost 350,000 pounds five years ago cost 700,000 pounds now. But then that matters for renters as well, because a by-to-let landlord will be putting up rents by that much, which means other rents will go up by that much. And so what it essentially means is that, you know, in the middle of a cost of living crisis, with state support being cut to

the bone, at the same time, housing prices already insane are going to fucking skyrocket, along with energy prices once the support ends. And so, you know, when we talk about things like collapse, I mean, I think, you know, when you talk about things like collapse, it can, at some point, it has to stop becoming quite as remote a possibility, even if that collapse is going to be not say directed at a palace or at a ruler, but will be sort of amorphous, because so many things have become so, you might say, unlivable. And it can be, and a lot of it can be traced back to a kind of homeostatic unwillingness or inability, or rather just not interest in, because they're interested in doing something else, adaptation to between a global economy

and a domestic economy, basically. On the other hand, have you considered that it's going to be fine? Oh, okay. What if it was all fine? So, any last thoughts, Patrick? Yeah, I mean, I think, so the one counterpoint is that collapses, I think we treat collapse, actually, this isn't a counterpoint at all. The collapse is a relatively common phenomenon, I think, in the grand scheme of history. Collapses of all kinds happen fairly regularly. Whole ways of life can just disappear in the course of weeks, months, years. The thing is, we're so used to thinking in terms of two years or five years or 10 years that it seems like a remote possibility when it's not. It's like, every individual generation's chance of experiencing

a collapse may be relatively low, but if your unit of analysis is five generations, or you're probably going to get some kind of significant collapse in there. The previous five rounds of Russian roulette, the gun didn't go off, so at least a regional scale. Extrapolating from three. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, because every way of doing things carries in it the seeds of its own destruction, right? No matter how intelligently or robustly you think you've set up a series of systems, there are always going to be weaknesses that are baked into those, and if you run the simulation enough times with enough variables, eventually things are going to come up right, you know? Like you're going to reach the point where you set off some sort of chain reaction

of events that leads to some sort of collapse. Personally, I would simply avoid that. With all that in mind, hey, you know what, Britain decided in 2018, let's not avoid it. Let's run headlong into it. To avoid it would be gay and also anti-Semitic somehow. So I want to say, number one, Patrick, always a huge delight to talk to you on the show about various arcane topics in history. Thank you very much for coming on. No, thank you so much for having me. It's the only place where we can have the Kentucky Colonel of history, a discussion about the Mycenaeans and also, you know, why this truss is wane grow. This is the only context in which I can imagine that happening. It was always a pleasure to join you all. This is why

it's so long because this character talks so slowly. A podcast with a Patreon funded by people who live in Britain must be an interested business model in a time of skyrocketing costs of living. Take that out. Thank you all for listening and also to, as Milo said, remind you that there is a Patreon five dollars a month. You can get a second episode every week due to inflation. It's proportionately cheaper than ever. Yeah, you can hear more of Colonel J.G.A. at that. In more of a sort of forest-gumping his way through millennia of history. That is correct. Also live shows. There's a live show. On the 18th of October in London, at between the bridges in Waterloo, there will be a Trash

Future Live show. Yes. The ticket link is in on the Patreon and in the Discord. We will put it in the show notes of this episode. Also, if you want to see me, you can see me there, obviously, but also 12th of October, London, the Pleasance Theatre. I'm doing my Edinburgh show, Voice Mail, one night only. 25th of October, ADC Theatre in Cambridge. Also the same thing, but in Cambridge this time. January 25th, Brighton, Comedia. That's a bit far out. Look, do you want it? There's early bird tickets. You want to get those early bird tickets? There's only 30 of them, so if you want a cheap ticket. Speaking of tickets, we don't say this enough, but at our live shows, if you are a $10 patron, not only do you get an extra Britonology and Q&As

when we feel like doing them, you also get a discounted live show ticket. Do check that out. Yes, five pounds off. Once you do all of that, of course, I also have to insist that you listen to Tides of History, the only podcast that I have listened to 100% of. Patrick, I go to the gym tomorrow, please have a new one out. I've actually have a lovely interview with an expert on the Mycenae economy. I actually did not know that was coming, but hey, well, check that out after listening to this. Surely the release schedule of the Tides of History cannot keep up with the gym schedule of a man who goes to the gym five days a week. It's simply unsustainable for a show requiring that level of research. Thank you very much, Milo, for saying to the

listeners that I do go to the gym five days a week. I want to add that it's for 90 minutes a day, and I've been doing it for about eight months. Longer than the average podcast. Well, I'm going to have to start listening to ComeTown just to fill the gaps. All right, check out the Tides of History, subscribe to Patreon, go see Milo, come see us in Australia. You know what it is, and we'll see you on the bonus episode in a few days. You've heard of Australia. Bye, everyone. I'm in London and come see us in Australia. Bye-bye.