Why Nothing Seems To Makes Sense Anymore - Rudyard Lynch

1. 0:00 – 5:37

   How Unusual is the Time We’re In?

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      As a guy who has spent a lot of time studying history, how unusual do you think that the time we're living in right now is?

   2. RLRudyard Lynch0:07

      We are the most absurd era in history by a very significant margin. Uh, and I can get into why I think that's true. I think there's only one under... there's one easy underlying variable that explains all of it, but I invented an acronym called SAW. And SAW is Studies in Ancient Wisdom, and what that means to convey is that there's an underlying shared truth that all the world religions share, all the world's folk ways going back thousands of years, and then this is corroborated by modern evidence, and I think s- this podcast is a great example. You might be like the, one of the biggest SAW content creators, where what you do is you compare ancient teachings with what modern science says, and so there is a strong tether between the two. And the 20th century is just a bizarre century, and that's true for about a dozen different reasons. Uh, the 20th century established different intellectual precedents as it related to mating, as it related to the n- idea of community, the nation, religion, how economic, uh, conditions worked. And so you could kind of call it the blue pill era of history from roughly the world wars until COVID or now, and it's really the century of social engineering. So our era of history is incredibly bizarre, and the irony is that we judge everyone else according to our standard, but our standard is incredibly strange. And so I like to say that a fish in a pond cannot know its place in the world because it only knows the water, and that we are that fish. And the reason we don't study history is because if we started looking for what it taught us, we'd realize we're doing something very, very wrong.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:47

      How so?

   4. RLRudyard Lynch1:48

      Oh, a variety of ways. Um, the largest example, and something I frequently like to say, is the idea that's killed the most people in history is the idea that humans are inherently perfectible, where the, the crisis that started, or the world wars in the 20th century's totalitarianism killed over 150 million people, and that's larger than anything else that's in any way comparable in history. And that was based upon the assumption that you can break and mold human nature to be whatever you want, and the blank slate, or the idea that all people are born the same, all people are born with the same capabilities sounds nice on paper, but in reality, its immediate next jump is totalitarianism, to socially engineer people to reach whatever aim you would like. And that's just one example where there's so many of these. The idea of infinite financial progress no matter what. This is an idea the left holds up a lot, which is, um, the left sees money as something to divide, not something to create. The reality is money is created every single year by people producing it, and if you look at most of history, most of civilization, stagnation is the norm. It's you have an empire rise. The empire exploits the peasants. They grow weak. Another... they fall. Barbarians restart the process. Only for pretty small slivers of history, including ours, for creating up certain incentive structures do you see very rapid progress, but we take that completely for granted.

   5. CWChris Williamson3:16

      So economically, very unique. What else would be in the, uh, top few, the top rungs?

   6. RLRudyard Lynch3:23

      So the idea that men and women are psychologically the same, which is something that our ancestors would view as completely ridiculous, and we view our ancestors as stupid. Our ancestors, if they saw us, if you took a Greek philosopher or a medieval philosopher and brought them to our day, they would say that we had a weird combination of autism and schizophrenia, where the thing with, uh... There, there's a lot of psychology about this, but we have very few records of autism or schizophrenia from the pre-industrial world, where the mental illnesses a society has are driven by the social structure that, and the neuroses it puts in the society. So in the Middle Ages, after the Black Death, you would have entire towns break into dancing as the sort of mania, or people would become witches, or people would have demonic possession. So different society, different psychological neuroses. I have a friend who was an anthropologist in Cambodia for a bunch of years, and the natives in Cambodia, they literally saw magic in their daily lives. So that's an example. They saw magic. They believed in witchcraft completely, and that was just an obvious part of their worldview. And that's something that separates us from the past, where every single other society in history, and even people in pretty recent history like Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Karl Marx, Queen Victoria, believed in the spirit world. Belief in the spirit world was completely common among educated people until around 1900. Um, and so to just go through the list, the idea that history doesn't have any lessons to teach us, that's modern. Men and women are the same, uh, that all... that culture doesn't matter, uh, that genetics doesn't vary across var- differing populations, uh, that human nature is perfectible, that there is no divine, that there is no spirit world, um, that economic progress is assured, that we, that war will end, and that... Yeah, basically that war is unnecessary. Where the past had this very, uh, you could call it realistic sense of the world, where they didn't... Modernity is motivated by this concept that if we get it right, we can break the entire game and win forever.

   7. CWChris Williamson5:33

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   8. RLRudyard Lynch5:33

      And the rest of history would view that as completely insane, and I think

2. 5:37 – 12:55

   The Coming Crisis of the 21st Century

   1. RLRudyard Lynch5:37

      one of the, the biggest things my channel talks about is I think we are on the edge of what I call the crisis of the 21st century, which is what I think will be... And it's easy to say that it's gonna be the bloodiest crisis in history, because in World War II, just 70 years ago, the world had one-quarter its current population. So it's very easy to have the bloodiest crisis in history when you have eight times as many people as the pre-industrial world.

   2. CWChris Williamson6:00

      Mm.

   3. RLRudyard Lynch6:00

      But I think the crisis that we're about to face in the next 30 years will be the bloodiest crisis in history.

   4. CWChris Williamson6:08

      ... why.

   5. RLRudyard Lynch6:09

      Yeah. So I'm looking at a bunch of different models here, and I've a bunch of... I've triangulated a bunch of different equations to find that we are on the verge of the crisis of the 21st century, and I think it's gonna be a global crisis. So let me tell you what the different things I'm looking at. One of them is that Peter Turchin is, and Peter Zeihan's also tapped into this pretty well, I think Zeihan came on your podcast before.

   6. CWChris Williamson6:33

      Mm-hmm.

   7. RLRudyard Lynch6:33

      Uh, if you got, if you know Zeihan, you know one side of this, and I have a lot of respect for Zeihan, I think he's done a good job. Uh, Peter Turchin, pulling from David Hackett Fischer, saw that the world has these global crises every 250 years that can be predicted by three variables in a computer model. Plugging these three variables retroactively historically, off these you can predict the years these crises happen. And what happens in each case is that there's mass war, famine, the decline of the global population, and a change of the social structure as there's political disturbances. In the Western world, the last example of this was the French Revolution and Napoleon. That was 250 years ago. Before then, the religious wars of the 1600s that killed a third of Europe's population. Before then, the Black Death, which killed half of Europe's population. Before then, uh, you have the fall of the Frankish Empire that destroyed centralized government in Western Europe. And you can push these as far back as you wanna look. You've got the Bronze Age collapse, you have the fall of the Roman Republic, and these are predicted off three d- three variables. And one of my favorite books ever is The Great Wave by David Hackett Fischer, and he uses inflation to predict this and you can look at inflation rates to predict when these crises happen, but the three variables are income inequality, decline in, uh, average wages, and competition for elite jobs. These three variables can predict when societies have revolutions to the years they take place in, because the way this variable works is that you have... is all things end up leading to their end, as Aristotle said. Everything ultimately culminates. As Aristotle said, "Something's great strength will become its greatest weakness when pushed to its extremity." And with a period of peace and population growth, what happens is the value between labor and capital gets destabilized. As the value of labor shrinks, the value of money to manipulate it grows, so inequality goes up. So, this explains why the post-World War II era had one of the lowest inequalities in recorded history, while our era has one of the highest inequalities ever. Inequality today is easily in the top five to ten worst periods ever in history. And thus, what happens once the inequality gets that bad and wages stagnate, because we have done literally everything we could do to depreciate wages. We have, uh, doubled the population through natural population growth since World War II, we've imported 50 million immigrants and that's a low ball number, we've globalized to countries like Mexico, China, Malaysia that have lower labor value, we've imported women into the workforce and they're 75% of the population, we've done automation which has actually... People don't think about automation but it's already probably the second or the third most important variable there. So, we have increased the supply of labor by 40%, but the deman- we've increased the supply of labor by 40% over what the demand is, so that's why wages go down.

   8. CWChris Williamson9:32

      Mm-hmm.

   9. RLRudyard Lynch9:32

      It's why Homer Simpson was a lower middle class loser, but he had a wife and kids. His wife stayed at home, three kids, owned his house, could have gone multiple vacations a year. For upper middle class people today, upper middle class young people, that's out of reach. So the quality of life has decri- declined precipitously since the post-war period. And this is something that the pop- that we've been really gaslighted about, but you can look at a variety of metrics between spending power, between ability to own a home, even stuff like height or sleep quality or obesity, and for example, over history, whenever the average age of marriage goes above 28 you're going to have a political crisis.

   10. CWChris Williamson10:09

       (laughs)

   11. RLRudyard Lynch10:10

       So, before the Black Death, people were getting married past age 28. Before, uh-

   12. CWChris Williamson10:14

       But you're not saying that people getting married after 28 caused the Black Death?

   13. RLRudyard Lynch10:18

       No. Humans... What I like to say is humans aren't desig- we're... Humans are designed to breed first and be rational later. So what happens when you pull out the incentive structure where the society... Because we live in a society where people are working too many hours, they can't afford a house, they can't be successful enough to attract a mate, thus their ability to reproduce declines. Once the ability to reproduce gets weaker, it means people start to tear the system apart because if you're screwed in the current system, you're going to roll the dice to get a potential... to get a different outcome. Because if you're screwed in the current route, you have an incentive to roll the dice with a revolution or a political crisis even though it means you could die because that gives you at least some shot. And so what happens as inequality grows, quality of life decreases, is the population splits up into different sub-factions based on the self-interest of different groups. So in medieval France, it was the Armagnacs versus Burgundians. In 17th century England, it was the Parliamentarians versus the Royalists. And all of these underlie some underlying class or ethnic or regional difference, where Royalists versus Cavaliers was, uh, the old nobility based out of Western England, and, versus the capitalists based out of Eastern England. Um, and then you have the Whites versus the Reds in the Russian Revolution, the Optimates versus the Populares parties in Republican Rome. And in us it's the right- the right versus the left. And the right versus the left underlies... There's a couple different correlations you can stack but the one I go after most is college educated versus un-college educated. Every single thing the left pushes makes the college educated better off. Every single thing the right pushes, pushes mostly the merchant class but also, uh, religious and military interests, and there's other stuff you can stack like cities versus countrysides, male versus female, high agency versus low agency. If you have low agency at your work, you're almost certainly gonna be a leftist. And even if you have high agency like you're a small business owner or a farmer, even if you're poor you're gonna be conservative. So-This is the underlying difference. As times get worse, what happens is that people get desperate and so they support their faction over the, uh, centralized government because the centralized government's not gonna give you any stuff. You don't appeal to moderates because the moderates aren't going to ... They haven't done, they haven't done crap for you, so you're going to support a radical that supports your self-interest. And so the right and the left have become further and further radicalized until, what I predict will happen, is that America will have a civil war or revolution within the next one to five years. And I can explain that more if you'd like.

3. 12:55 – 26:04

   What Could’ve Happened if Trump Was Shot

   1. RLRudyard Lynch12:55

   2. CWChris Williamson12:55

      You are someone that's spent a lot of time thinking about alternative histories. What do you think would've happened if Trump had been shot?

   3. RLRudyard Lynch13:04

      That's a great question. So the reason I've been thinking about that, and I- I actually predicted Trump would be assassinated two years in advance, because there are four historic conflicts I use as parallels for our current era, and what I do is I look ... It's almost like string theory where you can find certain historic parallelisms and you follow them, and they often turn out to be true. Those four historic periods are the English Civil War, the American Civil War, the French Revolution, and the fall of the Roman Republic. With the fall of the Roman Republic, what happened is that Rome became a great nation and conquered the world, and for those that are the known world from Syria to Spain. And for those that don't know, Rome was a democracy. It had two political parties that competed against each other, the Optimates and the Populares. And from my study, I found that the Populares are more so Republicans and the Optimates are Democrats. The Opt- the Optimates were more so the Roman deep state, and they had allies in Rome's foreign allied countries. So in the same way the Democrats have allies in Europe or Canada or Australia, the Optimates had allies in, uh, Greece or North Africa or Turkey. And so what happened was that Rome became this great country and Rome imported a third of its population as slaves, and so the slaves depreciated the local labor of the native Romans, and so they fell into poverty. So income inequality became absurd, where you had men who were equivalent to Zuckerberg or Elon Musk who could buy entire countries. Then what happened is Rome also saw a feminist movement, degradation of its moral code, collapse of its religion, and collapse of traditional Roman culture. As the Roman middle class died, Rome spiraled into immense political part- polarization between the Optimates and the Populares. And the Gracchi brothers, in our parallel, because there are multiple cycles I look at, the largest one I know of is the civilizational cycle in which America parallels Rome very strongly, and the Gracchi brothers were wealthy tycoons who operated off a platform of Make Rome Great Again. They wanted to reinstall the Roman middle class, uh, and bring back traditional Roman values at the expense of the wealthy elites in the deep state. What happened first is that the Populares, um, is that the Optimates deep state, they slandered the Gracchis and then said that they were trying to make themselves tyrants. They couldn't run for office by, because they were trying to destroy the democracy and make themselves tyrants. Then when that didn't fail, they assassinated the Gracchi brothers. What then happened is that the Populares, or their version of what I think are the Republicans, spiraled into warlords. And so th- this is a great parallel for what I think is going to happen to America. I think the right will crush the left, but the right lacks so little internal ideological unity-

   4. CWChris Williamson15:48

      Mm-hmm.

   5. RLRudyard Lynch15:48

      ... that the right will spiral into ideological warlords who will kill each other in the same way that for the, the Populares beat the Optimates and then inside the Populares were, uh, you had various, uh, strong men like Augustus, like Julius Caesar, like Marius, Octavian. And, uh, the problem with both the Populares and the Democrats is that they can't pull on groups of fighting men, because if you're the, the Populares or the populists, they can get all these young Roman men to fight for them by offering them stuff. But once you've alienated that, you have to rely on foreign mercenaries, which is what I think the left would do if it was caught in an actually violent conflict where they would try to build up a military of people from Mexico or Europe or Southeast Asia or whatever.

   6. CWChris Williamson16:33

      So the obvious thing that people think is something like ............................ the nice, nice idea, lessons from history, but we're beyond that barbarism now. You know, we're sort of an ascended species. Look, I can predict the weather in Venezuela tomorrow, and I can track what's going on with global news, and I've got air conditioning and I've got a car to take me around. Uh, the interesting thing that you said at the very beginning is, um, this sort of assumption that we've mastered the world, we've mastered social s- movement, social psychology, human psychology, health, science, everything is sort of within our control. And if you believe that, then you don't need to learn from the lessons of history because you assume that you're sort of out and apart from that. What would you say to someone that says, "Yeah, it's, like, nice idea that that happened in Rome or that happened in the French Revolution or whatever. Uh, I don't see the parallel." There's not going to be a land war. We're not going to see a kinetic altercation between left and right in America. That, that seems unbelievable.

   7. RLRudyard Lynch17:33

      I'm gonna answer that question, but I'll posit another question to you first. If we don't use history to study the world, what else are we supposed to look at?

   8. CWChris Williamson17:44

      I don't know what, I don't know what people think that they're using.

   9. RLRudyard Lynch17:47

      Exactly. So what I say is that if you're not using history to study the world, you're making stuff up, because w- the reason we don't like this, and I said before the reason people don't like studying history, is that you're expected to be accountable to it because there's this shared truth, and we've had people who have been analyzing history from as long ago as Herodotus, the Bible, Ibn Khaldun, the Chinese historians like Sima Qian, and they all hit the same points, and we are actually part of their narrative, but we can't explain their narrative. And I'll explain what that means. Where the reason we don't want to do this is the left, which is...One of the things I like to say is that even conservatives are leftists today, because the left has built up the modern worldview so much that even if you try to escape the leftist worldview, you're still operating off leftist assumptions. I just brought up class analysis. That was something Marx invented. The idea of equality being good, that's a Marxist idea. The idea that the government should help people push for greater social betterment is Marxist. And so the left wants to project its basically religious vision of the world, and the only way they can do that is by destroy- is by saying history's not important. And it's a tale as old as time inside history that wealthy eras get arrogant, where it's called decadence. It happened to the Greeks, the Romans, the Indians, the Chinese. Uh, and we are decadent, and decadent societies thinks they've- think they've mastered everything, they think they've accomplished everything, and then they grow weak, and then a new stronger faction emerges and wipes them out. So you can explain our hubris by being an extreme form of decadence that we are the wealthiest society in history, and thus we are even more delusional. And what I would say is that every single era, to differing degrees, thinks their era is special. Then you look back, and no one is special. If you see these patterns going back thousands of years, and it always comes back around, and if we think we are special, and we're unwilling to look at the dozens of times before we weren't special, that's legitimately a form of madness. If you want to completely ignore the outside evidence and then just believe your inner truth, that, it fits the definition of madness.

   10. CWChris Williamson19:59

       What's this got to do with Trump being shot at?

   11. RLRudyard Lynch20:02

       Uh, you have to look at the parallels between the future and the past, in which things can get bad because they have consistently gotten bad. And so if you choose not to look at it, it's going to, to catch you in the dark and slit your throat. And I would say, like, because I can talk about all these ideas, I can talk about the abstractions, the, the statistical models, but what I'd say is look outside. Like, go to Los Angeles, go to New York City, go to parts of Austin, and things aren't good, and then compare it to a photo reel of the 1960s. Um, look at your own personal life. Look at the lives of everyone around you. Uh, most people are depressed, poor, lonely, sexless, angry, have mental health issues. Most people's lives aren't good. Uh, and that's true on about the statistical and anecdotal basis. And furthermore, in the last month, Trump was nearly assassinated. The Democrats had to pull Kamala out as a candidate. Um, and they, sorry, they had to replace Biden with Kamala. And there have been states that have taken Tr- uh, Trump off the ballot. Uh, there has, the last two elections have been disputed. And so for each case, these are things that have only happened in the previous American Civil War. And so just look outside. The things, we've had enough warning shots at this point.

   12. CWChris Williamson21:23

       I'm not sure that I would agree with the, uh, everybody's life anecdotally is worse than it would have been in the 1960s. I don't know enough specifically about America.

   13. RLRudyard Lynch21:33

       20% has it better, 80% has it worse. It's comparable to dating, where what happened with, uh, income inequality and various things, is the top 20% did vastly better and the bottom 80% did worse. So I'm using everyone colloquially.

   14. CWChris Williamson21:46

       Mm-hmm. I see. Yeah, I, I don't know. Maybe I'm not fornicating with the 80% sufficiently well, um, but I, no, I, I, I don't know, man. I, I understand what you mean. Uh, there is, uh, certainly an awful lot of problems, whether it's coming from the maiden side, whether it's coming from e- economics, whether it's coming from, uh, real wages and what they can buy, whether it's coming from a, a psychological health standpoint, a psychic health standpoint. Um, but I look around me and I don't only hang around with highfalutin, sort of super successful people-

   15. RLRudyard Lynch22:17

       Yes.

   16. CWChris Williamson22:18

       Uh, and many of those people are flourishing. Not only that, but almost all of them are in relationships. Almost all of them are getting married. Almost all of them are having kids. And they're teachers, they're builders, they're plumbers, they're fucking Uber drivers. You know, they're not that homogenous when it comes to being in some super-

   17. RLRudyard Lynch22:35

       Yes.

   18. CWChris Williamson22:35

       ... upper echelon. So my sort of lived experience is different. That being said, I do see the data. So I have this discordance between what is being reported to me and then what I sometimes experience in my own life. All of that to say, what would have happened if Trump had been shot?

   19. RLRudyard Lynch22:54

       Oh-

   20. CWChris Williamson22:54

       What would have happened? How would the world be different?

   21. RLRudyard Lynch22:56

       I thought I answered that. The right would spiral into factions, where the issue with the right today is that there's no unifying ideology. The right is a various coalition of various anti-left factions. Um, and so the right has libertarians, it has populists, it has, uh, it has, uh, theoc- religious people, it has, uh, boomer cons, uh, fascists, and the right is held together by Trump's cult of personality. And I think this is something conservatives have to be careful about, that Trump's in his 70s. In no timeline is he going to live for the next few decades. And so what happened with the fall of the Roman Republic with the death of the Gracchis is that after the death of the Gracchis, the right re- the, basically Republicans lose faith in the system so you start seeing violence. There's in-and-out violence, um, in which people lose faith that the system has any service for them and so they lose the incentive to cooperate with others. And what would happen is I think that there would be blood in the street if Trump got shot. I think, uh, various, I think parts of the military would mutiny. I think, uh, various militias and stuff would kill people. There'd be riots in major cities. I don't know how bad the blood would be. The death of Trump is not my first targ- is not the, one of the dominant variables I would use to predict a civil war, but I completely think that there would be violence. And the thing is, even, the reason the left is, or the reason... Both sides are incredibly weak now. The Democrats and the Republicans are not operating under strong platforms. And so-... anything could knock them over at this point.

   22. CWChris Williamson24:31

       Mm-hmm.

   23. RLRudyard Lynch24:31

       The, and then inside them are various sub-factions, where the left's been eaten up by wokeness, which is this, which is, it- it just gets more and more radical each time it happens, while the right is, uh, all these different sub-factions. And so I would guess, and I'm just throwin' this out here, you would see maybe someone like an Elon, someone like, uh, someone like a, a Republican senator rise to a new leadership, and then you would compete with other Republicans for dominance inside the coalition.

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4. 26:04 – 32:43

   Why There Will Be a Far-Right Backlash

   1. CWChris Williamson26:04

      How does this relate to your predictions for a coming far right backlash?

   2. RLRudyard Lynch26:10

      The reason I say that we're gonna have a far right backlash is the same reason that why I think the, why I think that we are gonna have a revolution. Because what I see now, and I- I've looked at this through various different ways, is the elite now is incredibly stupid and foolish and arrogant, and they don't know how little they don't know. Meanwhile, you have this giant population of young men who are very well-armed. They're, they have nothing to lose, um, they're hopeless, and they can be easily manipulated. And so, that's first two variables. Third variable is that wokeness, wokeness is very poorly constructed because it establishes no incentives for cooperation. If you're a straight white man, wokeness will never be nice to you, no matter what you do. Meanwhile, they can't control the behavior of the people who are in their preferred racial or ethnic groups, where if you're a Black Muslim, uh, gay person, everything you do is fine, they can't control your behavior. So wokeness has got a lot of structural issues, and I can't believe they did it, because they've pushed wokeness so hard that it's basically built up this obvious resentment against it, and that resentment is gonna get loosened somewhere. And so, to repeat, foolish, arrogant elite, young white men, and also DEI and the economy have really screwed over young white men so they can't succeed in the current corporate system, and then you have, uh, a suicidally delusional ideology. So it's like you have two rooms, one building up pressure and one without enough pressure, and they're gonna hit an equilibrium.

   3. CWChris Williamson27:46

      So, me and you have spoken about this a couple of times before, uh, my male sedation hypothesis versus your incel far right uprising. Uh, give your, um, sort of insight about where you think young men are at at the moment, mental health, their desire for revolution and such.

   4. RLRudyard Lynch28:06

      I've had this debate a bunch, or not, I've had this discussion a lot of times, and the point that we've often ended up, I'm jumping three points ahead in the conversation, is that the conversation we often have is, what I say is, most young men won't want to fight.

   5. CWChris Williamson28:18

      Mm-hmm.

   6. RLRudyard Lynch28:18

      There's small cadres of radicals who will push for it, and then what happens is that those radicals are the people in charge. So if you look at these conflicts, the Jacobins were the French Revolution, they were less than 1% of France's population. Literally, you could look at the, this is such a cool fact, you could look at the s- political sub-factions of the French Revolution based off what cafes they went to, and-

   7. CWChris Williamson28:39

      You're kidding me.

   8. RLRudyard Lynch28:40

      No, really. So different political radicals in the French Revolution went to literally different cafes in Paris, so you could map out the fa- the political radical factions based off what streets the cafes they went to were. So you're operating off groups that are that small.

   9. CWChris Williamson28:54

      Mm-hmm.

   10. RLRudyard Lynch28:54

       The Bolsheviks, when they won the Russian Civil War, they were, all communists were 3% of their population, and the Bolsheviks were a minority of that. Uh, the, the, the Puritans who won the English Civil War, they were 10% of the population. The American Revolution, no one wanted the American Revolution five years before it started, and then it just got ratcheted up over time. So I like, when people ask me, "Rudyard, what are the different subdivisions inside the right?" I say, "Most people have no clue what's happening." Most people, um, don't know what's going on. They don't really have a concept of, uh, of what's gonna happen next. And then you have these factions of radicals that jockey, and before the English Civil War, people said the English have grown too weak to fight, and this was in the 1600s. It had been over a century since England had a civil war. What happened then is that the, the royalists and, uh, the parliamentarians, they just conscripted people. Same thing with the French Revolution, same thing at the Russian Civil War. The normies don't organize. They don't say, "Let's have a riot for normies. Let's push normies, normies forever." The radicals organize, and then they conscript the normies. So most of the population can just want to play video games and do sports. What you need is you need to have small factions of radicals that are capable of conscripting the normies.

   11. CWChris Williamson30:05

       What was that stat that you came up with, 20% are motivated, 60% will do whatever somebody says?

   12. RLRudyard Lynch30:11

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson30:11

       What's that thing?

   14. RLRudyard Lynch30:12

       So I pulled that from game theory, where, uh, it's a bunch of different things, where in game theory, you've consistently found, uh, and this is, I've- I've- I've studied multiple game theory studies on this. In general, 60% of the population will do what the group tells them to do. Six, and so, uh, we have various game theory studies. One is do you contribute to the, the pot, or do you take away? 20% of the population always contributes, even if against their self-interest. 20% tries to ch- cheat whenever they can. And then 60%...... tries to, um, just does whatever the group consensus is. And for certain things, like, will you put up this sign in front of your house? If, for various studies, if you can change the neighborhood consensus, that will move it 60 points. So, if the neighborhood consensus says don't put this sign up, 18% of people do it. If the neighborhood consensus changes, it moves up to 88, it moves up to s- 88 per- 78%, yes.

   15. CWChris Williamson31:06

       Yes.

   16. RLRudyard Lynch31:06

       Um, and, and so most people today are in ennui. They don't know what they really want. They don't know what they're really doing. They-

   17. CWChris Williamson31:14

       What's an ennui, for the people that don't know?

   18. RLRudyard Lynch31:15

       Oh, yeah. Uh, ennui is a French word for a lack of comprehens- a, a lack of connectiveness to your world and a lack of feeling connected, connected to, uh, your life.

   19. CWChris Williamson31:27

       It's like an existential angst.

   20. RLRudyard Lynch31:28

       It is, yes. Yes.

   21. CWChris Williamson31:30

       Okay.

   22. RLRudyard Lynch31:30

       And so most people don't know what's happening because the, the, the 2010 mind cannot comprehend our world, and most people are still mentally stuck in 2010. And I like to say that the way I would explain, uh, I would explain life today to my teenage self is I would say, "We became a sci-fi dystopia," but most people can't reach that conclusion, and so they're kinda stuck in this middle ground. So our current period, period is a period in which all of these factions are squabbling over who will become the dominant culture in a way that's comparable to the Jacobins squabbling among other French radicals, the Bolsheviks squabbling among other Russians, uh, various... We're in the building up period, and as Lenin said, "There are hours in which decades happen, and there are decades in which nothing happens." And so history works. We don't realize it's gonna happen until it slams you in the face, like the start of World War I or the fall of the Soviet Union. Uh, and this is just how things happen. Tensions gradually build up. If you're the kinda person who looks for this stuff, you see it. Otherwise, you continue your life. And then it just hits.

   23. CWChris Williamson32:37

       You're really stretching my, uh, historical and imaginary, uh, imaginative abilities.

5. 32:43 – 44:40

   Why People Are So Easily Swayed

   1. CWChris Williamson32:43

      Just trying to run forward with your idea of, um, sort of how easily swayed certain people are. Certainly 2020, summer of 2020, we saw a lot of people, I think, get involved in, uh, victimhood narrative and identity politics that probably wouldn't have done rec- previously, uh, probably didn't actually have that much insight. I mean, we've seen it when you go to these protests and people are chanting, "From the river to the sea," and they say, "Which river? Which sea?" and they don't know what they're talking about.

   2. RLRudyard Lynch33:10

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson33:10

      You've seen the same thing anytime that you push groups on the far right or the far left to actually understand what they're talking about. It's pretty evident that most of these people are just holding onto the coattails of a movement that-

   4. RLRudyard Lynch33:21

      Yes.

   5. CWChris Williamson33:21

      ... they think is the right or righteous thing to do. Uh, so I actually do see, even from my own experience, I do see that kind of, uh, domino effect, this mass domino effect happening, where only a small few groups at the start can, uh, rally-

   6. RLRudyard Lynch33:38

      Yes.

   7. CWChris Williamson33:38

      ... many downstream.

   8. RLRudyard Lynch33:39

      What do normal people believe in?

   9. CWChris Williamson33:43

      I have no idea.

   10. RLRudyard Lynch33:43

       Exactly. What I've told... So one of the takes I've made is I think this war will be the bloodiest war. It'll be fought horribly. I think there's gonna be purges. I think people will burn cities down. And I was talking a- on another podcast, they said, "Why do you think that?" And I said, "You, if, if you can't actually..." There are no deep values that are imprinted in people. Wokeness is very, I call it mask morality. It's this very exit, it's this very, uh, performative morality that doesn't actually require that you change your character. And I said that this is, this is one of the great ironies, that removing a Christian value system and replacing it with subjective postmodernism... There's something people don't realize. That is what got to Na- the Nazis or Stalin, because once you think everything's subjective and, uh, everything is according to interpretation, you don't have an argument for killing people for your goals. You don't have an argument for killing millions of people to reach utopia. And so I think normal people, when they don't believe in anything, they are capable of doing absolutely horrible things. And, like, to bring back a question you asked at the start of the podcast, the reason I think this is possible is because the bloodiest events in history, the bloodiest wars, the worst genocides, the worst slave states in history happened within living memory. You could call up people who were at the Holocaust or who were in Stalin's gulags now, and do you think we've really changed in the gen- in the lifetime since?

   11. CWChris Williamson35:03

       Mm. So I think, you know, my position has been for quite a while, and I've put this to you too, that there is just so much sedation of the populous, specifically the cohort that you're talking about-

   12. RLRudyard Lynch35:15

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson35:15

       ... through porn, through video games, through social media and screens, that there is this, uh, sort of mass opium, this, um-

   14. RLRudyard Lynch35:22

       Copium.

   15. CWChris Williamson35:23

       Copium, indeed. Uh, and I, my, I mean, uh, fucking hell. Me laying the, uh, sanity and safety of the future of the West at the feet of porn websites, video games, and social media doesn't exactly sound like a glowing review.

   16. RLRudyard Lynch35:41

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson35:41

       But I do think that there is so much... Uh, it, it could be so different that it's no longer just a difference of degree. It's genuinely a step change difference in kind of what we're able to do and able to, uh, sort of calming down this uprising, uh, desire, even when many of the people are out there doing it because it involves getting out of the house, getting dressed, utilizing the latent executive function that you haven't ever used.

   18. RLRudyard Lynch36:10

       Why do you think porn would have a strong enough effect for that to work?

   19. CWChris Williamson36:13

       I think that porn is able to curtail men's desire for reproduction. Not satisfactorily, but I think it is able to at least stop them from-... uh, feeling what in the past ... I mean, what was that example from Portugal? I'm pretty sure you taught me about that. The first son got to marry, the second, third, and fourth s-

   20. RLRudyard Lynch36:32

       Oh, right, yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson36:32

       They were all put on galleon ships, "Go explore the new world."

   22. RLRudyard Lynch36:35

       Yeah.

   23. CWChris Williamson36:35

       Well, what were they doing? They were trying to fix the sex ratio-

   24. RLRudyard Lynch36:37

       Yeah.

   25. CWChris Williamson36:37

       ... that, um, that basically, I think that it gives a titrated dose of sexual satisfaction to men who, without that, it would be one more, you know, just one more thing, the same as I don't sit at home and wonder about whether my life has meaning, I've got Netflix or I've got, uh, Xbox Live or whatever. I don't go out and spend sufficient time with my local cohort of friends-

   26. RLRudyard Lynch37:01

       Yeah.

   27. CWChris Williamson37:01

       ... to actually create a little revolutionary group that can go and push over granny and set cars on fire, because I'm busy watching, uh, social media.

   28. RLRudyard Lynch37:09

       And why do you think porn has a strong enough effect to do that?

   29. CWChris Williamson37:13

       Uh, not on its own to be able to do all of it. I think porn has a sufficiently strong effect to be able to sedate men's desire for women, just that men are largely mechanical creatures. Uh, the fact that you can look at a four-inch across screen and see a naked woman and your brain tell your limbic system some sex is about to happen. You can look around the side of it, you know that it's not real, and yet it's able to kid you. It's just so easily fallible, uh, that I think it's enough, or it has been thus far enough to keep men, uh, satisfied, unsatisfactorily.

   30. RLRudyard Lynch37:48

       Yeah. I'm 23, so I know a lot of the people in the demographic we're talking about explicitly. And I think that for a s- a part of men, that's true. I think human nature isn't like that though. I think human nature is not that stupid, where if people don't actually have... I think the subconscious is very deep, if people don't actually have reproductive options, if they don't have pride, if they don't have self-respect, if they don't have the ability to move socially, I don't think they can trick their minds through various distractions. And I think the easiest example of that is the cripplingly bad mental health issues, because the m- the mental health issues are a sign that subconsciously, um, w- we just can't trick ourselves. And I would agree with your thesis if this wasn't hitting elite aspirant men, because if you get a degree... An- a- it's a multivariate thing, uh, it's not just a dating crisis, it's, uh, not being able to get a good job, cost of living being too high. I think it's 10 different things that pile up. And if it was just the dating crisis, we wouldn't have this, but the other things add up too. Um, it's... I think all of that adds up so that, um, it creates enough of a sense of desperation among elite aspirant men that you would, that you could have this. And the example I'll give is, remember the Colombia protests?
6. 44:40 – 48:57

   The Primary Issues of the Left

   1. CWChris Williamson44:40

      Yeah, I think there's definitely something interesting about the displeasure and the sort of disgust that some elements of the far left have with a big chunk of the west, which is white guys. You know, if you're a white man, uh, you are the very, very bottom of the victimhood hierarchy. You get no points at all. Uh, you had this quote, which I really thought was interesting, "Don't gloat over your conquered foe. It gains you nothing and makes the conquered more dangerous."

   2. RLRudyard Lynch45:12

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson45:13

      And that, to me, is... It is, um, indicative of, of this really sort of... Well, actually, just explain that quote to me. Like, why, wh- why was that so interesting?

   4. RLRudyard Lynch45:22

      I mean, if, if you look at the history of empires, it's obvious. Like, if you wanna conquer someone, you need to kind of have a relationship with them. It doesn't have to be a good relationship. But let's look at the British Empire as an example. When the Brit- when the English subjugated the In- the Irish and the Scottish, they gave, they, they gave them social status if they fought for the empire. You could be an Irish or a Scottish guy, go to India, and you'd be treated like an English person. That was a way to get rid of all of the aspirational, aggressive, young Irish and Scottish guys. With the Romans, if you were part of... If you... They conquered you, you were a sharp young guy, they would let you into Roman culture. And so when, when you conquer someone, you still have a relationship with.

   5. CWChris Williamson46:02

      You assimilate in some way.

   6. RLRudyard Lynch46:03

      Exactly. Um, and the left, the left always really shocks me, because their complete lack of strategy is insane, where, um, they do not look at the... The, the left's great strength is the ability to manipulate people, where they can... Especially women. The left has like f- 10 different hooks in the psy- in the collective psyche of women that they can pull from to get them to do what they want. They're horrible at grand strategy though. And it's really shocking, wh- they just set up their entire coalition, that, th- their coalition-building is really bad, which is... I could explain that if you'd like. And so they've established no incentive for white men to cooperate inside the system, and they keep on ritually humiliating them. I don't think this would be this bad if the left didn't turn every single vector of culture into ritual humiliation of white men. Even if they just let Hollywood not be woke, I think that would, it would make things a lot better. But normies can't not ignore Hollywood. And I'm gonna throw this point in here, we're at a point where the western... The gover- the democratically elected governments of the west are purposely committing civilizational suicide. If we've rel- reached this threshold, and we can't talk about it, something's very wrong, where the governments of the west, they're doi-... A lot of them are doing de-growth, the de-grow an industrialized economy. They're bringing in immigrants not out of economic self-interest, but to replace the local population. Um, they are trying to, they're trying to like de- over-regulate the economy. They're trying to get rid of, uh, western heritage and western culture, and even destroy statues, uh, of the west's former leaders. The point of this is not to ni-... It's not some f- sort of warped self-interest, it's suicide. We are a civilization that's openly committing suicide.

   7. CWChris Williamson47:51

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7. 48:57 – 53:22

   Anti-Human Agenda of Climate Activists

   1. CWChris Williamson48:57

      I saw an interesting, uh, one of the three morning takes from Pirate Wise today, talking about this guy that's coming up with, uh, technology. Is it sulfur technology that they spray into the atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays away? So basically, we can curtail, uh, some of the effect of carbon emissions in the atmosphere with global warming by getting up above the carbon reflection and reflecting it back before it comes down-

   2. RLRudyard Lynch49:24

      Yes.

   3. CWChris Williamson49:24

      ... to the earth. And this has been loudly, loudly denounced by all of the pro-green environmental movements and-

   4. RLRudyard Lynch49:31

      Yes.

   5. CWChris Williamson49:31

      ... it was the theory on Pirate Wise, the reason for that is that it cuts off at the knees the degrowth movement.

   6. RLRudyard Lynch49:38

      Yes, exactly. That's the e- So I was talking to some people I know, and they asked me, "Do Te-" A- they're from the Northeast, they said, "Do Texans feel guilty for using air conditioning all year?" And I said, "No chance. It's a non-negotiable for this to be an industrialized civilization. If Texas didn't have AC, we'd be having this conversation in Pennsylvania or California." Um, and...

   7. CWChris Williamson50:00

      It's a vital system.

   8. RLRudyard Lynch50:01

      Exactly, yeah (laughs) . And, um, and so the crazy thing is that... Oh yeah, so the reason they're pushing against air conditioning, and air conditioning, i- i- do- you explain this further, you could nuke the entirety of Northwestern Europe and it would have negative eff- it would have little effect on carbon emissions. The thing that really is pushing carbon emissions is China and India installing 100 factories every second, 100 coal-powered factories every second. If you really cared about fixing the climate, you would build nuclear power. France or Hungary are mostly driven off nuclear power. Uh, but the point, and th- I just released a video on the Unabomber, and the thesis I say with the video is that there are psychological pre- pressures implicit to industrial civilization that we don't understand that create psychological issues which, um, which mean that people are actively pushing for the death of civilization. And, and the reason I think is I don't think humans... This is a whole different tangent, uh, h- I don't think humans evolved to live outside villages. I don't think humans evolved to live in cities and away from the earth, and so I think it creates weird psychological pressures. And it's not a coincidence that the places that have been industrialized for the longest, such as the Northeastern US, the Netherlands, Britain, are the places they're trying to commit civilizational suicide because I think industrial civilization, we haven't figured out the cultural compatibility with it in the same way that for the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, looking through the archeological record, we find that there were very rapid fluctuations in population. Population goes up, crashes by 80%, goes up again, crashes by 60%. That happened a couple times as agriculture was inventing because people didn't know how to deal with an agricultural society. I think that's-

   9. CWChris Williamson51:47

      What do you think happened? What causes so many people to pa-

   10. RLRudyard Lynch51:50

       Oh, this is, this is super cool. So, uh, you know how the, when the Europeans came to the new world, uh, they, the diseases wiped out the natives? The reasoning for that is that th- from the period between 10,000 BC and 5,000 BC, the Europeans or Eurasians started dealing with domesticated animals like cows and pigs, and almost all of our diseases are from domesticated animals. And so what happens when you're living with them very closely is that you get all these diseases. So Sif- agriculture was invented in 10,000 BC. The first cities were around 4,000 BC. The world's population was stagnant even after the invention of agriculture long term because we were hit by so many waves of diseases that we didn't evolve for. So the Eurasians went through this disease gradient that wiped out the Native Americans who didn't have domesticated animals in the 10,000 BC to 5,000 BC period. So I would say disease is the biggest cause, but we also know that there were... Agriculture was spread by genocide, and so it's very difficult to get a non-agricultural population to take in agriculture. And so, uh, like the Middle Easterners genocided a lot, the western half of Asia against the native peoples but we have archeological records that the native peoples could launch... The native hunter-gatherer peoples were able to launch counterattacks that could wipe out hundreds of miles of, of farmer land. So there was a nate- We know from archeology there was a native confederacy in Scandinavia that launched a genocidal war across Poland and Germany like 7,000 years ago.

   11. CWChris Williamson53:19

       That is so cool. What, so just,

8. 53:22 – 1:04:53

   How Dangerous is the Declining Birth Rate?

   1. CWChris Williamson53:22

      you know, touching on a topic that seems quite timely at the moment when we're talking about population decline, birth rates at the moment, how do you fold-

   2. RLRudyard Lynch53:30

      Yes.

   3. CWChris Williamson53:31

      ... the current declining birth rates into this discussion?

   4. RLRudyard Lynch53:34

      I was hoping we'd get to this. Um, uh, do you know Mouse Utopia?

   5. CWChris Williamson53:39

      Assume I don't.

   6. RLRudyard Lynch53:40

      Okay, great. Um, so Mouse Utopia, and this is one of my best videos for people watching, um, Mouse Utopia was a study that was run 30 times in the '60s and '70s, and the way the study works is that you drop nine mice into a cage that can hold 6,000 mice with perfect conditions. Then what happens is that the mice population balloons. There's, uh, infinite food, no predators, perfect climate, no disease, and then... And they were doing this at the time because this was the era when the world's pop- the world's population went up five times over in the 20th century, and for reasonable reasons, they were worried about what the effects of that would be. And then past the 2,000 mark, and again, that's one third of the carrying capacity, bizarre things happen. The mice stu- the mice split up into different subcategories of antisocial behavior. You had autistic mice who couldn't socially interact. You had sociopathic mice who would kill the mice that would continue to breed. You had the beautiful ones who would just groom themselves all day, but they would never breed. You had female mice who refused to, to mate and they'd just hang out isolated. You had homeless mice who would wander around the center of the colony allowing themselves to get beaten up. Uh, and you had a, the mi- the mouse social structure completely broke down, and then the birth rate crashed to completely zero as the mice lost the ability to have communities or socially interact with each other.

   7. CWChris Williamson55:02

      How much have we, as humans with frontal lobes, got to learn from the social structure of mice?

   8. RLRudyard Lynch55:08

      Yes. So, the mouse and the human brain structure is dif- is similar except for one variable, that being the free- fr- the prefrontal cortex, as you teased out, where we have the amygdala and we have, we have the lizard and the mammal brain, and those control for automatic functions, how we process, uh, fear or horniness or jealousy or happiness or excitement. We process that similarly to, like, a dog or a horse or a cat because, uh, we have the same lizard brain and the same mammal brain. So automatic functions and, uh, emotions are comparable across mammals. Now, finally, the thing that we do have that the mice don't is we have a vastly enlarged prefrontal cortex, which is the ability to plan and think in abstract, um, and that's what allowed the creation of human civilization. And with Mouse Utopia, you're seeing fundamentally hormonal changes, where the mice aren't rationally thinking to themselves, um, that "I don't wanna have kids. I hate everyone around me. I'm gonna be depressed." Um, the mice just act on impulse because the hormones change, and it's comparable to people with mental health conditions or who catch diseases. We humans, um, you could, let's say, catch a horrifying disease tomorrow and then you would- it would completely change how you feel the world on a personal basis. Our minds are not buffered from the world, and so we would see the same hormonal changes as the mice, but we would have the ability to think about them abstractly. But what I'd say for Mouse Utopia is every single thing in Mouse Utopia has already happened. It's just it hasn't fully played through its logic.

   9. CWChris Williamson56:51

      What is the underlying dynamic that caused that to happen in Mouse Utopia? I don't understand why you get to one-third the carrying capacity of a perfect environment and all of these weird side effects h- like, what's media-

   10. RLRudyard Lynch57:05

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson57:05

       ... is there a fucking spirit that gets in there and goes, "Oh, there's, there, they hit the 2,000 thing, time for the ethereal m- mouse poltergeist to go in-"

   12. RLRudyard Lynch57:12

       Yes.

   13. CWChris Williamson57:12

       "... and make everybody crazy." What's the dynamic? What's going on?

   14. RLRudyard Lynch57:16

       It's hard to say. I mean, if you look at the fall of Rome as an example, uh, it's unclear what caused the fall of Rome, where people... It's often a Rorschach test for what you care about. You can say the fall of Rome was caused by change in military structure, uh, civilizational, i- Rome's civilizational cycle ending, uh, climate change, population decline, uh, decline in values, uh, et cetera. And so complex historic events, it's often very difficult to figure out what actually caused them. Like, why did Genghis Khan become such a great conqueror? I could give you 10 reasons. I don't know which one is accurate. In Mouse Utopia, it's comparable, where the guy who ran the experiment, Calhoun-

   15. CWChris Williamson57:54

       He did the same, all 30?

   16. RLRudyard Lynch57:56

       Yeah, he did, he did 30 together.

   17. CWChris Williamson57:59

       Oh, so he did them all at the same time?

   18. RLRudyard Lynch58:00

       No, no, so he did-

   19. CWChris Williamson58:01

       Sorry.

   20. RLRudyard Lynch58:01

       ... he did over a very long period of time and he did 30 experiments.

   21. CWChris Williamson58:04

       Understood.

   22. RLRudyard Lynch58:05

       Yes. And so he, after doing all the experiments, said that it was lack of agency, uh, that the mice, once they lived in a perfect world that was overcrowded, they stopped feeling like they could actually go out in the world and do things. And th- it's very comparable to what Ted Kaczynski said the issue with modern civilization, which is over-socialization. Uh-

   23. CWChris Williamson58:25

       Dig into that for me.

   24. RLRudyard Lynch58:26

       Y- th- this is my last video as well, so it's pretty topical. The Unabomber said that industrial civilization would either collapse or we would use genetic engineering to change humans into cogs over the course of the 21st century. For those that don't know, the Unabomber was a terrorist from the 1990s and he... The reason he did his terrorism was to get the message out so that people could deal with it. But what the Unabomber said is that the complex interconnected system that is industrial civilization is so difficult to get to flow together that you need to have the individual sacrifice lots of their animal nature and lots of their individuality to get the system to work.

   25. CWChris Williamson59:10

       How so?

   26. RLRudyard Lynch59:11

       I'm gonna use an example I did from the last video. Um, there was no concept of employment in the pre-industrial world. Everyone was a renting farmer and they worked for themselves, and in the fa- in the pre-industrial world, the family was an economic unit. You, uh, your wife, w- uh, your father was your boss, you worked with your father, uh, your mother helped manage the economic system that was the family. You knew everyone around you. In the pre-industrial world, society was a community of people you know. Every single service, whether your religion, whether your insurance, whether your military defense, whether your, your people you work with, uh, for your, uh, job, they were all people you knew. It was a community. And so the idea of splitting people up into all these different sub-components of your- of their lives, it wouldn't... It didn't exist back then. And now modern civilization is a bureaucracy. I like to say a normal person knows significantly more bureaucracies than they have friends. Where there's the bureaucracy that do- handles waste, there's the school, there's your work, et cetera. And the thing with bureaucracies is you can't build up intimate social connections and, um... So what happens here is that because society gets atomized and split up due to the way, due to the sheer scale of industrial civilization-

   27. CWChris Williamson1:00:29

       Mm-hmm.

   28. RLRudyard Lynch1:00:29

       ... it means a person has to wear their mask all the time. They can't be authentic, they have to wear their mask with their boss, they have to wear their mask, uh, often with their families, uh, with their friends. There's n- and we've consistently found in all the great big universities, like Harvard and Columbia have studied this, the most important component for happiness is social connection. And so that would have significant social effects that we wouldn't even mentally process. It's not a side dish, it's the main course and...Uh, another, one of the most interesting books I've read is, uh, The History of Manners by Norbert Elias, and it's a history of manners in the Western world-

   29. CWChris Williamson1:01:06

       Mm-hmm.

   30. RLRudyard Lynch1:01:06

       ... from the Middle Ages until the present. And the fascinating thing is in the Middle Ages, um, if you wanted to cook something, you would cut up the animal carcass in front of your friends. In the Middle Ages, it was completely normal for friends and family to have sex in front of each other. Knights would write poetry about how much they loved the act of killing. Um, th- it was, it was a society where, like, there was no concept of privacy, and those are things that we find disgusting in our society because we deal with so many people we don't know that we don't want to see people we don't know do those things. And, um, and so the argument that the Unabomber made, and this is, this is really crazy where the left... Societies in collapse normally push their worst trait even further, uh, and that's a, a fascinating historical trend, where when the Aztecs knew they were gonna die as a civilization, they killed more people. When the Nazis knew that they were gonna lose World War II, they killed more Jews. When the Muslim world realized the European colonialists would wipe them out, they became more conservative. And so what the left did upon dealing with the underlying issues of industrial civilization is that they doubled down on using social engineering to control people. If you're a leftist, you're not allowed to like your country. You're not allowed to be possessive in romantic relationships. You're not allowed to want to kill people. You're not allowed to be chauvinistic and naturally push your own self-interest. You're not allowed to use magical thinking or believe in the divi- th- the divine. Um, where if you look at the left's worldview, and I know lots of people like this, people who are just... The inner elite or the low-level elite of the managerial class is completely socialized. If you look at someone like, let's say, a local, uh, bank branch manager or someone who works in the bureaucracy of Google, they are people who can't change out of the corporate America setting. They don't show a wide variety of emotions. They don't think things they're not told to. They do whatever their elites say. Uh, they believe that-
9. 1:04:53 – 1:14:39

   What is the Right Getting Wrong?

   1. CWChris Williamson1:04:53

      A lot of criticism of the left, uh, and perhaps rightly so. What is the right getting wrong mostly in your view? What do they face

   2. NANarrator1:05:03

      That's a-

   3. CWChris Williamson1:05:04

      ... fronting around?

   4. RLRudyard Lynch1:05:04

      That's a great question. Um, the, the video I'm writing now is the anthropology of the left. The video I'm gonna write next is the anthropology of the right. And so I study the left and the right as if they were tribes in the Amazon or the Congo. I look at the demographics that formed them, their philosophic assumptions, their strengths and weaknesses. Um, the right has no shared coherent ideology. The right doesn't... Thomas Sowell has said that the right is whatever the left isn't. So if you look at conservatives, you have the Taliban, you have libertarians, you have Nazis, you have monarchists, you have religious fundamentalists, you have, uh, classical liberals. These people share nothing except the left's coherent vision of the world. The future is whatever the left says, and the conservatives build their worldview off a past that never really existed. And, and so, uh, they're... When we're talking about the right, we're talking about different factions. I think the Boomercons and the old school right are, are frankly, like... Am I allowed to swear in this show?

   5. CWChris Williamson1:06:04

      Of course.

   6. RLRudyard Lynch1:06:05

      Oh yeah, they're cucks. Like, the Boomercons are cucks. Uh, they don't go hard enough. They don't have any concept of what's going on in the world. Um, the new right are sociopaths. Uh, the Christian right is delusional. Um, yeah, you can just give me factions, and I can criticize them.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:06:22

      (laughs) Well, it seems to me, at least looking at good portions of the right, maybe more sort of the, uh, manosphere right-

   8. RLRudyard Lynch1:06:30

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:06:30

      ... this sort of young men's movement, there is so much fucking cynicism.

   10. RLRudyard Lynch1:06:34

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:06:34

       It is, it is a very uninspiring movement to be a part of.

   12. RLRudyard Lynch1:06:39

       Yeah. Exactly. I'd say the biggest issue of the new right is that... The biggest issue of our entire society is it lacks a soul. There's a wonderful book by an Orthodox theologian that says, "The modern world is divided between those who numb itself to its meaninglessness through various substances and various hedonisms and those who realize it and go crazy." Every-

   13. CWChris Williamson1:06:57

       (laughs)

   14. RLRudyard Lynch1:07:00

       Exactly.

   15. CWChris Williamson1:07:02

       (laughs) Yeah. I just, uh, you know, th- that when I look at a lot of the ... Even the sort of more right-leaning content at the moment, even the- the hopeful messages are guised within a, "You have to do this, because if you don't do this then everything's going to go to shit."

   16. RLRudyard Lynch1:07:19

       Yeah, yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson1:07:19

       Like, your hopefulness is kind of delivered at the end of a barrel of a gun.

   18. RLRudyard Lynch1:07:22

       Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Um, and ... Yeah, it's just depressing, and like, the thing I see with a lot of the new right is it's just... It's very cynical, you're right. It lacks any sense of inner authenticity or inner truth, and it's funny, the people who tell you to be authentic are the least authentic people in the world. Um, some random redneck from my hometown in Pennsylvania is much more authentic than a person who says, "Be- be yourself, love yourself, be authentic."

   19. CWChris Williamson1:07:47

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   20. RLRudyard Lynch1:07:48

       Um, and- and, uh, yeah, it's ... It also gets stuck on weird points where, uh, like, this is a big issue, we've lost the ability to change settings, and so the new right obsesses over a couple different topics, um, like abortion, or the Jews, or physical fitness, uh, or just hatred of the left, and they lose the ability to see the bigger picture, and they're obsessed... Every ideology now is hyper-materialist in that it only sees things from their material good and it lacks any concept of the inner soul or character of things. Um, and ... Yeah, I mean, I think that i- it's a lot of desperate people who look for some kind of hedonism as a way to get out of desperation, because they don't have a better idea.

   21. CWChris Williamson1:08:36

       Yeah, I wonder what the combination of extreme cynicism with a fractured, fragmented sort of inner group-

   22. RLRudyard Lynch1:08:44

       Yes.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:08:45

       ... is ... I'm always really cautious, this is one of my ... I've got four rules of how you can tell if a content creator is being honest and truthful. One of them is, is their in-group bound together over the mutual hatred of an out-group, or the mutual love of their in-group?

   24. RLRudyard Lynch1:09:00

       Yes.

   25. CWChris Williamson1:09:00

       And I think I see an awful lot of ... On both sides, their identification is, "We don't know what we are, necessarily-

   26. RLRudyard Lynch1:09:09

       Yes, exactly.

   27. CWChris Williamson1:09:09

       ... but we know that we're not that, and that-

   28. RLRudyard Lynch1:09:11

       Yes.

   29. CWChris Williamson1:09:12

       ... is the other side."

   30. RLRudyard Lynch1:09:12

       Yes, exactly. It's why, for my channel, I've said that the- the value that I try to build my channel around is honor, because I said the le- the right now is based around hatred of the left, and I say a lot of the factions of the right are adjust- are ... They're a rationalization for killing people, and I think that's gonna end up in a very bad place, so you need to create an active value, and so why ... It's why I said, uh, "We stand for- for ..." Uh, when I released one of my videos, I said, "Honor, truth and freedom," and I think those are important values, and it's ... I mean, I think that we're in, uh, a winnowing event for content crea- political content creators. I don't think 80% will make it in the next three years. I think we're gonna see-
10. 1:14:39 – 1:18:29

    Why the Left Has Become Feminine

    1. CWChris Williamson1:14:39

       What about the left? How did the left end up getting so feminine in that way? Why are there no strong masculine figures-

    2. RLRudyard Lynch1:14:46

       Yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:14:47

       ... standing with the working class?

    4. RLRudyard Lynch1:14:48

       That's really a great question. Um, so in the video that I- I'm writing now and I'm, uh, gonna release in the next week, I- I split the left into the Western left and the Eastern left. The Eastern left is Marxism. The Western left is our left. It goes back to the French Revolution. And so you have a thinker, you have... There was a thinker in 1820s or 1810s France called Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon pushed for, uh, using liberating the Third World to launch revolution in the First World, the destruction of sex and trans. He pushed for, uh, the creation of a new man, creating a religion of science where you built secular rituals to, uh, worship the experts. Um, and the breakdown of trad- and th- the creation of complete equality. So everything in the left today you can find in French thinkers from the revolution 200 years ago. Um, that, you can view a tremendous amount of the current left as a resentful, spurned lover against the working classes because the w- the aim of the working classes was largely to get more money.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:15:49

       Mm-hmm.

    6. RLRudyard Lynch1:15:49

       And the left saw the working classes as this wedge to get them into power. And the leftist elite is all either basically academics or thugs. And this was, uh, earlier communist. The communist elite was either academics. Then when the academic... Then when the revolution worked, the thugs killed the academics. Stalin and Castro and Mao were literally like bandits for parts of their lives. Um, and what happened with the spurning of the working classes is that the left redirected towards women, and women were a demographic that was easier to manipulate and socially control. And so one of my... I just read two incredible books about this. One is The Leviathan and Its Enemies by Sam Francis, and the other one is, uh, is The Total State by Oran McIntyre. And both of them are books on how the ruling class controls the population because I'm going to make a video series talking about the mechanisms of power, and they both call the leftist elite foxes. And foxes are the kinds of people who manipulate through cunning. They're good people at running systems. They're good people at getting inside the levers of bureaucracy itself. It's comparable to when an empire falls, it's, there's always, uh, either a child emperor or an old fool surrounded by eunuchs, harem girls and bureaucrats. Our elite are eunuchs, harem girls and bureaucrats. And so the left went through the left because the left doesn't like using actual physical force, thus their levers of power come through manipulation and that came... That's indirectly l- a lot of the PSYOP stuff and the psychological manipulation comes from advertising. The people who made the advertising industry were the exact same people as the people who made propaganda during the world wars. World War I created the advertising industry for that reason. And so the left is able to use women and m- psychologically manipulate them, and women agree to this because the state can fill the void that the f- that men used to be. So the state can support, can s- keep you from being attacked. It can feed you with welfare. Um, it can make sure you have good health. It can give you insurance. So the state was able to make and the bureaucracy was able to make a- a bargain with women where in exchange for us replacing men, you give us unquestioning loyalty in exchange for your freedom from the patriarchy. And so that's the calculation that's going on. And the problem is that th- the left is desperate and they can't renegotiate that. They're- they're pushing up against the end of their lever. And so they're stuck pushing this equation and this bargain more and more to desperately maintain power and they lose the abil- they lack the ability to form a new coalition.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:18:27

       Mm. Yeah, that is interesting.

11. 1:18:29 – 1:25:09

    The Impact of Multiculturalism

    1. CWChris Williamson1:18:29

       What's the role of multiculturalism in this?

    2. RLRudyard Lynch1:18:33

       Yes. Um, so the modern supply chain is very complex and it's very large. This shirt, I- I think it's probably m- made in Vietnam. Uh, it- it's designed in, I don't know, Europe, made in Vietnam. Now we're in Texas. So the globalization of the economy requires a tremendous amount of cooperation by different nations. And so that's reason one. Global- globalism allows and multiculturalism allows greater accrue- accrue- a-... accreation? Accreation of wealth, uh, by large multinational companies. Second reason is that by watering down the West's culture, and the West is the most individualistic society ever, they can dominate their own populations. Only by taking in immigrants from elsewhere and by making globalist values do get rid of those pesky Western values like pride and freedom and, uh, in individual rights. And so it's inside the self-interest of the elites to, uh, push for globalism, either to weaken the strength of their enemies inside their own countries to get value and strength from other countries, or from, uh, the ability to cooperate transnationally more easily.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:19:49

       Does the globally ink- interconnected world and the fact that we are so multicultural, does that change any of the dynamics that you were looking at previously?

    4. RLRudyard Lynch1:19:59

       So this is a great question and it brings up I think one of... Possibly, possibly this is my best video. It's not the one that I look back upon most fondly, but this is probably my best video, modern civilization. Because one of the angles I look at is civilizational analysis, and I study the strength and weaknesses and the origins of Western, Greco-Roman, Chinese, Indian civilization. And I found that starting around the time of the World Wars, you saw something that looked independent from the other civilizations, where if you go to Egypt or Italy, Egypt especially, you can look at the Persian, the Greek, the Roman, the British, the Islamic architecture, and you know that that was a different civilization with a different idea. After the World Wars, block architecture took over the world, these concrete square blocks. They don't symbolize anything. Uh, when I briefly lived in California... I'm from rural Pennsylvania. In rural Pennsylvania, most people are white, Christian. They look... They wear European style clothes. They live in European style houses. They have a European political philosophy. California, clothes aren't European. Most people aren't white. They don't have a Europe... They operate off postmodernist political philosophy. They're not Christian. They wear clothes invented in California. So implicit in that is the creation of a new cultural formation that I call modern civilization. And Sam Francis has said that the managerial class is trying to create a new civilization independent of Western civilization, similarly to how the communists launched the Cultural Revolution against the, uh, old Russian or Chinese civilizations. So the elite's trying to make a new civilization. The problem is that new civilization doesn't stand for anything. It doesn't have any deep roots it can pull from-

Episode duration: 1:45:52