Rudyard Lynch: How World War I Built the New World Order

0:01 The start of the age of the last man is World War I. And a lot of this stuff is sort of trauma reaction to World War I, where everything because people talk about the Holocaust in World War II. I think that's genuinely valid as a sort of we are reacting against that. I think what we're reacting against even more is World War I, where you saw these sort of traditional heroic masculine monarchies fight this epic sort of Lord of the Rings-esque conflict over these old European countries, but it was done in the most horrifying ways possible with trenches that looked like Mordor, days at the Somme with trench feet. And so when you're looking at everything our society is built about, it's sort of we want to reject everything that went into World War I. And so we've been trying to reject their concepts of heroism or colonialism or earnestness or the idea that science can genuinely model the human condition.

0:58 And so we've doubled down on a lot of unhealthy traits due to that, but where where where I think the age of the last man really set in was the '60s with the removal of all the standards. You know, it's it's funny for you to bring up World War I because it is this it is Woodrow Wilson and and and 1913 and this sort of like notion of scientific administration and like the oh, we have the science now.

1:30 Most of the public are actually rubes. So what we really need to do with the help of my buddy Walter Lippmann and then Edward Bernays is manage people's perception of reality so that their choice set is narrow because they're basically wild animals and imbeciles. So democracy in any form is sort of a a joke. We just need to manage the public. We need to have a global government structure. So he creates the League of Nations in the aftermath of World War II and so it seems like that like World War II is like the crisis opportunity for the kind of technocratic global WEF elite to give be birthed by by that group by Wilson Lippmann George Bernard Shaw HG Wells this that whole group sort of says like this is our time to use science.

2:23 >> Yeah. Trust the science including eugenics which we all really like. And like that's that's kind of so I've been is that part of that is that is that in is it is that part of your model of what happened in that moment? >> you totally nailed that. >> [laughter] >> You you did a great job explaining it. That that's what I would have said. It it's that generation and it's it's Wilson Bernays and progressivism meant a different thing back then as it it means the same thing but different.

2:50 I'm guessing you're getting the argument from Sole. And a bunch of sources but sure yeah for sure. Sole talks about that really well. >> unconstrained vision of man the sort of straighten the crooked arrow. Yeah. So so you know bring us back so you've got this this age of the last man starts with like the whole vision of the world being smashed by World War II. Yes. What and and then World War II is basically just a kind of echo continuation of World War II really. It's like sort of the we call it like the interwar period between the two.

3:25 Um yeah, that that's correct. Uh they're they're sort of different James Burnham says World War II is the last war of the capitalist order and World War II is the first war of the managerial order. And you can see that with the regimes that went into World War II were by and large aristocratic parliamentary monarchies. They were the kind of society you could have seen in the Middle Ages. Um and that order ended with World War I bringing in the managerial society. The collapse of the Hapsburgs. And I've been looking a lot at sort of mass society.

4:01 Mass society is the idea that you have media and national institutions where across the country everyone listens to Dolly Parton or The Beatles. They have the same bureaucratic structure. And so mass society is how do you make social institutions for as many people as possible that once you do that, you establish weird incentives where if you enable the most people as possible, then you hit lowest common denominator as the shared value.

4:33 And so World War I smashed that open and you also had to convince these populations to die for their countries. And so it created incentives for sort of social handlers to first of all radically manipulate people and tell them things they want to hear. And so that generation of social engineers around the World Wars built a pretty inhuman society. And that was something they built through the education system, the architecture, the intellectuals where in our society, something is only registered as real if the system recognizes that it's real and if the system benefits from it.

5:14 And so what do you mean by the system? The bureaucratic structure. So truth is organ truth is orchestrated by the bureaucratic structure in our society. If the bureaucratic machine says something is is true, then it's true. So the New York Times and the deep state, like what do what do we mean by the bureaucratic structure? I find people defer to AIs on the internet a lot. It's weird where they'll just say like Grok, is this true?

5:40 Claude, is this true? Chat GPT, is this true? Because they sort of see it as a machine god. If you had actual rationality, you would be assessing the point you were given through these rationalistic frameworks that Aristotle or Francis Bacon developed. But you're just listening to the machine god because that's how they already think. The system supplies them the truth. I will not analyze this myself through common sense and reason. I will listen to the output the system gives us. And that's how you get people to believe the utter absurdities where the idea for example, the idea that all cultures are the same is insane. But then you can just shove the idea all cultures are the same and they can believe that because the system tells them to believe it because from the system's perspective, all cultures are in fact the same because they're equally exploitable.

6:34 The um one of the things that I I I worry about is the use of this term the system. So I want to linger on this for a little bit cuz I know you think about this stuff in a deep way. But a lot of people on the internet, basically every populist in one form or another, some of which I'll agree with more than others, will say that we have a thing called we have a we have there's a the system.

7:03 And and I guess what I'm going I want to push on and see how you react to is the way I think about a system, just a kind of technically, is it's actually got cause and effect mechanisms in it that are essentially reproducible. Like oh, a system, when you push this button here, this light goes on over here. Like like the electric grid is an actual system. It's all connected. It's got to run at 60 hertz. It's a system.

7:30 But when you have sort of this like the society, even you have something that we'll say is the system, but it's not really a system in the same way or maybe it is. And so I want to hear cuz right, cuz it's not it's like, okay. It seems like it's more almost more Marxist. It's like a more There's There's like a class culture divide. Like, this is where I get a little worried when I hear even my friends say like, we need to burn the system down or smash the system. I'm like, can you be a little more specific? I I think that's a very valid point because I am talking about something very different from the Marxists. I am pulling this from Bertrand de Jouvenel, um who is a libertarian philosopher from France a century ago.

8:13 And he divides society between the society and power. And so, power is an established organization where you send out orders, where the government is power, a corporate bureaucracy is power. And then the society is the organic self organism that it's the it's are you emergent order or are you bureaucratic? And so, pre-modern political philosophy was all about how do we increase the power of the society versus the power of sort of bureaucrat bureaucracy. Because bureaucracies become sort of cultural dead matter. They're not responsive to their environment. And so, when you're looking at Aristotle say that a society's natural elites should govern it, what he means by it by that is that when you have the social organism, people will naturally rise to the top and be widely respected as competent or skilled rather than being chosen by a hierarchical bureaucracy.

9:14 And this has occupied the minds of philosophers for thousands of years. So, I am just dipping my toes in. But when I'm talking about the system, I'm talking about bureaucratic structures that operate under hierarchical rules and um sort of pre-established systems that trounce organic emergent order. One way I think I'm going to add something else as well. >> keep on. When Marxists talk about capitalism being a system, they're doing psychological projection, where capitalism is an organic phenomena attached to its environment. And as a rule, the more your society's social structure reflects nature or reality, the better it will do. And so, the reason capitalism and democracy and science work so well is they have these checking mechanisms of does this social structure replicate nature?

10:08 And what Marxism does is it tries to crush nature and control every element of it. So, when you're looking part of the reason that figures like Donald Trump or Elon Musk garner respect from the American public and can lead on the right while the left can't do that is because these people have actually gone out into the world and built reputations and status through dealing with the real world. And we can't respect the people who are rewarded according to the system's logic because the system operates under rules that are removed from reality. And I want to get into the honor culture thing because I think that's valuable where um I am of Celtic ancestry or Ireland, Scotland, north of England. So, I was just my my parents told me that honor was the only thing that mattered in life. Um and it was the number one priority. And that was something I kept in sort of the back of my mind until I started going around the country and started realizing how many other different ways there are to live, but What is honor? What does that mean?

11:13 Honor is the ability to hold on to moral standards even if they cost you. And the sort of locus of the your honor is your sort of sense of self in honor, and then that extrapolates outwards from you. So, there's national honor, there's family honor, there's your personal honor. And so it's I find for a lot of sort of West Europeans who aren't from honor cultures, they don't have a pre-established framework for boundaries, where you're like, "I'm going to give more to other people, and I'm going to let people walk all over me because that's sort of the nice Christian thing to do." That's not actually what Christianity says.

11:56 Christianity doesn't tell you to be a or to like be let people walk over you. Yeah. Um but then they sort of translate that logic. But in an honor culture, as an example, um if someone messes with you, that's a slight on your personal honor, and it's an insult to your family line. And so you have a moral framework that's quite complex that can operate with the death of God. Because beforehand we had a social structure where everyone believed in God or at least said they did. And so that constructed the framework. We're now in a society where you can't point at the Bible and then point at someone and say, "You should do the thing in the Bible." The thing with honor codes, though, is they're not reliant on belief in God, they're reliant on belief in yourself.

12:43 And so there's no sort of theology needed for them, but it's a pre-established framework on how to handle disputes and how to sort of maintain your own boundaries. Um it's also across cultures. So Europe's original cultures were honor based. Vikings, Celts. It stems back to the original Aryans 4,000 years ago in Ukraine. Um but the Romans had an honor culture, too. When Carthage attacked Rome, their honor was insulted, so they crushed Carthage. Um a Roman gentleman was required to do all of these things for the to for both of the honor of his family and of Rome. This was a European thing. You see it in Native American peoples, Afghans. It's a warrior culture thing that stems from unpredictable environments. And so it's biggest in America in the south because the English nobility who helped make the American south, they had an honor culture. World War I was these different European honor cultures fighting each other where Serbia insulted Austria's honor which insulted Russia's honor, Germany. Um Yeah, modern sensibilities look at that and say, "How silly. King Ferdinand We fight a World War because of like the assassination of King Ferdinand? What a ridiculous thing to do."

13:57 But Am I supposed to justify that opinion? Am I [laughter] supposed to push back against it? Well, no. I mean, I just That's the When we hear I think when when modern hear ears hear honor honor in that way being something that can motivate war, it sounds wrong. It sounds anachronistic. >> That's because they're already consumed by nihilism. When you're dealing with these people who say that like honor starts wars is these are people who are already so deeply nihilistic and degenerate that they are actively happy that their civilization is dying.

14:33 And why would I listen to these people? And so the reason I'm bringing up honor is you're looking at the events in the modern western world and you can rationalize why it's okay from like a purely Christian perspective or you can pretend to. It's not actually okay from a Christian perspective, but you could rationalize to yourself why it would be because we're giving to the poor, we're helping people, we're spreading love. You can't from an honor culture. From an honor culture's perspective, we are basically having our society get actively ravaged and we're too weak to stand up.

15:08 And that doesn't require a theology because it's a biological reaction. Um and they've tested people from honor cultures versus non-honor cultures where people from honor cultures they hear an insult, it's literally a biological reaction of hatred, which people from non-honor cultures don't have. And so if you're looking at it's just we're constantly actively being screwed over, and we don't need a rationalistic, legalistic definition for why this is bad. It just fundamentally is a violation.

15:42 And so if if if you sort of get into these arguments of oh my god, can you make a legalistic justification for why it we should fight back against the destruction of our society, the honor culture answer would be this is a rationalization for your own weakness. You are making up justifications demanding to not look at this fundamental issue. Give me an example of the destruction. Be very specific. When you say destruction, it's very easy to say destruction of the society. What are we What Give me just one example that's very that's big and real. Failure of school system, failure of legal system, um importing of mass immigrants to take America's jobs, um no sort of understanding for how deindustrialization or AI guts at the economy, the mating crisis, the left seizure of academia, the left seizure of the corporations, um you would a better a better question to ask would be what institution still work because we are facing a sustained cultural attack on every single front that we do not have the immunological response to. And the difference in why if these things happened in America in 1890 and we would immediately see what's going on and hate it is that we lost that honor culture due to World War I.

17:03 Because the variables that motivated Europe's sort of uh conquest of the world and um and freedom, these are honor culture variables. And the final word, I believe, of the Declaration of Independence, is our sacred honor, where the Founding Fathers were saying they were defending America's sacred honor, because when the British were trying to force us to pay taxes without legal representation, that was an attack on the honors given to native-born English people. The core of the American Revolution was the King of England was violating the natural rights and honors given to a native-born Englishman.

17:45 Um I'm processing that. That's really interesting. Uh the um It seems like one thing that's part of this is honor is a is acting in accordance with with an identity. Yes. That is solid. So, it's like if if you are a husband and someone says something about your wife or does something to your wife, that that relationship is a fundamental part of your identity and your role in that relationship is a fundamental part of your identity.

18:25 And like so just like really personally, we watch again to reference like bedtime TV watching. We're watching the um Land Man and there's a scene in it where the uh the son's fiance, who's this pretty Mexican girl, is in the is like being assaulted in the back alley and he comes out, catches the guy before he can he's beat her up, but he hasn't, you know, He grabs him, flips him, and then punches him 17 times in the in the face, ultimately leading to his death. And this actually prompted a conversation with my wife, in which I'm like, "Yeah, I'm glad he murdered that guy.

19:04 That's good. I can't not imagine I would have done the same thing in that alley if that was happening to you." And she was being very Christian and saying, "Well, Jesus wouldn't want that to for you to do that. Like that's not proportional to murder him for that assault." And I couldn't get past the visceral feeling that no, no, no, it is right and just. So It is right and just that if you assault a woman like that, you should be you should you should be put through a wood chipper. Yeah. [laughter] Like I can't Is that the honor the DNA?

19:37 It's like like I like even like morally I'm like, I know I'm supposed to I I think I know that I'm supposed to I'm not sure. I'm going to have to go back and look and see like what would Jesus think if I just beat that guy's head into oblivion? Cuz that's what I really feel like I would need to do. >> [laughter] >> Yeah, I have two I have two points here. The first is um Both of them relate to Christianity. The first of which is I've defended Christianity a lot in my discussions lately where people say that communism is an outcome from Christianity. And what I say is if you want to look at this from a sort of responsibility perspective, Christianity existed, it formed a theology.

20:22 Marxism is in many ways a child of Christianity. A lot of its assumptions only make sense through a Christian frame, but it's a child who totally spurned its parent and its entire moral code is based off an invalidation of Christianity. And so what you have there is if you do not follow literally anything in the Bible, and if you throw out the entire Bible, then you can't blame the Bible for that. It's just a because you have to divide the world into who's responsible for what. And you can't hold Jesus and the church fathers accountable for this weird death cult that emerged 2,000 years later. And I said, "If you're not following any of Christian morality and you reject Christianity, then you should not blame Christians for that." And what I said is, when a lot of people blame Christianity for the rise of socialism, what I tell them, whenever people sort of blame Christianity for the rise of socialism or wokeism, what I say is, if you factor out the word Christianity and put in socialism, the argument actually fits.

21:26 Where if you say socialism's tenets are blank. And there's I read a a really brilliant author named Uspensky who said, the way to understand Christianity is to realize it's actually about God. It's not an ethical moral code, it's not a rationalistically built philosophy. It is actually about attaining the kingdom of heaven. And he said, when you read these church figures, you have to not analyze it rationally, but think it's actually a spiritual path to reach God.

21:55 And so when you try to apply Christianity in a non-religious framework, it gets weird. And so one of the things Uspensky said as well, is he he interprets it as these Christian teachings are for other Christians to build a community in imitation of kingdom of heaven. But if you're getting attacked and destroyed people who don't have your value system, you should not turn the other cheek. You can't like get rid of war, you can't get rid of plague, you can't get rid of suffering. We live in a fallen world. And this is why I say you have to see Christianity as a as a religion, not an ethical ideology, because their goal was to reach heaven as individuals. They were not on the social engineering sort of bent that we are. And so a disconnect non-religious people have to religious people is and I want to make a video explaining sort of the logic behind this, is that religious people accept that life is sort of flawed and boring. So let's make the flawed and boring elements as sacred as possible, so my life can be sacred. And so people will be like, "Oh, it's just sex." Which is true on a biological level, but once you're adding in the institution of marriage or the society or whatever is you've transmuted what is basically just a biological material act into something which is in service of something higher like the society or God or the family. And so a lot of religion is taking these base sort of unpleasant human acts and then giving them a sort of label and direction that feeds together into a cohesive worldview that everyone in the society can partake in and also elevates the individual. What we're talking about right now feeds into something philosophical that I think is um I wanted to talk to you about which is last time we hung out together and and talked and and even off off camera I think we both I certainly would consider myself fundamentally in the thread of classical liberalism.

23:49 >> Yeah. As it is generally understood among conservatives. You know, like I I I increasingly think of that as fundament my idea my political ideology is just being Americanism like the the institutions, the ideas of the founding that say the individual is free and has sovereignty that's God-given that the government is really basically a monster that should only be only be properly understood to the extent we have one at all to protect that first thing and the Bill of Rights is all the things government can't touch so that that first thing the individual sovereignty can be as robust as possible. So like that's class that's like peak what would you call classical liberalism like the the the British Enlightenment, the John Locke, Montesquieu, all this stuff.

24:41 It feels like at the intellectual level these things are starting to break or they're starting to not have the purchasing power that they used to have among the people that they should. Not like everybody most people are going about their normal lives not worrying about this but for those of us that are interested in the world of ideas it's like what does it mean to be a classical liberal now in a world where the West is committing suicide along every dimension? I know exactly what you're saying uh and the way I think of it is that uh the there's a sort there's a sort there's the rationalist community and uh it they're adjacent to tech and they sort of explain how to apply rationality to every part of your life, how to be rational about how just different situations in your life, how to wake up in the morning and how to do utility maximization. And that sounds smart if you're on like a highly specific tier of consciousness that almost no one in history has been in because if you have more wisdom you realize I'm an I'm an animal. Like a true Imagine if you did this to a dog.

25:49 It would just be stupid. And we're the same biological function as a dog but we have more prefrontal cortex and societal planning. Well, it's always been weird to be like if you're going to be rational, isn't it rational to treat the human being for what it is? Yeah, and the other thing with these people is they always apply rationality incorrectly. For example they believe in equality. Equality is not rational. Equality is not defended by any scientific thing. It's a faith-based thing for the left. They talk they believe in progress. Progress is not rational and they're stuck in this sort of French Revolution Reddit atheism that has been continually disproven and these people these people have stuck with opinions that seemed smart in the Enlightenment uh that time of Voltaire and they have continually failed. And so if you want to sort of use rationality as your only god and your only idol and you have nothing else, it's just a a useful diorama of your delusions because you're not grounding it in anything. You're not grounding it in human nature or values or history. So, you're just making a very elaborate logical game that doesn't have a reflection in the world. And that's what these people do. They're very good at making these games, but the games have no relation to reality. Where I mean, I was reading um So, Steven Pinker was going through in his book Enlightenment Now, he'll say um there is this slight There was this reduction in quality of life for working-class and middle-class Americans, but this was an acceptable loss for progress. He writes that in the book.

27:33 For the god of progress. Yeah. What is progress from their view? Steel man the definition of progress that you think he's using. Uh progress is increase in standardization, comfort, equality, and sort Progress in their book is the removal of the spiritual and the biological. These people are totally motivated by group conformity. Um but they're not honest about it. They're saying that they're rational individuals who are coming out of all of these choices due to intelligence. And that creates a profound discordance where none of the things they believe are actually rational. And for me, I've totally erased the barrier in my mind between science and religion. For me, it's I I've basically reverted back to a 17th century worldview where we're doing science inside a world that God made.

28:24 And so, as you do the the acts of science, you are furthering the goal of sort of developing consciousness. Because inside the world there's a lot of clues about how all the things in the world works. That's where I am. And once you remove the sort of framework given by the divine, there's no way to pick goals. So, it's all a cosmic At the bottom of them is entirely a cosmic joke of none of this matters.

28:51 Well, okay. There is a There's two ethics that are running alongside this conversation that you which which is if you believe that there is a soul as we and we both do and if you if you accept essentially like the the Christian idea. Yeah. Which is fundamentally a metaphysical assertion. It is a religious claim. It is not materialistic. That we all have some kind of equal something that's metaphysical. An equal value, an equal dignity, an equal worth of some kind.

29:29 That is in tension with the material not not equality. And then where do we use this moral metaphysical equality? Where Where does that inform the material world where there's smarter, stronger, better people? There's smarter, stronger, better cultures. There's people that should win. There's people that should rule because they're better. And there's people who should follow because they can't possibly lead or make these decisions under pressure and don't want to and will take the cowardly route and leave everyone worse off if they're put in that position. Um You see what I'm getting at? Like how do we I think classical liberalism maybe overplayed the the equality factor, the human equality assertion.

30:24 Maybe. But if we dispense with that and just leave it in some like I believe this, but otherwise I'm in the Machiavellian world of fight might makes right and there's no other thing to gate my behavior. I'm not sure that world's better. That seems like a worse world. This is why I say that you have to differentiate in Christianity and socialism and see Christianity as being about God, not an ethical code because this [snorts] was not an issue of discussion until the rise of socialism where 300 years ago, 400 years ago, people would say Christianity is for your soul and the actual society is this brutal Darwinistic jungle that the church is sort of like a recharge point for when you can't stand the brutal Darwinistic jungle and everyone took that for granted. So, these ideas of like actually these ideas of equality simply did not exist before the French Revolution. So, in our current society, um you have Christianity as an operating system and then Christianity is fighting with socialism where socialism or communism is the frame most people inhabit for a lot of their interactions, politics, economics, but it's a watered-down version of Marxism. What you do when you balance honor culture with Christianity kill socialism is you've moved the moral frame from are we arguing over social suicide to people have differing levels of honor based on people My answer to this and I have become I'm still a classical liberal, but I don't mean that in the way that before where I'm now a classical liberal like the 17th century sense, which is you are divided in a country like America between the principles of freedom and equality because classical liberalism creates legal equality to allow freedom of action and to allow unequal outcomes. You have the sort of disparity though between once you set out legal equality, it metastasizes into a sort of folk religion that consumes all of the elements of society if that makes sense.

32:38 Well, this is the feedback that the really simple way to sort of say that is um is it Moynihan that said, you know, conservatives are right that culture matters and liberals are right that politics impacts culture, something like that. But there's a feedback loop there that if you once you assert something I mean, I still I I I believe that the proper legal regime would be the abolition of all legal all prohibition for things for drugs.

33:11 Even though I think I don't take drugs, I don't even drink alcohol anymore, honestly, but it's just why should the state tell you what you can't put in your body and when you when it tries, it always sucks and people do it anyway and it's just black markets and it's terrible. So, but so that's a that's a divergent thing. That's saying, "Hey, what is legal isn't always good." Yeah. And so I can say to my children and to myself, "Drugs are bad, they'll wreck your life.

33:43 Uh don't do them. Pay no attention to all these people that love their psychedelics, that's a bunch of gobbledygook. Just live a clean life, you'll be happier." And but they should be legal and so long as you don't do anything else and you're just like getting high in your backyard, I don't care. Yeah. But then in reality, perhaps it's just more complicated cuz if it's legal, it starts to take on the tincture of being good because it's legal. The thing with the government is the government when it interferes in society, it takes away responsibility from a certain thing, so the society doesn't have to deal with it. So, if drugs were legal, then and this is a whole other different thing where for example, if you removed welfare, poor people in non-welfare societies develop communities of mutual support. So, if one of them another of their buddies will help them out.

34:35 >> are actually a really good case study in this in the United States. Welfare kills that. >> Yes. And so, that's a huge reason why the black community has experienced collapse in nearly all of its vital statistics since the '60s, even though they've had an inter- an inflow of cash. And And so, and there's been a good reversal There's underlying strengths that are happening in spite of all of that horror. Yes. But, yeah. Um Welfare's evil. And so, we are trying to We have tried to kill culture and then use the government and the bureaucracy to fulfill all of these things that culture used to fulfill, but they can't because culture is innately human. And part of the reason why we have an atomization of mating, a societal crisis, is the culture has atrophied so much. You don't generate social norms to mediate person-to-person interactions, and the system likes this and has furthered this, which is what the Soviet author said. Because it makes people reliant on the system and atomized. And so, what pre-industrial societies did, and this was a universal, was your level of freedom and respect was equivalent to your level of responsibility.

35:45 What America and a lot of sort of North European societies did is they made systems where every adult male had to be responsible for their own outcomes. And this is what generated the West's success because rather than these clan societies where everyone's mooching off everyone else and building these networks, when every individual is forced to be responsible for themselves, they have to develop an emergent order of cooperating with other people for their mutual benefit, and it makes the society very stress-resistant to the environment. And so, that's why individualism was so powerful. And so, the reason that America >> named, actually, cuz it's really voluntarism. Yes. It's not in at individualism as in like a celebration of the individual as a unit in some metaphysical sense is not what it is. It's It's It's a society It's a civil society that that that that respects the individual.

36:41 >> I have a a lengthy rant about individualism that speaks to the point you're saying, but what I'd say is we need to have a social structure where adults are held responsible for their own actions, and if you are responsible, you can be free. And so, the reason America had a universal suffrage democracy in the 19th century was that practically all white male Americans were property owners, literate, uh and they were responsible members of society who had to understand how the world worked enough to sort of put food on the table.

37:13 Um And so, if you look at other societies like France, the reason that France had an issue going to democracy is most people in France were peasants tied to the land under a in this feudal structure. And so, they >> aristocratic society. >> Yes. And so, the aristocrats had experience with wielding power and responsibility in a way that a small holding American farmer would, but then what the aristocracy had done is sort of strip a lot of the lower levels of agency. So, when they got power, they pushed socialism like the French Revolution. And socialism is fundamentally people with low agency trying to control trying to sort sort of seize more power, but individualism Low agency, high schooling. Yes, exactly. And so, to speak to your point on individualism, there's this whole debate about if America and the West has become more or less individualistic.

38:06 And I also have a gripe with the word individualism because it hides a distinction between freedom from yourself or freedom from the society and the government. Because 19th century and classical liberalism is freedom from external oppression, from a government intervention. You have as many legal freedoms as possible, but inside that freedom is a series of societal constraints. You have to follow the moral code, you have to support your family, give to your society. And then what happened in the 20th century was you saw the constraining of agency, and then freedom in that term meant something completely different and incorrect, where you're free to have an abortion, you're free to get government subsidies, you're free to not be held accountable for your own actions.

38:59 >> You're free You're free to pursue your emotional goals at other people's expense. >> Yes, exactly. You're free to be You're free to not experience pain or anxiety, even if that means other people can't speak because their speech might make you upset. >> Exactly. And so they've warped the term freedom into something it it just is not. These are not accurate assessments. And this has divided the heart of liberalism between equality and freedom, where the ideology of the French Revolution and the American Revolution are both called liberal, but they're very different things. The French Revolution evolved as the modern American left and ultimately communism and those things.

39:43 >> Yeah. And I am a classical liberal in the vein of what the founding fathers pulled from. And that version of classical liberalism stems back to the European aristocratic tradition and honor culture and freedom. And I would rather die I would rather live free than die a slave. That's the current that the founding fathers were pulling from. If you like this clip, you should check out the full video and all the other great content we've got at Dad Saves America. So be sure to hit the like button, subscribe, and ring that bell so you won't miss our new stuff as it drops each week.

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