Why Nothing Seems To Makes Sense Anymore - Rudyard Lynch

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?

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.

How so?

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.