TRASHFUTURE - The Labradoodle Fedayeen feat. Patrick Wyman

Episode Date: January 26, 2021

Our friend Patrick Wyman is back! And this week, after a brief jaunt down start up lane, we discuss the rapid radicalisation of the Anglo-American upper-middle class liberal, as they all seem to have gotten too much news recently. We've talked for ages in the past about your aggro conservative uncle, now it's time for the history, sociology, and economy of your aggro centrist uncle! Patrick's excellent substack, Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future can be found at Patrickwyman.substack.com, and you can check him out weekly in Discontents (https://discontents.substack.com/) alongside many names you may recognise. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). 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)

Okay, and now the ceremonies have been completed. We can begin the ritual is complete. We've looked outside, white birds have flown past the window. So we are clear weird spots on this liver that I'm looking at. I was going to say we're going through some entrails and it promotes an auspicious podcast. If you couldn't tell that all of this talk of of auguries and lictors. And I've been looking at this goat intestine.

It says there's too many fucking ghouls over here. We have returned to having a friend of the show. I think probably it's pointless to keep counting his guest appearances because they have now numbered in the many. We'd have to use the numerals. So it'd be like CXLI in terms of like what the kind of counting that humans can intuit without needing to think of numbers abstractly. One, two, three, many.

We are now in the many area. Yeah, you'd have to use the genitive plural and Latin. It is our friend and yours, Patrick Wyman. Patrick, how are you doing? I'm doing great. I mean, I feel like the only way I could be more a part of Trash Future is if you buried me under the floor of that podcast studio. At this point, you know, things are going really poorly.

You got to find a Greek. You got to find me and you got to find a gall and just bury us all under the floor there. Well, Fred and Rose West, us wheeling the Tarpaian rock into the studio. It's like, oh, don't worry about this. It's worth a thing at the end. Don't worry about it. The difficulty is that we're now on the third floor of a building. So we wouldn't so much be burying you underneath the studio

as getting you a job in whatever office is underneath us. Yeah. Well, this is what they did to the goals in the Greeks when they did that. I mean, is there a is there an actual functional difference there? It feels like that being being buried in an office building or being buried under the under the rocks of the forum, same difference. You could say that both how both are the giant glass skyscraper in the Roman Forum have taken on a sort of similar kind of sort of social

political ideological significance. Yeah, the the office underneath us is a lot like that little like cars there under the under the floor of the Roman Senate where they had people strangled sometimes. That's it's adult baby strangulation services. It's it's it's it's run by a bunch of people who work for human rights. Watch, I guess they're really into strangling nuns. I don't know. Yeah.

But no, we're most of the TF enemies are all nuns for some reason. Well, no, our enemies are the our enemies are all of the extensible human rights organizations with long histories of supporting the contrast. Foundation for the defense of democracy, so whatever. I thought our enemies were just the Durham guys. Maybe not human rights, but yeah, the stuff like the foundation for the defense of we don't know who our enemies are. It's more of a vibe, but like we figure it out as we go.

This is the trash future genius. Anyway, Patrick, it is always a real pleasure to be to have you back on to discuss some interesting element of the of the story of how we got to where we are today. And to you and I have sort of been discussing this for a few days that there is this there is this emerging radicalism in the upper middle class of America in the UK that is, I think, a historical phenomenon. It is relatively new. And what's odd is that it is radicalism towards the center.

And this is a concept I'm very excited to explore with all of us once we talk about this startup. That's right. Kessarum Kensei O's soft bank delenderist. Kuo Uskwe Tandem soft bank. I'm going to give Patrick the first guess on this one. It's called Hugh is H-U dot. I'm sure you can guess what's coming next.

It's M-A-N. No, it's not. No, it does not have two faces. Hugh dot man. It just sends you a man named Hugh. Hugh dot Grant. Well, I guess you could say it's sort of a Janice faced concept, but we'll get to that in a moment.

So Hugh dot man dot AI. Patrick, what do you think that is? Grocery deliveries. That's very, very consistent with what we usually talk about. I've got one. I've got one. Dot H-U is the top level domain for Hungary. So it sends you a Hungarian man.

Yeah. What does he do? I don't know if he just does some AI stuff for you. He checks for people of certain ethnicities in your house. It just sends you Sebastian Gorka. I would say Alice is so far the closest conceptually for years. I've been asking you to join me, but now you can ask me to join you.

I need one second here. So you're telling me that Alice is closer with the guess of a startup that sends you a Hungarian man than I was with grocery deliveries. You know, really, really in many ways, the Roman Empire also a startup that sends you a Hungarian man. Yeah, that was like sending you a Hungarian man or or at least one from Pannonia. Like it doesn't have to be Hungarian. We'll accept anybody from beyond the Leemace.

That is a decision. Just like kicking the tires and being like, yeah, I think this one's got some daisy in it, sir. I specified a thration. I did not want a nation. You can kick the tires of a daisy to this day. So OK, every day I carry a gladius and a net. So I'm always prepared.

So wait, isn't that a thration? No, well, actually, that would be because the people who carried the net were the retirees, so they had a net and a trident. So gladius and a net would be anachronistic. Threx. Yeah. So anyway, just a dude with a gladius. Anyway, welcome to Tides of History. Yeah, welcome to all of us spent too much time studying this stuff.

Sorry. No, so Hume, the reason I say Alice is close is that sending you a guy to do some AI stuff is only wrong in as much as it's not a guy. Sending you a robot to do some AI stuff. Aspects, essentially, yes. I'm going to say I'm going to read the paragraph from the blog post describing their mission, the first one. Eighty percent of our memories are forgotten.

I don't even make any fucking sense. Human memory is being taxed more and more. And as a result, our cognition, the ability to process since the taxed by the Democrats and make use of the memories that are created by us, always catching up with the past instead of going beyond the present to prospect the future. Our experiences are encoded in people, facts, thoughts and emotions, all of which influence the actions we take, the decisions we make

and the behavior we exhibit every day. Yet for all the influence on our decisions and behavior, 80 percent of what happens to us is forgotten and even less is recalled. So going back to Patrick, what do you think this thing does? You, man, AI, it's really sounding like a diary. I mean, if I had to guess, I would say that it like scans your Gmail and like compiles a list of your receipts and shit that like makes you.

So it gives you like a blow by blow account of your life as lived online. I have no idea. Yes, that's it. That's right. That's correct. What? Oh, it's like the like the algorithmically generated Facebook memories videos. Yes. But I filtered through Charlie Brooker, basically. Why are these? Why do all these companies go out of their way to sound so ominous?

For years, humans have been dependent on memory, which makes them weak. The sweet milk of nostalgia will lead you to your doom. Embrace the mists of forgetfulness with me. That's actually what it does. So what the what it is, basically, right, is it's the idea of Gary and man makes you a scrapbook. They have said that like most of our time is spent

imperfectly recalling things or searching for things that we might have known. For example, you'd search for like someone's birthday. So what they've done is they've said we have created an AI that acts as a supplement to your memory and can like help you write things. It can remember stuff that you've forgotten. And it essentially is. But the way that you interact with it is by just like constantly talking into it all the time or constantly texting it all the time.

Clippy in your ear, like autocom. It's what if what if Clippy was kind of customized to you? Well, like this isn't as insane as I thought because politicians have these, right? They have the like files of everyone they've ever met. So that like when they meet them again, 15 years later, they can be like, I never met this person for legal reasons. Yeah, for legal reasons. No, they can be like, how are you like children, whose names I remember?

I am making a real connection with you kind of thing. Fine. Yeah. But like, how is this a tech company? Well, it's just basically what Richard Nixon did. Just record every conversation he has. He's like, I don't think I was going to discriminate me. It's basically it puts Barbara Bush right in your pocket. That's the that's like that.

Because wasn't she famous for keeping like an elaborate file system on America's 17th intelligence agency? Yeah, but it was just Barbara Bush with index cards. And that's what this is offering to do for you is to put an elegant white haired wasp in your like right in your pocket. So what it says is your AI listens to you as you go about your day, gradually absorbing events, thoughts and to-dos that will become relevant later on. But it's not a simple memorized and regurgitate later system.

The longer you use your AI, the more it learns about you over time, becoming better and quicker at servicing and even predicting your needs and thoughts. Eventually replacing you all together. Of course, we won't do that because they, you know, well, the reason real reason it won't do that is that like you can't make an AI. Technologically. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's not tech. They want to heavily play a Hungarian man to do that.

Why is rather than speaking fucked up English and saying anti-semitic stuff all the time? I just, I worry about the possibility that it's going to learn about you like an AI does, which is going to mean it's going to learn about you the same way it say Amazon does, where it's like you just bought a TV. It seems like you should buy three more TVs. And so like you'll meet somebody or something and you want to remember it and you'll tell it to this fucking AI. And it's like, oh, yes, you're going to fucking meet them every day for the rest of your life. Wait. I'm just going to learn this now.

This is going to destroy the world. Like, you know that theory about the AI, if you just tell it to make paperclips and it will just keep making paperclips that destroys the planet. Like Alice gets this AI and it keeps Hungarian basilisk and it keeps, it keeps ordering gas masks until it destroys the planet again. How would that be different from what I actually do already? So the, the, his, his justification, the guy behind it is justification for building this said, quote, I suffer from imposter syndrome because I am an AI in a man's body. A large extent of that feeling comes from my original thoughts, unwritten,

uncaptured, or at best scattered around different forms of storage. These lost thoughts go unexpressed, unvoiced or unable to be recalled. It creates anxiety of what may have been forgotten. I hate that this is a startup whose only like growth industry is pointing a gun back and forth on a rain-slicked rooftop between two identical versions of someone else. I want an extension of me, an extension of my human capacity to store the memories that is personal and valuable to me, an extension that helps me recall in my own authentic voice that is secure and private. Just get a fucking notebook.

Come on. Get a diary. Some of them even come with like little locks on them if you want to keep your like middle school secrets. Damn. Jeffrey Epstein should have had a lock on that book. Impregnable. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I keep coming back to the Hungarian man thing because I feel like it would be just much more

effective to hire the services of a Hungarian man to follow you around and do this. Like isn't. Which is the Hungarian man theory of history? The Magyar stands a thwart history. The Swedish man were Hungarian. He stands a thwart history taking notes. That's what we want. Now I'm just going to have a Hungarian man service stuck in my head for.

Blessed are the Hungarians, nature's note takers. Fuck this podcast shit. We're all going into the Hungarian man business. Yeah. Well, they are emphasizing fertility. That's so there should be a lot of them is what I'm saying. The six million Florent man. So they have they have a blog post called freedom of speech, which I think is cool.

Cool. They send this Patrick. This is relevant to you at our core. We live by the principle of creating a world where all humans have a voice in that voice has a place in history. The voice of history going forward should not just be the domain only of the famous and infamous. So I am once again asking you to stop calling people humans. It sounds weird. Patrick, given that they've just invented social history, are you excited that you have a job now?

Fuck. I love this that it just everything that's even vaguely tech adjacent just keeps coming back to the whole like the Silicon Valley people invent the bus over and over again. And they're just like they've invented a notebook. They've invented a journal. It's like they were just we're just reinventing this basic thing like Elon Musk reinventing the fucking tunnel. That's what that's where we're at now. These people are just like reinventing the concept of remembering things with memory aids. Like I love that we now have an app for that.

So it's can just be the 17,000 thing cluttering up my phone that I don't use and feel bad about its existence. Yeah, but also and crucially it spies on you. Yeah, there's also there's also that. This is a great time to introduce my new startup, Tarpe.an. Have you ever wanted to throw someone off of Iraq? That's going to be so many fucking jokes in this that you need a like a level of so terroric knowledge to get them. Just like that's right. It's going to be you can just tell it's going to be one of those episodes that we love making.

Yeah, and we have an amazing time. Then three people in the audience are absolutely losing their shit and everyone else is like these days. People have less and less time to jack off in a barrel. That's why a diogen dot es. That's right. Come on. So the last paragraph from this is that they said like what they're calling this instead of a diary is they're calling it an intranet of thoughts. Oh, no.

Broke the Internet of Things. Woke the intranet of thoughts. Not even an internet, but intranet, a word which everyone has very positive associations. Yeah, this is like North Korean version of thinking. A decentralized human knowledge store created by technological versions of an individual's memory. A decentralized human knowledge system is just called brains. Yeah. Well, you can write stuff down that happened to you if you want to remember it and convey that to people in the future.

Yeah, because that's all. Yeah, you can use like fucking knotted string. It still works. You don't have to do this shit. I mean, I just want to like go to this guy with some wet clay tablets and a stylus and be like, look here, you can do cuneiform. It would be easier and more efficient than whatever the fuck this is. Interestingly, cuneiform, that would persist into history.

People would actually like... Oh, are we going to talk about how almost all digital storage is absolutely ephemeral? Absolutely ephemeral. This will either be gone or in the event that it doesn't get deleted at some point, it will just like fade off of the storage disk at a time when everyone here is still alive. It's so funny, right? That like, do you remember a time? And it wasn't that long ago when boomers were like,

you've got to be really careful with what you put on the internet, because that stuff just stays around forever. And now every archivist I know is like, yeah, no, it turns out we just threw all of this stuff into a hole basically, and it's just gone now. I mean, I feel like that's actually the way it's been for practically all of human history, though, and digital is no different. That just like everything we do, we throw away anyway. Like nobody keeps their fucking grocery list.

Roman Boomer being like, you want to be really careful what you put in one of those curse tablets. Please remember to scrape the wax out of your wax tablet, because otherwise somebody's going to make a palimps system. It's going to be weird when they've got your grocery list overlaid with your grammatical exercises, and that time you asked the prostitute to do that thing. Mm-hmm. Yeah, otherwise Patrick Wyman's going to study you later. That's the last thing anybody wants.

Look, I'm not trying to get this guy fired from the Senate. What I'm saying is he wrote some pretty suspect stuff in some votive graffiti. Hold it, holding up a slate that you've graffitied on. A chunk of wool. Yeah, that's like this you. He used a word to refer to Thracians, which I think belies his politics. So, in fact, I think that gives us a nice little sort of opportunity to go into our second topic. Yeah.

Kessram Kensei of Softbank Delanda asked. No, which is essentially the idea of the, let's say this, the, Patrick, the lictors and kensors have become politicized. What's going on? So, I'm really interested by this because it's basically an extended meditation on the problems are very bad, but their causes are very good. So, I think that this is at its core, Bidenism, which I actually think is a kind of a coherent ideological thing, is the product of a very specific kind of upper middle class sensibility

that thinks that the material manifestations of the world that we live in are pretty much fine, but more female drone pilots. Yeah, exactly. So, is that smaller or would be easier to fit them into the drone? It makes sense. It's true. Yeah, there are practical considerations in addition to kind of ideological ones. If you fit them into the drone, it's not a drone.

Yeah, that's just the plane. That sounds ableist to me. It also occurs to me very amusingly that Biden is probably the first ever US president to have an ideology named after him that he himself doesn't know what it is. Yeah, I mean, to the extent that Joe Biden is just reflective of kind of the median dem that anybody listens to, the median dem that anybody listens to at this point is overwhelmingly a comfortable upper middle class suburban. I think you have to see that as the kind of ideological and organizational core of the

Democratic Party to the extent that there is a kind of a coherent idea of Bidenism. It's offended by the aesthetics of the Trump era, thinks that things can be better, but the basic structure of society is pretty much fine because it's produced this class, this upper middle class of people who see themselves as kind of the moral core of the nation and acting in opposition to the moral core of Trumpism, which was basically local gentry and the petty bourgeois. Indeed. And I think just so, because I think this can be brought over to the UK as well with what might be called starmarism, which I think has emerged in sort of

roughly similar conditions, which has a slightly different politics to Bidenism. I think it's actually to the right of Bidenism generally. Somehow, starmarism is even more confused than Bidenism. And also because, and that's partly because, starmarism's appeal is supposed to be trying to triangulate between that professional that you discuss, Patrick, who is sort of the moral core of Bidenism, and also the imagined lost red-wall voter, but the desires of whom are mediated entirely by the right-wing gutter press. I think that might explain-

White Van Baz, but as filtered through White Van Baz whisperer. And starmar also has a problem that Biden doesn't have, which is that starmar is also trying to incorporate the support of Jabba Al-Gaadian column in terms of purging trans people from the face of the earth. Oh, we'll get to that. I put a bit in about this. So this is why the comparison is not complete one-to-one between starmarism and Bidenism, if only because I think starmarism has- Because Biden can win. But also because starmarism as an ideology has a more vexed relationship with its voters

and a slightly different material basis, but they're similar enough, I think, that we can proceed along the conversation generally about not just the politicization of the upper middle class, but the radicalization towards centrism, which I think has to be understood as small sea conservatism. And it's one that's important to talk about, because it was the politicized upper middle class that beat back the challenges in the left, in terms of both Bernie and Corbyn. It was the politicized upper middle class that also beat Trump, 8 out of 10 of the wealthiest counties in America voted Dem. And it was the politicized upper middle, primarily coastal and city class that in fact beat Trump. What we often call the

PMC, which was analyzed by the Aaron Reichs in their essay in Radical America, but what they have not analyzed is the sort of fracture within the upper middle class, wherever you want to call it, between regional gentry and urban PMC, often sort of finance adjacent upper middle class. Different kinds of radicalization, because that radicalization is not just at the center. And the reason why we've seen the guys storming the capitol, half of them being boat dealership owners or retired field grade Air Force officers or things of that nature, that's also PMC and that's also radicalization. And it was their votes, it was those white suburban votes that in fact put Trump in the White House in the first place. Whereas previously in Britain,

these people were very distracted with important scientific questions like, what if you gave dogs, girls' names and women dogs' names? What if you did that? And so I think that the question, there are many questions here, right? There is the material, there is the history of the PMC in general, which is as kind of a mediating class between capital and labor that sort of works to reproduce those relationships. This is everyone from teachers to social workers, to professors, lawyers, all of the people that keep that ideological machine going. And then what we're saying essentially is like, what I've been talking about really is that there is this idea of the national or global

coordinating PMC. These are the lawyers and professors that live in cities and financial centers that work with globalized capital. And there is the regional PMC, which are again, sort of these manager roles that work for industrial or extractive capital. And they have undergone this tremendous fracture, depending on when you want to start the count. I'd say that you could even say 1980, 1990s, as you see this like revanchist right-wingism sort of emerge and take hold in both the UK and the US in a different way than it had been before. So that's my view of the history, Patrick. I want to know what your view is. So that makes a lot of sense. And I think you can see this playing out generationally,

like I have a type of guy theory here, which is that the children of the ladder type that you just described, the children of kind of the regional or extractive or proper or also where that overlaps into the property PMC or kind of the property gentry, the children of those people are barstool guys, like barstool sports guys. They're people who are kind of generally aggrieved at the state of the world and don't ever want to think too hard about themselves, but also take for granted that they should be listened to and feel important and resent any sort of intrusion on that world. So if those are the children of these people, the parents are the ones who are hardcore Trumpists or who have some strong opinions about

what happened at the Capitol. And those people stand in contrast to the well-healed 50-something upper middle class suburban lawyer who is just who is so happy to have an adult back in the White House. Well, that's funny because some of those Capitol guys were upper middle class, well-healed, white 50-something lawyers. Yeah. So as I try to understand this, I think that the basic divide there is, do you consider yourself an owner or not? To what extent is ownership central to your identity? And the more central ownership is, the more likely you are to fall on the right side of that spectrum. The more you see yourself as a meritocratic salaried elite, the more likely you are to be on kind of the radical center side of that.

Does that, I don't know, does that track? Yeah, I think there's another dimension as well, which is regional. And I think one of the things I've been thinking of quite a bit more recently is understanding the politics of our present moment as a fracture in the interest of finance capital, which plays this coordinating, connecting, planning role and is concentrated in small cities along coasts and so on, where... Walton on the nays. Which is essentially a... In which requires things like manners, for example, to keep it going, these things that are reproduced. And it requires good enough manners and a lack of xenophobia so that my lawyer can call your lawyer in Japan and we can get this work done.

Two lawyers calling each other and just calling each other slurs on like a billion-dollar deal and that's just a back and forth. You can't see this, but I've taped my eyes back. I hope that's okay. But the thing is, these aren't considered forms of fundamental justice, they're considered manners. And then the regional, that regional class, they define themselves in opposition to the financial capitalist essentially. And so whatever the financial capitalist does is, you know, bad and degenerated and so on and so on. And one of the reasons I sort of look at this in the 1990s and 1980s is that this is kind of when in the West, the interests of financial capital as planning, planning, coordinating, financing and so on, diverged from industrial

capital because they realized they could gain more returns by financing industrial capital elsewhere. And so those interests diverged. And I think it's interesting to note that the intractable culture wars we all seem to be caught in that gave rise to Trumpism and stuff, those started in the 1990s. And it was only after that revolt of the regional elites, the regional gentry, the local gentry, as we talked about before, that the final, that the the handmaidens of the financial capital, so the radical center, as you might call them, developed a very, very paranoid style all at once as they became, as you got Russiagate, as you got people who became quite, you might say, radicalized by the experience that they were not, that the order that they

had come to expect had been up overturned. Well, this is something. So just to summarize here, what you're suggesting is that all of those memes about like, oh, these guys storming the capital, they have economic anxiety. That's true. But it's in the sense of anxiety of a conflict between two forms of capital elites. Yes. That's what I'm saying. The sort of the Davos guys versus the boat dealership. Yes, exactly. Alien versus predator. This sort of thing, I was thinking about the other day, just because as we know, I really, I really boiled the piss of some centrists online last week. And there were a number of people in my replies, I could only describe as like tinfoil hat centrists, who were like, they were so radicalized to centrism that like,

any departure from that belief system implied that you were some kind of Russian op. And so like, me just like leveling a critique of the things that I think they were like, well, this guy has been to Russia. So he's clearly in the pay of the Russian government. It's like, you sound like a QAnon guy right now. Like, and that's the guy. That's the guy that we're typifying today. Yeah, indeed. So I mean, so that that's my, but that's my sort of relations of production Rudolph Hilferding analysis. Patrick, I want to know how does that chime with what you've been thinking about? Are you proud of us for not saying anything about that name? I think if I think if we need to get it out of our systems, we should do it now.

This MF Hilferding. I want you to play with my Hilferding. Oh, God, I can't believe that's a real name. Anyway, so I think I don't disagree with any of that. I think I want to focus on the aesthetics for a moment because I think that that matters a lot that there's a basic kind of offense taken at the idea that we could be reduced to this and that it's kind of outright irresponsible and icky that they have kind of that. I think there's a real kind of moral aspects to this, a real kind of like a moral revulsion that or what they understand is a moral revulsion that's actually kind of an aesthetic one that like thinking Donald Trump was really gross, which like, yeah, of course he's gross, but he's gross in the way

that a lot of Americans are gross. There's this kind of basic sense that you look at these people and it's not right. It's just not okay. They're children. There's this sense of infantilizing and recoiling from their opposition. It's not that there's no sense of revulsion on the other side either. It's not that they're immune to that, but I think they have a very specific brand of it that permeates everything. So it's this pathologizing. How dare you, sir thing. Yeah, it's how dare you, sir. Donald Trump is obviously some kind of the need to pathologize what Donald Trump is, the sense that like he's icky and gross and like, well, he must be controlled by somebody else. Like the idea that he could just be a purely homegrown piece of shit is kind of

is kind of hard to grasp. But like that too is an America that exists. And I think it's tied into the physical and professional isolation of this upper middle class group that like, they're never going to interact with people who are kind of outside this bubble because they exist in a world that caters to them, right? That like, they're the world is full of apps and gadgets to make their life a little bit like easier and more interesting and to go, oh, yeah, I'll spend $50 dollars on that. He manages that diary. Exactly, that there's an app to get somebody to come over and put shelves in for them. So they live in a world that kind of caters to them and the idea that there are things that are outside that or that are counter to that or that actively reject

some of the things that they have internalized and hold dear, I think is very difficult. And indeed, this same argument, in fact, is mobilized as an ideological cudgel against the left as well. Because there is, because again, against the right, it is this, this could not possibly be real, essentially, where Russiagate or is sort of like putting your hands over your ears or and saying, this isn't happening. Similar thing, I think with a lot of the procedural tricks that were used to sort of delay or slow down Brexit or, in fact, remembering that the Brexit that we have is especially sort of thin, difficult, cruel and all this and non-functional, in fact, because this same kind of sort of moralism, this upper middle class moralism,

was unable to say, were going to, was unable to command that popular support of a, say, soft Brexit that kept us in the customs union, because the very idea that this was happening was inimical to the, to their idea of what they, how they perceived themselves and this sort of moral connection. And that, in a way, say it's used as a cudgel to be left as well ideologically. It's that acknowledging all of those problems, say, with meritocracy or whatever, acknowledging these things that exist outside of liberalism as political possibilities, acknowledging that things might not just, might need to be made better through, say, transformational change, that many of the previous changes that you liked were not so great,

then much of that sort of, again, quite paranoid style returns, you know, and you- But Riley, on the other hand, have you considered that orange man bad? Yeah, I mean, I think this is that, like, in that respect, the aesthetics thing is very insightful, because it was like, there's a dang cheeto in the White House and what we want is like a kettle chip, like a fancier kind of the same thing. It's one of the things that fascinates me about the whole deal is that, like, it's very hard for them to accept the idea that the system that produced them and made them like people who matter, like people whose needs and whims are catered to and who feel like they have some sort of positive role to play within society. The idea that they might

have, that the systems that put them where they are might somehow be bad or might have negative consequences, very hard to wrap their heads around in the same way that, like, it's just that their response to that is kind of moralistic and aesthetic rather than, I would say, like, if you challenge the local gentry's place in the world, well, they've got guns, you know? Or, like, if you try to strike at the local McDonald's owner's restaurant, he's going to react violently to the suggestion that all is not as it should be in the world, whereas- He's a very aggressive clown. I've tried to talk to him about it. He gets very mad. There's a man called the hamburger. He's always trying to steal his hamburgers. Ronald,

very upset, very upset about that. Yeah, like, that dude is going to respond in a much different way that, like, or is going to sublimate his rage at kind of status anxiety in a much different way than this kind of, like, more radical centrist upper middle class. Like, for them, it's just not, it's not thinkable. It's not possible, whereas the local gentry is like, well, if you come from my restaurant, I'll put a bullet in you. Yeah, because in a way, sorry, I was going to say, is in a way, the right, the right are sort of easier to understand for me in the sense that, like, the right have things that they think, and they believe those things, and they understand that those things are oppositional to the things that you think. Whereas the center like to think that

they don't disagree with anyone, and that simply they are aware of better ways of doing things. So when you talk about, like, raising the minimum wage, the right wing people are like, no, fuck you, you don't deserve $15 now, whereas the centrists are like, we'd love to do that. But if we did that, then the line would be sad. And so we unfortunately, the rules of the universe are such that we can't do it. And it's like, just admit that you don't want to do it. Well, this is the thing, right? And to my mind, both sides have kind of retreated into the unthinkable. And that's like, the crux of this episode, for me, what we're talking about is how did everybody get so fucking weird, right? How did you get QAnon? How did you get,

at the same time, Russiagate? And Alice, you can even add, how did you get the sort of broad, broadly now accepted idea in the UK that momentum was going to carry out political violence was always an inch away from carrying out mass political violence, which is genuinely what a lot of people think. How are all of these nice, respectable feminists absolutely insane about trans people? Well, this is why I bring up, and I put a lot of this in the notes, because I couldn't help myself, an essay by Richard Hofstadter called The Paranoid Style in American Politics. And I think what we're seeing here is absolutely like the fourth row to just dive into the Paranoid Style. The Paranoid Style sounds like a dance craze from the 50s. All the kids are out there

doing the Paranoid Style. Alice, you have some selections from the Paranoid Style. Oh, I have a couple of Paranoids. I would say it might be a good time for you to share some of those now. Let me hit you with this first one then. And like, I want you to think about the way Libs think about Putin, particularly, just as an example, where he's the one that this fits best. Horny and terrified at the same time. The enemy is a perfect model of malice, a kind of superman, sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in history, a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises,

starts, runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he's produced. The Paranoid's interpretation of history is distinctly personal. Decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone's will. Very often, the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power. He controls the press, he has unlimited funds, he has a new secret for influencing the mind, he has a special technique for seduction. So, I mean, there's your desinformatia right there, right? So this is fascinating, because I love that essay. I read it for the first time probably six or seven years ago when I was trying to wrap my head around the Tea Party as a phenomenon in

the U.S. and because a lot of it was apt then too. And there's like fields of discourse on Hofstadter and the Paranoid style and how that was a particular reflection of his own kind of like well-heeled 1950s and 60s liberalism. And like it is kind of his own kind of aesthetic revulsion for the birchers and those types. But like there's something definitely there to the extent that like it's a lot easier to make up an enemy and have them be all powerful than to confront the things that are actually there. So for those of us who actually have paid attention to the like the kinds of ins and outs of the right wing, especially the extreme right wing over the last four years, like what happened at the Capitol was not hugely shocking to the extent that they said they were

going to do it. We knew that these people were around, we knew that there were militia types and white nationalists and that like they had managed to kind of wrap a kind of a like a Napoleonic battering ram of QAnon idiots around themselves. And that they wanted to do something bad and had been planning on doing bad things for some time and were looking for an opportunity to do it. So this was like to those of us who actually watched the right, this was not surprising. But that was a real threat. Whereas, you know, it was a lot easier to get freaked out about Putin and disinformation and hacking voting machines. And then to think like, oh, we've got a homegrown terror problem, largely as a result of the fact that like, we've sent hundreds of thousands of

people off off to kill brown people for some time and have never kind of reckoned with the consequences of doing that. That's exactly the point that I want to pick up on, which is like to me, the common thread with this paranoia, right, is this absolute militant hostility towards context, right? It has to remain this sort of this personal thing that orange man bad, that Putin bad, that like the deep state or, you know, barbecuing children and stuff. And if you ask, you know, obviously, Banmari children, produces a much better texture, like if you ask a liberal, like, how and why did Trump get elected? How and why did Putin become president? By being gay, first of all, with each other.

By being gay with each other. But like, the hostility you'll be met with is very revealing to me that like, no, it has to be, it's entirely so generous. We can't have any kind of like, historical role in this. It's just a bad guy who has arisen from like, the steps or whatever. Again, just because I want to, I want to sort of keep making the point that this is not simply an American phenomenon either. It's also as British is that, again, if you remember the idea of like, all of Jeremy Corbyn's opposition to like, you know, expanding the EEC or whatever, that was taken context free to suggest that he was a deep cover Brexiteer who was sabotaging the Labour Party on behalf of, you know, same. Yeah. And it's not like, it's not like there's no agency

for these people. Like, it's not to say that Trump or Putin isn't cruel or whatever. It's not to say that they don't exercise agency. But it's the idea that they do that as totally free agents arising out of nowhere. That's the paranoid style. I think that's immensely helpful for understanding why everybody's so fucking normal now. It's a dumbed down version of the great man theory of history, right? It's like that you can just have somebody who is somebody or some small group that is comprehensible, right? Like that you can wrap your head around as and make and give those people all of the agency because then you never have to worry about things like structural patterns. You never have to worry about actual inequities of power or even like, you know, again, not to say

that like racism isn't bad and kind of a kind of a whole thing. But it's like, there's a difference between understanding the material manifestations of racism and how those play out in creating a whole series of structural inequities and saying like, you know what? You know what we need is a black poet. Like, you know what I mean? It's like there's and it's why the debate over representation sometimes seems to ring so hollow. And even as it's even as it's central to the kinds of politics that we see coming out of this radicalized upper middle class center, it's that like, you're, if you can just advance the representation, then you never have to deal with where this comes from, how we got there and the ways in which we're all implicated in it.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's like, it's like the Raytheon rainbow colored drone type shit, isn't it? It's like the aesthetics of a kind of like left or socially progressive cause with none of the structural changes. What's my favorite Atlantic headline coming out as transgender made me of more effective CIA officer. Every time it kills me, it made me a master of disguise. That like the transgender CIA officer kills me every time. Yeah. So I think that there is, if you want to sort of draw in some connections between what we were talking about earlier, what to do with material conditions and the fact that this is sort of so aesthetic and personalized, I think you can look at this as the sense of alienation, of alienation from what

you thought was a very stable community as these, this bifurcation. Yeah. All of my friends and Nazis just out of nowhere because I hadn't noticed anything previously that would lead me to believe that they were. So they must have just become so overnight. And so what you have is you have this, I get this split that I didn't, I believe as a historical materialist goes back to a bifurcation in a split between the interests of two different representations of capital that has worked itself out again ideologically as a kinds of divided nations and these divided nations require explanation and the easy explanation that doesn't involve any kind of thinking about the role that not just different types of capital,

but capital in general played in this happening. The easy alternative to that is. Slam poetry. Slam poetry. The easy alternative to that is a highly personal and therefore highly narrative driven and paranoid style of politics that has ended up with the construction of these gigantic threats that are always lurking around every corner in this very innervated and anxious sort of politics. They keep getting more complicated is the other thing. And there's one other bit of Hofstadter that I wanted to like read into the record, as it were, because it makes me think

like I read this paragraph. I read this paragraph again when I was preparing for this and I just in my head reflexively and I hated myself for doing this went buckle up, it's time for some game theory. Buckle up, fuck nuggets. And buckle up, fuck nuggets. A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Paranoid literature carefully and all but obsessively accumulates evidence. The difference between this evidence and that

commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a Hofstad world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it. Yeah, you can build up evidence that Nate Boothay is actually a real estate agent from Nebraska called Nate Boothay or whatever. You can build up a whole dossier of like bathroom sickos if you want. You can build up evidence for the deep state, you can build up evidence against like any number of these things. And this is why you get endless liberal

Twitter threads that are like, okay, I learned six Russian words and now I'm going to explain them back to you for an hour and a half. It kind of goes back to this thing that I've felt for a long time, I think even before I was a leftist, which is that words have just lost all meaning. People just say any fucking shit now. You critique someone's centrist opinion and they say you're an anti-Semite and then you're like, well, why am I not? I haven't said anything about Jewish people at all. They're like, well, no, because that's like something an anti-Semite would say is that they're not. And it's like, what the fuck are you talking about? And it applies to when you say you're not a Russian op or like, well, when was I paid by the Russian government?

Why would the Russian government pay me to say this? People are like, well, your silence speaks volumes. It's like, the fuck are you people talking about? Mr. Simpson, it's all rock bottom. It's all Godfrey Jones on rock bottom. I touched her, sweet can. Mr. Simpson, your silence only incriminates you further. And the thing is, it doesn't matter if it's not true. It feels true to me. And this is... Jeremy Corbyn gave me a heart attack. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? And this is... Jeremy Corbyn gave me a heart attack and I can get this many thousand words out of explaining how. Not just like to make the claim, but to make the claim so pedantically and at such lengths. So, again, Patrick, I'd like to throw back to you here as well, this idea

of trying to really exploring how, because this is relatively recent, right? Like this, the paranoid, like radicalized upper middle class is something that really, I feel like has kind of come out of 2015 maybe. What's your opinion on this? So, I think it coincides with the liberal upper, the paranoid liberal upper middle class specifically. Yeah. So, I think it's a product of the fact that they're now all on Facebook and they can see what the people they went to high school with who are now Godfaring Trump voters are saying. And that it's an opposition, that I think the opposition that you talked about between the different kinds of gentry and the split within the PMC. Like, mostly we're talking about older people. We're talking about the vast majority

of them, I would say, are people over the age of 50. There is a younger person's manifestation of this for like the 36-year-old... Epic guys, yeah. Yeah. Like the 36-year-old suburban wine mom has a different version of this particular kind of paranoia than the borderline boomer or Gen X. Yeah. Like, these are people who like, they might be able to open PDF, but they certainly will not be rotating PDF. Yes. That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. And so, I think as these people have gotten more online, the right-wing version of this was like chain emails in 2006, and where they were kind of being... And talk radio and they were kind of being exposed to this full bore. The liberal version of it, I think, has grown out of being exposed to ideas

that they previously would have only encountered or overheard at somebody's graduation party. Now, they have to see it on Facebook and they feel this kind of sense of revulsion, and so they're building a new politics around it. I know that that's true for my mom. My mom fits this pretty neatly. I don't think she's quite as kooky about the Russiagate stuff, but if you asked her, she would definitely say that Putin had some involvement. My question is, given that, as you say, we saw this with the right, and those guys started off on chain emails and ended up on... The Capital Steps. Yeah, and the Capital Steps. They ended up all as members of the Capital Steps. H from Capital Steps. What's the media ecosystem going

to look like driving in the opposite direction? Are we getting the fucking blogosphere back? Is Daily Coase going to be a thing again? As an addendum to that question, right? I'm going to have to open all of the gas taps in my house. I mean... I think as an addendum to that question as well. How many gas taps do you have? You can say it like... We're collecting them. Bidenism and Starmerism are playing into the paranoid style. They're not refuting it. They are certainly not taking away the things that undergird it. Biden's first moves have already been like, yeah, we're doing the war on terror domestically at this time. Everybody cheer for the FBI, and it's like, well, yeah, these people will.

First of all, it's stuff like Andy Borowitz on Facebook. Oh, shoot me. Yeah, or are you familiar with Randy Rainbow? Oh, unfortunately, yeah. Good God, yes. Yeah, or Sarah Cooper. That's the future of... Sarah Cooper's like, what if I couldn't do the voice? Googling Dignitas travel times. Dignit.is. I think that it's stuff like that, that it's going to be personalities who make them feel good about the aesthetic choices that they've made. And so they're going to be looking for a kind of a superficial diversity that reinforces the things that they already believe. And I think to the extent that... I think they can get a lot of that from mainstream sources. I think the New

York Times and the Washington Post will be perfectly happy to cater to this demographic and to conflate this demographic with America as a whole, as long as they win. As long as they're winners, then nobody has to pretend that anybody else exists because these are the people with the money to buy the stuff in the first place. What you're saying is that SNL is going to have Kamala Harris' stepdaughter on as a guest host, where she's going to reveal that she's actually is dating that poet laureate, and everyone's going to go fucking crazy. Step away from the light now. Yeah. When did the poet girl and Lin-Manuel Miranda got into a Twitter conversation about whether Lin-Manuel Miranda had caught the Hamilton references in the poem? I was like,

this is too heavy-handed for day one of the Biden... I knew we were going to get some really fucking painfully cringe lib shit, but this is like, no, come on, you've got to have something to build to. You can't fucking be blowing chips this big on day one. That's the lack of imagination. This is small scale. It's going to get so much worse. They're going to put Lin-Manuel Miranda in a Marvel movie. There's going to be like hentai of Joe fucking Jill Biden, isn't there? It's going to be so bad. If you thought that the veneration of the Trump family was bad, you have seen... No, I thought that was cool and very funny. I thought it was cool.

It was cool. It was cool for baron. But generally like this, Trump's saying that he doesn't agree with sharks, so he won't donate to the sharks, charity. And they'll be here long after we're gone, believe me. It's going to be... The thing is right, I think what we're going to see is that everyone is desperate for a king to come and rescue them. And it's this doddering elderly racist. But it's always been a doddering elderly racist.

It's in the finest traditions of the country. I'll give him that much. But like, yeah, no, the future is like gender fluid F-35s over Tehran, which is cool. So to bring it back, it's almost as though we're saying, yeah, it's like Roman citizens drawing votive graffiti of like Sulla with a huge dick being like, please take over. It's the marching song, the graffiti of the marching song that Caesar's Legionaries had, where they were like, oh, yeah, our generally just fucks everybody. He's just one fucks user. Yeah, it's like... I think you could see this a little bit with the kind of like Diamond Joe Biden persona that he paid on very effectively. I think there's going to be a

lot of stuff like that, like kind of mild cults of personality around democratic politicians. Which plays into the structural nature of the Democratic Party too. Like, if the Republican Party is very much built around these kind of institutions, and the conservative world is very much built around institutions in which politicians are kind of replaceable cogs, but the institutions continue. The Democratic Party is very personality based already that like you have Obama people and Clinton people, and now you're getting Buttigieg people and like that it's very siloed in these kind of personal networks. And so there's a real neat overlap between the style of political fandom that especially this upper middle class group has,

and the way the Democratic Party is organized anyway. So I think that's just going to continue. That's the way they've been doing things for a couple of decades, and I don't see any reason to think that that's going to stop. What's kind of curious to me is the extent to which that's happened across the aisle. And like, I think the thing about institutions and cults of personality in the Republican Party certainly used to be true. I think Donald Trump Jr. of all people was the most perceptive about this when he screamed at a mob of like retired dentists in Fort Lauderdale to go and storm the Capitol saying, this is Donald Trump's Republican Party. They're not getting that back. But I think also it's worth suggesting that this is, I've been sort of making sure we're

sort of saying that this is a phenomena that exists in Britain as well. In fact, I would say the radicalization of the upper middle class in Britain has gone further. And equally, I think it's also the idea of that the radicalization is specifically to do with the party has not gone as far. So in the US, this radicalization of the liberal upper middle class has been channeled very effectively through the Democratic Party. We would have seen it if Bernie had won the nomination. In the case of the UK, I think, there is, and to be fair, not since really Blair, I mean Miliband, they tried to do Milifandism, but it didn't really go anywhere. They sort of have people that they love, but they don't have people, sorry, they have people

that they hate, but they don't have people that they love the British centrist. They definitely hate Jiminy Crubbins, but they don't really love Stammer. Stammer is fine. Stammer is still their guy, but they don't, there's no fanfic about Stammer. There's none of the Biden, like old Daddy Biden coming to save us. The most you get is the idea that he is sort of miles and miles smarter than Boris Johnson and his performance in PMQs is going to, forensic. Unless you're Andrew Adonis. The guy is a Renfield. A guy called Adonis who just jacks off about Tony Blair all the time is like too close to life. This is actually, though, how the British psychosis is so different from the American psychosis, and I've been thinking

about this a lot, is that like, that is like Britain is like, it's something more absurd, like, yeah, there's this guy who's called Adonis for some reason, who just wants to fuck Tony Blair, and like, no, and he tweets about Tony Blair every single day, and he's one of the most highly paid people in British politics. But then like, because British people don't love politics, like British people hate politicians, like in general, like you don't really get the, like, I remember just seeing yesterday, one of the things that sent me the most was the Kamala Harris tweeting, ready to serve, and that just being the tweet, and like, you can't imagine a British politician tweeting that, because like, you don't fucking serve,

you get paid a lot of money to be in charge. That's not serving. It's like nobody thinks it's cool to be prime minister. You're not on the army, fuck off. So I mean, this is, in terms of our subject matter, I think it means that the radicalism of the British upper middle classes, well, less predictable, I think is constrained by the fact that it is a very comfortable radicalism that is driven by paranoia rather than desperation. So what it means is that they're going to spend more and more time online finding more and more evidence of the things that... From sickos. It's a fantastic time to be trans. I have a take on this, and this is going to sound kind of basic, but bear with me for a minute.

I think it has to do with the difference between winning and losing. If you win, you don't have to be as paranoid about this stuff. Like, if you feel like you're winning, if you feel like you're in the ascendancy, then you'll find other shit to worry about. But if you're fucking losing all the time, if you do not feel like you're, if you feel like there's a gap between the way the world is going and the way it should go, which is obviously the way you want it to go, then you start a podcast, or you get really worked up about trans stuff, because it's like a way of exerting control, you know what I mean? Or like the Russiagate stuff, when people, when Libs were getting real mad about that, and we're looking for a kind of a

magic molar solution to it, it's like that was just... It was a way of exerting control over circumstances that were clearly beyond their control, I think. Including starting podcasts, like Muller She Wrote, which is fucking great. No, no, no, no, you're fucking kidding me, really? I think it's actually... One of the hosts of Muller She Wrote got a full-sleeved tattoo of Robert Muller. And then after the Muller investigation concluded with nothing, the New York Times interviewer, and she said she had had to talk a lot of people off the ledge. Okay, I'm sorry, I am fucking sorry, but if you're starting a podcast about Robert Muller,

how are you reaching for the awkward pun of Muller She Wrote when it could have been the Muller Corner? How are you... That's only a European thing, Milo, I'm afraid. Yeah, well, I should have learned about it. Anyway, so Patrick, I think that's right. And then I think then, if that's right then, that does have a slight implication for things going forward, which is that the radicalized liberals over the last several years, are you saying that because there has been this victory, they may at least temporarily retreat from the paranoid style and get more normal until they lose again? Yeah, I think that's basically how it's going to go, that when you are...

I think you could see this a lot from kind of the gentry class in Trumpism too, that like, because they had won, they were very concerned with their position and consolidating their position. But at this point, there's no question that these people are running the show, at least in terms of kind of setting the tone for what the Democratic Party is going to do. So like, you can fix immigration because that's going to make you feel good about there not being brown kids and cages anymore. And now, maybe we don't need to worry about Russia as much, maybe we don't need to worry about disinformation as much because all is as it should be. Now, if they lose the midterms in 2022, and God forbid, they lose the presidency in 2024,

then I think you could see them go down a series of super fucked up rabbit holes, especially if it's somebody that they really hate who wins it. Like, if Ted Cruz becomes president in 2024, I think you're going to see an absolute freak out. He's a charisma powerhouse, so he could do it. Oh, yeah. Have you seen the polls for the next Republican primary? Because if you haven't, I highly recommend it because you'll have a great time thinking about how like, Donald Trump is like the only, he's the kingmaker now. If he decides he doesn't want to run again or start a new party or something else, all of these other guys, you know, Cruz, Hawley, whoever, everybody who like, either debased themselves for him or like to him sub 1% and

it fucking rocks. They deserve every bit of it. It's 100% going to be Lauren Boebert's husband's dick tattoo. And you just know that when it happens, Libs are going to be like, man, President Trump would never have done this because he had more dignities than that. I miss that. I think if there's a little bit of a sum up here as well, right? One of the reasons I think that the paranoid style has been that we've been talking about this kind of radicalization towards nothing but anxiety, not towards any action, has been sort of so popular among the, among the different fractions of the professional managerial class is that the professional managerial class is not a protagonist or an

antagonist of history. It is not, it is not the working class. It is not capital. It is basically just fretting about the fact that it is entirely superfluous to history and so, you know, plays around in the ideological garbage cans, so to speak, but it's sort of existing in nothing, but the castoffs of actual historical processes. I kind of, I have a slight refinement to that, which is that like, it's not that it does no sort of operative work, this, this paranoid style. It's that the work that it does is sort of futile and self-defeating. And that's how you get the long Russia gate threads or conversely, you get that other great show of effort, storming the fucking

capitals of the United States and then waiting for a cutscene. Indeed. And it's, it's, it's why like the... Turns out you left one cop alive back in like a previous room. You have to go back and... And I think, again, it's, it's, it's why at the same time, like there is that the, all of these sort of, if you like, you know, say ideological sort of upper middle class sort of efforts around Brexit sort of came to very little. You know, it is, it is engaging with self soothing rather than engaging with what's going on. Yeah, it's a fidget cube. Yes. It is, it is a very dangerous fidget spinner that is trying to get people fired up for tweets.

The fidget spinner invented by Vladimir Putin. That's right. So there we go. We understand how it all joins together. There's a thing here that I think is worth bearing in mind that it has to do with the relative physical and social isolation of the upper middle class from anybody else. That like, if you live in, if you are a member of this upper middle class, you can exist without ever interacting with anybody who is not a service worker or, or a member of this class yourself. Like it's a, it's a peer group, like a social peer group. Whereas if you're a member of the

working class, you're aware that there are people above you, right? If you're a, if you're a, if you're an owner, you're aware that there are people below you, right? But in the, but for the upper middle class, like you can exist in pretty much a world that is purely made up of other upper middle class people and which, which creates this really powerful bubble effect and leads you to believe that there are a lot more of you than there are. And I think you like clients, you don't have employees or owners. Exactly. You have, you have partners. You have, you have, you have coworkers. You don't, it's a much less kind of nakedly hierarchical world. But it's also kind of limited in its, in its extent, right? So like, you can simultaneously feel like the, feel totally

secure and also feel like it's, it's inexplicable that the world is not going the way that you want it to, because you're never exposed to anything that's not. So like that, yeah, if that makes any sort of sense. I think, I think what, what this, what this really is getting at is sort of different ways of describing the same process of dislocation, alienation and innervation. And that has, and that has produced what again, is I think a relatively politically unreachable coterie of extremely reactionary 60 year olds who just happen to channel that reaction into voting for Starmer or Johnson or Trump or Biden, because they, that's also how they see, that's also how they see politics as like, just as just the exercise of a vote and so on and so on. But that is the

sort of the limits of the political possibility and it's extraordinarily reactionary just because it is sort of so, so sort of a creature of ideology. Yeah. Yeah. Alienation, not just for the proletariat no more. No, I think what Patrick was saying about the sort of the flat hierarchies of the upper middle class is very perceptive in that as we know, mums exist in a net, not a pyramid. That's why it's called mums net because it is a sort of a conglomeration of equals. It's a conglomeration of many pyramid shaped schemes. There might be a chief mum, like a like a glimmer, but he is simply a kind of prinkeps off the mums net. He's not above them. He's simply there to kind of be an organizing force. So Patrick, please go ahead.

I got lost in the hierarchies of mums net. Yeah, to the extent that there's an academic article for you lost in the hierarchies of mums net. It's funny that it is a real kind of flat world. It's not and it speaks its own kind of language of hierarchy and status and it has its it has its own kinds of signifiers. And that's why like, I want to write an article on this or like an essay on this and I want to call it the Labradoodle class. Because I think that's the perfect kind of thing where like, you don't buy $100,000 RV, you buy a $5,000 dog. And that like this signals that you're that that first of all, you call it Jessica or or Luther or Walter and your wife's called musty. So Patrick, I don't know if you know this,

but there's a stereotype that upper middle class British people name their name their name their dogs like normal human girls names and then name their daughters dog's names. Yeah, I have not heard this. The amount of like women you meet who live in Kensington who are called like Tiffin or something is like men. Yeah, Muffy. Toodley Boodley or whatever. Like it's so real. Yeah, so a girl called Muffy will be like walking a dog called like, I don't know, Cheryl Sarah. Yeah, she's called Muffy and she is like 16 15 taps bug. Like sorry. You were saying about the Labradoodle, Patrick. Yes. So I just think like, for people in the upper middle class, they know how to read these signs, right? And they're they're very like ensconced in this world. And and it's a highly

aesthetic one without realizing that it's aesthetic and it's highly ideological without realizing it's ideological. So into Joe Biden bringing dogs back to the White House, they get so into the Queen wearing different kinds of brooches to say what she really to send secret messages to like the people who read the right kinds of newspaper, what she really thinks about Brexit. Yes, the reason why the Queen is wearing this ancient Hindu symbol brooch is because she's wearing the ancient Hindu symbol to honor her uncle. That's right. Yeah. That's yeah, I think there's a lot of that we're like the the ideological without realizing that it's ideological just like thinking that this is the way the world works and has to work and the

only way it can work and that anything, any idea other than that is a deviation that has to be fought back. Like that's the that's at the core of this. And that's why it's reactionary and conservative at heart. Like that's the but cannot come to grips with the idea of itself as being conservative. Like it has to see itself as progressive as moving towards something better without the without like wrapping its head around the idea that you that really you're fighting to maintain what is. I think that's very that's that's very perceptive. And I think that's a nice bow to tie around this entire conversation. In fact, classroom can see a soft bank to lend us. So I want to say number one Patrick,

it is always a huge delight to have you on the podcast and I urge everybody to listen to Tides of History to subscribe also to your to your various sub-stacks because you're on disc you also have your own. Yes, I have my own. It's called Perspectives. I kind of alternate between writing essays that are way too long about things like Bro culture and Gentry and talking about like pyramids and mounds and temples in the prehistoric Americas. It's a it's a real grab bag. I would say many, many there have been there have been many times where sort of things that we talk about on this podcast originate as essays on perspectives. Yeah, so please do check it out. I now want to pitch you on called sub-stacked with Patrick Wyman where you talk about really big

guys where we finally learn what your pre-workout routine is. It's a lot of mobility work. I take care of my joints. Thank you. That's awesome. Responsible lifting. That's what we're about in this show. It's right. Absolutely. And also like I mentioned also, in addition to the sub-stacks, there's also Tides of History, which you also must listen to. It's a must listen. Is it Tia? It's the trash future lock of the week. The lock of the week is actually the lock that should have been on Jeffrey Epstein's diary. That's right. It's too bad. There were so many consequences for the people who were in it. Yeah. Like one academic like sort of lost his do nothing job. Andrew Neil will never work again. We got to talk about GB news as well.

Anyway, and look, this certainly also isn't the limits of this conversation, right? There is a whole universe of observations around how people define themselves through media consumption. If you're part of the good PMC, your media consumption has to be this. This is by far the end of this conversation. I think this is just an interesting couple of opening salvos. There's a whole universe. This is the problem when we have you on, Patrick, is we end up being so interested that we run for five and a half hours. And it's like, no, this is the podcast where I don't do that. There's a whole universe of trash future episodes that Patrick Wyman is about to be on. I can't thank you guys enough for having me. I love chatting with y'all.

This is like my favorite thing. I love getting to do this. Anytime y'all want me, I'm here. We love it. Pleasure. Please do come on. Well, that's your problem sometime soon. That must also happen. Well, that's your problem. Like what happened to the Coliseum? Yeah, why not? That's what happened. So in other news, don't forget this is a free episode. There is a bonus episode. It will come out in a couple of days and will consist of us talking to Seamus Malik of Zellie about Saudi Arabia's giga projects, including them doing a great big line of city off the desert. Yeah, that's cool, which is awesome. Doing a cocaine ass project in the shape of a line of cocaine is dope. The line finally real. It's too bad that you didn't save

that for the episode, but hey, that's just a taste of what you'll be getting. That's just, those are the kind of bonus jokes I make. All right. So I think with all that in the can, I think we'll well say see you on the bonus episode. Cheers.