Pete and Aaron Reading James Burnham - Complete

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1:24Then, sweat it out as you watch your picks play out live. It's the best way to get more locked in on game day. Make all the picks you want. This football season, all in the same app. Also, price picks is going crazy with the deals to start the football season. Giving users a new promo every day during stack September. And now, price picks is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff, because everyone and everything is on price picks. What you want? Download the app today and use Co-Ad large to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. Price picks, run your game. Aaron. What's happening, man? We don't seem like the kind of guys who really like to read a lot. So this is getting weird. Yeah, I don't read so good. Them words is hard. So you had the idea for doing this one. I will read it. So tell me, why did you want to do chapter three of James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution?

2:29So I knew that we wouldn't have enough time or willpower to do the entire thing. I would, I would make that my life's work and my magnum opus. But chapter three really stuck with me, mostly because of my background and my near group and in group in the libertarian sphere. And I never really considered the fact that I've always had that binary brain of it's either capitalism or socialism. And I've kind of adopted the way I thought that socialism isn't croaching. And it's not anywhere near what like, somebody like Lenin would view as socialism. But yeah, I mean, and particularly for this book, when we were reading state revolution, the sheer amount of things that Lenin called, like just called it, I mean throughout that

3:36reading it was like he was spod on with a lot of things. And throughout my incomplete reading of this, I'm still in the middle of it, every page has something that I can immediately point to a tangible aspect of something I deal with every day and be like, yeah, Burnham called it. Yeah, I read it this afternoon because it's only, it's only seven, nine pages, seven eight or nine pages. And yeah, I was stopping constantly because I was just like, oh man, I have to ponder that. Yeah. Yeah, really have to ponder that. So all right, well, I mean, we usually do like 25 or 30 pages in a go. So stop anytime. I'll start reading it. Okay. Absolutely. All right. Chapter three, the theory of the permanence of capitalism by former Trotsky, James Burnham. During the past century, dozens, perhaps even hundreds of theories of history have been

4:36elaborated. These differ endlessly among themselves in the words they use, the causal explanations they offer for the historical process, the alleged laws of history, which they seem to discover. But most of these differences are irrelevant to the central problem with which this book is concerned. That problem is to discover, if possible, what type, if indeed it is to be a different type of social organization is on the immediate historical horizon. I will pause to say that he, this book was released in 1941. So he's positing what's going to happen. And he probably started, he probably wrote this in 1940. And he's kind of setting you up, especially, you know, us, us libertarians or former libertarians I, of what I consider myself to be. So when you're reading this, whatever definition of capitalism he's using, he knows it's not real capitalism, bro. And he doesn't care. He's, it's capitalism in its totality.

5:40Whatever your definition is, that's what he's talking about. With reference to this specific problem, all of the theories with the exception of those few which approximate to the theory of the managerial revolution, well, down to two and only two. The first of these, the first of these predicts that capitalism will continue for an indefinite but long time, if not forever. That is that the major institutions of capitalist society, or at least most of them, will not be radically changed. The second predicts that capitalist society will be replaced by socialist society. The theory of the managerial revolution predicts that capitalist society will be replaced by managerial society, the nature of which we'll be explained later. That in fact, the transition from capitalist to managerial society is already well underway. It is clear that although all three of these theories might be false, only one of them

6:43can be true. The answer that each of them gives to the question of what will happen, what will actually happen in the future, plainly denies the answers given by the other two. If then, the theory of the managerial revolution is true, it must be possible to present consideration, sufficient to justify us in regard to other two theories as false. They're all mutually exclusive. Right. Such demonstration would, by itself, make the theory of the managerial revolution very probable since, apart from these three, there are at present no other serious theoretical contenders. I propose, therefore, in this and the following chapter to review briefly the evidence for rejecting the theory of the permanence of capitalism and the theory of the socialist revolution.

7:44And we're off. Oddly enough, the belief that the capitalist society will continue is seldom put in theoretical form. It is rather left implicit in what people say and do, and in the writings and sayings of most historians, sociologists, and politicians. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the majority of people in the United States hold this belief, though it has been somewhat shaken in recent years. When examined, this belief is seen to be based not on any evidence in its favor, but primarily on two assumptions. Both of these assumptions are flatly and entirely false. Here we go. The first is the assumption that society has always been capitalist in structure, and therefore, presumably always will be. An actual fact, society has been capitalist from a minute fragment of the total human history.

8:46Any exact date chosen is the beginning of the... How many times have you seen people cite instances of, I guess, right wing anarchism and arco-capitalism throughout history? I mean, it always seems forced, but... Yeah, extremely like... You really got it. Yeah, many evil Iceland, many evil Scotland. Yeah. I mean, Ireland, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. Those are the two ones that come to mind as well. Or like... Yeah. So, I guess what I'm getting at is it's always forced. Capitalism has only existed since maybe the late 18th century. I mean, some people may say the Hanseatic League, which goes back further, but I mean, on any grand scale in the West, yeah. So...

9:46Yeah, if you compare it to... What's that? Mercantilism. Yeah. That's very hard when you start differentiating between capitalism and mercantilism. It's always kind of a... There's shades of each when you get into that 16th, 17th century. And before... All right, moving on. Any exact date chosen as the beginning of capitalism would be arbitrary. But the start of capitalist social organization on any wide scale can scarcely be put earlier than the 14th century AD and capitalist domination must be placed much later than that. The second assumption is that capitalism has some necessary kind of correlation with human nature. That's... Man. Yeah. Yeah, I've been... I was reading John C. Calhoun's Disquisition on Government.

10:48Got it down here somewhere. And his argument for why government is necessary is the exact same... Is the exact same argument that anarchists or laissez-faire economists make for why laissez-faire would work? Self-interest. Yep. Self-ownership, private property. Or private property is an extension of self-ownership. And that's kind of an appeal to human nature that I hear a lot. Yep. All right, so... The second assumption is that capitalism has some necessary kind of correlation with human nature. This, as a matter of fact, is the same assumption as the first, but expressed differently. To see that it is false, it is not required to be sure just what human nature may be. It is enough to observe that human nature has been able to adapt itself to dozens of types of society, many of which have been studied by anthropologists and historians, and a number

11:51of which have lasted far longer than capitalism. I don't think that's unreasonable to kind of imparting to your belief system. That's the interpretation of history. Yeah. Yeah. With these assumptions dropped, the positive case for the view that capitalism will continue doesn't amount so much. In fact, has hardly even been stated coherently by anyone. But, apart from this lack of positive defense, we can, I think, list certain sets of facts which give all the grounds that a reasonable man should need for believing that capitalism is not going to continue, that it will disappear in a couple of decades at most and perhaps in a couple of years, which is as exact as one should pretend to be in these matters. These facts do not demonstrate this in any way that a mathematical or logical theorem

12:53is demonstrated. No belief about future events can be demonstrated. They simply make the belief more probable that any alternative belief, which as much as can be done. This is in parenthesis. In what follows for reasons which will become evident later, I do not include references to Germany, Italy, or Russia. Okay. So, what are you waiting for? Lock-in for kickoff, because everyone and everything is on price picks.

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15:13Get it out as you watch your picks play out live. It's the best way to get more locked in on game day. Make all the picks you want. This football season, all in the same app. Also, PrizePigs is going crazy with the deals to start the football season, giving users a new promo every day during stack September. And now, PrizePigs is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff, because everyone and everything is on PrizePigs. What you want? Download the app today and use Co-Ad large to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePigs, run your game. The first and perhaps crucial evidence for the view that capitalism is not going to continue much longer is the continuous presence within the capitalist nations of mass unemployment and the failure of all means tried for getting rid of mass unemployment. The unemployed, it is especially significant to note, include large percentages of the youth just entering working age.

16:14We pause you right there. Is that applicable to today? It's applicable to every conscious moment of my life. Yeah, mass unemployment. Now, not in the traditional sense that people are looking for work, and they just can't find jobs, because there's no productive positions for them to fill. But if you look at today, this call for universal basic income, universal health care, this emphasis on work life balance. I think that's in response to not so much people being unemployed through no fault of their own, but this general drive towards not having to work for your basic necessities is stemmed from the fact that there's just not a whole lot of people working, and at the same time, there's not a whole lot of people looking for work.

17:16Yeah, I mean, I would... Yeah, I don't know if I have anything to add to that. I'm going to move on. Continuous mass unemployment is not new in history. It is, in fact, a symptom that a given type of social organization is just about finished. It was found among the poorer citizens during the last years of Athens, among the urban proletariat, as they were called, in the Roman Empire, and very notably, at the end of the Middle Ages, among the dispossessed serfs and villains who had been thrown off the land in order to make way for capitalist views of the land. I pronounce that right, villains. I recognize that from Marx. I think so, yeah. Yeah. What is a villain, hold on. I'm trying to remember now. I looked it up once. I read... Good old tenant entirely subject to a lord.

18:16So, basically... Close enough to a serf. Mass unemployment means that the given type of social organization has broken down, that it cannot any longer provide its members with socially useful functions, even according to its own ideas, of what is socially useful. Hey Uncle Ted, how are you doing? Ah! It cannot support these masses for any length of time and idleness for its resources are not sufficient. The unemployed... That's where the Marxists would disagree, they would say, no, no, we have the resources. They're just not being diverted to it. You know, they're being diverted to socially unnecessary production. Right. The unemployed hover on the fringe of society, on the one hand, like a terrible weight, dragging it down and believing it to death, on the other, a constant irritant and reservoir of forces directed against the society.

19:20That is brutal, then. Experience has already shown that there is not the slightest prospect of ridding capitalism of mass unemployment. Remember, this is 1941. So, 80 years ago, 81. This is indeed becoming widely admitted among the defenders of capitalism, as well as many spokesmen of the New Deal. Even total war, the most drastic conceivable solution, could not end mass unemployment in England and France, nor will it do so in this country. Every solution that has any possibility of succeeding leads directly or indirectly outside the framework of capitalism. That right there, like just really hit home. When you have an ideology and you're trying to apply an ideological solution to reality, and let's say you're an anarcho-capitalist,

20:23for instance, you're trying to game out ways to apply solutions. The law of unintended consequences will take effect, and there's really nothing in the anarcho-capitalist toolbox that can fix mass unemployment. Yeah, well, I mean, they will say that the freer of the market, the more jobs will be created, and you will have 100% unemployment. I mean, you'll have 0% unemployment, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the only people who, at that point, the only people who won't work or people who can't work. Yeah. I think that's pining this guy, but. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. God, the solutions applied to reality. If you take, if you're an anarcho-capitalist framework, all of your solutions that are within that capitalist framework,

21:26there's no solving it within it. Well, I think some may argue that because you're in an anarcho-capitalist society, and there are no entitlements, no welfare, no nothing like that, that people will be compelled to work, that they'll be forced to work. Yeah, yeah, that's true. I've always kind of envisioned not trying to strum, but an anarcho-capitalist society is like that 10,000 leech and shines, more of a corporate structure, where the Hansehrman-Hop covenant communities, if you take the idea of a covenant community, will there be unemployment in a covenant community? And depends on the constitution of the covenant community. Exactly, yep. Yeah, so I mean, either way, it's a nice, I love it.

22:31That's where I come from, and I would love to see that implemented, but I guess what constitutes mass unemployment would depend on the covenant community. Two, capitalism has always been characterized by recurring economic crises, by periods of boom followed by periods of depression. Until a dozen years ago, however, the curve of total production always went higher in one major boom period than in the boom proceeding. It did so, not only in terms of the actual quality of goods produced, but in the relative quantity of the volume of goods compared to the increased population and plant capacity. Thus, in spite of the crises, there was a general overall increase in capitalist production, which was simply the measure of the ability of capitalist social organization to handle its own resources. Since the world crisis of 1927 through 29,

23:32this overall curve has reversed. The height of a boom period relative to population and potential capacity is lower than that of the proceeding boom. The new direction of the curve is in its turn. Simply the expression of the fact that capitalism can no longer handle its own resources. And again, for all the mesesian's listening, that boom and bust cycle, we know it's due to the expansion of credit, but Burnham incorporates central banking into his view of capitalism. Well, he's also living in the real world. He's talking about what's happening now, and you can already hear people screaming, well, that's not real capitalism. Yeah, and that boom and bust cycle, I mean, again, like I love Ann Cap Theory, but there's really nothing inherently, there's nothing to inoculate,

24:35say a covenant community with a bank, with a currency, from a boom and bust cycle, because credit in and of itself isn't tied to any type of ideology. What I would like to say here is that it looks like Burnham is making, like, he did say, he did make an immediate kind of prediction. The first sentence of part three here is, the volume of public and private debt has reached a point where it cannot be managed much longer. Okay, so some people would say, okay, how are we still, how are we still going? Well, I mean, maybe they adjusted, they bring in a Paul Volker, or someone like that, to get it through, but what I want to say more about these time frames is, it's hard to, predict, when you know something is going bad,

25:37when you know something is going wrong, there could be somebody out there who has already figured out how to let, how to keep that wrong going for a long time. There were a lot of people talking about the fall of the Roman Empire in the first and second century. Show button here, football season is finally back, and prize picks is bringing out their best offer yet. New users who sign up will get $150 in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. That's right, if you win your first $5 lineup, you'll get $150 in lineups. On prize picks, you simply pick two to six players, pick more or less on their stat projections and submit your lineup. Then, sweat it out as you watch your picks play out live. It's the best way to get more locked in on game day. Make all the picks you want. This football season, all in the same app. Also, prize picks is going crazy with the deals to start the football season, giving users a new promo every day during stack September. And now, prize picks is available nationwide.

26:38So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on prize picks. What you want? Download the app today and use code at large to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. Prize picks, run your game. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then, explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love from beauty and fashion, to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com. Show button here. Football season is finally back. And prize picks is bringing out their best offer yet. New users who sign up will get $150 in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. That's right, if you win your first $5 lineup,

27:39you'll get $150 in lineups. On prize picks, you simply pick two to six players, pick more or less on their stack projections and submit your lineup. Then, sweat it out as you watch your picks play out live. It's the best way to get more locked in on game day. Make all the picks you want. This football season, all in the same app. Also, prize picks is going crazy with the deals to start the football season. Giving users a new promo every day during stack September. And now, prize picks is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on prize picks. What you want? Download the app today and use Co-Add Large to get $150 instantly in lineups. If you win your first $5 lineup, prize picks, run your game. It took a couple more centuries. It does not discount the arguments that they were making. No, not at all. And applying it to now, if you view the United States as the beacon of capitalism and enlightenment values

28:41and all that, you can see its evolution or de-evolution from its inception to right now. And capitalism even won deregulation and all these good libertarian policies were applied sparingly throughout history. It wasn't enough to manage the decline. I'm going to read the first sentence again and keep going. The volume of public and private debt has reached a point where it cannot be managed much longer. The debt, like the unemployed, sucks away the diminishing bloodstream of capitalism. And it cannot be shaken off. Bankruptcies, which formerly readjusted the debt position of capitalism, hardly make a dent in it. The scale of bankruptcy or inflation which could reduce the debt to manageable size would at the same time, as all economists

29:42recognize, utterly dislocate all capitalist institutions. Yeah. And going back to Hoppa, any institution, whether it's a nation state or a company or a covenant community, any institution is prone to just that high time preference culture, which leads to that racking up of unmanageable debt. And that kind of segues nicely into why I'm right way. All right. The maintenance of the capitalist market depended on at least comparatively free monetary exchange transactions. The area of these, especially on awards, a world scale, is diminishing towards a vanishing point. This is well indicated by the useless gold hoard at Fort Knox and the barter methods of Russia, Germany, and Italy.

30:42I believe if you're at this in 40 or 41, and it was released in 41, we get Bretton Woods in five years, right? I think Bretton Woods is 46. 46. Oh, Don. Yeah, that's the mortal wound to the whatever gold standard we had left. Oh, yeah, it was a 44 summit. So yeah, the try to explain, Bretton Woods, the best I can, is basically what it meant was that, OK, so the delegates agreed that the gold standard would create a fixed currency exchange rate. So there'd be no fluctuation. There'd be no fluctuation. No market. The agreement also facilitated the creation of immensely important structures in the financial world.

31:42The IMF, the International Bank for Reconstruction International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which is known today as the World Bank. So that's your Bretton Woods. And yeah, you're right. There's no, what did you say? There's no more market, no more, yeah, no more market forces affecting the exchange rate. Yep. All right. Four, the maintenance of the capitalist market depended on at least comparatively, I already read that one. Since shortly, this is part five, since shortly after the First World War, that there has been in all major capitalist nations of permanent agricultural depression. Agriculture is obviously an indispensable part of the total economy. And the breakdown in this essential sector is another mark of the incurable disease of lifting capitalism. No remedies. And how many they are that have been tried,

32:45produce any sign of cure. The farming population sink in debt and poverty, and not enough food is produced and distributed. While agriculture is kept barely going through huge state subsidies. I don't know if today we have a problem of not enough food being produced. But I know that I just don't know a whole lot about the agricultural industry right now. But I know one thing I do know is that it is propped up entirely by state subsidies. Yeah. Now, somebody is screaming right now, though, that FDR had them destroy food in the thirties so that he could keep prices high to affect supply and demand. But that's what you have under capitalism. Yeah. That is a solution well within the bounds of capitalism. A private entity can do that just as well as a public one can.

33:48No, man. Only the state's equal. Only the state's equal, dude. Capitalism is no longer able to find uses for the available investment funds, which waste an idleness in the account books of the banks. The mass unemployment of private money is scarcely less indicative of the death of capitalism than the mass unemployment of human beings. Damn. This mass unemployment of private money. That's a really good phrase. Yeah. And it strikes at, I know it strikes at my mesesion sensibilities. Both show the inability of the capitalist institutions any longer to organize human activities. During the past decade in the United States, as in other capitalist nations, new capital investment has come almost entirely from the state, not from private funds. And even now, I mean, with the literal trillions of dollars

34:50sitting in futures and investment portfolios and assets and all that, can we honestly say that it's being employed in any sense in a beneficial way to society? And this is where you get people varying off and going towards Marxism. Seven, the continuance of capitalism was, we saw, dependent upon a certain relationship between the great powers and the backward sections and peoples of the earth. One of the most striking developments the past 15 years, which has been little noticed, is the inability of the great capitalist nations any longer to manage the exploitation and development of these backward sections. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the relations between the United States and South America. The United States, in spite of its imperious necessity for the nation's very survival, has not and cannot

35:53devise a scheme for handling the economic phase of a hemisphere policy. Though during the past few years and above all, and above all during the war, the road has been wide open. Nothing gets done. Here again, the only workable schemes are compelled to leave the basis of capitalism. Which is war and color revolutions and banana republics and all that. This is why, if you ask somebody, how did the United States get out of the Great Depression? They've been taught to say, well, World War II. Because, I mean, honestly, if war is the greatest thing for the economy, we should just be blowing up our own buildings and bridges just constantly. Oh, yeah. Infrastructure, man. Capitalism is no longer able to use its own technological possibilities. One side of this is shown by such facts as the inability

36:55of the United States to carry out a housing program, when the houses are needed and wanted, and the technical means to produce them in abundance or on hand. This is the case with almost all goods. But an equally symptomatic side is seen in the inability to make use of many inventions and new technical methods. Hundreds of these, though they could reduce immeasurably the number of man hours needed to turn out goods and increase greatly the convenience of life, nonetheless, sit on the shelf. In many entire economic sectors, such as agriculture, building, coal mining, the technical methods today available make the usual present methods seem stone age. And nearly every economic field is to some degree affected. Using the inventions and methods available, available wood, it is correctly understood, smash up the capitalist structure. Technological unemployment is present in recent capitalism,

37:57but it is hardly anything compared to what technological unemployment would be if capitalism made use of its available technology. It's talking about achieving post-scarcity through automation and all that. And we have that today. We have the means to automate almost every facet of the production process in any industry. And this is where we get into the managerial state. Yeah. These facts also show that capitalism and its rulers can no longer use their own resources. And the point is that if they won't, someone else will. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments,

38:57QVC has what you need for the season ahead, with brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. With verbal care, help is always ready before, during, and after your stay. We've planned for the plot twists, so support is always available. Because a great trip starts with peace of mind. Seems like every California homeowner knows someone whose insurance has been canceled. That's where Kin comes in. Kin can help with flexible coverage across all 58 California counties and policy options tailored to the risks you face where you live, including wildfire, wind, and severe weather concerns. CY California homeowners are turning to Kin at kin.com slash pot cat. That's k-i-n dot com forward slash podcast. Kin refers to Kin Distributor Insurance Services, a licensed California surplus lines broker, coverage is placed with an insurer that is not licensed or regulated by the California Insurance Commissioner. 9. As symptomatic and decisive as these economic and technical

40:00developments, it, as symptomatic and decisive as these economic and technological developments is the fact that the ideologies of capitalism, the bourgeois ideologies, have become impudent. Ideologies we have seen are the cement that binds together the social fabric when the cement loosens. The fabric is about to disintegrate. And no one who has watched the world during the past 20 years can doubt the ever increasing importance of the bourgeois ideologies. Yeah, impotence. So already humble brag about this on Twitter. I was hanging out with Yarvan, who basically has gotten people to read Burnham. And I asked him about this quote, because this is a quote that a lot of people use to say that Burnham was not against ideologies. He says ideologies we have seen are the cement that binds

41:02together the social fabric. So what I asked Yarvan was are ideologies for the plebs and the people who are in power, who desire power, who understand power, understand that ideology is handcuffs. Yeah. He seemed to agree with that. So he seemed to agree that the powerful will push ideologies upon people and say, this is what's going to hold you. This is what holds us together while they are, while they are have no ideology whatsoever, even if they're telling you they have the same ideology as you, and they're just doing as they wish with the power that's been granted them. Yeah, particularly bourgeois ideologies, like monarchism or liberalism, or any of those. I'm not saying that to, as being mean or anything,

42:06but if your middle class abides by a general ideology, like say liberalism in the United States, and then they have different disagreements and factions scattered throughout, you could still have a cohesive society. If half your society is communist and the other half is liberal, then that's when you're going to see things like Russia, things like Germany, things like Italy, China. Yep. I'm going to read that again. Ideologies we have seen are the cement that binds together the social fabric. When the cement loosens, the fabric is about to disintegrate. And no one who has watched a world during the past 20 years can doubt the ever-increasing impidence of the bourgeois ideologies. On the one hand, the scientific pretensions of these ideologies have been exploded. History, sociology, and anthropology are not yet much of sciences.

43:06But they are enough to show every serious person that the concepts of the bourgeois ideologies are not written in the stars, or not universal laws of nature. But are at best just temporary expressions of the interests and ideals of a particular class of men at a particular historical time. That was a punch in the gut to me, too. Yep. We're all just dust in the wind, man. It does not matter how non-scientific or anti-scientific and ideology may be. It can do its work so long as it possesses the power to move great masses of men to action. This, this, the bourgeois ideologies once could do as the great revolutions and the imperial and economic conquest prove, and this they can no longer do. That's so spot on, it's ridiculous. Are you going to die for libertarianism?

44:07Are you ready, Comrade? I'm ready to die to end these lockdowns. When the bourgeois ideologies were challenged in the saw and the sedate and land by the ideology of Nazism, it was Nazism that won the sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the people. All possible discounts for the effects of Nazi terrorism must not dilute us into misreading this brute fact. Man, that's a paragraph right there. Oh, yeah. Only the hopelessly naive can imagine that France fell so swiftly because of the mere mechanical strength of the Nazi war machine. That might have been sufficient in a longer run, but not to destroy a great nation with a colossal military establishment in a few weeks. France collapsed so swiftly because its people had no heart for the war, as every observer had remarked, even through the censorship from the beginning of the war. And they had no heart for the war because the bourgeois ideologies by which they were appealed

45:08to no longer had power to move their hearts. Men are prepared to be heroes for very foolish and unworthy ideals, but they must at least believe in those ideals, man. Yeah, you're just throwing haymakers. No, I was kind of like a blue collar trope that like the Frencher posseys and cowards and all that, but when I read that paragraph, I was like, you know what, he's absolutely right. There's there no different than anybody else. They just weren't moved. They didn't have leaders worth following. They didn't have beliefs that resonated with them. And now that's why we're having a retention crisis right now in our military. Yeah, say the French were posseys in 1789. Wow. No, whereas the impotence of bourgeois ideologies more apparent than among the youth and the coming world, after all, will be the youth's world. The abject failure of voluntary military enlistment

46:08and Britain in this country tells its own story to all who wished to listen. It is underlined in reverse by the hundreds of distinguished adult voices, which during 1940 began reproaching the American youth for indifference, unwillingness to sacrifice, lack of ideals, how right these reproaches are and how little effect they have. Man, do you see how inconsistent your thinking is? Yeah, come on, man. Yeah. It's like telling a leftist that they're inconsistent. I just think when I read that, I was like, yeah, just wait a few months when Pearl Harbor happens. Then I honestly don't know if we would have even needed a draft. Yeah. But that's not so much them being motivated by any type of patriotism or love of liberalism

47:10and democracy and all that. That's, it was a revenge thing. Yeah, it has nothing to do with ideologies. Yeah. That's what they've been able to manufacture with the terror wars. Oh, yeah. They saw how effective Pearl Harbor was. And depending on where you sit on that, they created more or they literally created more. Yeah, I mean, if you can't sell love of country or anything anymore, then let's sell that, the commies are encroaching Korea and Vietnam. The commies are encroaching Grenada. The radical Islamic terrorism, Rack war one, one and a half, two, three Afghanistan, nine and 11, wherever you stand, nine and 11. And truth, the bourgeoisie itself has a large measure lost confidence in its own ideologies. The words begin to have a hollow sound in the most sympathetic capitalist ears.

48:12This too is unmistakably revealed in the policy and attitude of England's rulers during the past years. What was Munich in the whole policy of appeasement but a recognition of bourgeois impotence? Oh man, going after Chamberlain Bad, huh? The head of the British government's traveling to the feet of the Austrian house painter was the fitting symbol of the capitalist loss of faith in themselves. Let me read that again. The head of the British government's traveling to the feet of the Austrian house painter was the fitting symbol of the capitalist loss of faith in themselves. The Austrian house painter. Wonder who that is. Every authentic report during the autumn of 1930 from Britain told of the discouragement and fear of the leaders in government and business. And no one who has listened to American leaders off the record or who has followed the less public organs of British of business opinion will suppose that such attitudes are confined to Britain.

49:17All history makes clear that an indispensable quality of any man or class that wishes to lead to hold power and privilege in society is boundless self-confidence. Other sets of facts could easily be added to this list, but these are perhaps the most plainly sympathetic, symptomatic, sorry. Their effect moreover is cumulative. The attempted remedies for them experience shows only aggravate them, sorry. They permit no other conclusion than the capitalist organization of society has entered its final years. Let me read that last sentence of the body of that again. All history makes clear that an indispensable quality of any man or class that wishes to lead to hold power and privilege in society is boundless self-confidence.

50:17I mean, is there any way you can argue with that? Not at all, not recently now. And whether you're talking about Trump or the four horsemen or whoever else, I mean, boundless self-confidence, like just having the ability to be persuasive to the masses, you could be speaking Chinese and they'll follow you. If you're running a small business, the last thing you need is enterprise-sized software costs. That's why Autodesk built solutions for the way small teams actually work. With Autodesk for small business, it's easier to find the right Autodesk tools without adding extra complexity. And now Autodesk Flex starts at just $99, giving you access to more than 100 Autodesk products on a pay-as-you-go basis. So whether you need design tools for one busy week or one big project, you can scale usage

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52:21you dragged into your home, it feels like a piece that belongs with the rest of your furniture. Eureka Ergonomic, finally, an office chair that works hard and looks like it belongs. Visit EurekaErgonomic.com now to find a chair that finally fits your space and your workday. That's Eureka, E-U-R-E-K-A, Ergonomic, ERG-O-N-O-M-I-C, dot com. A colossal monster, a city and ruins, no way out, except inside of the old electric Toyota CHR, John Show stars in, escape. Test drive Toyota's new all-electric family today. Toyota, let's go places. Well, I mean, it's one of those things that I remember middle school teacher telling me, and we didn't have the internet at this time. So it was kind of hard to find, but he's like, he's like, if you can find a video of Hitler speaking, you won't even have to know what he's saying. You will be moved. And that's hard for you to hear when you're in middle school

53:26and you've already had, you know, a good 10 years of indoctrination into the, you know, that, oh my God, Hitler, no, no, there's no way. And then you like listen to him speaking, you're like, holy crap. And then it becomes the joke like, say what you want about Hitler, but you know, fantastic orator. Say which one about Mussolini, but those trains are right on time. Yeah, and, you know, if you, if you kind of apply that, that idea to our sphere or former sphere or whatever, it's something that even the leadership, like at the top can't really make that happen. Yeah, the whole boundless self confidence thing. I mean, when you're in a leadership position and you're trying to move people, like you can't, you can't be self deprecating.

54:28You can't be speaking a language like, you know, that comes off to normal people, like you're some type of bug man. You know, that's why populism's taken a grip both left wing and right wing populism is taking a grip right now. It's because they have fantastic, relatable, persuasive orators. Yeah, or tweeters. Or tweeters. What was the last time you saw Anthony Sabatini put something out that was like slightly cringe. I don't remember. Oh, people who don't know Anthony Sabatini is a state senator in Florida who would be nice to see on the, on the big stage just because he has no filter whatsoever. What's what's going on with Matt gates? I don't know. They're trying to, they try to take him down with that whole thing and everything. Yeah. I though was mentioning something this weekend about that, about Matt.

55:28Yeah, he, yeah, you can tell that it's bullshit because the Republican party as a whole has not at all distance themselves from him. Right. It's the people that have like said anything were like the, you know, the anti Trump Republicans that didn't like him to begin with. Yeah. And what's there? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then too. But that's, that's how I can kind of gauge what's bullshit or not because, you know, the top leadership of the party isn't saying anything. They're treating him exactly the same as they were before. So you can be rest assured that they don't have anything. Yeah. This is a hard hitting essay because when you define capitalism properly because there is no free market, laissez faire, and there is not going to be a free market laissez faire, at least not in our lifetime. And people can make, you know, you can make the argument that when I was reading it, I was thinking, oh, well, you know, if you're in the black market, it's free and everything. It's like, well, it's really not that free.

56:28I mean, you're like literally might have to protect yourself with, with a lot of firepower protect your business. And, yeah, you never see best, you never see best by running drive buys on brands, so. Yeah. But capitalism, if you're going to use the term capitalism now, and you're going to use it in any other way, then something that is pure theory, just use it. It's amazing to me that the same people that will say, you know, well, real capitalism hasn't been tried will argue that capitalism has gotten out, gotten a billion Asians out of, you know, out of poverty in the last 30 years. Yeah. And that I say, well, that was neoliberalism. Yeah. And then it becomes like, oh, I don't like that though. Because it was neoliberalism. I mean, it really was. I mean, stop.

57:29You know, I mean, neoliberalism is horrible when you look at, you know, when you look at it from an ideological perspective, but they did get a billion people, a billion Asians out of poverty in the last 30 years. Yeah. If you view the onset of capitalism as, you know, the old school medieval burgers, these literally seizing power and solidifying private property rights from the king, that kind of gives you a historical perspective. And eventually that system of private property rights, you know, seizing private property rights, seizing free markets, you know, that came at a cost. And now we're entering an era where, you know, it's evolving into something else, whether it's socialism, fascism, or as burn them and cause it's a managerial state. It regardless, it is fundamentally departed from, you know,

58:31the liberal ideal of what capitalism is. Well, what we did find was that managerial, the managerial state is a lot better than what South Korea had before. Yeah. Yeah. It's able to drive, able to drive a lot of people out of poverty. Yeah. And, you know, it's another thing like, you know, I would rather have a managerial state that, you know, I share values in a culture with than a libertarian utopia of, like, blue-haired opi's trannies that, you know, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That just reminded me I need to ask just the Jeff Dice to question, all that I got right this time. Do you still believe? I was just like, one of his famous quotes from a few years ago

59:31and I want to see what he has to say now that COVID and everything is completely insane. But the, yeah, I mean, Burnham, man, there's something in every friggin' reading. And what's funny is this is, I'm doing this with you. And very well, I'm going to release this next, this is my next episode, the very next episode, maybe myself in Buck Johnson reading Samuel Francis's chapter out of this, his review of Suicide of the West by Burnham. This is Sam Francis, Thinkers of Our Times, James Burnham, where he basically does a commentary on every James Burnham book. Oh, wow. I have, I went and bought another one of these because I'm tearing this up so bad. I just wanted to have one because this is right now, this is the book I can't put down. Yeah, no. Going from Lenin to Burnham, you can tell that he was kind

1:00:31of in that sphere at one point because he has the same polemical writing style. And it's actually very easy to read. You have to kind of learn a different language when you're reading like the Orthodox Marxists. Yeah, but with Burnham, it's kind of more, you know, there's a lot less learning curve, no learning curve for me, really. But I would highly recommend any Burnham content, but I'm just happy to read, be reading the managerial revolution right now. Yeah, after you read, if you can get Lenin down, you don't have to get it down perfectly but just understand, you know, have a good grasp of it. Reading Burnham is a lot easier. Absolutely. He was a trot ski. He was head of like a trot ski organization or something like that. I mean, the guy was deep in it and then just took a, did a huge 180. Yeah, and in the next chapter, it's like on the coming transition

1:01:32to socialism or whatever. He goes into the fact that workers as a class are very malleable ideologically. There's no guarantee that they're going to fulfill their Marxist destiny of, you know, seizing power and bringing about a communist society. They might seize power, but it'll look like, you know, either Nazi Germany or Russia or, you know, something else. Well, even Lenin knew that and that's why Lenin wasn't an internationalist like trot ski. Yeah, he, you know, he, it was for an Stalin picked up on that, that too. And then of course later things got, things went awry after, you know, certain people got into power and they were like, oh, we gotta, we gotta expand this a little bit. Good luck with that. That's when you, that's when you realize the world doesn't want this. And when I say the world, I'm talking about the people, people of this world do not want this. You know, it was like when, what's his name?

1:02:32Can't remember the American journalists. He's like the only American who's buried in, buried in the Kremlin or in the tomb there. He, John Reed, I think it was, when he went to Russia, pre-revolution and he was telling Lenin, he's like, the American workers, we'll, we'll stand with the, with the Russian workers. And it's like, nothing won't. Yeah, that's smoking crack. Yeah, well, it's not smoking crack. It's like he's literally lying to him. Yeah. To get him to, he was trying to get him to go for it to push harder in what he was doing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, some of those Americans that went over there were way more hardcore than a lot of even, it led in his inner group. Because you know, let it have guys in his inner group where like, is this gonna work? All right. So. Yeah. Back to my farm, every time it'll be fine. Or we could just go back, let's, let's get this war over

1:03:35so we can go back to Germany and Switzerland, you know. They were living the good life there for, for a decade and a half. Oh, yeah. German intelligence agencies were fucking like rock stars. Yeah. Fucking making it rain. Anyway, got anything to plug? Yeah, you can find me on, not the latest episode of timeline Earth due to a scheduling dispute. But yeah, you'll eventually find me on timeline Earth. And I hope to keep doing little tidbits like this. I'm kind of entering a transition phase in my professional life and taking a step back from content creation. But, you know, I'm always available for a guest spot. And especially for you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanana show. Is this guy ever been on the show before? There's just, oh, Aaron from timeline Earth, yeah. I mean, many times.

1:04:36Hey, Doma. You're my co-host. That's so awesome. All right. Let's get to it. I asked you on today so that we could talk about Sam Francis. This is actually the book, the print version. Sam Francis is basically, it's a review of every James Burnham book. So every book that James Burnham wrote, he has a, it does 10 to 15 pages on it to explain what it is. And what are we looking for today? We're going to do the Machiavellians. Nice. And I know you read it. And also you said that you thought about when you, you started reading this review, which was what's the call, crisis of modernity? Yeah. So the crisis of a journey by Agusta Del Noce. He's an Italian philosopher for 1910,

1:05:39died in 76, I think. And he's just another one of those people that basically called it well before anybody else was calling it. He identified the, pretty much the flow of history from liberalism and to kind of what we're experiencing right now, which is its logical endpoint. And it really resonated with me. I've also, in preparation for this episode, I also read a lot of Heidegger. And I also went back into the managerial revolution just to get me into a Burnham mindset. Cool. Cool. All right. Well, let's get this up on the screen and start reading. I'll look at it. All right. So this is taken from, I don't even know what this text, it takes it from because this text actually, I can't find in PDF anywhere. It was never made into a PDF. I mean, maybe if someone has it, they can send it to me.

1:06:40But I just found this on archive. And it had this section of the Machiavellians in it. So, yeah, let's just go and stop anytime. So this is Sam Francis reviewing the Machiavellians by James Burnham. Thank you. Machiavellians written a 41 or 42, a year after managerial revolution. So, all right. The managerial revolution has grown out of Burnham's dispute with Trotsky in the 1930s and was an answer to Trotsky. Stalinist Russia was not a deformed worker state, but a new kind of society that Marxism had not anticipated. Managerial society. Yet despite Burnham's political and intellectual break with Marxism, significant fragments of Marxist ideology remained with him and seriously marred his statement of the theory of the managerial revolution. In the Machiavellians, defenders of freedom, Burnham eradicated many of his remaining Marxist preconceptions,

1:07:45formulated a general theory of human political behavior and restated the theory of the managerial revolution in terms of this theoretical framework. Yeah, there's definitely a not so hidden critique of Marxism. You can definitely tell he's 100% away from Marxism right now, even though that's kind of where he started. It's good to have you on here for going to talk about Marxism because we've probably done a bunch of episodes on Marxism together, haven't we? Yeah, a few books, a few readings. Yeah. All right. In his first book, which had begun with a long epigraph from Machiavellian letters, Burnham had revealed a scathing contempt for what he called ideology. Although he recognized a social need for ideologies as sets of beliefs that hold societies together, he had dismissed them as unscientific beliefs that were uncontrolled by facts, managerial revolution, page 185. This discrepancy between logic and reality,

1:08:48between the verbalized form and the concrete meaning, is one that is a persistent theme in all of Burnham's writings and one that he explicitly developed in the Machiavellians. Burnham found in Machiavelli and in the four political theorists of the 20th century whom he described as Machiavellians, the foundations of a realistic method of social and political analysis. Contrasting the theological and metaphysical political philosophy of Dante Elegari's in De Manarquia with the historically and empirically grounded approach of Machiavelli, Burnham developed a fundamental distinction between the formal and the real meaning of a statement. The formal meaning of a statement is the meaning which is explicitly stated, but which serves to express in an indirect and disguised manner, what may be called the real meaning. Some, it's an interesting metaphysical development.

1:09:48I love it. This is quote, and I'll work out. Oh no, no, keep going. Quoting, by real meaning, I refer to meaning not in terms of the fictional world of religion, metaphysics, miracles and pseudo history, but in terms of the actual world of space, time and events. Yeah, I mean, metaphysics is like the lens in which we view reality and truth. So I don't know, like just the managerial revolution is something I really got into of Burnham's and I was about 75% satisfied with it and not just because it's a little outdated. Yeah, yeah. No, that's what most people think. Most people say that it's a great book, but a lot of people can say, well, he didn't get his predictions correct and everything is like, well, I mean, yeah. You're in the middle, a war just started. It's kind of hard. It's kind of hard. It's kind of some slack. All right. The real meaning then is the empirically discoverable

1:10:50and verifiable meaning, the only meaning that has value for expressing the truth. In Machiavelli, Burnham argued, there is no distinction between the formal and real meanings because Machiavelli explicitly stated his goals in meaning did not attempt to disguise them and took pains to verify them empirically and to make them clear. Whether this is an accurate presentation of Machiavelli or not is not particularly important to the political theory that Burnham developed. His purpose was not to write a learned treaties on Renaissance history and philosophy, but to elaborate on empirically sound method of analyzing human political affairs. The tradition of political thought by Burnham labeled Machiavelli and did indeed derive many of its ideas from the 16th century Florentine, but whether this was an accurate derivation and whether Machiavelli himself would have endorsed Machiavelli and his own are separate and secondary questions. I've heard that critique before.

1:11:51Would Machiavelli have agreed with Burnham? And I don't know enough about Machiavelli, the actual person to say whether or not he would, but I do know that he did see the usefulness and veiling your agenda. The four thinkers who Burnham discussed in detail in the Machiavellians were George Zarell, Robert Michels, Gettano Masca, and Valfredo Pareto. To at least some extent, all four saw themselves as the heirs of Machiavelli. Like him, they were all concerned with the problems of political power, not with how to justify power, nor with the external forms and appearances of power, but with how men actually use, pursue, attain, and lose power. Like Machiavelli, all four were profoundly conscious of the radical discrepancies between the formal disguises of power in rhetoric, ideology, and institutions

1:12:52and the terrible realities of power in the actual history of men. It's something that I can't stress enough, is that people can talk about their ideology, their political ideology, all they want. But when it comes down to ruling, and there's a great quote from Francis in the book, in the review of Suicide of the West, where he says, ideology never makes it into, never exists in reality, because it's formed in a vacuum outside of reality. So basically, once it's introduced to reality, it just gets punched in the mouth, and everything goes out the window. No, it's a transcendent end goal to point to channel revolutionary or reformist energy into a transcendent goal. That's all ideology is.

1:13:52It's like you said, it doesn't exist in reality is purely metaphysical. Yeah, and another thing that Francis says in the review of Suicide of the West is that basically ideology is there for the masses. They need to concentrate on something while the Machiavellians are actually ruling. Yeah, so he gives them something to feel good about. It gives them an identity, something that I've been talking about on the timeline a lot today is how people make their political, their political ideology their right density. So it gives them something to feel good about, but then they wonder their whole lives, how come what, this guy was talking about my ideology when he was running for office, and then he gets into office and my ideology doesn't materialize, why? Well, a really useful tidbit that I got from Burnham from the managerial revolution is that,

1:14:54in order for an ideology to become dominant, people, the masses have to be willing to die for it, and that's kind of how you know that capitalism or liberalism or even socialism slash Marxism will not be the dominant ideology at any point in time because it's been a while since people were willing to die for it or willing to kill for it even, at least not in mass, not in any great extent, but that's kind of the lens that I view, trying to predict accelerationism from is, what are some things that are popping up now that maybe might be inspirational enough for people to kill or die for? Zionist? And well, but sure, the Machiavellians are definitely willing to die for it, or at least try to send people to die for it, but yeah, nowadays, well, I'm talking about in the real itself,

1:15:54what we've seen since October 7th. Yeah, willing to kill for it absolutely. I don't think they're willing to die for it, they're definitely willing to drop bombs for it, but it seems like the Houthis are willing to die for what? Yeah, yep, I mean, any sect of Islam is you can usually find some flowers in there to pluck. Thirdly, like Machiavelli, they believe that through the observation and study of the history of power relationships, a set of generalizations about power and men's usage of it could be formulated. In other words, that historically grounded science of power, not a philosophy or ethical theory was possible. That's why whenever you have these libertarians I was dealing with today on the timeline who are like, so you believe in an imaginary line and you don't want people to cross it. Why do you love violence? Because I do. Yeah, I mean, it's like, and then I realized

1:16:57when people are asking that question, why do you have a problem with this? It's very feminine. It's, it's long, it's like literally long-housing. It's like they've been completely long-housed and it's created their ideology and their questioning. Well, since the 20s, since we started getting into a psychoanalysis like Freud and all that, you've noticed that everything is positive as a psychoanalytical diagnosis? Yes, yeah, why are you? It's always, it's never about, are you doing this for, did you do this to acquire land? Did you go to war to acquire land? Did you go to war to do this? It's always, what's wrong with you? Why would they do this? Yeah, even like the etymology of words, like, transphobe, that sounds like a mental illness that, you know, 80 years ago would have got you put into

1:17:59an asylum and that's where we're still looking at that today, that's still the norm today is everything is psychoanalytical, everything is scientific and, you know, when you talk about good and evil to a leftist or a really committed liberal, it's not that they don't believe in it, it's just that that exists outside of their metaphysics and because they don't believe, but this is something I learned from Denotia, this isn't, believe it or not, this isn't an original thought I had. But they don't, they don't have in their metaphysics anything that exists outside of science or psychoanalysis. So when you talk about good and evil or, you know, these things that we always have understood, we, we white people have always understood as universal metaphysics that you and I can engage in a conversation and to be reasonably assured that, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna abide within a certain framework. That's completely out the window with them because they just, it doesn't compute.

1:19:00They're like, why are you talking about that? Why are you asking that question? It's like you, by asking the question, you have a mental illness, you're, there's just, nothing you can say isn't problematic. Yeah, it either elicits a confusion or a disgust response, which, you know, we kind of get from them too. So all things being equal. Yeah, I was noticing, you know, Stone Tosca doxed. And, yeah, yep. And when I saw there are people openly celebrating it on Twitter and I'm like, this is the most feminine thing I've ever seen. Yeah, yeah. Yes, queen. Yeah. A 99, a 99 post thread. Yeah, yeah, I saw that. Could you imagine taking it? I can't wait till he does a comic about it. Yeah. All right. Behind these common beliefs was a body of common assumptions about the nature of political man and human history.

1:20:00The Machiavellian saw political life as constantly in flux. But the process of change is repetitive and roughly cyclical. Quoting, the recurring pattern of change expresses the more or less permanent core of human nature as it functions politically. The instability of all governments and political forms follows in part from the timeless human appetite for power. I really need to make my neck after TL, I really need to read disposition on government by John C. Calhoun because he talks so much about stuff like this. Because of the recurrent patterns of change, history moves in cycles and is not a unilinerable linear progression. The repetitive cycles make possible a science of human political behavior. What men have done before they will do again in the future and within the limits it is therefore possible to predict their behavior

1:21:00through analogies drawn from history. Yeah, I mean, unless you believe in like that we exist in post history. Machiavellian's followers saw men in general as evil. Quote, all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature whenever they may find occasion for it. The Machiavellians depicted human beings as insatiable in their desire for power, wealth and preeminence, but also as irrational prejudice, ignorant and easily deceived by others as well as by themselves. Yeah, hey, Moscow specifically criticized and rejected the optimistic progressiveism as roots of Russo reminds me of who is it, Spangler or optimism as cowardice. Yeah, Pareto devoted much of the six volumes, six volumes.

1:22:01Pareto devoted much of the six volumes of the mind and society to exposing human irrationality and appetitive motivations. I'm not going to lie to you. I've tried to read original works by Pareto and I could not. He's really tough to read, man. I have the other. I have a couple books, a couple smaller books on the elites and man, it's, it's a slog sometimes. No, you just, it's like he introduces a bunch of mathematical concepts and I can't, I can't do it. Like I can't follow that. I'm not that smart, sorry. Sorel explicated the role of myths and falsehoods in providing a unifying force for political action, especially violent action. Michelle Sturrett, his work on political parties, showed how minorities continually monopolize power by deceiving and coercing the mass membership. Yep, lots of be said about that right there. The emphasis on human evil and irrationality is central

1:23:03to the Machiavellian argument. Burn him in the Machiavellian, saw politics into a large extent to human condition in terms of the savage and incessant struggle for power at all levels of society. Regardless of how this struggle might be disguised by language, symbolism and institutional forms. And see, this is where I think Burnham kind of retained a little bit of his Marxism or at least his haigalianism is, um, you know, when you're talking about, what does that say? Radles-Hovall of this struggle might be disguised by language, symbolism and institutional forms. I don't think that Burnham took too much, didn't give enough account for things that exist outside the dialectic, especially in his critique of socialism. It was still very scientific and it was still very focused on, you know, material and economic, economic,

1:24:04dialectic struggles. Just not resolving in a way that Marxists prescribed it would, you know, with dialectical materialism. But another thing I learned from the notches, is that they really didn't give any attention to the more abstract things, like, you know, what he just mentioned, you know, language, symbolism, institutional forms, culture, religion, and just things that exist outside of, you know, empirical science. And there's other ideologies that we may be, another ideology we may be familiar with who fails and do the same thing, I assume. Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's, I hate to say, I hate using this word, but it's nuanced. Which doesn't really say anything. Driven by insatiable appetites and irrational beliefs, men seek to dominate each other or to escape domination by others. This struggle invariably results in a minority coming to power,

1:25:04monopolizing as much as possible political, economic, military, technical, and honorific resources, and excluding and oppressing the majority. Thus is formed in elite, Pareto, ruling class, Moscow, or oligarchy, Michelle's, that rules the majority and exploits it for its own benefit, reinforce, and fraud. The rule of elites in human societies is inevitable, and therefore, all the garkey is the only possible distribution of power, what Michelle's called, the iron law of oligarchy. I mean, if you had asked me if I agreed with that five, 10 years, or yeah, 10 years ago now, I would have called you a statist. Now you just, you become a realist, and then in the eyes of some, that means that you're immoral. Yeah, I mean, this is scientific. It is an observable fact that power is always concentrated

1:26:06and select few individuals, and they're not very nice people. Oh, we know science. They're not libertarians. We know science is racist, so. Yeah. There is no end to oligarchical rule. Although one elite may lose its power, indeed, always loses its power sooner or later, another minority takes its place through what Pareto calls the circulation of elites, and the record of this unending rise and fall of ruling minorities in human is human history. So one thing I wanted to pick your brain on, having listened to your episode with Catgirl Kool-Ak today is I wanted to ask you, what do you suspect will be the circulation of elites if or when his predictions of a full-on collapse by 2030, what does that circulation of elites look like? I mean, I think it may break down regionally.

1:27:10You may have new elites stepping up, or most of the time it's existing elites. They just, it's like people have said, because we've been talking about the PayPal Mafia and how we see them as trying to make a move right now and push the elites out and take over. And someone made a comment, well, they're already a part of the elites, T-allones, palens here, all these countries. But I think Orin McIntyre made a really good point today. He said, the elites always come from within, I mean, Caesar wasn't an outsider. Yeah. Pinochet, when you have radical change, Pinochet was not, I mean, he didn't come in from another country. He was in the military. He was somebody that everyone knew. The circulation of elites always happens from the inside.

1:28:12So if you're thinking that your neighbor is gonna be an elite, unless you do like Hoppa teachers and you do it locally and you find a natural elite and you raise them up to take over and help to change a locale, then you'll know that this person is coming in from outside. But I mean, at the national level, at a government level, at a oligarchical level, it's always gonna be from the existing elites. They're just gonna move in and they're just gonna switch them out and you're just gonna hope that they're going to be more in your favor than the previous elites. But if everything does fall apart at 2030, I mean, all I see is people will be begging for anybody. And I think that the person, whoever has set themselves up with the most, with a rhetoric of where Americans

1:29:16we should be proud of our heritage, we can take our heritage back. We don't have to put up with this. I think that is the person who is more going to be to circulate in and out and who somebody, who they may potentially look to in order to try to get them out of that situation. Yeah, I mean, the reason why this would be so unprecedented if, I mean, one of the reasons why, the main reason I think about is when I think of a collapse, and I think of a power vacuum and who fills that power vacuum. It's whoever has the most hard power and whoever has the most energy behind them. And right now, well, if theoretically a few years before collapse, there's a lot of energy stored right now and it's just waiting to burst. So if his prediction is correct, man, that's gonna be crazy because I think people right now are just, the only thing stopping them right now is, they have a job, they get to, they have a family,

1:30:19they may not have access to a whole lot of hard power, but man, wouldn't that be just historically unprecedented collapse? Well, Charles Haywood believes that with the way the regime is attacking Elon Musk, he said at the end of a recent podcast, he thought that Elon Musk may turn to basically creating his own private security force, which would be his own private army. Yeah, but then again, this would be the match point would be a financial collapse, which implies that the dollar doesn't really have any value anymore. So now it just becomes like, you know, depending on how hard it is, a barter system, who has the most assets to barter, who has the most, who has the most betrayed? Well, here's the thing is, the people who are going to rule, the people who would rule after a collapse

1:31:21or the people who've already been planning for the collapse. And I would assume that there are people already in elite positions who already have an idea of what a new currency would look like and things like that. So I think that's where it goes. Boy, that doesn't go well for us. Yeah. No, not at all. From nice suburban ass. All right. These conclusions are bleak and the Machiavellians saw little ground for hope of democratic emancipation. Modern democracy, they interpreted as a special kind of disguised oligarchy based on commercial and industrial power and not fundamentally different from early kinds of elitism. Moscow and Pareto, in particular, saw socialism as no more than an illusion that threatens to subordinate all of society to an elite based on the power of the state. To Michelle's, oligarchy was an inherent part of social and political organization.

1:32:22A doctrine that was most common to most of the Machiavellians in which Burnham emphasized was the concept of what Moscow called the political formula, Pareto called derivations and Cerelle called myths. According to these writers, elites do not hold power simply through force and intimidation. They formulate doctrines that rationalize or justify their control in logical, moral, theological, or philosophical terms. These doctrines, political formulas, derivations or myths or as Burnham called them in the managerial revolution, ideologies act as social and politically integrated forces and are often quite sophisticated and complex in their structures. Most members of a society, of a society, elites as well as non-elites, believe them and to at least some extent take them seriously. Nevertheless, I think less and less.

1:33:22Don't you agree? Don't you think people, I would say, elites more so than any, but I think more and more people even just walking around basically or just at the end of their rope where they're just, when it comes to ideologies and they're just like, I'm just gotta take care of myself. I think what separates maybe our side from the normies and from the other side is that we don't view ideology as an ends, we view it as a means. And that's back, I don't know, I got nothing else on that. But yeah, pretty much that's it. It's a means to it. It's a means to an end. Pointing the masses in a direction propaganda, channeling energy towards a certain outcome, that's all going towards a means to a desirable end that we would like or we hope happens or we hope to get somebody in there that can make it happen. If it happens to be a particular ideology,

1:34:25it's really of no consequence to us. Call it Christian nationalism, call it fucking white nationalism, ethno, whatever. Like as long as most of our desired ends are going to be fulfilled, like we know that we don't have the luxury to pick and choose. Most members of a society's elites as well as non-elites, believe them. Nevertheless, despite their sophistication and large number of adherents, these ideologies are not to be regarded as scientific and purpose or content. Their purpose is not to express or explain reality in a way that can be proved or disproved, but to provide a rationalization for the existence and power of the dominant minority. The fact that ideologies are not scientific and that those who believe in them do so for non-rational reasons means that it is useless to criticize ideologies in terms of verifiable facts or logic. All you have to do is just make fun of them, mock them.

1:35:26You'll say, do you humanize other eyes, whatever you want to call it? I do it. Ideology is impervious to such criticism because belief in it is dependent on non-rational factors such as self-interest or emotion. The fact that an elite itself usually believes in most or all of its own ideology also means that no elite can be entirely scientific in its own thinking and behavior. Any elite must always, to some extent, be the victim of its own myths. Burnham argues that the Machiavellians, the Machiavellian science of power could provide a non-ideological framework for an elite, but he was highly skeptical that any elite could for long make successful use of this science. Yeah, good on his part because, I mean, when you think of any great man that ever arose, it's exactly what they said. They talk the talk as far as ideology goes. They may have even believed some of it,

1:36:28but take any great man and none of them were purely ideological in practice. Well, think about this and I know people are probably sick of me bringing him up, but Bukkeli. I only know two things about Bukkeli. I know that he hates crime and crack down on it and he likes Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, I know that he or she's not an ideology, which is no great. Yeah, so he does, I don't know that he has an ideology. He first ran for president in the far left party. He got kicked out of that, had to go and I mean, bounced all around. All I can judge him on is what he's done. Yeah, I mean, he's kissed the wall, yes. His wife has some Sephardic in her, yes. Yeah, I know that that means that you're just waiting for the other shooted drop. He's going to disappoint you because he did that. All I can judge him on is what he's done so far and everything he's done so far looks pretty damn good to me.

1:37:30Yeah, we don't we don't have the luxury of having the expectation of even a somewhat pure great man that comes in, sweeps, sweeps, whatever this is away. We know it like like take Musk, for example, he's probably the most likely candidate to fight the fight the current regime and maybe went out. He's on the right track, but you know, he's definitely not ideological. He wants to get to Mars. That's about it. And anything that stands in between him and that goal needs to be swept away. That's not an ideology either. No, no, that's he has a goal. That's it. That's it. All right. Burn him in the Machiavellians tended to interpret all of social and political reality in terms of the doctrine of the elite. For them, the nature of the elite is largely determinative of other social, economic, political and cultural institutions. Institutions that are not consistent with perceived interest of an elite

1:38:31are abolished or discouraged while those that are or would be consistent with this perceived interest are created or promoted. Quoting from the book. From the point of view of the theory of the ruling class, a society is the society of its ruling class. A nation's strengths or weaknesses, its cultures, its powers of endurance, its prosperity, its decadence, depend in the first instance upon the nature of its ruling elite. More particularly, the way in which to study a nation to understand it, to predict what will happen to it, requires first of all and primarily an analysis of the ruling class. Political history and political science are thus predominantly the history and science of ruling classes, their origin, development, composition, structure and changes. The importance that the Machiavellians attached to the elite or ruling class resembles and to a degree parallels Marx's emphasis on economic forces

1:39:34in interpreting history. Yet the Machiavellian theory of elites is a broader doctrine than that of Marx and allows for consideration of non-economic and non-material forces in understanding men in history far more than Marx did. Yeah, which is very difficult when you factor in all of the other non-scientific factors that go into studying the history of a nation, a culture of people. You know, it gets so far beyond dialectics, it's insane. It's hard. That's why predicting things is so fucking hard. There's too many goddamn factors. Nevertheless, because Burnham and the Machiavellians saw politics in terms of a struggle for power and the struggle for power with central to the nature of an elite and to all other social relationships, it would not be inaccurates to describe Machiavellianism as a kind of political

1:40:35determinism paralleling the economic determinism of Marx. Let me ask you this. Do you think there was really a struggle for power? You know, I think is roundly agreed, Circuit. Somewhere around 2012 is when we kind of had this turning point into what we have now, which is just like gay, trans, Soviet Russia. But before that, I mean, we, there's been a lot of talk about how great the 90s was and how, you know, how basically unified we were, how basically free and prosperous we were, and how happy we were. I think there's something to that. The culture was definitely different. The ruling class, do you think the ruling class was different then? And then we had maybe not even a struggle that got us to where we are now. And that kind of defined the nature of why they're so incompetent because they didn't have to struggle for it.

1:41:36Well, I think Thomas makes a really good point about the early 90s is the 90s, especially the first half of the 90s, is that it was, it was kind of anarchy. There was, and, you know, I know the anarchist watching, they want me to make an argument that anarchy is good, because it means without rulers. It means without rulers. Let's shut the fuck up. You know, we mean the normal does. Yeah, we, we mean the definition that everybody agrees upon. Oh, but that's democracy. Yeah, go fuck your mother. I mean, people getting the amount of crime, people get, I mean, there's a reason why basically Giuliani had to unleash an army onto the streets to stop crime in New York. Yeah, it had reached. And here's the thing, the people who talk about the 90s being this great, they're usually leftists. They're usually people from the left side. Well, why was the 90s great? Because they could get away with doing all the degenerate shit that they wanted to.

1:42:39They weren't judged for it. It was fine. I mean, I knew people who, you know, it was live and let live, but also live and let live to, like, to be, you know, kind of, kind of more on the right than you are allowed to be now. Well, and not even that because you think about the Pat Con movement where they would go, they were going after right wing militia groups and, you know, they don't even talk about that, like, half of those militia groups that they took down. Yeah, black still, you still couldn't be that far to the, it's still illegal to be that far to the right, but, you know, you could, you could call your friend a fag or you could like, you know, you could say the N word and nobody would like, nobody would freak out about it amongst your peer group. Now, not so much. I mean, but it was, it was, it was heaven for someone like James Lindsay. He got away with doing all the degenerate shitty one and two and far right wingers were being cracked down upon. Yeah, yeah. And the other question I have is, do you think that would be the defining factor of, say,

1:43:40the 80s and Reagan years into the 90s was the switch between tough on crime and then, you know, prison and mandatory minimum sentencing, prison reform, mandatory minimum sentencing, this, this transfer over to a, a softer approach, a more, I don't know, socially informed approach. It's hard for me to say that, you know, in the 80s, I was not, that wasn't something that I would have been able to really pay attention to. I have to think about history and, you know, I'm not going to be able to give a personal, a personal opinion on that. But, yeah, there, I mean, really the problem in the 80s was, I mean, it was just, the crime was insane and it was just so matter of fact. Yeah. It's just you accepted the fact that there was all this crime going on and it's not like now where, you know, you have social media, everybody's like, look, you got these sorrows, DAs and you,

1:44:41they can go out and commit crime all they want. If you try and stop them, you go to jail. Yeah, people who, you know, put up flyers who get two years in jail, someone rapes a 12-year-old, they get, you know, 15 months probation, you can talk more about that now. It's, you can learn more about it because a social media about back then it was, you know, harder. You really just have to go back into books and study the history on that. But, yeah, I can't really, I can't really answer that question properly. But, you know, it's being an adult in the 90s and living through the 90s. Yeah, I mean, I knew people who were OD, you know, OD killed themselves. Got hung up on, got hung up on, on oxy really early. I knew people got hung up on meth real early on in the, in the whole game. All right. You know, I knew people in, I mean, from when I was a kid, I knew people, like, my dad worked with the guy whose wife was the first recorded crack victim in New York City. Oh, wow. Yeah. Huh. And they were white. Huh. Yeah. Yeah. So it is, it is pretty great.

1:45:51All right. It should also be understood that Bernamon as mentors were not arguing for elitism in the sense of aristocracy. They were not arguing that elite should rule the majority because their members are better, more virtuous, stronger, more intelligent or wiser than most men. They were arguing for the sociological inevitability of minority domination for the impossibility of majority rule and democracy in any literal or meaningful sense. I mean, democracy now, to me, when people ask me what democracy means now, I just tell them either what, whatever the regime is pushing, satamy, transgenderism. I mean, that's basically what democracy is. Yeah. And it's great to see, you know, the, the inherent contradictions between democracy and liberalism kind of play itself out on the left, especially with this Palestine Israel thing going on. It's, it's, you could, if you view it through that lens, democracy versus liberalism,

1:46:53it's, it's just amazing to see. And it's only going to get better. The fact of oligarchy they argued was found that on an empirical and comparative study of history, on the biological and psychological realities of human beings and on the nature of human societies, societies. It was a fact that could be neither ignored nor altered and moral deprivation or criticism of the fact of oligarchy is irrelevant to its truth. Yet elites are not permanent. And the laws that govern the change and the composition and the rise and fall of elites were an important theme for Burnham and for Moscow and Pareto to whom he devoted most attention. Moscow had recognized in all elites an aristocratic tendency by which they tend to restrict or encourage entrance to or exit from their ranks. Yeah. That's, that's another battle ground is everybody wants to be everybody want everybody's chasing status. That's why you have people going into $200,000 in debt to

1:47:54go to Harvard. That's so that they can have that degree and enter the ranks of the elite or at least the, the near group of the elite. And it's, it's going to be really funny if, if we have a collapse. When the restrictive aristocratic tendency is predominant, society is stable and may begin to stagnate. When the democratic tendency is predominant, society is in flux with many innovations, social and political crises, cultural ferment and perhaps disorder chaos and revolution. Yeah. Speaking of the transition between the 90s to the early odds. Pareto himself went further and developed a psychology of elites that is at the root of his theory of the circulation of elites. Pareto distinguished between derivations of ideologies and residues which are constant universal psychological instincts or impulses. Among the six classes of residues that Pareto recognized the two most important were those of class

1:48:58the instinct for combinations in class two group preference group persistence. And then there's four more and that's why I couldn't read Pareto. But if you read AA's book on the one I read on the populist illusion, he does a really good job of summing it all up in a very fast and a very short and very short chapter. So these were excellent. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great book. It's a point. It's me like I'm retarded. These residues, Pareto specifically correlated with Machiavelli's distinction between the fox and the lion among rulers. Just as the ruler who is a fox relies on cunning deceit and verbal and intellectual skills, elites whose members are driven by class one residues tend to synthesize arbitrary elements of their experience. Class one residues include behavioral patterns such as those of magic, philosophical system making and financial manipulation.

1:50:00Eleets that contain primarily verbalists, intellectuals and administrators will exhibit a high proportion of class one residues and will try to preserve their own power and resolve problems through verbal, administrative and manipulative behavior rather than through the use of force. They thus correspond to Machiavelli's foxes, quoting from the book Machiavellians. They live by their wits, they put their reliance on fraud to seek intrudeness, they do not have strong attachment to family, church, nation and traditions, they live in the present, taking little thought of the future and are always ready for change, novelty and adventure. They are not adept as a rule in the use of force, they are inventive and chance-taking. We'll talk a little bit about that in a second. I remember an episode from way back where I forget if it was you or your guest implied that our elites are entirely comprised of foxes, there are no lions and maybe it was

1:51:04Trump, maybe it's Elon, but they're the lions right now, the only two. Well, I mean, you do have the people in power now who are using force. So Biden is still pretty soft. Yeah, I mean, you throw in people in jail and you're destroying people's lives and their livelihood and everything. A lot of people would rather be dead than have that happen to them. But you have to wonder what stage in civilization, what stage in elite theory you are when the foxes start to use? Yeah, I mean, I guess exiting the animal analogy, it's when they're sufficiently threatened and when they're sufficiently fragile. I think it's a fragility more than anything.

1:52:07Yeah, the residues of class two group persistence correspond to the lions of Machiavelli, for those who exhibit a high proportion of class two residues. Quoting are able and ready to use force, relying on it rather than brains to solve their problems. They are conservative, patriotic, loyal to tradition, and solvently tends super individual groups like family or church or nation. Where are these people? I know. Who's going to cut the gory and not, please? I don't know who these people are. I've heard about them from class two residues or psychic forces that tend to sustain and perpetuate existing combinations. They are sociologically conservative while those of class one are sociologically innovative. That's an interesting word. A healthy elite, according to Pareto, will have an equilibrium in the distribution of these psychic types within it, but under certain conditions

1:53:07and imbalance will result. That's what we're saying now. That's what it is now because the ones who would commit violence would be the lions and they have no lions. It's all foxes. Yep. If two throes shed against the wall and see what's next, basically, yeah. If too many class two residues accrue in the elite, it will rely excessively on force and will fail to innovate and adapt to changing circumstances and challenges. If too many class one types come to predominate as Pareto believes was happening in the late 19th century, the elite and its society will become soft, unstable, corrupt, and disorderly. Although the society may produce a very high level of cultural expression. Worst of all, however, the society will be unwilling and unable to use force to protect itself from either internal and external challenges.

1:54:07I don't think we're anywhere like that. That's not here. While the foxes of class one predominate in the elite, the lions of class two are concentrated in the non elite and may use force against the foxes in rebellion and other forms of violence. External enemies may also commit aggression against the societies ruled by foxes. And in any case, because of the lack of qualities of group persistence, a society led by class one types will have few psychic resources for mustering endurance and sacrifice. Yeah, that's that. There's no there's no energy to direct in any type of revolutionary social change. Elites that are imbalanced by too many class one or class two residues are unstable and are likely to be overthrown or replaced. They tend to create the conditions that lead to their fall from power. The rise and fall of elites and changes in their composition Pareto called the circulation of elites. Normally a healthy elite will be in continual but slow circulation,

1:55:13admitting new members and expelling or ostracizing old and decadent elements. When the circulation occurs too rapidly or when one elite is suddenly and entirely replaced by another, the result is revolution. The theory of yeah, I guess that yeah, I mean before this, I'd never heard it place that way. I've heard a lot of explanations for what constitutes and what causes revolutionary social change. But I mean, I guess you can explain it in many different ways and still come out with the same right answer. I think what we may be seeing now and this is an original idea. I don't remember who maybe heard it from Orn. You have an overproduction of elites because and I would say it's because the money supply has been increased and expanded so far that you have so many people that have acquired insane amounts of wealth. Yeah. And they basically become elites but they are not the kind they're not impressive at all. They're you know, if you have too

1:56:19much of something, if you have if you produce too much of something and it happens too fast, a lot of times you're just going to have defects all over the place. Yeah. If everybody's in a elite, then nobody's in a elite and you go from there. The theory of elites has developed by Moscow and Pareto and endorsed and expounded by Burnham was no by no means an argument for the monopolization of power and privilege by an established few. Indeed, Moscow and Pareto were emphatic that healthy elites should alter in composition slowly and regularly and that they should not become homogenous homogenous or monolithic. Moscow in particular is well done these points and developed a method that went beyond the descriptive analysis of Machiavellianism to a normative mode of analysis by which elites and the societies they ruled could be evaluated. Although the rule of elites, unelected and unrepresentative, is inevitable.

1:57:20Moscow argued that the internal structure of elites is an important means of distinguishing them. All societies according to Moscow are composed of contending social forces, groups that have interest and values associated with particular kinds of activities, agriculture, industry, education, religion, the army, etc. Within these social forces, there are hierarchies and differentiations of power, wealth, merit, or geographical location. The most significant social forces become part of the elite and pursue their particular interests and values within it. Yeah, I guess to a degree. I don't know if that's particularly applicable now. But yeah, the hierarchies have been flattened so much because like you said, we're over-manufacturing. I mean, other than like the top levels of the state or the deep state or whatever, or the Illuminati, everything below that is pretty much there's not a whole lot of difference

1:58:28other than what industry they're in or geographic location, that there's not really a whole lot of difference in what defines them. When according to Moscow, there's a multiplicity of independent social forces within the elite or ruling class such that no one force has sufficient power to exclude or exploit the others, then a de facto condition of juridical defense obtains. Moscow's concept of juridical defense is approximate to what is more generally known as the rule of law. Because of the mutually balancing and restraining action of the social forces in the ruling class, no single force or faction can accumulate or exercise arbitrary irregular power. Each social force and the groups and individuals composing or attached to it protects itself from exploitation by the checking power it holds against the others. Even though this system of socio-political checks may not be formally reorganized in recognized in law, it can still exist and

1:59:34be a substantive restraint on tyrannical power. Yeah, there is kind of a parallel rule book for when you hit a certain amount of asset value. Moscow's concept of juridical defense owed much to both Machiavelli and Montesquieu as well as to the exponents of the classical theory of the mixed constitution. Unlike Montesquieu, however, Moscow did not limit his idea of checks and balances to the formal and legalistic component of the government, but extended it to the substantial, concrete or real component social forces within a ruling class. So that's another thing I see. And I don't know to the degree that it affects really rich people that we would probably call elite, but what is it? The mixed constitution idea where you have the rule of law, but there's also other rules that everybody kind of agrees to follow. That has been just withering away on the vine. On purpose, everything is legalistic. Now everything has to be codified into an employee

2:00:43handbook or an HR department or something like that. And I think that's a function of just managerialism. Yeah. Managerialism is so, I mean, there's nothing more managerial than law fair. We were talking about how how pernicious law fair is and just how how it's so common now for people to weaponize bad faith interpretations of, you know, contracts of laws of agreements, even informal ones. And that was kind of never the case before. And I suspect it as something to do with demographic changes and, you know, the ripple effect of them affecting, you know, cultures that were otherwise, you know, not exhibiting that behavior. But even amongst our social class, you know, it's still, it's so pernicious now where even five, 10 years ago, I at least in my experience, everybody kind of agreed, functionally agreed on, you know, what

2:01:48like what makes for an agreement or a contract or, you know, an address of grievance. Yeah. Once you start getting into, you start importing all sorts of different cultures, you're not going to have any anonymity. And I think it's also a function of just the true economic state that we're in that despite what the graphs say, I don't have the luxury of, you know, risking a $5,000 deposit with a shiddily written contract that I may or may not get back if you don't show up. Because now I have to worry about that. This departure from the formal to the real was part of the Machiavellian tradition. And Moscow thus welded it to the classical tradition of mixed constitution in Burnham's words, juridical defense can be secure only where there are at work various in opposing tendencies and forces and where these mutually check and restrain each other.

2:02:48The product of juridical defense is liberty. The specific forms of juridical defense include the familiar democratic rights, security of private property, security against arbitrary arrest, freedom of religion, discussion, and assembly. Moreover, the multiplicity of social forces participating in sharing power in the world in class leads to a high level of civilization and an efflorescence of cultural life. Yes. Because in order for that, in order for that to flourish, there has to be something outside the state. And I think that's the commonly accepted definition of liberty, which is kind of anything outside of the public, anything in like any informal actions you take is an act of liberty. And like there's, you know, it may not be formalized into law, but it's definitely a cultural change where that particular type of liberty, the important type of liberty that we like is just going away in an informal manner. By way of contrast, the monopolization of power

2:03:58by one social force leads to its unchecked power and to a low level of civilization as other social forces with other resources, values, and skills are excluded and exploited. Using the concept of juridical defense and its antithesis, Moscow was able to evaluate different kinds of qualities depending on the internal structure and composition of their elites. The worst kind of government would be the uniform regimes in which the unrestrained power of a single social force prevents all others from obtaining power and distributing to the public culture. The best kind of government to both Moscow and Pareto was the representative middle class aristocratic parliamentary governments of the mid to late 19th century. This type, however, was threatened by the rise of mass democracy, new classes of wealth and power and socialism. The, yeah, these forces to both Moscow and Pareto threatens to upset the delicate balance

2:04:59that underlies the juridical defense and to impose a monolithic regime on modern society. It should be noted that this normative measure of governments is fundamentally modern and as such it follows Machiavelli and Manusky. The best regime to Moscow and Pareto is not that in which the virtue of the citizen is most developed, but that in which the security and liberty of the citizen and the commonwealth are best protected. Although Moscow and the Machiavellians were influenced by Aristotle, Cicero, and the pre-modern tradition of political thought, their primary concern was not, as with the earlier school, the ethical realization of man and society. The special contribution of the Machiavelli in tradition, however, is the establishment of a criterion of normative judgment of regimes based on empirical rather than on transcendental grounds. Yeah, I think Del Noce would disagree with that slightly.

2:06:00Burnham accepted this Machiavelli in formulation and its fundamental to his entire career as a political thinker. His primary concern, like Machiavelli, was to establish a verifiable methodology for the analysis of social and political affairs, but he was also concerned to discover a realistic means of evaluating judging political institutions and behavior. Oh, nothing. This is just explaining kind of the etymology of how we came to regard regimes. He found both in the Machiavellians and it was the limitation of power that remained for him the primary political ideal. Quoting, the Machiavellians are the only ones who have told us the full truth about power. The primary object in practice of all rulers is to serve their own interests to maintain their own power and privilege. No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of good will,

2:07:01no religion will restrain power. Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leaders, nor businessmen, neither bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in the basic use which they will seek to make of power. Only power restrains power. When all opposition is destroyed, there is no longer any limit to what power may do. A despotism, any kind of despotism, can meet benevolent only by accident. Yeah, we'll see. I think this assumes a base human nature even amongst the elites that I don't know if it's applicable today, especially given the radical departure and competence from his time to ours and then also the growth of AI assistants. In the managerial revolution, Burnham had developed a model for explanation of current world

2:08:03events, the depression, the rise of totalitarianism, revolutionary changes in social and economic structure, political behavior, and intellectual and cultural fermentation. The chief problem with his presentation of the theory of the managerial revolution was its overreliance on Marxist economic determinism and analogies drawn from the Marxist interpretation of history. The Machiavellians, however, were not economic determinists and their interpretation of history was far more flexible than that of Marx. Burnham therefore undertook to restate the theory of the managerial revolution in terms of the Machiavellian analytical framework. According to the Machiavellian model, an elite or ruling class suffers a crisis of power under certain circumstances. Burnham retained in the Machiavellians the essentially economic definition of the old elite as a capitalist, bourgeois or entrepreneurial class that owned and operated the means of production. However, the economic forces and relationships were not the central factors in

2:09:08bringing about the crisis of the old elite and the rise of a new one. The rise of new social forces, especially technological developments over which the capitalist or entrepreneurial elite has no control has made its institutions and ideologies obsolete and less useful for preserving its power. The old elite has also undergone a psychological intellectual and moral degeneration. It shows little faith in its own ideology and institutions and it exhibits Moscow's aristocratic tendency and a crystallization of its membership, interests and activities instead of a dynamic, innovative expansion. Finally, the entrepreneurial elite is tending to a abandoned political and professional pursuits in favor of cultural and leisure activities. It is drawn to humanitarian and irrationalist ideologies that undermine its own rule and it shows an increasing reluctance and inability to use force effectively.

2:10:12The class one or Fox-like residues of Pareto are accumulating too heavily in the entrepreneurial elite. In opposition to these signs of decadence is the aggressive, efficient, dynamic and sometimes fanatical character of the rising managerial class. It's self-annused social force, quoting from the Machiavellians. The production executives and organizers of the industrial process, officials trained in the manipulation of the great labor organizations and the administrators, bureau chiefs and commas are developed in the executive branch of the unlimited modern state machines and that the managers may function, the economic and political structure must be modified as it is now being modified. As to rest no longer on private ownership and small scale nationalist sovereignty, but primarily upon state control of the economy and continental or vast regional world political organization. Yeah, I don't know about all that but I think we were talking about this yesterday.

2:11:16The line between ownership and control is continually being blurred and that's one of the ways you know that we live in a managerial state is the owner of my business has very little control over it other than the hiring and firing of me. I pretty much make command decisions every day in his stead and he gives me the, like, his only function is to provide capital and give me the thumbs up or the thumbs down and that's not a capitalist definition of ownership at all. Vivek has been talking about this when it comes to the president. He said that anybody who gets elected should be in charge. So the person who gets elected, I mean, and let's face it, he uses this to term managerial all the time. He talks about how we're a managerial state. He's red-burn him. He knows all of this. And yeah, it's just how, when you have such a complex

2:12:18technologically complex and and personnel, I guess he humanly complex entity like, you know, the executive branch, how does the president exercise ownership? Well, he has to be able to basically be able to hire and fire whoever he wants. Yeah, yep. Yeah, that's part of it. Absolutely. I think that's the best you can do. You know, going back to Charles Haywood's episode on Elon Musk, Elon Musk will walk around a plant and make it no less than 100 command decisions during that visit. And like, that's how he actually exercises ownership to whatever degree, you know, the physical limitations of time give him. And so like, he's kind of a different beast too. Yeah, no, it need, the person needs to be in charge. And he said, FDR is the perfect example of it. FDR was a king. He was a dictator.

2:13:20All the power rest, all the power in the government rested in him. Nobody did anything, nobody did anything without his say so. This vast reorganization will require the use of force, military machines, and soldiers far more than did the old capitalist society. Hence, the ruling class of managers will include more lions or class two residues than did the entrepreneurial elite. The political formula of the managers will be democratists and will appeal to the emotions and material once the masses, but the political reality will be autocracy. What Burnham calls bonapartism represented by the Nazi, Stalinist, and New Deal political style and ideologies will prevail over the constitutionalist, decentralized, parliamentary governments of the capitalist era. Yeah, that's, you know, the ignorance of managerialism as the defining feature of our time right now is really the biggest obstacle towards getting the,

2:14:22getting the normies to at least a little bit closer to being able to effectively analyze reality. But ideology stands in the way of that. Yeah, and it doesn't have to because most normies aren't ideologically, they just don't know this. We need to, we need to wake them up, bro. And like not because, you know, we hope to seize power or anything, but just because it's the right thing to do. Well, A.A makes a point in this book that if you wake up, if the normies get woken up too much and too many of them get woken up, then you suffer, you suffer revolution. Yeah, and we're not talking, we're talking about France, not, not American. The tendency of bonapartism and of the managerial class is totalitarian. The managers want need and find valuable a state that is unitary and all powerful. Intermediary and non-political institutions and groups are denounced and undermined

2:15:25if they do not support the rising managerial powers. Not only does the managerial class need an extended and unnipidant state for its own internal and international policies and goals, but also the crisis of the depression and the second world war gives it the opportunity to create one. Hence, managerial propaganda denounces the entrepreneurial class and its supportive institutions, churches, non-politicized labor unions, small businessmen, schools, the opposition press, local political institutions, the Congress itself, and seeks to portray them as reactionary, parochial, and responsible for the present crisis and its misery. Only by destroying and moving beyond these obsolescent forces can the crisis be resolved. Burnham was not happy. Do we stop there? I mean, you just described reality, bro. Yeah. Burnham was not happy about the

2:16:32totalitarian vector of managerial society. Private capitalist ownership of the economy, he wrote, quote, meant a dispersion of economic power and a partial separation between economic and other social forces in a manner that prevented the concentration of an overwhelming single social force. Today, the advance of the managerial revolution is everywhere concentrating economic power in the state apparatus where it tends to unite with control over the other great social forces. The army, education, labor, law, the political bureaucracy, art, and science even. This development, see, science especially now. Yeah. This development, too, tends to destroy the basis for those social oppositions that keep freedom alive. Yeah. The entrepreneurs are there for correct to argue that the new deal and other managerial policies were a threat to freedom

2:17:33by the entrepreneurial formulas of market capitalism, a limited state, and national sovereignty had lost their credibility. In any case, the debate between the conservative, see, that's something that people just don't realize. People who are for market capitalism, a limited state, and national sovereignty, understand that they don't, they're not willing to accept that it's lost their credibility. And they think that they don't understand where we are right now in history. They don't know where they're at. Where we're past that, where you're now, and like those days are over, they're not coming back. Yeah. And so, and so, constantly, you know, it's like, well, no, this is the way things are done. This is the way things should be done. This is what guarantees the most individual freedom, bro. We're beyond it. Yeah, freedom. My favorite question, freedom to do what? Freedom to do what? I want you to say who it was, but I had a a libertarian in my DMs today who's just freaking out. He's like, why are there so many libertarians

2:18:39who argue for like the most heinous stuff and stuff that's illegal and not only illegal, but would be considered immoral by the majority of the West at least is okay. Well, they, they took a legal theory and turned it into an ideal. Yeah, but like somebody said that in one of the threads, I was like, yeah, pretty much. Dave, Dave had a thread today. So that. Yeah, yeah, it was Dave. Yeah, you took a legal theory like a dry, what's supposed to be a dry, not fun legal theory, and turned it into your entire identity like good job. You are just a piece of human trash that will never about. Yeah, and you will until you stop. And the inevitable end of your of your theoretical, whatever is talking about whether possession of child porn is a crime. Yeah, and that's why like if if they were, I shouldn't say they're pieces of trash that will never amount to anything because then I just wouldn't care. But it's the the the proactive part

2:19:45of libertarianism is is making sure that you and more importantly, your children are propagandized to that. And they're just, you know, they're not as bad as leftists because they don't hold any power whatsoever. They're just like I wouldn't, I wouldn't let them babysit my kids. Well, I think the biggest problem with it is is that these free market principles and these free principles are so easily the language of that is so easily adopted by people in power. And then it's it's so delicious. It's so easily adopted by people in power who will say, oh, look, we have free trade. And it's like, well, no, but that's not real free trade. We're shipping in yeah, we're we're shipping in sex toys for your toddler. Yeah. And then and then for free trade has never been tried. Why are you using that term? And area is like, well, because it's so easily everything, everything you come up with can and will be used against you. Yeah. Yeah. Everything will be

2:20:50manipulated, which, you know, if they want to know how, then they should watch this episode. In any case, the debate between the conservative spokesman for the old line capitalist class and the Marxist and the democratic socialitarians who defend the rising managerial class is a debate in ideology and myths that express a contest for control over the despotic and bonapartist political order, which they both anticipate. The apologists for the managers would destroy all liberty and juridical defense in pursuit of utopianism. And the apologists of traditional capitalism are simply whistling in the wind for quote, it is in any case impossible to return to private capitalism. See, yeah, I mean, one thing I have to hand it to, to, you know, whether conscious or not, malfusions is that they're not utopian. I got to get I got a respect for that. But

2:21:55everybody else seems to be that maybe quote of the episode. Hey, at least they're not utopian. Yet Burnham was not entirely pessimistic about the survival of some liberty. He suggested that some social opposition might persist or develop the would or develop that would create a balance of forces in the managerial elite. And he also hoped that the principles of the Machiavellian science of power would inform the new ruling class of its real interests and of the utility of liberty. Now anybody who's like out there, anybody who's out there promoting liberty and everything just read that went, that's me. Yeah, it's it's very much limited to utilitarianism. And that's also kind of a product of the shift to utilitarian, I guess utilitarian metaphysics is a product of

2:22:56the rise of revolutionary Marxism and that energy being transferred the revolutionary energy being transferred into the managerial class. They're all it's all utility. How many utils will will you generate if I give you a steamy check? Oh, boy, you tools. Okay, you're getting a steamy check. How many utils will I generate if I put a bullet in your head? He developed a brilliant defensive liberty and juridical defense on the grounds that they actually enhance the cohesion, strength and flexibility of a society rather than limited. The Machiavellians' problem of probably Burnham's most widely misunderstood book. George Orwell appears to have seen it in a blueprint for the double think of 1984. The sociologist David Spitz took a similar view of the book and included Burnham as an anti-democratic ideologue.

2:23:56The very subtitle of Burnham's book Defenders of Freedom should be sufficient to refute this misinterpretation and it may be that some critics of the book have not read far beyond the subtitle. That's me. That's me with every book. It is true that Burnham described the coming society in the starkest language, yet this style is typical of Machiavelli and his disciples and is appropriate to their claim to realism and disavowal of ideology and sentiments. So I've actually never read the Machiavellians, but does Burnham adopt a different style than say the managerial revolution? Is it a noticeably different tone? No, he has a very distinct way of writing. If you read the managerial revolution, you read Suicide of the West. You know it's the same person writing it. All right, all right. I thought he switched up his tone, which would be insane. That would be nuts. It is difficult to see how any familiarity with the contents and arguments

2:25:01of the Machiavellians could overlook Burnham's exposition of the theory of juridical defense. His criticism of managerial political tendencies or his own defense of liberty. The fact that many critics had missed these points suggests that Burnham's discussion of ideology applies to the authors of such criticism. And that's what Mr. Samuel Francis had to say about the Machiavellians. Yeah, no, I mean, it's, I like these kind of critiques that aren't really critiques. It's just an exposition of it. And I try to do that myself with some original works, and it never works out well for me because I'm just not that eloquent. I do podcast reviews and Milwaukee Tool reviews. It's one of those books that when you read it, you're going to have,

2:26:03it's one of those books that if you're a hard core ideologue, you may not read, you may not get it the first time. Yeah, you may have, it's one of those things that a couple of years down the line, maybe something like, somebody told me at the beginning of 2019 to read Yarvin's, why I'm not a libertarian. And I read it. And I'm like, this is a couple of good points in here. Okay. 2020 rolls around. Yeah. 2020 rolls around. Everything happens. You start getting into the summer. Yeah. And you know, cities are on fire. I'm like, yeah, let me read that again. And I'm like, oh, oh, yeah. Okay. And I read it again like a year ago. And I was just like, this is, this makes more sense than anything, than anything I've ever read as far as a critique of a critique of libertarianism. I did try to, I did try to crack the managerial. Not the Machiavellians back in the day when Yarvin was talking about it.

2:27:06And I couldn't get through it because I just, I was in that same phase. Like, this none of this resonates with me. None of it's particularly interesting or prescient. And now as we're reading this, I'm like, all right. I wish I talked more, but like, I'm too busy agreeing with it. Yeah, no, it's steep. There's a way, there's a way you want politics to be in. There's where what politics is. Yeah. And if you want politics to be a certain way, you're going to have to take, you have to take power and do it. At the, at the very least, you have to acknowledge that the, the only form of, of society that you're ever going to be in is some form of an oligarchy, which is a huge hurdle for a lot of people. Yeah, it's well, there may be a white pill in there. If you really understand a lead theory, if a lead, if you embrace it, if you realize that it's always a small group of people in charge,

2:28:08there's a chance that you, you could actually be a part of a group that gets those, that helps to get those people in charge, people who are on your side, who at least, you know, it's like we've been talking about the PayPal Mafia. It's like, do I think the guys in the PayPal Mafia agree with me? Probably not. I mean, there's probably, it may be a couple of them, but do they, do they hate me? No, I don't think so. And if, if you're young enough, especially now where everything is politicized and you're young enough, you can orient your life towards, at least your material life towards, you know, getting involved in industries that no matter who's in charge, like, especially if it's the elites you think are going to be in charge or you like, you can be a beneficiary of a circulation of elites, if not from the current ones. That's kind of my whole shick is like, get into an industry or a career that is circulation of

2:29:14elites proof. Like, not recession proof because we're done, we're probably done with recessions, but circulation of elites proof. Well, and there are a lot of those. You know, I have people who contact me all the time now and say, you know, it's like, finally got myself to the point where I'm pretty sure that, you know, no matter what would happen, I'll always be able to earn it in common area. Yeah. I mean, that's important. Yeah, I mean, yeah, a certain level of self-sufficiency and preparedness, absolutely. I am woefully, and, you know, I'm trying to have a kid and all that too. And, you know, that, I'm telling you, that episode I listened to, listen to today with, uh, cat, cat girl, Kool-Ack, trying to broken my, it's just putting me in a real bad mood all day. Yeah, you came into the group. I recommend you to the to the listeners. Yeah, you came into the group chat and you were like, all right, I'm going to kill myself now. Yeah. Oh, man. All right. Well, um, let's, let's end this, uh, working people find your work when you do work.

2:30:21So you can find me at BTWA underscore returns on x, formerly noticed Twitter, and you can find me every single Wednesday live on, uh, timeline earth. All right. Thanks, Aaron. Appreciate it. Yep. Thank you for having me.