TRIGGERnometry - The Case Against Democracy - Curtis Yarvin

Episode Date: July 23, 2023

Curtis Yarvin, also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American blogger. He is known, along with philosopher Nick Land, for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neoreactionary movement (NRx). He argues that American democracy is a failed experiment which should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations. SPONSORED BY: Manscaped. Get 20% off and free shipping when you use the code TRIGGER20 at https://www.manscaped.com/ SPONSORED BY: ExpressVPN. Go to https://www.expressvpn.com/trigger/ and get an extra 3 months free on a one-year package! Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The sense in which ideas in this oligarchical system, which we call, you know, democracy tend to prevail over good ideas is that the bad ideas are empowering. Even if these ideas actually harm these victims, which I would argue, you know, they do. They feel good. And the society that we're living in, you know, that promotion of bad ideas has gotten so strong that the bad ideas are now able to use authoritarian techniques. to repress the good ideas. The mechanism that basically creates that coordination of ideology

is promotion rather than suppression, it's attraction rather than repulsion. What about these unbiased, you know, experts? But the thing is, you give power to the experts, and power corrupts them. And suddenly they become, they develop these conflicts of interest. They become sort of corrupted. And basically, when you give power to the market,

place of ideas, the marketplace of ideas corrupts itself and you get basically a world of absolutely terrible ideas. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisham. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today has gone from an anonymous blogger to one of the intellectual godfathers of the so-called new right courtesy.

And welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you so much. And I'm enjoying being here and being in the UK. Well, it's great to have you on the show. We'll get into whether New Right is the right term. But before we do that and all the rest of it, tell us who are you? How are you where you are? What's been the journey that brings you to be sitting here? Well, I'm an American and here I am. And I just turned 50 years old and it's been a rather strange and interesting journey. I actually grew up as what we call a foreign service brat. So I grew up in the as a

child with the American Foreign Service in case you don't know the the foreign service. I believe you have one of your own. We go around the world and rule it, essentially. And, you know, perhaps one of my... We used to do that here. Yeah, well, you know, you still help us. You're still like you're so useful, you know, for this and that. And, you know, perhaps my, in terms of formative, you know, intellectual experiences, perhaps my most formative moment was when I was 15 years old and my father, Wisconsin, and a portho, they have a very, very fine wine there. And I was reading his his unclassified cables back to America, and he used to have me proofread them. And I'm reading

these cables. And it suddenly struck me that the relationship between the U.S. and Portugal, although on paper it's a symmetric relationship, there's something asymmetric there. And I sort of realized that actually the purpose of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Portugal, is not to relate between equals. You know, we have this treaty that says if Portugal is attacked, perhaps by Morocco or Spain or even the Soviets, America will come to its defense. But also if America is attacked by Canada or Mexico, for example,

Portugal will help defend us. And I'm like, you know, actually, why are there 50 Americans, some of the best Americans in the world in Portugal? I mean, wonderful people in the Foreign Service. I have only praised for them. their goal is their mission is clearly to in fact supervise the government of Portugal and and so to basically sort of go from this worldview of kind of you know this worldview of the Cold War liberal that I grew up in reading the International Herald

Tribune or the economist and I'm like suddenly I'm like this is this is an empire and and you know Thucydides would have recognized it as just as unequal as the Delian League And that sort of sparked, I mean, you know, I stored that away, you know, for a number of years. I'm actually a retired computer programmer, computer scientists, some people might even say, although. And after 2000, I started working on a computer science research project, and, you know, research is hard. You read a lot of books. And, you know, it would have passed the time when your brain isn't on the computer science. And I started to sort of really through the reading of libertarians, such as Mises and Rothbard and Rospart student, Hanserman Hoppa, I don't know if you know the name.

He wrote this book, Democracy, The God That Failed. And, you know, he was a libertarian, but he's sort of bringing me, you know, bringing in this worldview from kind of before the Democratic Revolution and really opening you to the very difficult question of how our ancestors would see us. You know, we have this picture of our ancestors, but we've seldom reversed the question. You know, we know what we think of Elizabeth I. Well, what Elizabeth the first think of us? You know, we're sitting here right next to Westminster Abbey. You know, what would she think? What would she say if she could see Britain today? And our attitude toward the past, you know, as I started to read the writers of the past, I got into, I'm a huge admirer of Thomas Carlyle, who's now, you know, very young. unknown and very misunderstood. And as I started to sort of read the past, I started to get a sense of kind of stepping outside, you know, whether it's the Overton Window or Plato's Cave or

whatever, I started to get a sense of how the past would see the present. You know, we live in a time that considers it a very, very superior to all of human history in a number of respects. And, you know, when you look at our cell phones, our computers, you know, these things are sort of clearly superior, but are we as superior as human beings? Are values and perspectives superior? This seems to me to be a subject well-worthy of debate, and especially what started to concern me is that there's a sort of almost a sort of provincialism to the present, because when you're in a very provincial society, you tend to be very centered on where you are, and you dismiss sort of the rest of the world, as heathens, barbarians, you know, and, you know, you seldom in this sort of provincial context,

you basically seldom sort of flip the script and say, what would they think of us? And to be sort of cosmopolitan in the present is to be able to flip that script and think, this is how we see the Mongolians, but this is also how the Mongolians see us. And so, you know, to answer the question of how the Elizabethans would see us of how Shakespeare would see the present, you know, sort of opened up this kind of vast, unopened field of thought. And I felt that, you know, in a way, you know, by starting to think this way, I felt myself, you know, sort of, as one might say, exiting the matrix. And, you know, the thing that I'm kind of most notorious for in some ways is back in 2007, I was sitting in the cafe in the Hate-Ashbury District of San Francisco.

It's called the People's Cafe, Coffee of the People. It was covered with 60s propaganda from that time. And I was thinking about this great movie The Matrix. And I was like, and of course, when we think about kind of breaking our frames, as I was taught to think, of course, you grow up in the 20th century. I'm very much a child of the 20th century, you grew up thinking of your, you know, breaking your frames as sort of a revolt against traditionalism.

And to sort of take that and flip it around and turn it into a revolt against the present, it seemed like a very subversive act. And so I started to use this metaphor from the matrix of the red pill. And now everyone, you know, has this metaphor of being red-pilled or pilled or whatever, which, you know, actually this metaphor was far too powerful for me.

It was rested for me immediately in two directions at the same time in my very abstruse content. They broke open the pill. They dumped out my, you know, very abstruse, you know, criticisms of Carlisle and whatever. And it was replaced the one by the pickup artist community who started to talk about being red-pilled in terms of seeing the, you know, the truth about women or whatever. and then, of course, by, you know, full-on Nazis, are rather neo-Nazis or post-Nazis,

or, you know, the party office is no longer issuing membership cards, but, you know, the term is still used. And so it's sort of, you know, I obviously, I'm not going to take credit for everything that's described as red-pilled. It became more mainstream than either of those two eventually as well. Yes, yes. Eventually, eventually it became sort of more generalized and mainstreamed, And now it's lovely because it means almost nothing.

But, you know, to, you know, and at the same time, and this would have definitely happened. Without Lee, a lot of people as sort of the ideas of the 1960s kind of hardened, you know, out of their kind of original freshness because these ideas felt very fresh, you know, 15, 60 years ago, kind of hardened into a kind of orthodoxy. And so people were looking for ways to controvert that orthodoxy, to deny it, to. sort of push back against it, especially in sort of anonymous places on the internet. And so you got this sort of world of like 4chan. You're familiar with 4chan. I was never a 4chan person. But, you know, a lot, there was a lot of sort of seething ferment of, you know, how strongly people in that could basically spit in the face of the powers that be. And the people, you know, who, the people in that world, you know, which is a world, I sort of, you know, I kind of, I respect people in a lot of

ways who are sort of performative dissidents who have this kind of purely negative nihilistic vision. But there actually, I think, has to be something more than pure nihilism. You know, when you're in an orthodoxy nihilism is sort of very attractive. And I think that one of the things that happens, you know, all around the world as people, kids go to these schools and, you know, they sort of receive this content which strikes them as very wrong and very disturbing. And at a certain point, they go to their teacher. And they say, you know, maybe in deep confidence, you know, I don't believe in any of this stuff, it seems wrong. It seems very strange. This obsession with race seems very odd and very unpleasant. And we're taught, you know, at the same

time in the U.S. to believe we have these two concepts of equal protection of the law and protected classes. How did these things, you know, interact? You know, it's very Orwellian. But, you know, if I don't believe in this, what do I believe in? And the teacher says to them, well, it's very simple. The opposite of this is being a Nazi. And at that point, your 15-year-old says, well, then I'm a Nazi. And I'm using the British pronunciation, you know, just because I'm here in the UK. And that's a sort of like that antagonism where basically you're part of the kind of stereotyped, you're sort of when you do that and, you know, I like to warn people against that choice because it's not that to be a Nazi is to be too radical, actually.

I think you must be much more radical than that. But it's like the sort of, you know, you're inhabiting this caricatured opposition to the frame, whereas actually to be outside the frame is much bigger and much more interesting. And the past is much more enormous. Let's talk about that. So I want to give you an opportunity to also clarify what you said, being more radical than a Nazi. What are you talking about? So, you know, I would say, for example, that, you know, to take Shakespeare seriously is much more radical than being a Nazi.

And so, you know, when you look at the world of Elizabeth I first, it's a world that when we when we take it seriously we can almost we can barely understand so for example i you know it's a digression but i happen to be like like many very intellectual people i happen to be in oxfordian i believe that shakespeare was the role of oxford and so for example to take the world of elizabethan court poetry seriously and to take there's a wonderful speech in troilus and Creseda, where Ulysses sort of has this kind of defense of inequality and his defense of rank and his defense of like nobility, you'll not find an ounce of democratic sentiment in Shakespeare. You know, whereas, for example, Hitler is a demagogue.

You know, he's a very, and if you look at, for example, the relationship between Hitler and the kind of the German nationalist right, great writers like Ernst Jr., who, you know, there's recently, I don't, do you know, Junger? There's recently been a younger revival, amazing, amazing writer. And these people look down upon Hitler as a sort of peasant, you know, and in anti-Semitism, you know, in German society in 1900, you know, was a sort of peasant belief. You know, the idea that it could become a serious thing that would result in serious consequences for people was unthinkable to these German aristocrats.

And so, for example, if I, you know, place myself in that time, I'm sort of with, much more with a kind of Stelfenberg, kind of the old German aristocratic, right, who tried to eventually tried to blow up Hitler with a bomb and failed. And Junger himself is almost caught up in these purges and killed. But Ernst Junger, Ernst von Solomon, Friedrich Rek, some people you probably haven't heard of, you know, those for me. are the writers to read from the time. And so to say, for example, that you're an anti-Nazi, you know, you could basically say, okay, if you're an anti-Nazi, you could be a Stalinist. My own grandparents in America were Stalinists. They were, you know, Jewish communists of Russian origin, I think like some of your ancestors. In fact, I believe our names and with the same last two letters. And so to say that you're not a non-Semitism, you're not an

Nazi. It's like, you know, one of my favorite things to explain is the word Gentile, because when we use the word Gentile, it's a negative set. It means that you're not a Jew. Or in Utah, it means that you're not a Mormon. Actually, you and I could go. I was just in Utah, but they didn't tell me that. You were a Gentile in Utah. And, you know, regardless of your ethnic origin, you're a Gentile because it means you're not a Mormon. So you're not a Mormon. You could be a Hindu. You could be a Zoroastrian. And so, you know, to say what did Gentiles think? What is Gentile thinking is, you know, fundamentally a parochial and false categorization. So to say what to anti-Nazis think, you could be a Stalinist, you could be an American liberal, you could be Ernst Junger or Julius Evela.

And so to sort of expand basically once you say, going back to my example of the first, 15-year-old kid, to say, okay, I'm not woke, I'm post-woke, whatever. You know, what does that mean? You know, this word woke dates to 2012, as though we invented these ideas in 2012, which is absolute nonsense. They were being taught in American universities in the 70s. They were actually, you know, go back solidly to the 30s. And, you know, so to say that I'm not this, you know, once you say that not this means that, you're sort of making the mistake. of saying Gentiles believe this. Right. And to

escape from that pattern and say no, actually, you know, to say, I don't believe, for example, you know, to say, you know, the meaning of I don't believe in democracy, you know, that can be, have a huge number of meanings.

But to group, for example, Hitler and Elizabeth I the First, either of whom believed in democracy, I mean, I can't imagine that, you know, Queen Elizabeth would have let that little man in her presence for more than a few minutes. And, you know, and so sort of, it's so crucial to basically say, okay, I'm escaping from this, you know, dichotomy. And even to sort of view this dichotomy as kind of a single line and say,

okay, well, I don't believe in woke so, but I'm not Hitler, but let's go, you know, 10% toward Hitler. I'm a moderate. I'm a moderate, you know, as they say, the best way to fight, you know, radical, racist terrorism is to support moderate racists. And, oh, no, wait, they don't say that. And so there are all these other different, fascinating, amazing directions to go to when you kind of let yourself out of the very narrow prison of the present and kind of into the past. And so, you know, when I speak, I, of course, like to, you know, kind of red pill. People are kind of living within this very constrained intellectual universe and say, you can get outside this. But, you know, But, you know, I also like to speak to the Nazis. And, you know, I want to say actually, you know, there's a sort of paucity of imagination. And there's a sort of when you do that, you're kind of remaining within the frame. And it's very important to sort of leave that frame. And so like my example of the, you know, the 15 year old, a brilliant 15 year old kid who becomes a Nazi, which I've seen millions and millions of cases of, okay, not millions, but.

very many and it's sort of very sad because you get sort of trapped in that space and especially you're sort of looking for what is the most taboo belief in the modern world you end up in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial well um you know the Holocaust is one of the best attested facts you know in history but um if you're looking for the truth about World War II actually almost every other World War II conspiracy theory is true except Holocaust denial and And so President Roosevelt had prior knowledge of Pearl Harbor. Totally believe this, for example. I, you know, I don't want to go into details on this.

But, you know, and so when we understand this sort of enemy, like if you look at kind of pop history, professional history, kind of studies of the Third Reich, you know, we understand it clearly as glass. We see Hitler almost perfectly. Understanding Stalin, you know, have you read, there's a recent book Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin that came out? a lovely history, you know, kind of a revisionist history or someone, but impeccably academic of, you know, sort of Stalin's perspective in the war, kind of recapitulates the icebreaker hypothesis. Oh, yeah. You know what? It's funny because that is, I'm not, I, there's most conspiracy theories, I think, are complete nonsense. But there's a few Russian writers. And the one you're talking about is actually been bettered. Yeah. He's been bettered by other people,

including Salonian, who, I mean, that's a legit thing that Stalin wanted to stab Hitler in the back. That's why they signed in on aggression. Yes, yes, yes. And I happened to also believe that FDR had prior knowledge of that. And there's no way to prove it. Can't be proved. You know, only circumstantial evidence. And so the thing is when you sort of go back and kind of look at that period, you know, again, you know, when you're just like, okay, something smells funny, I'm a Nazi, you know, you're just missing all of this.

subtlety and all of this, you know, actually this amazing history. You know, you can read Charles Beard, President Roosevelt in the coming of the war. Charles Callant Tancel was the leading American diplomatic historian of the time. He was granted unfettered access to State Department papers. He wrote backdoor to war, which is basically like, you know, FDR organized this war, which killed, I mean, and, well, I mean, was it good for the Jews? You know, as one says, right? And so, you know, this is sort of tremendous catastrophe, actually. You know, the book that I recommend, you know, the writer Nicholson Baker? No.

Amazing American writer, novelist. He's written fiction, nonfiction. Really one of America's great writers. And you wrote this book about 15 years ago called Human Smoke. And Human Smoke is a history of World War II told in chronological tweet-length excerpts from primary sources. It's amazing. And, you know, you come away from this. And if there's just one thing that,

I kind of want people to believe about World War II. It said it was not a Marvel movie. It was not in any sense of Marvel movie. There's no Marvel movies. History. World War I, my gosh, you know, certainly not a Marvel movie. And so, you know, when you step outside of this material,

you really, really, really need to step outside of this sort of, you know, linear, you know, here I'm a progressive, here I'm a Nazi. And, you know, by the way, when we use, the word progressive. My grandparents actually were American communists. They were Stalinists, to be exact. And they met at a Communist Party meeting, I believe in the late 20s or early 30s,

and they were Stalinists all the way through the 70s, which took a lot of, a lot of, you know, persistence. I feel like to apologize to your forebears for... You're not responsible for the sins of your ancestors. Yes, yes. Keep trying to make the point on other issues. There you go. There you go. I don't believe I'm responsible.

but, you know, it provides a certain... I'll take the reparations. It provides a certain accountability for sort of understanding what went on. And I only learned that my, you know, they were so secretive, it was such a secret of time. I only learned that my grandparents

were communists from my parents. My grandparents themselves would never talk about it. The word they used and said was progressive. They only said progressive. And if you go back, there's a wonderful resource called

Marxist.org. It's about this fellow Carl, Karl Marx. but it includes a lot of sort of leftist, you know, archival material from the past. And you can go and read the pages of the communist, which was the official journal of the CPUSA, and you can look at the way they used the word progressive. And they use it in exactly the same way to describe the same set of people. It is always a positive word. It always means our friends.

And so in a way, when you use the word progressive, you know, without realizing it today, you know, the old left becomes the new left. So the old left in America is the kind of party left. It's centralized. And the new left, which consists largely of, you know the term red diaper baby that we use in the U.S. Red diaper baby means sort of a child of the party world. And so like my father, for example, is a red diaper baby. And the new left basically kind of takes kind of the value system of 1930s communism and it becomes a decentralized. thing. There's no longer a party. You know, it's now this sort of movement that that sweeps through society. But if you look at the connections between what people who were communists in the 1930s and everyone cool in the 1930s was communist, almost exclusively. And it was just an amazing group of people. I mean, they were brilliant. They were like, you know, when I try to explain 30s communism to people today, I'm like, you know, okay, maybe you went to gifted school, a little smart, you're watching, you know, a very intellectual podcast. Probably, you know,

you've got a little bit up top. Imagine all the gifted kids in the world decided to form a party to take over the world. That was American communism. An amazing, amazing experience. And what this experience sort of, you know, devols into is, you know, first of all, it becomes like progressivism and people sort of forget where progressivism comes from. There's a sort of history of American anti-communism, which sort of takes on these kind of nationalist overtones and thinks of it as like this, you know, sort of infection stemming from Moscow. I'm like, how to get to Moscow? How to get to Moscow? You know, you know, in, of course, because of course in Russian intellectual history, you have the spectrum of easternizers versus westernizers. So you, on the one hand,

you have Lenin, Nechiev, you know, Kropotkin, people like that. And on the other end, you have Dostigievsky, Poverinov. Do you know Poverinosov? You do. I know the dichotomy they're talking about. I'm just aware that Francis hasn't asked a question about how... No, no. You can hear me. I'm really... First of all, it's because I'm really enjoying you talk about it. And I'm really enjoying the way that you analyze what has happened. And it's through a very different lens. I guess my question to you, Curtis, is you've identified

the problems. Yes. So what is your vision? What isn't my vision? So my vision is essentially to see the present as sort of continuous with the past. And my vision is to kind of, in a way, break out of kind of not even, you know, is a progressive, the 20th century revolution, but really to ask questions about the 19th century revolution. and the 18th century revolution.

And so, you know, for example, one of my favorite writers is, you know, named Joseph Demestra. So Demetra is, he was trained as an Enlightenment man. He was trained basically in the school of Voltaire. And he basically sort of, you know, criticizes the French Revolution from his somewhat safe position

as a minister in Savoy. And, you know, to sort of find the French Revolution discussed in a book, published in 1797 that could as well apply to the Russian Revolution to sort of, you know, even although so much of the 20th century bloodthirstiness has vanished, which is I think absolutely wonderful. We're very peaceful people. And, you know, this is one of the reasons why I can imagine kind of very great political change happening in a peaceful way, whereas most people see it as sort of violent. You know, imagine sort of, you know, the fall of the fall of the

the Soviet Union from the perspective of a 1920s Bolshevik of like the era of like war communism. They could have never imagined that this enormous thing would disappear without a fight or that you would see sort of the Velvet Revolution in China. Yeah, because they would have been the ones that physically suppressed it with great enthusiasm. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. And if you'd ask basically, you know, and this is why I'm sort of, you know, in a way of leading up to, you know, this answer is that most people imagine a kind of political change like this only coming, you know, at the expense of great violence. And if you'd asked, and I don't believe that's necessary or desirable, even possible. And if you'd ask, basically,

the Bolshevik of the 1920s to look at the events of 1989 to 1909, he would have been very confused because what he would have seen is this, basically the fall of the Soviet Union was brought about by a windbag and a drunk, that is Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Sometimes I think Yacovlev was, most of the ideas of Glasnows and Parasdraika came from Yaakovlev. These are not great individuals. These are not violent individuals. There's a crowd of a few thousand people in front of the Russian presidential palace,

you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And this old Bolshevik would be like, well, where's the Soviet youth? Where's the Komsomel? You know, what is how, what is the Komsomel do? How many people are in the Comstamol? And you'd be like, well, there's about 100,000 people in the Consumol. And where are they? Why are they not fighting for Soviet power?

It's like, well, they mainly joined the Comsimal to get jobs. You know, and so sort of all of the energy and power and people who are like progressives today don't really realize where this came from. And so the ability for these kind of, you know, intense revolutions to kind of collapse completely in a way and to sort of lose their force. you know, is fairly considerable. And so, you know, to answer your question very directly, I'm a monarchist, I used to say.

I was a royalist to, you know, distinguish myself from the people here who believe in costumes and so on. You know, what we have is this in this country, what you have in this country is this kind of costume monarchy, you know, which is purely symbolic in nature. And, you know, one of the questions I ask is very simply, what would Elizabeth I've thought of Elizabeth the second? And, you know, and that's a, like, once you put yourself in that framework, you know, the answer is obvious.

You know, so when I say I'm a monarchist, I'm a believer in essentially absolute, though, accountable monarchy, which strikes everyone is very, very strange. I would an absolutely, sorry, I was going to say, so let's look at the globe. So who would be your idea of an effective absolute monarchy? Are we talking about something like Saudi Arabia? Are we talking about the UAE, the crown prince? You know, these are very foreign. You know, one of the difficulties is that you have to go to sort of very foreign countries to look for an equivalent at the sovereign level.

So, you know, if you're looking at 20th century political leaders who are essentially monarchs who I admire greatly. Le Quang Yu of Singapore, who is in a way an Englishman. He's a sort of Englishman, is because Singapore is the strange half Asian thing, you know, did an amazing job with that country. Deng Xiaoping, you know, is arguably the greatest leader of the 20th century. If you look at kind of the transformation of China under his leadership, he takes this absolute crap power that's created by Mao, who is a nut, an absolute nut. And then, you know,

the power of Mao, he's an absolute nut. And like Stalin, you know, the revolution needs its own. He needs to destroy kind of all the people who brought him to power so that he can rule alone. And Mao is this, you know, crazed Chinese emperor. And somehow through the turmoil of Chinese politics, he's replaced by this intensely practical person. and Deng Xiaoping, who sort of turns this deranged third world country into, you know, as I look around this room, think about all the things in this room that were made in a monarchy. You know, those cameras made in a monarchy. Can you make that in Britain?

No. You could. You could. You could. It would be a lot worse and cost seven times as much. It would be a lot worse. It would cost a lot more. Yeah.

And this must remind you at a certain level, again, of the late Soviet. Union, there's a wonderful, Phil, do you know the director, Christoph Kislauski? He did the three colors. You know, Poland, you know, communist Poland had this great film tradition, right? And Kislauski was trained under the, you know, the communist system. He later, you know, he went to France. He's one of the great directors of our time, but he did this film Blind Chance.

And in Blind Chance, there's a lovely scene where a Polish communist bureaucrat has gone to Paris, You know, these visits to the West were like jealously guarded. And one of the things you did when you visit the West was, of course, to shop. And he's brought back from Japan a solar calculator. And there's a scene of these, you know, it's like the 80s. And there's a scene of these 80s communist apparatchiks just looking at the solar calculator and thinking we can't do that. And so, you know, when you look at, you know, China, for example, I'm from California.

We're trying to build high speed rail there. You know, if you look at a map of the Chinese, you know, subway system, the high-speed rail system, it's like a cancer sprouting. You know, in California, they've been trying to build a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. But hang on a second, Curtis. So you're talking about innovation here. But what about the Uyghurs? What about the Uyghurs? What about the Uyghurs? And so, you know, when you look at, and this is one of the points about 20th century, you know,

monarchies essentially is that when you look at 20th century monarchies or as we like to say dictatorships and and you're seeing essentially you see all of these kind of atrocities and basically one of the things that you know lord acton you know great englishman said that absolute power corrupts absolutely and i used to believe that i used to be a kind of a classical liberal even a libertarian. And I started to realize at a certain point why, you know, you have, you know, these sort of new monarchies, these fascisms in the 20th century, Hitler being the worst, probably, you know, the best of the 20th century fascist leaders is Salazar of Portugal. And, you know, Salazar is a very, you know, like a very mild fascist, but he still has a secret police. He still has,

you know, and, you know, if you're even in Mussolini's, you know, Italy before the war, if you're, you know, an anti-fascist in Mussolini's Italy, you get, like, sent to an island, you know, and it's not Auschwitz, right? And so, you know, the, like, sense of, you know, the reason, you know, when you say, like, what about the Uyghurs, you know, for example, you're basically looking at a regime, which is in the Uyghurs, you know, you know, you're basically looking at a regime, which is insecure at a certain level. And it's basically... But on all regimes are insecure at a certain level, Curtis, surely?

All regimes are insecure at a certain level. And basically, when you look at, you know, say, you know, Elizabeth I first, for example, so Elizabeth I first is under a constant threat of being assassinated by Catholics. There are many, you know, Jesuitical plots against her. And, you know, the consequence of this is that, you know, to be a Catholic, in Elizabeth Spritten is no easy time. Actually, you know, there are many features of Elizabethan England that make us think of dictatorships today.

There's censorship of the press. You know, there's a play by Ben Johnson, Isle of Dogs, which is lost because it lampooned sort of powerful figures. And yet also when we look at these, you know, at Elizabeth's England, we're not looking at a world like Stalin's Russia, you know, where anyone could get in trouble for any reason, often completely superious,

we're not looking at a world like, you know, I mean, there were plenty of Catholics in, you know, she didn't send Catholics

to the Gulag. And so, you know, this is sort of, she didn't send Catholics to the death camps, but if they tried

to plot to a assassinator, yeah, that was going to be a problem. And so, you know, it's sort of, you know, tempered by

the kind of level of, of insecurity there. And that level, of insecurity also, you know, we're very fortunate to live in a relatively, you know, nonviolent age. And so when you look, for example, at the Uyghurs, you know, there, of course, there are Central Asian people. And like many people around the turn of the century, kind of a lot of Saudi money and sort of went in. And they developed a terrorist movement there, which I think

what really kicked that off was this, a bunch of Uyghurs went to, I forget what city, on a train station and, like, started massacring people with knives. And the response of the Chinese government is not, you know, certainly it's not, I mean, this is, of course, post-Posteng, you know, it's not a response that, you know, sort of matches what I would do. At the same time, basically, there's another country which has a land border with China, which is, Afghanistan and you know and when you look at basically the U.S. approach to Afghanistan and you're like, okay, would I rather be a U.S. U.S. in, you know, Zinjiang or would I rather be live in Afghanistan for 20 years of war and watch this being done the American way in which we spend $2 trillion and countless lives of ours and theirs to basically take Afghanistan from the Taliban and give it to the Taliban. Hold on, but that isn't the comparison we're talking about.

We're talking about a Chinese-style authoritarian system versus the system we have in the West, right? But the system we have in the West is a system for governing Western people. And so basically when we say the reason these, I mean, these countries are neighbors, very similar cultures. And so, you know, when we're sort of comparing apples to apples, you know, actually it's very apples to apples comparison to look at the Western system of governing, you know, Afghanistan and the Chinese system of governing what is after all really a Chinese colony

of Xinjiang. I just don't want to get sidetracked into that. Let's stick with the West, right? Let's stick with the West. Let's stick with the West. And so, and so, you know, let's sort of take this. you use the word authoritarian. And the word authoritarian is a very interesting word

because when you get into kind of basic, you know, sort of, again, pre-enlightenment political science, you're even like Aristotle and so forth. You know, there really isn't anything in political science that Aristotle didn't understand. And, you know, one of my, you know, basic beliefs or core beliefs, you know,

we sort of have this belief in like limited government, for example, today. every government is unlimited every you know every sovereignty is absolute sovereignty is conserved and when you say you know there's you know a limited government i just you know spoke you know okay in america we have freedom of speech in theory that's a british tradition uh you know i just spoke with someone this morning who is being investigated by the police he's facing 14 years in prison for satirical tweets um and you know of course this is a you know people being prosecuted for for the tweets is that a very common thing here.

Because I just want to, I understand what you're saying, and these are all good points that we've covered on the show plenty. So the fact that Western governments are violating some of arguably the sacred principles of their own societies is a problem, and I agree with it. But I want to make a different, no, it's a different point. But we mustn't compare that to what we actually mean when we say the word authoritarianism. I think, yes, and I think there's actually, there's a very important point there. And, you know, the sort of the difference, you know, as I understand it,

you describe yourself as a classical liberal. And so you see these kind of principles of... I don't think I ever have, but it's not too far away from one. It's not too far. It's not too far away. And so from the perspective of most people who see this like woke authoritarianism or whatever, they kind of identify it as a somewhat new thing. Certainly, I remember kind of the freedom of speech on the internet in the 1990s

when you felt that anyone can say anything for any reason and no one care. And we've come to a very different... place from that and so understanding the causes of that and saying are the causes of that deeper than this kind of you know superficial question of how do we get past wokeness how do we roll the clock back to the 90s and in you know you're not going to roll back the clock to 90s and I think it's partly technological issue right the the what the internet did is it changed the way we communicate and so the authoritarianism that you see now it's a response to the fact that communications become much more powerful than it ever has been.

Well, it is, it is, it is. But, you know, we started, we were talking about, you know, World War II earlier and, and, you know, cancel culture in specific. And let me tell a couple of stories. So, you know, one of the things, and you basically, you know, people who lose historical conflicts get written out of history very easily. And so you don't understand the age of what we call cancel. culture. And so, you know, for example, just as, you know, I'll give you two examples. One is a woman

named Bella Dodd, completely forgotten by history. She was a member of the U.S. Politburo, of the CPOSA. She was a school teacher in New York's communist school teacher in New York City, very like my grandmother, a little more successful in the party. She becomes a member of the Politburoo. She's a member of the faction of Earl Browder, who is basically pushing the popular front line of unity between liberals and communists. You know, they win the war, World War II ends, and there's a split between the liberals and communists, sort of like the Sino-Soviet split, you know, in some ways. And, you know, sort of competing factions of progressivism. And as a result, Stalin, who controls the American Communist Party, purges its leadership. Browder is purged,

and Belladad has to be perched. And the way in which they purge Beladadad is very interesting. You can read it in her autobiography School of Darkness, they basically accuse her of being unfair to her Puerto Rican building superintendent. In fact, they accused her of what was not at the time called racial chauvinism, but actually racism. Of course, this is completely untrue.

And so if you wanted to be tried in a kangaroo court, and they had process within this party, literally they had kangaroo courts. If you wanted to be tried in a kangaroo court for racism in the West in the 1940s, you had to be on the polypure of the Communist Party. You know, fast forward about 30 years. There's a book that was republished recently

called The Romance of American Communism by Lidian Niviv, Gordek, also a Russian Jewish communist of Russian Jewish, you know, extraction. Gornick grew up in the party in the 50s, you know, and in the 70s, she falls out of pure communism. She becomes a new leftist feminist. This is not an anti-leftist book, which is one of the things that makes it so valuable. It was recently republished by NYRB,

so you can get your hands on the copy easily. And she's talking about cancel culture in the 70s. And, you know, in the 60s, really. And, you know, one of the things these gifted kids, these brilliant people did in the party was they constantly canceled each other long before. And Gornick would go in this amazing oral history and she would speak to someone

and they would be like, oh, the cancellation, you know, person A, oh, the cancellation was the worst. It was so terrible. You know, you got expelled from the party and your friends would ignore you in the grocery store. It was awful. And then they talked to person B, and person B would be, oh, my God, it was so bad. And the worst of them was person A, you know. And, you know, this, so it sort of became this kind of circular firing squad, you know, which wasn't done with bullets in the same way as Stalin, but was done, you know, by cancellation.

So just to sort of broaden this out a little bit, you know. Oh, yeah. Well, that's why I always say to people, the late Soviet Union wasn't Stalinism, but it was exactly that. Exactly that. Which is why what's happening now? You would lose your job. You're just like,

oh my god, this is a... Yeah. Right. So I always make this point to people in the West that this isn't new and here's the parallel that you may want to think about when you're engaging.

This isn't new, but let me tell a couple of other stories. So Browner, I read this. this somewhere and unfortunately I need a better historical researcher dig this reference back up because I can't find it now, but it did in fact happen. Browder is making a secret speech to the party, to the American Politburo in the mid-30s. And he's recounting the achievements of the comrades. And he's like one of the things that we've done, of course, you know, they sort of took over Hollywood screenwriting and made it almost a union shop of party writers. But one of the things he says is we have people in all the major publishers. And anti-communist books can no longer be published.

And when I read material from the 30s and 40s and I've read quite a bit of it. You know, of course, you've probably heard the story of like Animal Farm couldn't be published. Oh. Yeah. It goes far. I mean, but this is what I always say to people, right? Read the preface. If you want to, if you want to understand what censorship actually is, read the preface. Right. He talks about it. It's not somebody says. saying this book must be burned. It's the fact that you can't publish anything without anyone ever telling you why. That's right. That's right. And it goes, and it goes, you know, it goes far, you know, beyond Orwell. Orwell, you know, has, is still kind of sign of, kind of in sympathy with

these groups. He doesn't get, like, super canceled. But, you know, when you look at American publishing in the 20s, it goes all the way from, you know, all this communist stuff, you know, the new masses. go to Marxist.org and read the archive of the new masses. It's like the New Yorker for communists in 1930, which is to say the New Yorker. And joking. And you'll just see the mind of the present in the past. If you're looking for people who have the same worldview

as the average American college student in 2023, and you're looking for those people in 1923, 1923, there's very few of them. They're overwhelmingly social elites. You'll find them in places like Grin. village. I always advise people to watch the film Reds, which is a very, you know, Warren Beatty is John Reed, young John Reed, only American buried in the Wall of the Kremlin. And you basically see these people with these insanely modern attitudes. They live like people

in San Francisco. Their love lives are like the love lives of people in San Francisco. These are completely modern people. And they're a very small minority. And they basically set out to take power. So here's a couple of examples that are sort of a little outside of the normal space of like anti-wokeness. So basically, you know, this thing with the publishers is done. And this sort of kind of defines what it means to be like mainstream media. What it means to be mainstream publishing is you kind of went through this filtration, this coordination. It was a very different process in Nazi Germany. But this ideological coordination, which was centralized in Nazi Germany, except for the CPOS.

say, which is long gone. It was decentralized in this country. Wokeness is decentralized, but it achieves the same, you know, purpose as I'm going to butcher the German, Glecheltong, you know, which is basically turning everything, the sort of turning everything Nazi that, you know, happen in the Third Reich. You know, my favorite example of this is a wonderful writer, Victor Klemperer. Do you know the name? He was a Jew who survived the Third Reich because he was married to an Aryan, and his wife was a linguist. He was a, his wife was an era, he was a linguist. So we wrote this wonderful book called Language of the Third Reich.

He wound up in East Germany, so his works were not, he was actually a member of the East German parliament later. And so his works, you know, were not widely known until the 90s. And he has this one story in which he had a cat. The cat does not survive the word. So someone's sad story. He had a cat, and he subscribed to a cat magazine. And in 1931, his cat magazine was all about cats.

But by 1935, it was all about the German cat. And so, you know, you've started to see the German cat everywhere. And so here's one other story about basically how. Curtis, can I just interrupt you just a second? Because the points you make, I really agree with. Yes. I agree with the authoritarian element of it. The problem I have is the monarchy.

And you're saying, we need a monarchy. Yet you have used the example. in previous interviews of Google being a monarchy. Yet Google are one of the instruments that silences people online. So doesn't that contradict your entire argument? So Google, you know, I'm a Silicon Valley person. So, you know, I'm sort of very familiar with kind of the way this thinking has evolved over time. And, you know, where these sort of centralized social media providers came out of,

everyone who started these things had this kind of 90s light libertarian ideology of Silicon Valley that I used to believe in. And it used to be you could publish absolutely anything, you know, on blogger. And when you look at how these companies became these enforcers, it was quite unwilling. And they basically, I mean, now, you know, they didn't want to do this. And they basically sort of felt themselves under the same kind of decentralized constraint that basically gave us sort of the German cat. And you'll notice, for example, that you have, and this is kind of one of the fundamental conundrums of our society. You know, I coined the term the cathedral to refer to these kind of the mainstream intellectual, basically newspapers and academia. And one of the things you note is

that this is nominally decentralized system with all these separate poles. You know, in Nazi Germany, you have Goebbels and his Ministry of Enlightenment, and he's like, oh, you must be enlightened this way, that way, right? You know. But just to translate your point into sort of simpler language, what you're saying, basically, is it's decentralized. No one is sitting at the top going, everyone must have equity and diversity. No one's doing that.

No one's. But everyone must have. And so you have the same effect that Goebbels was trying to generate. But the mechanism is totally different. Right. And it's a fascinating. question of what this mechanism is. Okay, cool. So we've got about 10 minutes left.

I want to, before we move on to locals and have the conversation there, let's use the last 10 minutes in a little bit more succinct, concrete way to talk about that mechanism. Why is it that we're now obsessed with the German cat? Why is it that the same ideological positions are being pushed on everybody from corporations, the media, parliament down the road from here, the church, right? I mean, the NHS, everyone is ad hoc to a particular worldview. And you can even believe that's a great worldview and it's exact.

Everyone needs equity and diversity and whatever. But what is that happen? How is that happen? What is the mechanism? There is no more important question. Cool. Let's take 10 minutes very specifically and talk about that. That is the most important question of the time.

And the answer is because we're not a monarchy. And let me be really specific and clear about that. because we're not, you know, Aristotle, let's go back to Aristotle. Aristotle is like, there are three forms of government, monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. You have the rule of the one, the many, and the few. These are actually forms of power rather than forms of government. So these forms of power exist, you know, in every society. You know, you look at, you know, the Kennedys in America. You know, there's an element of monarchy there. But overwhelmingly, you know, you have this fellow Michael Young who were at the rise of the meritocracy, a father of Toby Young, I believe, you know,

an Englishman, and we use this word meritocracy, we mean this sort of institutional oligarchy in which decisions are made through process. And the whole idea of the 20th century is essentially that politics has failed. The idea of politicians running the state is horrifying to people. It leads to Hitler. That's what happens. Hitler was elected. We're less democratically as a politician, as a demagogue. And you're basically like, you know what? If we let elected politicians run the state, we get demagoguery, we get Hitler. It's all true.

That's what happened. That's what we got. Right. And so, you know, the response to that was sort of to use the word democracy. When you talk about liberal democracy, civil society, you know, sort of the world of George Soros. And, you know, I think one thing that's worth reflecting on. is the way we use the word democracy and politics. So you might notice that the word democracy has a very positive connotation and the word politics has a very negative connotation and yet there's synonyms.

And so when we say liberal democracy, civil society, what we really mean is that the government should be run by professors and journalists. And when those professors and journalists and civil servants like my parents are basically told what to do by politicians. Let's say the politicians can even fire them. You know, that's horrifying that leads us down the road to him. And so, you know, the principle of this sort of, you know, technocratic, meritocratic government is that the government should be ruled by experts. And these experts, the ideas of these experts exist in a marketplace of ideas, which is not the sort of democratic marketplace of ideas. It gives us Q&ON and, you know, weird anti-vaxxer internet stuff.

You know, that's a terrible marketplace of ideas. Everything that people say about it is true. But the marketplace of ideas among informed experts. And you're just like, how could this go wrong? And let me give you an example that sort of has nothing to do with awokeness, nothing to do with the German cat. Hold on. Let me just work through what you're saying so that the logic is clear. Well, it's very easy to see how that goes wrong.

because if the idea of democracy is essentially that you can get rid of the coach, right, if you don't like the coach, well, if the coach isn't actually in charge. Yes. If the coach actually isn't in charge, the wires leading to the election. You can replace the coach, but the team is still going to be run the way that is run. By the managers, the trainers. Right. Right.

And so, you know, what, you know, and this is really, this is very old thing. This is, you know, American progressivism, essentially, from the early point. part of the century, you know, going back in history, you have this sort of gilded age system in America, very like China, very corrupt, very effective, you know, and the politicians are these scoundrels, these corrupt people, very uneducated, very bribed, you know, things get done in a messy way. And, you know, the old American elites, you know, I mean people like Henry Adams, for example, really the earliest progressives. The farther you go back in progressivism, the more I like these people. And the, and they're just like,

you know, this society should be ruled by the best people in it. And these people are manifestly not the best people. They are not the experts. They are not the smartest people. But who gets to judge who the best people are. Well, at present, who gets to judge who the best people are, are these institutions. Right. And so let me basically, you know, the meritocracy essentially. Now it gets corrupted by, you know, all this race stuff or whatever. But, you know, let me give you an example of a problem that we're all familiar with. And the, you know, it's, you know, effect in this, and that example is COVID. You'll remember COVID. Unwillingly. You probably had COVID. You probably had COVID. And so I think it's fairly clearly established. It's not really a right-wing conspiracy theory.

It's fairly clear that if it didn't happen, it could have happened. And here's how COVID happens. So first you have SARS-1, which basically jumps from a bat to a palm civet. It's very well-established, very nasty disease. And this. you know, as hard to one is a problem. It almost escapes. It almost becomes COVID and it kills about 20% of the people that have it. It makes Delta COVID, which was a nasty disease, you know, look like the common cold. It's an important problem. The way science is funded, specifically science,

and, you know, including, for example, virology. Virology is not social science. It's very clearly scientific. It's a hard science. And in the, in the principle of the second half of the 20th century, the way that science has funded is sort of, you know, consistent with this kind of government by experts principle, which, and the thing about an oligarchy is it almost looks like it's no government at all. It's just like, no, there's no power here. It's just, it's just science. It's not power. It's just science. You know, but when you look more closely at power, there's always human beings involved. And so the result of SARS-1 is that virology becomes important, and specifically bat coronaviruses become important. And the way science, having like dropped out of my PhD program, but you know, some people think of me as a computer scientist. The way science works is you get funding for things that are important and things that matter. And so within virology, basically, people realize that they could get quite a bit of grants by referring to this very real problem with bat coronaviruses. And they basically said, well, you know, this is a serious problem.

We deserve a number of pounds to study it. And so they're like, what if this happened to? in. What if a bat coronavirus emerged? Well, let's go and find all the bat coronaviruses. Let's go to all the bat caves. They literally did this. Let's bring the viruses back. But the problem is these viruses are bad viruses. They don't naturally infect humans, but they could mutate to infect humans, but waiting for them to mutate the very slow and random process. So what if we mutated them? And what if we trained them? What if we put a fureen cleavage site in? What if we trained them to infect, you know, humanized mice? What if we did this in? And, what if we did this in? And

a Chinese laboratory with very poor biosafety conditions. You know, the Wuhan virus was not, that's an American virus because it's funded by American science. These people were literally funded to do this research by American grants. And so when you talk to the, you know, the virologists who did this, they're like, well, we need to predict the emergency. Well, what happens if you predict it? What do you do? We predicted it all right. You know, and it's like you find, you know, come home and you find your 10-year-old sitting fire to the kitchen curtains, and you're like, why are you sitting fire to the curtains? He's like, well, you know, there's a lot of fires in the kitchen. Cooking happens. There are accidents. What if the curtains called fire? Could we get out? Could the

dog get out? So, so, so gain of function and research, at least in this context, is clearly a bad idea. And yet this bad idea, which, you know, any fool on the street can see is a bad idea, basically succeeds in the marketplace of ideas that, you know, consists of professional virologists with IQs of 150 who've trained for many, many years to study this. And the question of why this bad idea succeeds in the marketplace of ideas is fundamental to the question of why bad ideas, you know, rule our society today and how we, you know, like the difference between gain of function research and the idea that colleges should

discriminated in missions by the skin color of the people applying to them. You know, they're both equally ridiculous ideas. Yep. Right. And how do these ridiculous ideas succeed? And when we use words like authoritarianism, which is basically sort of an anti-monarchical word, we're basically looking at the sort of the pathologies of monarchies, which are systems very alien to the, in very opposed to the kind of oligarchy.

that runs our democratic societies today. And monarchies, you know, when they fail, when they're bad, and any system of government, democracy, oligarchy, or monarchy, can be good or bad. Basic point of Aristotle. When bad monarchies distort the marketplace of ideas, it's overwhelmingly by repressing good ideas. And the way that we got here is very different from that.

It's by a system that promotes bad ideas. Moreover, it promotes bad ideas, not through a sort of conscious monarchical plan. There's no little counsel to supreme elders of something sitting in a little room saying, we're going to fund this bad idea because we like bad ideas. That would be better in some ways because it would be easy to get rid of those people. But there's actually, there's no center, there's no little cabal, there's no dictatorship, there's sort of none of that. There's just a system that structurally rewards these bad ideas.

And it structurally rewards these bad ideas, first of all, by separating authority from responsibility. And so, you know, is someone like, you know, Fauci who's almost, you know, a little monarch within this oligarchical structure of process, you know, and who is really, you know, critical in, you know, sort of authorizing and continuing this gain of function research will never be held accountable. And so you have this kind of division, this, you know, when bad ideas are accountable, they are not, they are not, not favored in the evolutionary Darwinian contest of ideas. But when you look at the way bad ideas are promoted, and it's simply enough to not have that accountability. And when you don't have that accountability, the attraction of bad ideas, not the sort of repulsive, if you, if you're not, you're not, if you're not, if you're not, if you're not, if you're not, if you're not, if you're not you think about like electromagnetic force, you have traction and repulsion. And what happens is basically you have these bad ideas and they feel good for some reason. Within virology, for example, gain of function research feels good because everyone's doing it. It's the way to get grants. And if you say,

no one should be doing this, you're basically saying your fellow virologist should not be funded. That's going to be hard. All right. But the thing is, you know, when you basically, extend that outside the circles of experts, essentially, you know, these experts are promoting policies that strengthen power, that reward them. They're like, my field is important, my field is matter, matters, more must be done. And then you extend this to sort of the broader world. Where does this sort of culture of victimology come from? Whether you're looking, we talked about communism, progressivism earlier. And if you look at, for example, the Scottsboro Boys case, you know, which is promoted by communists in the 1930s,

you connect that to George Floyd. There's sort of this clear thread there. And there's, you know, providing people with the feeling of saying, I'm the defender of the victim. You know, I am the white knight. I am the paladin. I am standing up, you know, for, and, you know, the effect of these ideas may be terrible.

I mean, I think the effect of the George Floyd riots on, you know, the African-American, community in America is straightforwardly negative. It's very clear social science statistics. Massive numbers of deaths from depolicing. Right. But that doesn't have an accountability impact on the marketplace of ideas. What impacts the marketplace of ideas is...

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Discover the euphoria elixir collection by Calvin Klein. What, to translate that, sorry, to translate what you're saying into simple language, the people who pushed that narrative didn't get the comeuppance they should have got. Yes. They were not delegitized, dis-credited. They were not delegitized,

but they felt that positive feeling. of feeling incredibly good about it. Their hearts felt warm, they felt important, they felt like they mattered, they felt like it gave them meaning. And so, you know, the sort of market in that kind of meaning, which is confined in the 1930s to a very small elite set of like American communists, including my forebears, basically becomes mass market in, you know, the sort of George Floyd experience. Now every suburban housewife feels like they matter, like, they matter, like,

like they're standing up. And what they don't realize is that that's a mechanism that only promotes bad ideas. The bad ideas displaced good ideas. And you get this kind of monoculture, which looks exactly like the kind of monoculture, at least structurally. I'm not saying whether, you know, it looks exactly like the kind of monoculture that's enforced through repressive means by an authoritarian government such as Nazi Germany. But the mechanism that basically creates that coordination of ideology is promotion rather than suppression. It's attraction rather than repulsion.

And it's completely, it's inevitable in an oligarchical meritocratic structure of government. And so when these oligarchies were established, you had these marketplaces of ideas, you know, professors have never been involved in government. the idea that professors should run the government in 1900 was as absurd as saying postmen should run the government. And because these marketplaces of ideas in academia were not corrupted by power, they were flat and they were excellent. And people are like, okay, I have these corrupt politicians elected by, you know, democracy, terrible result. You know, we'll still use the name democracy, just as we still use the name monarchy. But politicians are awful. They're corrupt.

What about these unbiased, you know, experts? But the thing is, you give power to the experts, and power corrupts them. And suddenly they become, they develop these conflicts of interest. They become sort of corrupted. And basically, when you give power to the marketplace of ideas, the marketplace of ideas corrupts itself. And you get basically a world of absolutely terrible ideas. Curtis, it's an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

last question we always ask is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be um i'm going to go back to something that i said earlier about technology and i think the thing that we're not talking about when we talk about technology is uh you know technology's destruction of labor demand and and the way it makes you know absolutely ruthlessly acts to make human beings useless. And I think one of the reasons why the future needs a kind of state power, I used to be a libertarian, I love being a libertarian. I'm, I describe myself as recovering libertarian. I'll always be a libertarian in a way. And, you know, one of the things that has happened to these societies is that, you know, you have a society, go to the tower blocks,

you know, 10 miles from here, you have these, these buildings full of absolutely useless people. and they're just decaying in the most horrific way. And, you know, this is a very long train of history that starts with, you know, Goldsmith's deserted village. You know, like all the labor demand for like the local blacksmith disappears. And then, you know, his grandchildren have this horrific Dickensian existence where they're used as human robots. And now we don't even need human robots anymore because we have robots.

And then suddenly along come these large language models and they start working, killing the demand. for basically what David Graber called bullshit jobs, suddenly like paper pushing is under attack. And you're like, whoa, I thought I could have a career pushing papers. And suddenly you can't. And so, you know, we have, you know, the system of technology is, you know, economics refer, economists refer to, you know, technology is basically productivity. And you're just like increasing productivity is good.

More productivity is better. More stuff is better than less stuff. And we come into this economy where there's actually. demand for like 10 guys who write, you know, 10, you know, men and women who write the large language models. And then the large language models start writing themselves. And that's the real AI disaster is that you don't need people anymore. It's not that they'll revolt against people and some sort of golemouth. It's that you don't need people anymore. And so, you know, the, the only way to prevent that is a sort of, you know, regime which says,

okay you know we better up up because there's a protest against you know when you're basically saying you know the purpose of government is the health of the people not the luxury of the people not the wealth of the people but the health of the people you go back to thinkers like john ruskin and carlyle who are like wait a second you know power needs to step in and power needs to basically regulate the economy to make people needed. And that's a very hard and deep question, and I'm sure people are protesting. Are they protesting me?

I don't know. We'll find out. Curtis Yavon, thank you so much for coming on, and we've got a great section for locals with Curtis coming right up, head on over there, and we'll see you there. In God We Trust is on U.S. currency, and no one's grumbled on that. But nevertheless, I'm trying to work out

if Mr. Yavin believes we, or rather royalty, should continue to use the facade of a god which might not exist in reference to emblems and symbols which are used to ceremonially binders.