Once You Study the "Circulation of Elites Theory, Something Weird Happens | Harry Miller

Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Did you have a moment where you crossed the Rubicon? Where you realized, oh shit, I want to be here. I don't, you know. In terms of life in general? I think a lot of that has occurred over the past year of just speaking more. Because again, for me, I thought the only reason people would care about what I said is if it would be involved with my death. I thought they'd only care about a suicide note or if I talked about my suicide. But now, like in the past year, all I do is talk about life and vitality and strength and beauty and overcoming. And with that, you know, like Hades can be conquered. Death is conquered. It's just life is so beautiful. And I think that's when I realized like I want to be here and like, but you know, it's very funny like I remember like during one of the worst times or something, you know, my mom was just having trouble with what was happening with me and I think she saw like a psychic or something and the psychic told my mom and this could have been just like a gas station psychic. This could have been whatever but told my mom like that I wasn't going to commit suicide in my life and I remember being just so enamored. With the thought that something else was going to kill me except for myself and I just thought that was like a treat that I wouldn't be my enemy and that I would have something and I really like that's a huge like this this just this philosophical idea of you define yourself and what denies you and so for me, I'm just trying to impose myself against life. I want and to just expand myself and to feel the friction and I think about like life. From the first like prokaryotic cell creating a membrane and again the membrane is a no it says this is what I am I am not my environment and then it develops and it develops it there's the nucleus then you have like animals and it's just like from the dawn of time like life is saying like no fuck you I want to live finds a way you can't eat me it finds a way like I'm going to have my way and I just think that's really beautiful and for a long time I felt very subjective. To. To circumstance and to other things and I think and that's what's really dangerous because when you when you feel powerless and I've and I've written about this elsewhere, you know, it's really easy you want to and I reaffirm this you want to excuse yourself excuse like excalibur remove cause from yourself, but when you remove cause from yourself, you become a doorstop you become this inanimate object. So you have to accuse yourself you have to fill yourself with causation and action and vigor and. It's very hard like that's the first step of like me becoming something that wanted to live was was accusing myself when I looked at my bed and I realized like if I die like nobody's going to save me and I think especially for young dudes like that's a huge like that's sort of like that's the Rubicon moment when you realize like nobody's coming there is no cavalry like you better figure out a way to do this because nothing's changing I think that's when the chemistry really starts to change in your brain. And at least that's when it changed for me. Why do you think you know your stories obviously been very well outlined today and you going through all the steps that kind of got you there and like your personal experience, but why do you think we have. You know, this is a kind of heavy word to use but such like a widespread epidemic in the younger generations of like a lot of young men, especially who are struggling and who have these thoughts more common. Only then they have in the past well, I think a lot of I think a lot of a lot of the veneer and social trust that our parents and their parents had has eroded I think there's very low confidence and the fabric of like what we have yes, I think about I was talking with it's crazy you know I think when you think about just the way things are so you are you familiar with with the are you familiar with like the Thomas Jefferson quote about like the. The. The blood of tyranny must be so who do you think he's talking about and when he says that like King George in the in the war for independence. Well, the quote was the the price of freedom is like the blood of tyrants or the tree of liberty must be wet with the blood of tyrants it's it's it's mulch or like he's like it's right. I don't think he was necessarily just talking about them. No, I think I was he said it in reference to and I was just talking with a friend about this in reference to Shay's rebellion, which. Occurs 1796 1786 like yes 76 87 like right before the Constitution is written and so as the Constitution is being written you have Americans going to war against essentially Washington and the young like not even formed federal government and Thomas Jefferson is speaking about his own like the tree of liberty is there the blood of tyrants is there so it's like even there's something just so deeply beautifully pessimistic about the Jeffersonian philosophy. Mm hmm. Right there. Shay's rebellion being like, you know, a veteran comes back and like he's been fighting a war and he can't pay on debts. Right. And so even at even at the birth, there's this pessimism and this perpetual struggle. There's this fight. So that's never that never goes away. And I think again, for me, I grew up in a post 9-11 world. And I think over the past 25 years, you see the American hegemony. You see dissolved. You see stories not add up over time. And I think a lot of young people. And that's how I felt, you know, whether it was American Pine College football or Oxford University, just this I kept asking, like, can I graduate? And the adults were like, we'll get back to you. And for me, and I think, you know, there is this. There is, you know, so again, there's this atomization and atomization. And this occurs. There's both like when you have. There's the extreme American individualism of like capital and money and just making money, which when everybody acts as individuals, that's also atomizing. And on the other hand, you have like extreme the notion of like collectivism and identitylessness both result in a sort of atomized person. I think that's I think that's a pressure that weighs on people feeling individualized. But, you know, there's I was reading recently and it talks about like sort of like in the elite. Theory and talking about just sort of like the state of like, say, like where we are and like in our country with like young people, there's revolutions typically occur. So in elite theory, like mass movements, mass populist movements don't create change. It's typically elites use massive groups to dispossess other elites and like steal the elite's place. And, you know, there's this from. Say that again. Elites use massive groups. To displace other elites. So it's not. So every. Every. Every mob, like whether it's the French Revolution or 1917, like whatever the people are mass, their matter, they they it's inertia that moves and displaces other things. But now, right. OK, here we go. So the other elites displaced the other elites and. So I'll try to combine a couple of I there's there's two YouTubers I really like Nima Parvini and Carlos Peron, I think, who goes by like your robots on YouTube. Nima Parvini, Nima Parvini. I just read. Something recently of his about elite theory, which is like where I'm getting a lot of these ideas. But in elite theory. So there's essentially two groups. There's the ruler and the rule. So he references like Mosca, Pareto and Juvenal are the big at least people that I remember from his from his book. And so there's the there's the theory of like the rule in the rules and like the law of oligarchy where. A organized minority will always control an unorganized majority. And so democracy proves a great smokescreen to just move. It's just mass and you can, especially through through through media, if you can control media and opinion forming mechanisms, that mass will largely contour to what the elite want. And so the ruler and the ruled within the ruler, there's the governing elites and the non governing elites which create this huge. Yeah, this is the guy. Yeah. So I really like I've been reading a lot of his stuff recently. And I find it really interesting and because he talks a lot about elite theory, which just is essentially that it's pessimistic. It's that largely change doesn't occur from like large groups, but from elites and elites use large groups. I think he's on to something, right? One of, if not the most common DMs I get on Instagram are many of you asking me what my favorite books are. Well, today's your lucky day because if you use the link in my description below to join my newsletter, I'm going to give you my top ten book recommendations. Right now, also, if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make money producing content from the show, you can do so via the Discord link in my description below. And finally, you can join my Patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes via the Patreon link in my description below. As always, please take one second to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. I really appreciate that. Also, the like button is a big help and you can join my newsletter via the link in the description below. And so, yeah, and this is largely, I guess, from the start of the 20th century, Wilfred Pareto, Mosca, Juvenal. The ruling class, and especially now, you develop what's, what was called, I forget who said this, Ehrenreich maybe? There's this, I think it's a couple. They termed it the professional managerial class, PMCs, the bureaucracy. So like power, the goal of power is to consolidate itself and centralize itself. And so among the rulers, you have the rulers and the ruled. And so Pareto has this theory of the circulation of elites. And so the elites, as any like living organ, they have to circulate talent. And so typically, is this the same Pareto's principle? I have no idea. I don't know. What is that? Isn't that 80-20 theory? Yeah, I just make that up. Pareto's principle, is that 80-20? Yeah, the 80-20 rule. Is this the same Pareto? I have no idea. This would be Vilfredo Pareto. It is. It is? Does it say that? It's named after him. That's the same guy. All right. Yeah, keep cooking. Look at that. Oh, sick. Okay. Yeah, this is a genius theory. It's basically saying that like 20% of results happen from 80% of, I definitely fuck that up, but like, look it up. It's good stuff. It's flipped away. Yeah, 20%. So yeah, so that's the elite theory. That's the elite theory. The small minority. He's like hitting his head against the table over here, like, God damn it. The organized minority creates the effects that we see. Yes. And so he has the theory of this, or the circulation of elites. And so the greatest threat to the elites are the best of the ruled class. So that would be the top elites within the ruled class. So that would be, you know, you want to talk about, and especially like within, dude, like our system of like, it's like a gerontocracy. Like it's just old people. Yeah. Like it's just, it's very gerontological. Yeah. And so there's this, and that's an old mythological structure of like generational war of Uranus, Saturn, the Olympians. Like that is, there's a war between generations. And so they circulate the elites and the benefit is with the elites is that you, you skim the talent from the ruled class who would organize the ruled class to revolt against the elite. So you're able to sort of poach the talent from your ruled class by making them conform to your standards. And similarly, when you combine that with juvenile, he has the high, low, middle theory. So within the, within that hierarchy of ruler and ruled, there's the central subsidiary periphery and the central power is the power. And in order to, again, the greatest threat is that middle, typically that, that just that, that native block that you're, you're just, you're general, whatever, your general massive group by appealing to a peripheral. Um, you can sort of squeeze, if you combine like the, the sort of the circulation of the elites and then high, low, middle theory, you're just sort of squeezing this middle group, which is the, just the pretty standard run of the mill person or whatever within a society. And, um, make 95% of people fight over 5% of the problems. Right. And, and so what's right. And so what's interesting is like, yeah, you're fighting nonsense. Um, your elites are being skimmed. And so, and I think Parvinia searched this, like in some of his essays, but, and I think it's probably stated elsewhere, like when the, with an elite theory thinkers, but revolts occur when those top elites within the, within the ruled class are, are prohibited from entering the elite circle. And so, um, right. And so like you are, so you want to talk about like this, this, this sort of angstiness. I mean, that is the most dangerous feeling to like an incumbent power structure. And the way they resolve that is to, um, empower, um, empower. A peripheral force to distract, um, explain that to people with an example, empower a peripheral. Well, I think like, and then this is, this is, um, from Carlos Peron, I think his name is, um, Europos on YouTube. And he has some like video essays. Um, he, he talks about Tiberius Gracchus who, that was a huge, very sort of Shays rebellion. So like, he's got very rich oligarchs are eating up all of the land and dispossessing native, like Rome, Romans who are, who had, who were veterans of the wars and they would, um, so they're, so oligarchs are taking up the land and they are leveraging them out with like really cheap slave labor. And so Gracchus comes. And so that's, so that's your, that's, that's your subsidiary, the, the Romans. And then you've got the oligarchs, the central, and then the peripheral there through unethical slave labor, they're essentially entirely dispossessing your, your subsidiary, your, your, your, your normal. Base and Tiberius Gracchus proposes like a distributive effort to give capital to give land among the, um, the Romans, the veterans, because that gives them something to fight for that gives them possession within their, within their, um, within their body. And, uh, they assassinate him. Um, the Senate assassinates him. And so that's the example he provides historically. But I think, you know, that's just like a lot of the squeeze. It's just a lot of. Um, I think people don't realize again, it's elite theory would be, is like very pessimistic. Um, it's almost like hopeless, but I think people, and I guess that's the title there. Like they need you angry. Um, exactly. They need you angry because then you can't. And I think, and I think especially with a lot of dialogue, um, I view it, I don't know if you've ever seen like a rugby match. Have you ever seen rugby? I mean, I've seen it like in passing. So like if, if you. I played sevens when I first came here, um, at old blue shot, old blue, I think they're national champions last year. Um, I, old blue was like the club I played sevens for. So you went right into rugby in New York. Yes, but it didn't last long as it was, it ended up being much of the same as football. I'm like, I just couldn't keep doing it, but it was, it was, I had to like try it and I made good friends. Um, but in rugby, if you advance the ball too fast and you don't have any help and you, you leave your help behind, then you have to give up possession. Possession of the ball. And because you've left your help and nobody can like pick up the ball. And so there's a turnover. And so I think similarly, like anger and being an articulate advances the ball without help. Like you need to, and that's why, and that's just why I like, like writing and talking because you can sort of, if you can articulate and make people aware of things, there's your help. And then you can slowly, like, you can sort of calmly educate groups of people. And, um, but yeah, if you just get angry, that's you being a freelancer. You advance the ball too fast. Congrats. Like you moved the ball, but now you got tackled and the ball's turned over. I think you have to do something with it. And that's the problem. This is the curse of humanity. The anger takes over. Yeah. People don't step back. I think to get attention on something, you have to express, especially when something evil is happening or something is very clearly wrong and people are getting hurt. You have to express something emotionally such that people go, Oh, maybe I should pay attention to this. The problem is our nature then lets us. Attract other people who are just going to do nothing but that. And then we're incentivized to just keep doing that. Keep on crashing out just over and over and over again, that then eventually it kind of drowns out in the noise where people are like, all right, too much for me. But again, that's why that's like the whole, like, that's the whole, like, Pareto principle where like, it just sort of, it's unorganized. Yes. Um, and without unorganization, like that's, that's why some metals aren't magnetic is because when it's magnetic, all of those dipoles are facing the same way. And so the force is coherent and can move a body. Whereas an unmagnetized piece of metal, they've all got their, they've all got their dipoles, they've all got their atoms or whatever, but it's unorganized. And so it's just, it's inert. Um, and, uh, so yeah, I think it's very important just that's, and that's why I think, um, I don't know, I think articulation and I always think like, I'm always amazed. That's why I love writing. Cause I think about, you know, just the kind of, and that's what, and. I've was talking with somebody recently just about, especially with social media, you want to talk about like money, careers, selling out, saying things and being paid to say things or whatever, you know, I guess there's like sort of two schools of, of public personality or writer where it's like, you can, you can cash out and that would be lovely. But then you think about like, if you are really writing something that matters, it doesn't matter if it's in prison or in prisonment or exile and like, I wonder to myself like very often, um, Salman Rushdie, do you have the, what happened to him? He got excommunicated. Didn't he have to leave Iran and then they had a fatwa against him? Oh, right. For what he wrote. They still try to. I think, is he still teaching in New York city? You might be right about that. I'm not sure. I didn't check that. Um, but yeah. And then, and then, and then that becomes like a gut check where it's like, do you have like the balls to do that? You know? Um. That means you're really over the target. Right. Somewhere it hurts. Right. I don't think there's, you know, I, I don't say this to be like dramatic about it, but I don't think there's much in this world more inspiring than art that evokes, uh, that hits a nerve. Yeah. That hits a spot to where people go, a lot of people go, they just get it. Yeah. And they're like, what he said right there. Yeah. Yeah. You know? That's why I, I, um, I think like Gustav Leber said, like, you know, like, you know, like good art should scare people. Um, and I really do think like something that is, and that's also why, again, that's why I think social media is great because it is so, um, it's, it's not gatekept. It's not hierarchical. It's, it's lateral and it's the barrier to entry is very low. Um, and you know, it makes the, uh, I remember, oh, there was just, there was a point i was going to say um yes it's good oh yeah the point of like in terms of art where through the typical avenues like i've written things or i've applied for things and i think there would be nothing more terrifying as an artist than to go to a studio or to go to a bona fide source of media give them something that you've made and they go yes this is exactly what we were looking for because i think if you if you make something that is exactly what people were looking for you're already 10 years too late like you're responding to a trend i think if you're actually making something that is real it should confuse people it should bewilder people at first um people should like hiss at it and you know it should it should cause some disorder it should cause a ruckus um there's one place i'd push back on that uh-huh i agree with your point but not necessarily the end result i think there's a time and a place where you're absolutely right something can literally evoke it so much that it's ahead of its time i think there's also something where you create a piece of art that is so good people didn't know they needed it until the second they looked at it and said oh fuck yeah right you know what i mean right well that's why i think like i think that is genius is when you um produce something so clearly it's just so obvious um it's just it fills you with hindsight and it's and it's so pure and uh no i agree and i think a lot of the a lot of the yeah i'm very excited and i've and i've and i've like written about this and i've made videos about this like i'm very excited for um the next like aesthetic steps that are to be taken um the next aesthetic steps just in terms of like i think about like i really like every epoch of styles like i just recently made a video about um in nietzsche's birth of tragedy he ends it by talking about musical dissonance and praising musical dissonance and so this is at the time this is maybe like 1870 all right so bring that into english for people musical distance so like just um a chord that sounds harsh and like he references richard wagner who is playing with chromaticism which is essentially just like lots of half steps small intervals that make it sort of like um tense and it and it sort of like shakes and he ends praising musical dissonance and saying that so tragedy began tragedy which we now probably just view as like plays or movies but tragedy began as um a pure like a dionysian chorus a pure it was music it began as music tragedy began as music yeah so it began as a as a as the chorus it began um only as the chorus in the orchestra and then with thespis um where we get the term thespian he becomes the first actor to interact with the chorus and then aeschylus sophocles they introduced the second actor the third actor and that's now now we have plays we have tragedy attic tragedy classic athenian tragedy but before it's just music and so he says all art forms are sort of appealing to like music to dissonance um and so like in tragedy like the distance of a movie is like rocky like everything has hit the fan like there's the moment of dissonance and then the chord resolves at the end where he's a champion and so like it's all it's like writing about um just how like i really love like the new genres of like new wave or shoegaze like news genres that really play with musical dissonance and um you know there's there's these underlying truths within like aesthetics or like within art but like each generation finds its new technology to communicate itself and um no i'm just really interested um in how technology like okay here's like a on the topic of technology i don't even know how to explain this i can like see the wave like the physical wavelengths that happen in his brain while he's going and then so he's like right there it's great it's beautiful cool keep it going um there are some thinkers and like i've also have you seen did you see the back rooms no okay so the back rooms are essentially like a modern telling of the labyrinth of like the labyrinth of the minotaur um okay yeah and i really liked the back rooms and so it's interesting i make a point so is this a book movie movie movie and then it was like i guess all the og ones on youtube yeah right but it's the new a24 film young kid it was good i liked it i gotta check it out it was good um and dave's very based with culture nice i do like i love watching like again and that's why i think so talking about like aesthetics communicating a timeless phenomenon within the current yes these are the back rooms um and so the back rooms can you look up like pirate uh mascot back rooms okay so this is the pirate um interesting okay so he is the sort of he is the mob that lurks in the back rooms and is chasing our protagonist and so this is on the topic of techno capital technology and capital so capital capital is it's money and technology it's and it's and it's seeking to self-replicate and so i'm gonna see i'm gonna try to tie a lot of things together here capital comes from the root cap meaning head it referred to heads of cattle and so capital was originally stock live stock it was animals it was cattle um and so with the domestication of agriculture the animal was the first machine so the animals you you hook a bull up to a to a plow and the bull drags the and the bull drags the plow and i do believe um uh europos who i've the youtuber who i've referenced he talks about sort of what i'm about to talk about and i think he really influenced me but when you understand the cow the bull as a form of technology as a machine the minotaur is a cyborg the minotaur is a mix between man and machine and so before there were corporate office office spaces and so before there were corporate office offices and so before there were corporate office spaces for a a man to communicate his fear of being conformed to capital of being technologically possessed and losing his identity that would be the minotaur that would be the bull man who lurks in the labyrinth which is um there are no like straight lines and right angles in nature and so the labyrinth is this artificial man-made maze that the bull man the cyborg roams around and so the modern manifestation of this occurs as the mascot so the mascot is the protagonist his profession he has to emasculate himself and embarrass himself by wearing his jobs uniform and so he's like he sells furniture as a pirate and so he he strips his identity and his minotaur is him in a costume him in a corporate costume that is techno capital stealing his identity and that's the monster that lurks in the modern lab forcing you to be something you don't want to be for the benefit of the audience that they create right and like into the world where it's like he is the he is the bull on the plow he is the machine man and then of course the end game of this would be like terminator or matrix where you know in terminator the robots take the form of man so so now you go from bull man to corporate man to robot man so that's so that's technology at its final set of stealing the human form and then you have um in the matrix like they're not even human they're just using humans for batteries that's right and um this is like a really fun uh this is like a fun i was reading so i guess this sort of like goes this is like nick so nick land wrote a wrote a like a manifesto i guess called meltdown and talks about accelerationism um and and this is also i think also an interesting comment on like sort of like the difference between left and right where a lot of like rightism is it's called a reaction because it looks towards an idealized history whereas a lot of progressivism looks towards an idealized utopia a future so it's like they're pointed in different directions of where their ideality is i don't think i've ever heard someone put it that way and that is yeah yes right so like spangler talks about that where and it's even in the language like conservative you're conserving a past progress you're progressing into the future it's it's fundamentally like a conflict of time and so wow and so what's interesting is that with technology there is this idea um and again a lot of this is from europa's there's this idea among like um like silicon valley bros and of this idea of like a future techno singularity where man human form becomes obsolete and it becomes you know entirely replaced with with techno with the um with the machine and um no it's just really interesting like i think it's important to realize like we are not in you could say we're like in a secular world but i think it's important to realize like we are not in you could say we're like in a secular world but i think it's important to realize like we are not in you could say we're like in a secular world but i think it's important to realize like we're like in a secular world but we are not in a world without like we are not in a world without gods or supernatural powers or compulsions and so really even like the modern the the the future utopia the progressive utopia is the is the christian like apocalypse the christian the eschaton the end of days right so it's they both view a future singularity at the end of time um for for the christians world but i think it's important to realize like we are not in a secular world but i think it's important to realize like we are not in a world without gods or compulsions and so really even like the modern the the eschaton the eschaton body whereas for like the the the techno singularity for the progressive there is this sort of the it is freedom through technology it is it is the breaking down of like even like sexual differences where like the human form is now negotiable reality is negotiable and what's in so but those share the same identity where um you know this is like a lot of ideas to break down but especially if we're going to keep it just specifically to capital you know in genesis there is the idea of you know god produces the world and like man is in the image of god and he is told to um to multiply and to subdue nature and this idea of like subduing nature creates the basis of like of ownership and of capital and um and a man at the center of things which is which is a unique idea and by the time you get to especially the protestant reformation um there is the the lutheran idea of of work and of holiness and the protestant work ethic and so now you have um it's sort of broken so the establishment between work and labor and capital and religiosity has been created and then especially in america where you have like the the wasps come over to america and that's a mercantile that's those are mercantile colonies um over the course of time you know the the religiosity of um the protestant work ethic which is at first very spiritual over time degrades and of course this coincides with the enlightenment in which the uh i am that i am of like the old testament sort of gives way ed to car would have been i guess you know 17th century gives way to i think therefore i am and so now the locus of of progress and of control in the alignment move towards moves towards man creating his own values and so capital the work ethic and the capital is becoming more and more powerful the the godliness is sort of disappearing the power of man's intellect the enlightenment um which is rather sort of like that is that is in the in the in genesis the serpent says like and you will be like god conscious of both good and evil the awareness of man is increasing it's called the enlightenment light loose the elusive the luciferian realization the awareness the waking up and um you know a lot of these a lot of writers like i think about i think about spangler and man and techniques like heidegger talks about technology techno capital the machine almost breaks containment um and so now technology and i guess kaczynski talks about this technology starts to progress at a rate ted kaczynski yeah the unabomber and he is like he has a man in his manifesto industrial society in its future he talks about the unabomber and he talks about the unabomber and he talks about the scientists so scientists become sort of techno priests where they serve technology and now technology um like you think about people joke about this like waking up one day and it's like how we had all of this and we invented excel spreadsheets and now the man had domesticated bull to till his land and now man wakes up to serve the computer and so they move you farther and farther away from earth figuratively right but then it becomes literal and it so now essentially like the neo as a battery in the brain and then it becomes literal and then it becomes literal in the matrix it's not far removed from a man who spends his entire waking life in front of the computer serving the machine um and so and so yeah so essentially what was formerly the clerical priesthood that the church might have fulfilled um and all all of that godliness gets replaced with the state and so you see like at the top of the at the top of the dollar bill is the the all-seeing eye so like the state the the collective group replaces what was previously the function of god technology continues to improve and sort of escape our powers um yet what's strange is even as our ideas change in some cases very much for the worse here if people start to think of the human race as just a bootloader for something else i would argue that's obviously not how i see the world you know the elements of human nature don't change that's what's so strange to me the things we do just are in a different medium or in a different context from what guys in drunk with power say we're doing in a different context i mean two thousand years ago four thousand years ago ten thousand years ago it's just manifested in a new way because of the environment we have well that's why and then so that becomes the central argument of the enlightenment between like rousseau and the idea of like this wasn't so i guess it was uh lock like tabula rasa blank slate man says you know rousseau says man is born free but everywhere he's in chains um the idea that man is programmable man is man is a programmable machine versus you know he can he can he's often like um compared to like the marquis de sade who where we get the term sadist or some of the other like some of the other people who believe in sort of like inherent sin or who believe in like marquis de sade wouldn't believe in that because he wasn't a christian but this idea of the natural infallibility of man um and his natural his ability to do awful things and dostoevsky says you know something along something along the lines of um in beginning with total freedom i end with total freedom total slavery or like total tyranny um the the pretext for um rousseau like rousseau rousseau by saying that man is naturally good now creates the pretext by saying if man is not good then we as society must program him to be good which then sets the stage for um collectivism and for you know marx steps in and talks about now now we're now we're changing the environment or really we're Bastiat, Frederick Bastiat in the 1850s writes the law, and again, I was talking earlier about sort of the negative capacity of the law, thou shalt not, in believing that what's very dangerous is a law that says thou shalt, because now the law is force. And if the force acts in a negative sense where if a man commits a crime, he is punished, that's just. But for the law to go out of its way to compel a man to do a thing, that's just pure force. And so ultimately, I think what gets in the way of my agreement, because Marx makes a good point about capital deterritorializing the earth, and sort of Thomas Carlyle calls it the cash nexus or the gospel of mammon, where- Can you, yeah, explain. Yeah, so the only things that connect man, which previously would have been social bonds, is money. And so money just flattens everything into, it's the machine, everything becomes flat. So- So they, and their theory then was socialism is flatten the money and it'll solve the problems. Well, for Marx, so he says, it turns, capital turns everything solid into air. And again, I'm very open to rebuff on this, and I'm just thinking out loud and trying to recall what I've read. Marx views the issue as the centralizing of capital forces, much like Gracchus did, right? Where it's like, in the oligarchs, it's achieved, it's reached these sort of points of attraction, where now the middle class can't even access it, right? And everybody's just a proletariat. And which is like, okay, fair point. But of course, then the consequences, which Bastiat refutes, is that now you're having to use the law in a prescriptive sense to say this person gets this, this person gets that. And that's why he says, if the law was perfect, elections wouldn't matter because nobody would care, because it would only act in a negative sense when a crime was done. But because the law is imperfect, that's why elections wouldn't matter. And that's why elections wouldn't matter so much, because now we can get into the legislative powers and say, tax this group, give this. So that's why elections are so contentious. And he actually has a really beautiful sort of section in the law on what he calls philanthropic tyranny, which he, in 1850, he calls it philanthropic tyranny, where like, even for the good of man, the pretext is like, we're trying to equalize man and like, serve man, you are able to forcefully compel man to do things you normally wouldn't do, he normally wouldn't do. But it's really hard. So, and then on the inverse, so you have like total, total collective subjection, subjugation. But then on the other hand, like Nick Land points out about Adam Smith writes The Wealth of Nations, and he references each man acting individually in service of the invisible hand, right? And so what's ironic is the invisible hand ends up sounding like a god. And so like Thomas, so Carlisle calls it the gospel of mammon. So like, when the spirit of God leaves the Protestant work ethic, it's just pure techno capital growth, and progressivism towards the utopia, towards paradise. And so then there's this sort of like collision course, where like the end time, the eschaton is this sort of singularity, where the, where man is freed from the body, some people. Freed from the body. Right, where it's like, he's been, the body's been become, the body has been made obsolete. That's dressing up, that's dressing up something evil with angelic. Right, right, right. And so that's, and so that's like, that is the, those are sort of like the undercurrents of like, you know, when identifying the, the, the ideas that head towards this point, and I just, all of this to say that even among the most ardent atheists, there's still a, the, the fervor is still very religious. There's still, there is still this, this point that we're racing to and that's why i have to not believe in something by believing in something there's always you're always going to have something there's always and that's the thing about priority is like there always has to be some kind of priority in your protocol of like belief in action do you believe in god absolutely yeah i would say i'm a christian so like i believe um you know just in the miracles i've experienced in the life i've experienced the miracles you've experienced yeah just i've experienced healing i mean this is a whole other crazy thing all in the memoir um which hasn't been released yet i was gonna say i want to link it one day no one day maybe i'm hoping just dumb um let's go right we need it um no and i do believe i do believe no i believe in christ um and so that's why for me you know again i'm sort of pessimistic where it's like the the i forget maybe it's lewis where it's like all of like the whole christian timeline you know is pretty much just like a perpetual retreat it's just losing ground um losing it's just losing ground i don't know who said that i think it was lewis um it might have been gk chesterton you're fired if you got it right you're out of here um but no it is i run bill cooper talks about this where it's like everybody's sort of playing by the same playbook where even with different intentions the finish line is the same thing and that becomes sort of nick lens um accelerant that and this is this is what's trippy is you have a lot of these like these silicon valley bros talking about encountering demons on these like psychedelic trips nicholanda makes an entry and i guess like to lose um and qatari also talk about this um we were briefly talking about like oedipus earlier this whole idea of like the war between generations oedipus killing his father the terminators of skynet killing yeah john carter like not john carter but um yeah be careful right right right oh yeah yeah um people don't care about it people don't care about it people don't care we're going to start thinking about that the wrong way but there is this sort of like and that's that's like nick lannery says the the children move back in time to their parents and so whereas the christian would view sort of a a second coming and eschaton the end of times um and the the resurrection of the of the body um you know it's isn't it curious how how did how did the first spell book for conjuring demons get produced um if if not a being that was to be produced was able to travel back in time and give instructions to produce it so there's this element of time leaking backwards to create itself and that's why i think it's it's to lose talks about desire being a this mechanism which creates the future and so that actually that like the past doesn't move towards the future but that the future creates itself out of the past um between these sort of two singularities and then again that's what that's just that's just what becomes so trippy is this sort of just this weird black hole at the end of time that like and i sort of i made a video about this comparing it to solitaire where you know that it feels like there's this freedom of choice we're playing this game but as you approach the end of a solitaire game same thing in a chess game like there's a mid-game complexity where you can make the most possible moves but once you pass the mid-game complexity um the number of moves decreases and eventually for example every game of solitaire always ends with a king being put away and then you're like oh my god i'm going to go away it's like the last move i can i can 100 predict how the last move of solitaire ends in every single game you play so in certain games which obey the law of conservation of energy and matter um there's a script that has to be followed at the at the extreme beginning and end which i just think is really interesting um i have no thesis out of this but i just think all of that i think is a very interesting this has all been a schizo ramble for the past like 30 minutes no it's great um you have a beautiful mind i love but yeah so that's so i think that's really interesting all of the i say all of this really all of this to say that we should be more curious things are so much bigger um than like what you see on the television like if it's on the television it's probably already garbage because it's like if it's if it's gone through all of those avenues of approval um it's trying to manufacture consent and create an opinion out of you and i forget who said it but it's like homer will always be fresher than the newspaper like the the modern state of like as a rule i just try not to consume things that are coming out right now um unless it's your podcast but yeah i just think everything is just so everything is beautiful everything is awesome like how can you not get amped up about it like the story is the this is the great this is the only story that's ever told every other story is derivative of this main plot line um dude i haven't even talked about like nephilim and like giants and stuff do you know about that that'll be another time no we can do that today can we just put a pin on that for one second because i don't want to lose this thought like what is what does happiness look like to you and i'm going to bring this back to something you talked about a half hour ago but i really want you to find that first i think happiness is ultimately service service yeah um i think i think will the will and this is as like chopin our puts it the will precedes the intellect um the will and i think in the lord's prayer it says in the lord's prayer it references the will the universal will and it conforms the personal will to the to the infinite will and it says our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done the prayer opens by saying not my will but yours and jesus says that in gethsemane he says like if this cup is not for me let it pass but not not my will but yours i think ultimately happiness is in renouncing um your your personal ego to the universal will and ironically in anybody who like anybody will this will be the result anybody else finds but like hedonism and selfishness and greed um anti anti-service towards the universal will um will only leave one feeling completely dissatisfied um easier said than done but i think ultimately it is it is it is renunciation of the uh of just all your all your personal and just being of service that's a great answer well the reason i was asking is because when you were going on that pretty biblical rant there that was really good i like that a lot did that stick that makes sense it's not a schizo rant i have a beautiful mind it's great but like you were talking about and i'm gonna up how you phrased it but like the story we're in right now is being written by the past and all that and it's actually a great moment and like it's a positive outlook at a moment where you opened up that arc by saying i'm a post 9 11 baby right yeah and so i've lived in this world where i've seen 9 11 endless wars financial crash wealth gap forming at a level that's never been seen before political unrest social unrest and the worst of humanity attacking itself from within with the pandemic and all that like you've seen all this stuff that the fourth turning lays out is like the crisis yeah yeah so of course you've read i haven't read that it's on my list but i'm familiar yeah good all right yeah yeah i'm almost with your bibliography i'm almost shocked you haven't read that yeah it's on my shelf okay unbelievable but like you're a part of the artist generation the gen z generation yeah right right grows up that grows up effectively in the crisis and is very very molded by that and it's not to say like it's a negative generation but things you point to are all things that are falling apart and yet you're able to see some light at the end of the tunnel here by seeing the good of what we have around us and you've even lived that arc yourself by still being here as well and being excited about the stuff that's there so do you see this as like a moment of a very long moment but a moment of like major civilizational strife around the world that we can overcome yeah to build and come you know almost like cut off a piece of ourselves to come back stronger well if you want to be a hero the one time you'd be prayed to be born in is that like the end of the world like what else what are you looking for like i sort of probably like um and again it's like very like spangler says like optimism is cowardice like it'll probably it like it'll probably get worse things probably get worse but there's something about like and again i view it like like in a forest like there's these beautiful old growth forests there's a fire and it burns down and now it's being decomposed and eat by like eaten by mycelium and being repurposed into these new forms and like for me you know growing up whether it's whatever institution you knock on the door and they say and i wrote this um i wrote this like in an essay one time where i was like just talking about trying to find a job in new york city and you know i i said you know um i asked somebody who had a job like you know how did you get a job and i said you know somebody gave me a chance and then i said well can i have one and the guy said no we're all out and like there's this just this is the chance like chaos is an opportunity it's just pure it's pure flux it's pure raw material to build it however you want um it's terrifying it's very scary and like that's like my only advice is really just to guard your soul like that's all you can do you will lose your soul like and that's the whole the whole idea of the palantir the orb and like lord of the rings is that you lose your soul looking at far off things worrying about far off things that drive you crazy so all you can do um and martin luther says you know like if if if i was told the world was going to end today i would still if i was told the world was going to end tomorrow i would still play my apple tree today like all you can do is just do the daily work that's right um cultivate your soul and i think ultimately like in the book of hosea also on the topic of like hosea says ultimately like my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge um and there's just this huge and sometimes i feel sort of like i feel very it's easy to be there's just so many grifters and like that's a huge fear of mine is to like to succumb to cheap parlor tricks and wordplay um there is i don't think you're in danger i try i try hard um in trojan women by euripides it says um you know eloquence allied with wickedness it is a terrible thing and i realize you know i have a gift for first talking like i just talk to i talk um and i love to hear myself talk selfishly and like like god help me god guard me against you know if i would ever advocate for something wicked like i really don't want to i really don't want to um the fact that you think about that though as a guard i think that's a big thing the most important step yeah because you're constantly self-evaluating right yes um but yeah i think you can't help but get excited um and yeah you just like there's just something so beautiful there is in like horus's ode i think three three two or three three um i think it's three two he talks about a man the virtuous man even if everybody's yelling at him even if like the winds from the uh adrian seer like blowing against him even if everything crumbles around him he just stands there on flinching at the debris and i think all you can do is just not flinch at the debris you can just you can only just be yourself and and not um like i detest fear and i used to be so scared all the time and um how'd you get rid of it uh i became desperate enough like i think about um again when i started my bed and realized if i died there would only be the smell and it's like okay like that's the game we're playing those are the stakes i have nothing to lose um i had to become more desperate and there's just so many like beautiful like mantras i keep to myself like d.h florence says i've never seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself a bird will fall frozen that of a tree without ever feeling sorry for itself there's a beautiful um it also doesn't have the wherewithal to do it though doesn't even know because again that's also the bird has no fear because it has no ego it's just pure will it's just pure fulfilling its function like every problem i've ever had was because i was thinking too much yeah and being too personal tortured by our own abilities and that's what zen is and like zen is just sort of like stripping that ego from yourself um i love if i have advice i always get like reading recommendations i think the bhagavad-gita is a beautiful book because that whole book is about have you ever read it i've never read it really good essentially arjuna's this prince with in an invincible like an indestructible bow that he's just like he's he's a badass and he has to go to war but he doesn't want to go to war and like fight his his family and then krishna comes and long like long story short krishna says to like lay up all your fears in me and just perform your duty perform your dharma you're the righteous act perform what your role is in this world and essentially this there's this there's this idea of nishkama karma so karma you're probably familiar with is like action like that's what you do it's action and your fate what you do is what you receive nishkama means without desire and so jesus simply says like let not you know let don't let your left hand know what your right hand does like when you give nishkama karma is you perform things without any desire for fruit you just do it because it's your dharma that's right and so especially when you read like a a symbolic interpretation of the bhagavad-gita it's krishna and arjuna are in the chariot of war arjuna is the personal ego krishna is the soul it's the will it's the impersonal the universal and the ego serves the universal and it fulfills and it fulfills the star money says you know better better one's own dharma no matter how no matter how imperfect um than another's dharma no matter how perfect um all you can do is be yourself all you can do is fulfill your will and your nature and um you know it could mean i mean it could be death you're gonna die anyway um which is actually a pretty great thing because it would it would suck if there was a way not to die because then you would actually be afraid then you would be thinking like because you don't want to die because you don't want to die then if there's a if there was a way out that would be fear because then you would just be clammed up and all the time do you fear death i want to be a hardo and say like hell no i think i think death like in i think it's in egyptian it's called mat which is also like the word for mother i think death is a change of when when a sperm cell meets an ovum when a sperm meets an egg the sperm loses its identity and so does the egg but life is born out of it a new being i think similarly when when my when my body is lost whether it's like cremated or whatever buried or like if it's was trampled under a tank tread that's the sperm meeting the egg and like that's it's a release it's it's a change it's an ontological change of being um you could say that the sperm is dead it doesn't exist anymore but there's something bigger there's life that came out of that um and so i want to say i want to say no i'm not afraid um it's always when you say hardo like that that you get your bell rung and so i don't want to be hot and i don't want to be proud and be like nah man i don't give a about death yeah you're not a braggart in the face of it as you can't be a honcho but you're just saying i also think it's braver to stare it down when you are scared like that that's what the courage is you know there's a quote about that like that's isn't that from gladiator like all you can do is smile back yeah yeah yeah um gladiator's got some bangers um it does it's going it's so good right um and uh so yeah i think no but i think it'll be beautiful um i think it'll probably feel like sex i think it'll be i think it's i think you think you'll feel it when it happens i mean i guess how fast it happens i think i mean there's been times where i've stood up too fast and gotten lightheaded and i thought i was like i've had like my life flash before my eyes um i had a okay actually on the topic of death when i harmed myself very badly one night this is this also helps alleviate my fear of death i i let the blood dry and then i went to bed and when i went to bed i had a dream and in this dream i was on a sort of like i was on this couch that was covered in plastic wrap that you would see like some like grandma's house or something right yeah and i was laying on it so it's pure black there's only a couch with like this floral pattern and there's plastic on top of it i'm laying on it my head's on the left side my feet are kicked up and i'm watching it from the third person like a stage play almost and then this guy um comes up to me and uh covers my mouth and slits my throat and it cuts and then i wake back up and i'm now in um this entirely white place with all light and no shadows and the floor is like quicksilver or mercury it's like there's just liquid reflection on the ground um that sort of like ripples out from my feet and there's this long table prepared in front of me left to right as far as the eye can see in both directions and it's covered in food and there's a feast prepared and everybody i've ever loved is at this table um all of my friends and family and then people who had never interacted with each other were like laughing with each other and sharing drinks and so like my grandmother who had never met one of my teammates was talking to him like they had known each other forever it was just it was purely familiar and i look around and this table is full and then i look i see my chair and then i look at the chair next to me and it's empty and at that moment i feel a tap on my shoulder and i look and there's a line of all the people that hurt me in my life and one by one they hugged me and we apologized quote for all the things that we did not know in this life and they were my first guests at the table and then i woke up who was the first person that hugged you that's a secret for now i'm gonna keep that a secret for now because it's kind of uh compromising but soon one day um and that's then for me that's what that's what heaven is it's a play it's a place so beautiful you'd want even your worst enemies to be there and a place with no partitions um and i think that's a beautiful place and so i think that um you know somebody can shock that up to pure ephemera of the neurons in my in my lizard brain um but for me it was beautiful and um i think that helps alleviate and remove a lot of the fear i have for it and again i also think i think there's something so exciting about if you live beautifully and if you live as as magnanimously as possible as big as possible death only enhances the myth um if you you live so well that even like your enemies feel bad for you miss you miss you miss you miss you miss you miss you miss you miss you miss you miss you miss you miss you i think would be a beautiful thing so there's really no downsides um if you protect your soul um easier said than done everything is conspiring to distract you from it and again i think that's the biggest thing where it's like it's very easy all that's necessary is that you're distracted forever and you'll never be able to get away with it and i think that's the biggest thing where it's You'll never even ask the question, you'll never even. And I also think, I wrote about this one time where it's like, I also think there's this really sort of angsty idea of like when you die and this idea of like heaven and hell and eternal punishment, you know, and people feel sort of like they view this all as like a gotcha test with a really douchey vice principal who like didn't give you a studying packet and said, yo, you fucked that up and now you're gonna get detention for the rest of your life and you're gonna get a ruler across your knuckles. But I view it much more in like a sort of, if you view every time you deny the impulse to perform the kill, to perform the vice that would harm another or like, you know, every time you deny that you're denying the flesh and you are developing the sovereignty and the discipline of the soul of your noose, you're renewing your mind, you are developing your mind and your soul. And if you don't do that and you conform to the flesh, your soul and your flesh are like, you're, you know, you're just so enmeshed in the carnality and the desire. - Thank you guys for checking out this clip. If you haven't already subscribed, please subscribe and hit the like button on this video. It is a huge, huge help. And if you'd like to check out this clip's full podcast episode, that link is in the description below or right here. And finally, you can follow me on Instagram and X by using the links in my description below.