TRASHFUTURE - Wet Tyrant Contest feat. Patrick Wyman

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

For this week’s free one, we’re joined by Patrick Wyman (@Patrick_Wyman) of the Tides of History and Pursuit of Dadliness podcasts to discuss the strange nature of Britain’s elites, how they vary from those of the United States (and of the Venetian Republic, for that matter), and why America is in many ways governed by big guys in polo shirts who own car dealerships and attended Arizona State. Check out Tides of History here! https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/ 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 *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *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/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of TF it is me Riley uh Milo is safely hived off in Edinburgh in the TF temporary. It's me David Tennant North TF North encampment. We also have Alex in glad. Does that make me then the longer established TF North. No, no, no, your TF North encampment bracket slightly rougher. Yeah, no, you're the France is with an E because your trans France is big. France is beg is from fours. Fernberg's me and Britain. Oh wait, sorry. Yeah, that's correct. As a glass go vibe, but he is from Edinburgh.

You are not the encampment. You are the permanent tower base. You're the I think tanks all of the times that are saying called spitting image, splicing image, but like I have a limit on the number of times we can say that urban Welsh characters. How many times we can? Wait, how many times say you never want to?

You never want to call it spitting image. You call it never, every time. I imagine it may be quite inconvenient. Oh, buddy. No, I genuinely every time, and you can go back and you can listen on the recording and every time there is a pause from me or I'm considering whether or not to say something.

I just leave you to it. Oh my God. Okay. So I'm considering whether or not to say something. I just leave you to it. Oh my God. Okay. Yes. I'm having a moment. I'll destroy to Saiyan's confidence in the in the first minute. How we all do. Yeah.

Well, how we're doing is I want to introduce our guest for the day. It is returning get returning champion. Possibly our most frequent guest ever. It is none other than Patrick. Why man? Patrick has a going. I'm doing fantastic. How are you all doing?

Great, yeah, better for having you on. A pleasure to have in class. It's good to be here. It's a frigid 110 degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix, looking forward to being inside for the next hour and not seeing the sun. Oh, Patrick Weiman is enjoying the free salmon and caviar blinis that only top gold tier members of the Trashhooter lounge have access to.

Somehow that delivery has not arrived, so I'll be keeping my eyes on it. It would perish pretty badly in that heat, or reckon. It's like panseered, but in the truck. Yeah, it's a limit of three per person anyway. It's not really worth it. Also, I need to admit to something that I have delayed this recording by approximately half an hour by being God's perfect of, however,

I also got to see the most exciting thing you can see in the London Underground, which is the little device they bring out when you drop your phone between the train and the platform. I love the device. I love the track retrieval device. And so far this pushes us to two users of the track retrieval device hosting this podcast. And they are absolutely the two you would guess.

Apart from the one woman who wants to use it. That's your curse at least. You're like, eat a piss. Yeah. Did you delay the trains at all? Because I can sort of imagine like someone like on the fucking central line or whatever is being really pissed off at you, like ruin their journey because you didn't, you had an off moment.

I did think of more like tantalists than editors. I'm not really trying to like fuck my mom in order to use the track for people to fuck. I did in fact have to cause a train to arrive at another platform. So I got to wear the infrastructural version of a big DUNTS cap today, which is the guy, the TFL guy with the grabber arm doing the thing

and another TFL guy comes down and waves people onto another platform. And I'm clearly the only non-TFL employee now on the platform. So everyone knows why, why the, what? Oh, basically causes them to like be slightly. You have my full sympathy. I would hate that. I'm too, I'm too British for that situation.

I'd be like, just leave the phone. Yeah, it's the train's phone now. Yeah. Yeah, but I can't handle the embarrassment. I'll eat the grand. Now that Patrick is here. You will probably have guessed that we are going to be talking about some historical parallels of, let's say,

modern day indicators of collapse, which we have been doing for a couple years. We never get you on to talk about nice things from history, do we? No, well, this is, I mean, that's because history is mostly sad stories about bad people. And so if you want to talk about nice things from history, do we? No, well, this is, I mean, that's because history is mostly sad stories about bad people. And so if you want to talk about sad stories and bad people in the present, I'm the guy you call, like, that's what I'm here for.

And this is something I've been thinking about for a while now, which is not just the ways that institutions sort of rot and crumble and stop working, or the ways in which sort of system level disruptions can upset things like trade and social and political networks, but how the specific psychological manias of elites and elites who are desirous of protecting their own positions, who get dogmatically ossified beliefs about the world and the world around them, basically how the core ossified fossilized, dangerous beliefs can lead to collapse and what history can tell us. Well, we talk often about how, you know, the fall of Rome, right, is not like a discrete

event necessarily. It's a series of like logistical infrastructural things. Like, you know, one day your, you know, your road isn't like maintained anymore or one day your train arrives at a different platform because someone has like thrown an iPhone onto the overground tracks. You know, and one day, you know, you think you're going to go to a market town somewhere in like what will become the English Midlands, and all of a sudden, like maybe 50% of the people are transacting in coins, and the other 50% are just bartering now. You know, so this is what we're talking about, but we're not just talking about that kind of collapse. We're

zeroing in on a specific dimension, which is what you might call governing elites. So not just rich people, not just baristas, not even necessarily CEOs. We mean people who make political or policy decisions about what the state does, either directly or indirectly. That's MPs. Yeah, the swam. I love the swam.

MPs, ministers, wankers, mandarins, think tankers, certain journalists and commentators, opposition as well as government politicians. The people who we talk about is making up the kind of governing monolith. If we want to talk about failures, what we're talking about in the context of history, you can say, for example, you look at the UK's failure to invest in anything and compare that to the American economic recovery, which like love it or hate it is in fact happening. People might not be feeling it, right? But the elite plan in the US did work for those elites.

They've repaired what they needed, what they wanted to repair for themselves. Yeah, we're pro IRA podcasts. Yeah. Or the ongoing failure to say invest in green energy, which might cause, I don't know, all of the treat networks that those elites love so well to collapse.

I take issue with your assertion that the most exciting thing that could happen on the London Underground is the deployment of the track retrieval device. No. I think spice air things could occur. There are another few things here as well, right? The belief in the power of technology to reform magic unaided by people, the idea that a chatbot can replace certain elements of the

NHS is a common core belief that unites everybody across every bit of the political spectrum in the UK if they have any power. Oh, sure. We've talked before about like the, uh, the ideology of whatever we're guessing computationally in the future is going to be called AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they're also doing their best with the NHS to make those two ends meet by making the NHS so dysfunctional that an AI can do it. Like, they've realized that they can't get an AI to run a functioning health service, but if you make the health service not work, you can get it to

the point where an AI could do it as well. However, these are all examples of not just a failure of elites to govern for the people they're supposed to be governing for. It's a failure of elites to reproduce the society that makes them elites, right? This is two different kinds of failures. So the contrast between the US and the UK, I think is a really interesting one, because the disconnect in the United States, I think politically, is between what people think the political system is supposed to do or who it's supposed to be for and who it's actually for. So the United States is run effectively by petty local elites who overlap to some not particularly significant degree with the kind of thin layer of centralized bureaucracy and, you know, government, like apparatus

of government that resides in Washington, DC, like for the most part, the United States is run by local elites who are different from place to place, but tend to have fairly common interests that, you know, are usually channeled pretty effectively through both political parties, right? Like the, the, the IRA in the United States is a, it is just a bag full of goodies for, for guys who own six McDonald's and Bakersfield, California. You know, like, obviously, this varies from state to state, you know, in some states, this could be like a cabal of like, you know, Democrat DNC guys in other states, it could be like a guy owns a jet ski dealership. In a third state, it could be the clan. But you know, it's it's it's it's former all state quarterbacks turned car dealership owners

in South Georgia. Right. Like that's, this is the backbone of the American, of the American kind of petty elite, and they are incredibly well represented in all of the United States political institutions. And if you realize that that's who American government is for, then this is all working out great. Like this is, the system is working pretty much as it's intended. It's a, it is a series of systems to funnel treats to those people, right? I think in the UK, there is more of a disconnect between kind of economic elites and political elites because of the monolith of the governing class and the way in which it's built around specific sense of like feeder institutions, right? Like, I think there's more of a disconnect between

that and what's happening in the localities. And I think there is just straight up a bigger disconnect between the political center and the UK and the localities. Like Americans complain all the time about Washington, DC, but the vast majority of politics in the United States doesn't actually happen there. It happens in like golf courses in Orlando, you know, like those are political centers in the US. They made a beautiful deal. Well, it's a nation of politically.

It's a nation of controllers, essentially, right? Like that is actually the reason that mafia guys love to be controllers is that gives you quite a bit of power. However, yeah, however, right? In the, in the, in the UK, we are not a nation of controllers. Is in fact, a bunch of fake local government where most things actually happen in the center.

However, as you say, Patrick, that center is vastly more isolated than in the, like the example being, of course, the, the birth of the frying pan chart phenomenon in the US Where you can see a bunch of the just Decisions to invest again. I need to be clear here like I'm not saying these are amazing But like they are accomplishing the goals of the people who are who are governing right there internally functional at least and They were and that was able to break what I've sort of start, you could just call the Trump Obama consensus

that there should be no investment in the, in, at all, right? That was broke, that managed to be broken so that the political elites could effectively serve the business elites interests. This is not happening in the UK. I like the Trump Obama consensus, that's, sorry, provocative of you. It's, I mean, honestly, I'm not consensus. It's very provocative of you. I mean, honestly,

I'm not consensus. It's the it is though. It's the it's the it's the end of the kind of neoliberal consensus about well, we can't let government do too much because honestly, I think the turning point in the US was the pandemic and especially the PPP program, all of the all of these basically like infusions of free money. If you could do even the most limited amount of paperwork and nobody was going to ask you what you did with the money ever. Like, small business people and medium-sized business people and big business people all over the United States were like, wait, you mean we can just ask government to give us money directly

and they'll do it and they'll never ask what we did with it? Like, that has a way of changing people's ideas about public investment where you're like, never asked what we did with it. Like that has a way of changing people's ideas about, about public investment where you're like, universal business income, we did it. It's a fucking incredible accomplishment that they were just like, oh, firehose of money. And you know, it worked out pretty well

for pretty much everybody involved. Like, the owner of the Don't Tread on Me gun store, somewhere in Alabama just taking off his like, libertarian hat and putting on his big like Soviet Ushanker for five minutes. So I'll he applies for all of his three government money. It's genuinely a very easy like way to own somebody on Twitter. Is anytime they talk about like small government, you can look out for that pvp loans and they're

like, oh, they had like $500,000 from federal government. They've never paid it back. And that, you know, the rationale they put on the forum was like paperclips or whatever. Okay. So I have to tell you about this. Operation paperclips. I have to tell you about this particular character who I've been following on Instagram for a while, because I think he speaks directly to the heart of this, this kind of transformation, which I think you guys are rightly pointing out has happened in the United States.

There is, that's a pretty significant political shift that's taken place. There's, okay, so there's a guy I follow, he goes by the moniker Wall Street waitlifter. He is an investment advisor. I love him already. Yes, he is an investment advisor living somewhere in kind of like exerban California. He owns a CrossFit gym.

He's just ridiculously strong, like stupid strong. You can overhead press like 405 pounds, which is nuts. Like that's nuts, like it's crazy. But anyway, his current personal peccadillo is the fact that the city government of the excerpt where he lives got a bunch of money that was supposed to go to local businesses and then didn't.

So this guy who you would think like 10 years ago is like a small government conservative, like a libertarian, right, is now going in front of the city council and complaining about how he didn't get his treat and how the other business owners didn't get their treats. And like that right there, I think is the political shift in a nutshell, where these guys who were all like,

oh, so for a lie, it's like we don't take anything from anybody like government, but are now like, I want my treats too. This guy bursting through the wall of the city council chamber like the cool aid man, just like a man who weighs the best part of a ton, where money? That's kind of it. He has a mustache. He's like, he's like a Victorian strong man. He's in a leotard.

He's lifting weights that say 100 on. Can man. He's in a little way. It's hard. He's lifting weights that say 100. Can he please be the episode art for this episode? He's, this guy is probably five foot seven and 260 pounds and like with very little body fat and it's giant mustache. Yeah. Kind of saying. It's, it's, it's, it's incredible, but he's an incredible character because you can track

the, the development of the American business classes attitudes toward subsidies and government investment just through watching this guy get mad at a local city council because he posts videos. It's like a video of him overhead pressing 405 pounds and then a video of him getting mad at the city council. And that's his Instagram feed. It's a big talk the bell weather state. We've got a bell weather big guy. Where he goes, so goes the American voter. And this is the kind of person that is the backbone of the American political elite, the upwardly mobile jacked gym owner who's getting mad at the city council.

Like this is, this is America's political class. Maybe like if that guy opens a chain of gyms, suddenly he's a state senator and he's represented in our institutions of power. That's how this works. I want us then bring this back to Britain, right? Because the question I want to answer in the next sort of 40 to 50 minutes is, why did this fail to happen in Britain? And how can we get? Why is it supposed to be? How can we locate that failure in the unique isolated strangeness of the British elite. Well, I have a sort of a contrast, a contrast piece to this, which is something I want to do in the next few weeks about local government spending that also has a guy in it. And it's sort of like this American's equivalent.

And the short answer, the preview of that is they just take all of the money and fuck off to Dubai, right? They don't become a state senator, they just leave. Yes, fucking nice. No, no, tax. Women aren't allowed to talk sick. We'll never have a London stock exchange wait left to guy. No, he's not going to be here. He's in Dubai. Yeah, what else? No, he's not going to be here. He's in Dubai. Yeah. Well, sorry. It links up with something we've said on this show a lot, which is that, you know, the

British government is the only truly right wing government on earth because they're the only government that believes in the destruction of the state in its entirety. Like the American government only destroys the state insofar as it like ever helps the poor or anyone who needs services. It doesn't destroy the cops, the military, and the police. They understand that they need those three things. Otherwise, they won't be in charge anymore. The cops, as the British government is like, no, no, no.

We've got to get rid of it all. We're men of principle. So I want to go into this and then go back into history. Like Patrick, we've talked about a few of these. I think that Alice, you've brought up a few more. I didn't go worth talking about. But I want to just do a quick theory, relate a quick theory of elite behavior

from Italian sociologist, Alfredo Pareto, that we could just use to hang some of these examples off. So basically, Pareto said that there are some people who are more gifted than others who become elites. He doesn't mean that these people are better. It's just, for example, like the feudal aristocracy was descended from people who are very gifted at fighting. And so they were able to impose themselves as elites on others.

It's not that giftedness isn't like a value judgment or I'm not reading it as a value judgment. They were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were successful. They were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were successful. They were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were successful. They were, they were, they were, periods. Yeah, exactly. And so, and though that feudal European elite formed itself

by basically putting, having a guy who maybe used to be like a commander of a legion or just a powerful barbarian lord, sort of plant himself on the side of a road and say, I'm your landlord and God said it was so. And also I control this mountain pass. And then created a bunch of institutions that allowed their water-headed children to never have to be threatened off of those mountain passes ever. And then that took a thousand years for Napoleon to sweep away, essentially.

It is really amazing how much of European history is just like continues like this until Napoleon. Yeah. Napoleon was the mauve of his day. You know, he was the only threat to the animal. Is that about the size of it, Patrick? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of that. Elites tend to come into being at particular moments, like they have a discontinuous historical development, right?

Like it's not this kind of steady process of elite emergence. You have a group of people who, at a very specific point in time managed to entrench themselves. I mean, I think that's the, that's kind of the common thing that for, for whatever reason, for whatever kind of institutional, structural, or purely contingent reason, they happen to find a moment and they happen to, to kind of, worm their way in. I mean, I think the Kennedys are a pretty good example of that. Like, the, like, the whole reason that we have to deal with Kennedys now is because there was a specific moment where you could make the transition from being a quasi-criminal bootlegger to having

your kid become a senator. And that was like the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s. And so we ended up with a bunch of those guys. Oh, and the UK would bring in that back, don't worry. Yeah, who said things are static? I mean, but the, but I think part of the difference in the United States between the US and the UK and we're like, you're joking about it with the Dubai guys, but the, the extent to which you have these local elites that extract surplus from their communities and do they reinvest it in the communities?

Do they invest it elsewhere within the boundaries of the same country? Or do they take it out of the country entirely? Like, what are your elites doing with the resources that they've managed to extract? Is kind of a major question of political economy. And I feel like in the UK, to the extent that there are local or regional elites,

they're not in any meaningful sense at all, reinvesting in their communities. Not that they're doing a lot of that in the US, but they're doing slightly more. What this actually sort of makes me think of, right? If you want to talk about historical parallels, the sort of a elite class that is extraordinarily extractive, but then consistently moves that extracted wealth elsewhere is what like 15th and 16th century Spain. We're just like, we are extracting all of the wealth of the new world.

We are still like taxing a shit out of our peasants. And all of that is used to just buy Germans to go kill like their friends in different mountain passes. Or to build a ridiculous, baroque church in some mountain village in Xtema Dura. Right? Like you just walk into some mountain village in Xtrema Dura, right? Like you just walk into some random village in Xtrema Dura, and there's like a Baroque altar piece that cost the entire annual income

of a silver mine in South America, right? Like that's the, and just the guy who happened to own the silver mine happened to have in a state in this village. He's like, I'd like to do something nice for my church. And yeah, that's like, you can do a lot worse in trying to understand the basics of how a political system works,

than by understanding the mechanisms of extraction and what they do with the money. And like, you know, local and regional elites in the US aren't great about this. Like my hometown is a pretty good example of like the elites there just take the money and then they spend it elsewhere for the most part. But they do still build themselves in big ass houses

and they do still, they like, they do still sometimes patronize restaurants there. So it's not like they take all of it out. I feel like in the UK, if you make your money in lester, you're not staying in lester, like you're going to either going to London or you're going abroad. Yeah, London's sort of an interesting example of that because the character of London is this strange place where like all of this money funnels to it both internationally and from the UK.

But it has to be restricted in and of itself to just stuff that elites like. So that's the reason why everything is in London and also a lot of it sucks. But I want to bring it back to governing elites because that's what I'm specifically interested in thinking about today, right? So Pareto's usage, governing elites encompasses all political parties, anyone who could influence government, not just political parties, but also think tankers, certain columnist, journalists, et cetera, et cetera, right? And what he's interested in is how often does this population rotate? How many new people or even new ideas or whatever come in and how often do they go out?

And these rotations and squabbles are not just about the facts of things, but they are about psychosocial propensities and governing styles. They are about the ways in which you decide to emotionally relate to what you're doing. Are you a sort of more, are you a consensus builder, are you a conqueror, things of that nature? And, or, and then? Are you a nice old man who likes making jam? Yeah, or are you a, are, do you, are there certain beliefs that become necessary for membership in that elite that might work at, that might work? Again, I don't mean work in terms of our good for everyone,

just work in terms of the furtherance of that elite's goals or the goals of their real constituents, right? Will those ideas stop working. For example, will conditions change and then all of a sudden that doesn't work anymore, right? And, you know, I think like just even throughout history, right, I want to start thinking about elite formation and deformation. I think Patrick, you gave me a really good example about the kingdom of Israel and Judah in the Iron Age. Yeah, so this is kind of a perhaps a seemingly strange

place to take this discussion. But so the elites of especially the kingdom of Judah, which is where we get prior to the prior to the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 587, 586 BC, somewhere in there, The elite of the kingdom of Judah, which is responsible for a lot of the core biblical texts that assign Yahweh primacy among the pantheon, like the idea that Yahweh is the most important god, the one who's supposed to be worshipped above all others. The corollary to that was the special relationship between Yahweh, the people of Israel, the city of Jerusalem and the house of David. So the, the, the ruling dynasty that had controlled the kingdom of Judah for a few centuries

here. And he was really good at flying giants. He was. That's, that's exactly it. I mean, these, the, the stories that we have about these people exist because there was a concerted elite interest in collecting, writing down and transmitting the stories as a, as a kind of a, this thing of self-legitimation, right? So David got me in charge. I've got a playground right today. Listen, you fucking

toilet. Do you see Goliath around here anywhere? Do you? Have you seen fucking Goliath recently? Where is that prick? That's right. Now where to be fucking seen sunshine. Now shut up. This is, but there's a lot to this, right? This kind of like protection racket-esque idea of how an elite comes into being 100%. That's exactly right.

Like, they're, and so, but it's, if you come into being as a protection racket, to come up with some sort of bigger ideological justification for you to be in charge, right? Like this is one of the core pieces of the development of an elite is it's not enough to just like have the swords. You have to have a reason why somebody says it's okay for you to have the swords. You've got to have both aspects of that. And in Judah, Goldie, Sulds, Balmirin, scary stuff about these pens that the other gays is. But it works with pens too. Like, if you take the elite of ancient Egypt, which defined

itself by being literate, right? And there's like a kind of a magical religious power that goes along with literacy. The pen and the sword are their flip sides of the same coin of elite legitimation. And so in Judah anyway, what you get, and the reason why this is a really fun example of elite ossification is the the elite of Judah continuously tells themselves this story about how they're the favorite of Yahweh and how Yahweh is protecting them from all comers. And like the Assyrians invade, but they don't destroy Jerusalem. And then the Assyrians invade again, it made again, and they don't destroy Jerusalem. And then the Egyptians come and they invade, but they don't destroy Jerusalem. And like the house of David is still kind of sitting up there on the hill, like managing to, to wait these things out.

And then the Babylonians come and they're like, well, we could probably wait this out. Yalways got our back. And then it turns out the Yalways does not in fact have their back. And he Jerusalem was wiped off the face of the map. The House of David is destroyed. And most of the population of Judah either leaves or is exiled to Babylon for, you know, the next 80-ish years, right? Like, so that's a really good example of how their beliefs, I mean, they were in a pretty tough situation politically, but their beliefs about who was protecting them and the kind of inevitability of their position at the top of this small regional, pretty unimportant kingdom is what leads directly to their destruction, because they've pulled themselves this story, they've bought into it. And then it turns out like if you've got 20,000 Babylonian siege engineers,

then you're probably not going to survive. I'm getting a lot of pushback about this Jerusalem being destroyed by the Babylonians, being a lot of people are saying, David, we trusted you. I said, I could sort out Goliath. I never said anything about Amarabi. Okay? Different keys are very different priorities. This is a great example of a belief that is useful to propagate for one reason, which is my rule is divinely inspired. And moreover, you can rely on my connection and personal relationship

with God to protect us. And so we don't need to do anything else. That's a useful belief if you don't actually believe it. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's useful in one way, but it's like deeply self-sabotaging in another way. And the thing that reminds me of more than anything is austerity, like we were just talking about where it's like, it's very, very legitimizing. You can be like, we're the adults in the room. We know how to operate the economy. We're making the tough decisions.

And then the tough decisions make everything much worse. Yeah. And then suddenly you're richy soon after and you're going, Yahweh has gone woke. But this is a great example because management of the economy and beliefs about the economy have taken on a lot of the characteristics of how older power structures used to talk about the supernatural, the gods, the enacting of the gods. Yeah, honestly, I mean, I think there's a lot to that. We use a lot of the same kind of moralistic language or the idea of like, we've got to figure out what the economy wants or what the economy needs and we've got to appease it somehow.

I think there's a lot of overlap in terms of how Egyptian kings talked about discerning the will of Amun Ra and going along with it and the way that political leaders today talk about discerning the will of the economy and helping that along. This trust is not seeing the field of reads. Yeah. Yeah, the land of Sajin B, or mistress of Sajin B, he's not so serious that you've saved his bathroom. that you've stained his ball from. Yeah. Well, and so, but this is the, when you have these kind of quasi religious or overtly religious sets of beliefs about the proper order of the world and your key role in maintaining

that proper relationship, maintaining that proper sense of order in the world, it's really easy to get locked into a kind of exclusionary way of understanding things where you just like write off all the evidence that doesn't agree with your priors, and you have no incentive to question your priors at all or to question the assumptions that make you the person who makes the decisions and makes you important, like, why would you? Right? Like, it's the the iron love institutions, right?

Like, you're you're you're more likely to try to retain power in a dying institution than admit that there's something wrong with the institution itself. That's not the iron love. And this is also you say, okay, well, how do how do the how do elite groups that perpetuate themselves that are able to continue to serve their own interests? How do they avoid doing this? And the answer is they never avoid it forever. Right? And this is the only way that elite groups throughout history have avoided doing this is by rotating, by going through that process of rotation, because it's precisely that process of rotation that prevents these beliefs from sticking.

The problem is that every one of these elite groups doesn't want everyone in there, doesn't want to rotate out of it. And so there is an extraordinary amount of defensiveness, right? Of, shut the fuck up for I come back there and rotate your elite group. Indeed. Incredibly sexual. Yeah. So indeed. That sounds incredibly sexual. And so.

Yeah. Getting my elite group sorted, yeah. So, right, my movements of like non-elite to elite positions in vice versa, actually, it tends to slow down over time between sort of big, not necessarily cataclysmic, but very sort of large changes. The ends and beginnings of long cycles. You could see the six day war, the energy crisis, and the birth of neoliberalism as the production of one elite cycle where a lot of old sort of new deal or progressives in

the states or where the old generation of the labor party in this country started getting filtered out of those institutions. We got instead the Atari Democrats in the states who are sort of key to the like the Clintonism and and Clintonian third-wayism and then at the same time you get the that's the birth of new labor here after the failure of Michael Foot like these are moments moments of of elite of Cataclysm that produce changes that rotate in new elites. And those elites have essentially defended in the UK,

have defended their position so well, from the last time there was any chance of elite rotation in 2017 and 19. Like that really, from the perspective of elite theory, what 2017 and 19 were was an opportunity to rotate in new elites who didn't have all of the credentialing and checking processes that made sure they would be, they would work in accordance with those pre-existing elites, right? They were going to come in through another door and

and actually, again, from the perspective of just, does the, is the elite able to do what it does for itself, actually probably save it from itself. So what you're saying is that Britain is having a sort of like a long 1830s, right? Well, we're like, everyone knows that the system is unsustainable, but nothing is happening. Well, you can't, what a part of becoming it, part of getting yourself into a position of being in charge is you cannot believe the system is unsustainable.

That's what, and we talk about the belief that is ossified. It is basically a belief about public investment. And the, and again, even if it is public investment as the US did by just spraying down small business tyrants with money, that's still some kind of investment, which we're still failing to do and failing on their own terms. Wet tyrant contests. Yeah.

But the way of wetting the tyrants that we've discovered is what we've been calling productivity and this kind of like newer like refinement of capital, like capital, like the ideology. But we can't do it. We're just careful. We're not doing it.

No, we're just doing the old stuff still. I really want an episode called Wedding the Time. Yeah. But like that's something. We can call this one that. Yeah. But like we can, I want to think a little more about like maybe one of the suggestions you had Alice was talking about Venice in this context.

We're again. Oh, yes. So this is just too. So I think about Charles Snow, a great deal lately. I think about his his lecture, the two cultures, a great deal. And there's a bit in it in which he sort of like recapitulates the the iron law of institutions, which if you if you'll permit me, I can just read the whole thing. It's like two paragraphs. The business is it is nothing like enough to say we have to educate ourselves or perish is a

little more melodramatic than the fact warrant, and I interrupted to say that this was written in 1959, so to say that we have to educate ourselves or watch a steep decline in our own lifetime is about right. We can't do it, I am now convinced without breaking the existing pattern. I know how difficult this is. It goes against the emotional grain of nearly all of us. In many ways it goes against my own, standing uneasily with one foot in a dead or dying world, and the other in a world that at all costs we must see born. I wish I could be certain that we shall have the courage of what our minds tell us. More often than I like, I'm saddened by a historical myth, whether the myth is a good

history or not doesn't matter, it's pressing enough for me. I can't help thinking of the Venetian Republic in their last half century. Like us, they had been fabulously lucky. They had become rich as we did by accident. They had acquired immense political skill just as we have. A good many of them were tough-minded, realistic, patriotic men. They knew just as clearly as we know that the current of history had begun to flow against them. Many of them gave their

minds to working out ways to keep going. It would have meant breaking the pattern into which they had crystallized. They were fond of the pattern just as we are fond of ours. They never found the will to break it. What am I supposed to do? Create some kind of new society in a lagoon. I think it's worth asking, right? This situation, Alice, outline, Patrick, can you go into a little more of what the actual dynamics were that caused— Absolutely, and vent at too many councils of numbers of dudes that caused Venice to be unable to sustain itself. When theoretically, it probably could have continued going on not as it was, but certainly not with such a dramatic fall.

Yeah, so the Venetian political system is fascinating because it comes into being over very long periods of development that are punctuated by these moments of absolute fucking crisis, right? Like where they, so the Venetian elite is first and foremost a mercantile elite. They make their money by doing trade and by doing money things and by building boats and like, because it's fucking Venice. And like, right?

Like, so you're doing maritime trade. And this is the case for, you know, up until the beginning of the 15th century, but the Venetian elite at various points has to fend off challenges from people who are lower down the social scale. And at various points, they make decisions to pull up the ladder of entry into the elite after them.

So there comes a point where no matter how much money you're going to make, unless you're married into the right families, you're never going to have any sort of political influence or political power, political authority. And the Venetian elite turns out to be pretty good at maintaining its own position because they shift their investment as it becomes more difficult to trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, for example, because the Ottomans are coming up. They're like, well, we've got the Po Valley right here, and we've got a ton of money, and we can hire mercenaries, and we can fight land wars in Italy, pretty much to our hearts content, because we have the resources to do it. We can hire the best mercenaries from all over the place. And this is what they do. So they kind of turn their attention

from holding an overseas empire to building, you know, a land-based state in northern Italy that's still centered on Venice. And the Venetian political elite benefits from this over and over and over again. Like they managed to pretty smoothly transition from one form of a maritime empire to a more terrestrial one in what happens to be one of the richest and most densely populated areas of Europe. Right? So they basically just trade one form of extractive control for another and manage to and manage to remain rich. And they do this for centuries. They managed to they managed to kind of retain this right up until the point when Italy becomes a playground for the great powers of the 16th century. And they've got a, and, you know, Venice's elite remains rich.

They, they, they managed to carve out their place in this continuing order in which Italy is basically controlled by, by much larger powers with, with their, their bases elsewhere. The Venetian elite manages to continue going on. And so like a lot of the Palazzi that you still see in Venice are built after the point of Venice's maximum actual power and authority as a state, right? They're built in the 16th, 17th century, because Venice's elite are still rich as hell, because they've still got landed.

They're still in. Yeah, I mean, imagine if, yeah, I mean, imagine if you just got rich at some point a couple of centuries before and you've managed to remain rich because you're, you know, you're not expanding your business, but you're not like losing enough to where you can't build a new palazzo if you want it. And so Venice's elite manages to just kind of pivot from thing to thing throughout these periods of really deep structural change. Eventually, they just turn Venice into a tourist destination and they remain rich from that because they're catering to elites from elsewhere doing the grand tour and coming to get some culture. And they've got opera houses now and they're going to get rich off that. They're going to get rich off running high end operations

of high end courtesans. So Venice's elite manages to, without incorporating almost any new blood for several centuries, manages to remain rich right up until the point when finally the structures have changed too much. And it's like, well, we would need to be doing something fundamentally different and they can never get there. So effectively, the story of Venice up until basically what Italian unification is a story of an elite that is able to recognize that it cannot maintain all of its beliefs forever. It is in fact an example of an elite that manages to avoid ossification. Yeah, they're really flexible for a really long time right up until they would have to make that final break, which comes more or less

with Napoleon, right? And so first with Napoleon and then with their incorporation into the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th century, like right up until that point, Venice's elite manages to do a pretty good job. And then, but then, you know, as with everything, it always comes back to Napoleon, right? So I guess my question is, how do you, because this is, if most elites mostly fail most of the time, they had a very good run for a very long time of, and more importantly, through learning the wrong lesson from this, all of our elites have to start wearing carnival masks.

And not just at the parties. No. So, but they have to. Oh, Liz Truss has absolutely worn some carnival masks. not just at the parties. No. But they have to. Let's trust this. Absolutely. On some cardable masks. I think the question, the interesting question there, right, is what accounts for their unusual level of success in maintaining the thing that makes them elites as a going concern? Is it that they're, they're, they're, they're not accepting new people, but they're clearly

able to observe the world around them in pivot. Mm-hmm. It's, I think there's an important distinction in elite behaviors between being really invested in the idea of being an elite and the idea of basing your elite position on, on some sort of legitimating thing. I think the, what made the Venetian elite, so effective for so long was that they just wanted to be rich and powerful and make decisions and they didn't really care all that much what the basis for that was.

I mean, they were pretty... Swiss vibes. Yeah, I mean, honestly, they didn't really care whether they were making their money off of slave trading or grain trading or hiring out mercenaries, or serving, or acting as bankers, or controlling land at a state, or hosting tourists. They didn't really care as long as they got to maintain their position, which is not true of a lot of elites. A lot of elites get really invested in the specific thing that makes them rich and powerful at a particular moment. Well, that's no anxiety here.

And that's what leads into this sort of like a misunderstanding of Venetian history, right? It's to make it like his anxiety for Britain in 1959, which is it's not that, you know, the Venetian republic is going to sink into the ocean. It's not that it's, you know, it's a leads are going to be poor. It's that it stops being the Venetian republic. Yeah. Right. That's the sort of that's the worry and that the same is going to happen to to us and to our elites is that, you know, the UK is not going to be as independent,

as sort of like as polar as it is. Classical education, ass anxiety. I've just, I've just got this joke like burrowing into my head like a brain parasite. So I'll share it with you. It's the fucking is the Kevin Hart meme and it's like, this is Venice bitch. We clown in this motherfucki. But I give back to Rivenna. Give me Photoshop of Kevin Hart as Enrico Dandolo are doing that. Please. Thank you. That's so good. And so you can even you can also take it again, that's like as sort of most theories of most theories of elite behavior tend to be sociological. And so they think about the individuals who come into these institutions,

not just the anxieties about say the country. And so you say, okay, well, are, and I think in the, in the UK, and that's not in the US as well, right? You got like the West Wing disease where everyone wants to be in the room where it happens. But there is, I think the, the reverence of the people for their own positions in the room where it happens. But there is, I think the, the reverence of the

people for their own positions in the UK, I think is it actually a big, it is a big determinant of why our elites are individually so uniquely incapable, like why they are so uniquely unable to bring in new information because. Ever since like the second world war, at the absolute latest, we have been obsessed with this idea of punching above our weight. And ever since decolonization, again, absolute latest, right?

We've had this elite neurosis where it's like, okay, we can see everything's not going the way we want it to, but we have to maintain both the position and the appearance of it. And then I think you can then say, okay, well, things like questions of economic management, well, you're no longer managing the economy of 25% of the world. Sure, you're still managing the economy of a very large one that many millions of people live in. Those questions take on less of a substance, right? And take on more of a performance.

You know, so West's reading is, West's reading does not understand. I believe personally that West's reading does not understand. And if he did understand and cared, he wouldn't be in that position, right? Whoever is in West's reading's position has to not understand. And if he did understand and cared, he wouldn't be in that position, right? Whoever is in West Streetings position has to not understand the relationship between, say, like staffing technology and health outcomes. They have to not understand or perform not understanding that you can just reform your way into a bare-bone service with one nurse somehow treating the whole country, right? You have to believe that or perform your belief of it.

And this is, I think, related to the idea of being value as you sort of alluded to earlier, Patrick, valuing not just being powerful, being in control of something, but values, the seriousness of the position, values being applauded and welcomed into these institutions by your fellows who are increasingly only talking to one another. I mean, we talk on this show about AI's slowly losing power because they start taking on information generated by other generative AI models. It's the same kind of sort of Habsburg, Habsburgian, or Mad Cow even. The British elite gave themselves leadership pre-ons, as well as that. Essentially, yeah, it is a kind of preionic condition where they're all eating from the

same trough that they're also all filling with themselves. Yeah, it's the human centipede of political thought. And this is, and you know, this goes, you can, so it's as circulation into and through that elite becomes closed and separate, even separate from its economic elites, right? There is no, well, that was Brexit, like not to be too live about this, but to do this sort of like, acts of prestige based self-harm, right? And, you know, when you look then at, all right, well, a, an elite that is closed off from the people it's supposed to serve, not again, not you and me, but business, right?

And it is increasingly sort of enraptured with its own institutions, with the Spectator Garden party, the various like prestigious schools that you're supposed to go to, the fact that they've all, these people have all been friends forever. The fact that labor is mostly interested in selecting for its future rising stars to go back to streeting, for example, someone who's never had a fucking real job other than just working for the party. Or as it's new parliamentary candidates, people up and down the country

are just being parachuted in from Westminster. You know, it's a, oh, you're gonna be selected as the MP for, you know, for somewhere in the West Midlands. Great, we've got a guy who's spent his entire life living in Camden who's never met anyone here. Oh, literally, the guy you're talking about, the guy who's running for Nadine Doris is sitting midbed for chair.

I saw him described by an unnamed senior labor source as perfect for it because he was half farmer, half banker. And I was like, you could have put that word for word in the Roman Empire like easily. Oh, I think as we're talking about this, I feel like one of the fundamental differences between the US and the UK is that that that class of people does exist in the United States, but they tend to get funneled into very specific areas of government, right? Like, especially the US foreign policy establishment is full of those fucking people who all went to the Harvard School of Government.

And you know, the American legal establishment, very much like that too, right? Like very much full of these people who attended these same three institutions and they all know each other and they all are deeply in love with, you know, the smelling their own Farts brand of brand of doing government. But most American governance is not in the hands of those people, right? Like they have their very specific like they have their very specific purviews and remits. And but most American government is like fat guys and polo shirts. Like that's the, that's the, that's the American political class. And so you have, when you, when you see these failures in American governance, they tend to be in the areas of, in the areas where those people are, are most prominent. They tend to be in foreign policy. They tend to be in, in the law. They tend

to, is Supreme Court like shit like that. And then you hear like the pious bleeding of the class of people who have come up socialized to those institutional norms. But that's all politics in the UK. It seems to me that's one hundred percent of it. There is no counterbalance. There is no, and that's what I mean, right? When I, when I, you think about the US, there is in terms of the people who are actually in power, right, is still no lead. There's no governance for itself, but it is able to, it is able to sustain itself more

effectively. Again, not super well. I mean, they did just get a credit downgrade. The global reserve currency shouldn't get a credit downgrade. It's not good. Like this is not, I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, point painting this as like a positive series of outcomes or process.

But from this, from the simple fact that they were able to abandon the Trump Obama, no investment under any circumstances, consensus, and we have not been able to abandon the Blair Cameron and then everyone else since then. That consensus, I think it is down to this kind of elite socialization, this kind of kind of elite socialization, this kind of a prion of society, essentially. Think about this contrast, right? So there's a, I can't, I think he's now a senator from Oklahoma, Mark Wayne Mullin. He is, his name is Mark Wayne. I don't believe he has a college degree, but he is a rich kind of small businessman, turned

politician. He's like, he has hobbies like he was an MMA fighter and he's he's he's very concerned about the proper treatment of combat sports athletes and he wants to sponsor a version of a what's called the Ali Act, which gives Boxers a lot of a lot more control over their careers that doesn't apply to MMA fighters. But obviously his politics are fucking horrible. He's a Republican from Oklahoma, right? Like he's it, but Mark Wayne Mullen, the fact that he is now a member of the federal government, right? Like he absolutely reflects the beliefs of the Oklahoma regional elite, right? That is new blood into American politics in some meaningful sense. Like now, do I think everything he stands for is fucking horrible? Absolutely, right? But

he is actually reflective of a politically involved and politically important class of people. Like he is a type of guy who is there representing people who have a say in the running of the United States of America. Now, I wish they didn't, but, but they do. And in that way, it makes the institutions of centralized governance more responsive to what's actually happening out in the country. And I mean, I feel like for all of the many problems with the lack of centralization in the United States, like the weak ass federal government here. They're the fact that it is still filled with people who are locally or regionally prominent

and are able to go to the center and be like fucking bootleg ass, Mr. Smith goes to Washington in the worst way possible. Like that's, that's a fundamental political difference. I think that's that Mr. Smith can go to Washington, whereas there are kind of tank lines of ideology set up to keep Mr. Smith from getting within 10 miles of Westminster. Hmm. But this is, and also, I want to think as well about the, the, the, the, the British elite

as it currently stands, didn't just spring into being fully formed. The British elite is almost globally unique in its strangeness as it emerged from the industrial revolution. This is from an essay by Tom Nairn on British elites from the New Left Review. It has observed that all capitalist classes, as soon as their free-know-of-action economically is assured, become rapidly conservative and outlook. The English capitalist class, because of the peculiar circumstances attending its birth, was conservative from the outset, but did not evolve its own conservatism as the

product of a unified bourgeois culture, such as in France or whatever. The perfect model of social conservatism was before its eyes in the social order of the English agrarian world. Modern English conservatism was the product, therefore, of a grafting process whereby the emergent society of industrial capitalism took this older world into itself as its head. Its directing organ capable of looking after its vital interests and able to provide a kind of authority. And many cited hegemony superior to anything that it and its notorious crudity could develop. So we think about the actual birth of the English elites in the 19th century. The fact that there was no bourgeois revolution in England, there was a settlement between

the aristocracy and the emerging capitalist class where they all just sort of enmeshed with one another. Aristocrats invested in mills, and then the capitalists married, the emergent capitalists married their children to the sort of second and third children of the aristocrats. And accordingly, the ideology that they developed was a kind of almost like an inherited bureaucracy,

inherited managerialism, feudal, if aristocratic managerialism. This is why we have... Like landlord managerialism, which in itself leads to a lot of peculiarities. It's why, for example, I think that the British Constitution is unwritten and relies on everybody following unwritten rules. Why were you reading stuff for?

Why in case it was written by bloke? Come on, be serious. You're not getting your deposit back on this country. I'm sorry. I mean, but that's, that is an interesting, that's a really interesting contrast because it's an elite group that developed, it's a really distinct sense of a distinct set of legitimating institutions that if you do these things, you two can, you two can belong to this elite world. So it's an elite that appears to be somewhat open to new blood as long as you go through the funnels that leads you into the elite. Right? So that's a much more intense process of narrowing socialization than you get with elite

groups elsewhere. The funnel that leads you into the elite is the funnel they piss on you through at the Skull and Bones Club. Correct. Yes. Absolutely. Whereas in the United States, by contrast, there are a lot of different sets of educational institutions, right? Like if you are a local elite in Arizona, right, where I now live, chances are good that you

went to Arizona State University, right? Like this is a, you are, and you know, the other blonde sorority girls who went to Arizona State University who are married to local car dealers and lawyers. And like, like you've all grown up and you've all gone to school together and there is a local and regional kind of nexus of wealth, power and political authority. I was like in a politics media and the professions is dominated by the cabal, the mafia of people who went to Phoenix University online. Yeah, I mean, but that's a think about the difference between that. There is no, there is no UK equivalent to that. I don't think, right? Like you would, you would just, if you were close to the devolved nations, like the University of Glasgow and Scotland, maybe. Yeah. Like you would, you would, if you were had aspirations to become more, you would

go to, you would go to one of those centralizing institutions and you would become a product of that. You would be socialized to that worldview. Whereas it's entirely possible to, you know, if you're from the Seattle suburbs to go to the University of Washington, join a fraternity at the University of Washington and then go back to your Seattle excerb and run things there, right? Like that's an entirely possible path where you have stayed entirely within that region and never left it. And maybe you've moved elsewhere for a little while, but like you haven't been socialized through a centralizing institution. It says the closest thing we have to like

American Zybotsu's. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, I think that's a really good, I think that's a really good parallel, yeah. It's gonna level with everyone. I don't know what a Zybotsu is. It's Japanese for big company. Oh, okay. Anyway, yeah. It's going to level with everyone. I don't know what a Zibot series is. It's Japanese for big company. Oh, okay.

Anyway, anyway, we're at about time, but Patrick, it's always a pleasure to have you on, to talk about the historical and geographical parallels between things and try to use the, or sorry, well, I try to use the, the comparative method to sus, uh, try to sus out something, uh, true about our political, uh, environment and others, uh, yell over me. Yes. That's right. But that's precisely the dynamic that keeps me coming back is the, the really earnest attempt

to learn something followed by, uh, followed by bits. Yeah. Yeah. Don't like it. Go for them. More equitable podcasts than they'll do. attempt to learn something followed by, followed by bits. Like, that's- Don't like it, go form a more equitable podcast than the little dude. You know, before we end, I wanted to say, I realized, I'm sure Patrick has, I bothered you about the Venice thing a lot, and I like talking and thinking about Venice.

I was trying to think of the foundation myth of Venice for an episode a couple of months ago, and while listening back, I got it very wrong. But while listening back to your podcast in Ties of History from a couple years ago on the foundation of Venice, I realized that every single thing I said was something I remembered from that podcast and put together in a spectacularly wrong way. See, this is the problem with the oral transmission of information is it is intensely subject to reimagining.

Right. This is like a hammeric bod. Same the meuses of the lagoon. Nope. That's what they did. They took these set piece, they took these little set piece things and then built a story around it. And then the next time you did it, you went back to the same set piece and put it together

in an entirely different way. And that's the, that's the, that's the culture, baby. And also, right, if people want to, uh, want to learn a little more about history, or perhaps, uh, some new projects that you're doing, where can they find that? And what might that new project be? Well, so my new project is called the pursuit of dadliness. It is a dad culture podcast. We're covering history, fitness, the master and commander novels, sandwiches. Yeah, I've gotten multiple guests coming on to talk about the Aubrey Matterin series. So like not one mini. This is the kind of this is the kind of content you can expect from the pursuit of dadliness.

I'm very excited about it. Basically, I just wanted a chance to interview people that I like about things that I think are interesting but that are not necessarily history. And I think that culture is a pretty good umbrella for that. So I'm enjoying the heck out of it. I've already enjoyed the conversations that I've had.

I'm looking forward to having more. And I'm still doing heck out of it. I've already enjoyed the conversations that I've had. I'm looking forward to having more. And I'm still doing Tide's of history. I'm still still plugging away on the iron age here. Yeah, I'm listening to it at the gym. It is my go-to gym listening. Also, if you're listening to this, it is after our Edinburgh live show. So it's too late for you to come to that.

But it is not too late for you to go see Milo. No, yeah, come see my show. By the time you hear this, I may be in an advanced state of psychological decay. Come watch me absolutely lose my mind at 10 past noon every day at Monkey Barrel to an audience of primarily pensioners, I presume, because who the fuck goes to a comedy show at 10 past noons. Other than people who just had discount fission chips. So please do come to that and help me scare some old people with a show which is primarily about death,

which I imagine they will find more affecting than most. All righty. Other than that, you know the deal, the Patreon gets you a couple other more episodes, Britainology, left on red. There's a stream. Mondays and Thursdays, when Alice is home. What can it be?

Nine to- Which I mostly am. I'm back now. Nine to 11 UK time. Women be at home. With all that being said, I want to once again thank Patrick. Once again thank you. And we will see you in a couple of fine days.

They're on the Patreon, they're giving us their dollars, beautiful, beautiful little patrons. They're wonderful patrons that the American people love to see. Thank you guys for having me. It is always a pleasure. Bye, everybody. Bye, everyone. you