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Member Q&A with Auron MacIntyre
2k Plays3 months ago
This is a preview of our full interview with Auron MacIntyre. The full episode is available to paid subscribers at blog.exitgroup.us.
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Transcript
Introduction to Oren and Discussion Goals
00:00:17
Speaker
Well, Oren, it's great to have you here, man. I'd like to just introduce, we we actually had a pretty extended conversation on the Total State a couple of weeks ago. That was a great conversation. So you don't need much introduction ah to this group, but you're a contributor on the Blaze. You've got your your podcast, the Oren Mac entire show, which is fantastic, which I've, i've ah Been on your show. Thanks very much for having me on there. And basically just wanted to have you on to talk about ah your book, talk about also your experience in alternative right-wing media, what that looks like ah from the inside. Several of our guys are sort of interested in in the creation of right-wing culture that or or or just alternative culture.
00:01:09
Speaker
and um you know from your vantage in the blaze, what you're seeing. So ah I don't know if you have like opening comments, things you want to say, but but welcome, Oron. Great to have
Oren's Book and Comparative Analysis
00:01:20
Speaker
you. ah Thanks for having me, man. I was not i did not prepare opening comments. so No problem.
00:01:26
Speaker
ah But I appreciate you having me. It was great to to finally meet you in person in DC. Kevin's one of the ah the, you know, when I started ah tweeting, Kevin was one of the first accounts where I was like, man, this guy knows what he's doing. One day I might be as good at this as he is. And so, ah you know, been been a fan for a long time. So it was great to to finally meet up and thanks for having me here.
00:01:49
Speaker
Oh, thanks a lot, man. ah Well, I can go over some of these questions. We had a lot of discussion in the um in the thread here. But if you raised a question in the chat, will you just raise your hand now and go ahead and ask it? And let's start there. Yeah, VaultGanger, go ahead. OK, so I'll just read this off, because I couldn't find bread. So I finished the book a couple of days ago. and um It seems like it's ah it's a good it's a good read. I think a lot of interesting stuff in there that I wasn't aware of. But so one of the questions like or sort of thoughts that keep coming kept coming to my mind was that your book seems to overlap significantly with the means why liberalism failed. um But from a more historical and analytical perspective, they both seem equally important.
00:02:45
Speaker
but out From your perspective, do you think this is even possible or necessary or worthwhile? How would we distill the message of both in a sort coherent, easily understandable narrative that highlights the negatives of the country while also being generally positive in its attempt to paint a picture for how to move forward?
00:03:05
Speaker
Well, I think the big difference would be that, and I'm a big fan of Denine's book. It was one of the first, yeah, I had read arguments mechanically or theoretically about why liberalism might not work as intended. But Denine's book was probably the first ah really well put together, easily accessible argument as to why it might fail morally.
00:03:27
Speaker
And so I always tell people you know why liberalism failed is a great ah thing to hand to your parents for them to kind of grasp perhaps why there might be an issue with kind of the current governing paradigm. ah So I think his book is excellent. I think it it deserves the ah you know ah the reputation it has. And I think it speaks to a very particular problem ah inside liberalism.
00:03:53
Speaker
um I would say the contrast is that while I definitely touch on some of the deficiencies of liberal ideology, um I am hoping to show a wider scope of not just the way in which kind of enlightenment philosophy has in some ways disconnected us from the critical things that make society possible. ah But also wanting to show that there's a larger edifice, ah the the managerial bureaucracy, the total state built on top of it, is it's ideological, yes, but the the power structures involved ah reach back.
00:04:34
Speaker
you know that that this is This ideology has not been chosen at random and that it feeds into the power of the current class. Obviously the liberalism of the 1700s is drastically different than what we're talking about now. And so while there are some threads that run through these things, and I think it's important to connect those genealogies,
00:04:55
Speaker
ah radical transformations have taken place inside the ah ideology to make it fit ah much more tightly with the goals of the managerial regime.
Liberalism and Managerial Structures
00:05:05
Speaker
And so I would say if I was trying to explain that the perhaps the ah merits and differences of the two books, I would say Danin's book is much more focused I think on liberalism itself and the moral case as to why it perhaps it is not the best ah manner in which to organize a society as where my book is pointing to some of those issues and flaws ah that enable
00:05:32
Speaker
the construction of kind of a social edifice that is not reflect reality, but that that has been ah extended out into a structure of power ah that reaches not just inside, of course, America, but across an entire network, a global network of elites that now exists largely in the West. Thank you for that. i One of the things that I, the senses that I got from reading the book was ah you you made such an excellent case and and and we we spoke at dinner and you mentioned your reading of of Nick Land.
00:06:06
Speaker
and and his argument for sort of how this is all on rails. Like it's all kind of an inevitable consequence of of technological development. Like that's what births the managerial bureaucracy. um Do you feel like it's inevitable? do you Like, do you feel like ah there's there's ah there's a coherent alternative?
00:06:28
Speaker
I think that's probably not the case at scale so ah lands argument is one of Intel intelligence being compounded through the capitalist process, and so for land because.
00:06:43
Speaker
ah it because capital will essentially create its own priorities, it will create its own incentive structure, it will necessarily create an inhuman um set of ah of social ah hierarchies that are not beneficial to those of us who are big fans of like meat space, but do help to accelerate ah this technological process.
00:07:07
Speaker
Now you can buy into that or not. I understand that that's a that the for a lot of people that's a rather abstract and somewhat science science fiction argument. um But I do think that there is a very real sense in which ah once we scale society to a certain level, we have to create ah these artificial constructs and we have to mold people to them. And so it's not that you know empires did not exist before you know, capitalism or the managerial revolution or any of these things, but they were very human. They were grounded inside the cultures ah in in which they were founded. There was overcodes that were placed on top of your society if you were added to say the Roman Empire or something like that.
00:07:53
Speaker
But for the most part, they still allowed you to operate as a coherent people, as a coherent culture, as a coherent tradition that might get overridden to some ah degree by that overcoat of imp period of of Imperium. ah But it was never completely replaced, as where in the current paradigm, we have to literally make people less human in order to operate our machinery of ah social organization at scale.
00:08:20
Speaker
And so I think there are most definitely ah profitable alternatives to human organization outside of the mass managerial structure. But
Listener Impact and Ideological Shifts
00:08:29
Speaker
I think we have to understand that really, you know, there are no solutions only trade offs. And so if we want a ah more organic and coherent society, ah then we might not get to put, you know, a half a billion people or more under its ah auspices. Thank you. Nick, go ahead. Well, good evening. Can you hear me? Yes.
00:08:50
Speaker
Aaron, a pleasure to speak with you. I don't have a question. I really just wanted to say thank you. In 2020, I was sitting in an airport terminal browsing my for you tab on Twitter killing time. And I came across one of your tweets ah that referenced Sam Francis Leviathan and its enemies.
00:09:11
Speaker
And it got me interested, so I read that book, read several other their books, and now I'm ah four years clean of my libertarianism. So um posting makes a difference. Yours certainly did. um My family's in a better place now than we were in 2020 because of some of these things. So again, just want to say thank you. ah Posting does make a difference.
00:09:34
Speaker
Well, thanks man. I appreciate that you dove directly into the 750 page unedited Sam Francis manuscript. Like you didn't decide to just, you know, tiptoe into that, you know, Danine's book or something. You decided to go all the way. So I appreciate that dedication. You know, there' there's so many libertarians you can't, you know, how could you possibly make a difference? But it mattered to that one. Right. Um, Kevin, go ahead. Every libertarian we can save, you know,
00:10:01
Speaker
Well, first, I'm going to echo Nicholas, because I am one of those saved libertarians, or recovering, if you will. And I echo the comments on ah ah thanking you, because when I got the solution with that, you helped me ah tread the path towards a different way of looking at things. um and And one of those things is with immigration, right? And so it seems to me that many of the arguments about why immigration internationally is bad, or at least has downsides, also applies to domestic migration. So here, I'm i'm in Nashville, Middle Tennessee, and less than a quarter of the population here was born here and were in race here. And so I wonder if and the managerial state requires that movement. um Should states, especially red states, be trying to put up some sort of soft barrier to domestic migration, or should they be encouraging like the big sort?
00:10:58
Speaker
Yeah,
State Policies and Migration Challenges
00:10:59
Speaker
as as a ah native Floridian, one of the few ah who's actually born in Florida, I have to say I'm very familiar with this issue. I've made the joke many times that border ah control actually begins at the Mason-Dixon. And so I agree wholeheartedly. That's a real problem. Obviously, there's there's this tension.
00:11:18
Speaker
ah red states need to develop the level of capital, ah the level of self-reliance inside their borders if they want to be able to separate themselves from the central government apparatus. ah To some extent, you want to be able to sort people ah in who are, you know, basically advantageous migration, right? Like, let's, let's make ourselves the Singapore's of the United States, right? Bring in only the only the best ah in certain situations. The problem with that obviously is twofold. One, you know, even though you can bring someone in because they're competent, ah that doesn't mean that they're aligned politically. And when you bring in these large corporations, they very often bring in a ah number of employees or support structures that are themselves more likely to push your state blue. ah In Florida, we've avoided that a little bit because so much of the recent migration was COVID based.
00:12:10
Speaker
ah It was people who explicitly wanted to live under Ron DeSantis and not under whatever in you know horrible regime they had to suffer ah through during the pandemic. And so that has itself created a a sorting mechanism that was much better. Previously, we were just flooded by the worst of New York and New Jersey. um And now ah it's really only people who want to live here. ah the The most important mechanism for that is probably really aggressive social legislation.
00:12:39
Speaker
anti-abortion, anti-trans, the kinds of stuff ah that liberals treat as an absolutely existential threat to their existence, ah good. you know Pass as much of that as possible, become as ah hostile to ah those lifestyles as you can. Obviously, due to the current legal structure in the United States, you can't explicitly ban people.
00:13:02
Speaker
ah But you can make it very difficult and that way you know when when even if a guy like Elon wants to move a factory to your state he can do that but only his employees that are willing to live with you know like a six week abortion ban and a complete ban and all trans stuff are gonna move with him right and so that matters.
00:13:22
Speaker
ah That said, you know my family's from Tennessee, so ah yeah I worry about that state. I feel like it's getting a flood. I believe you said you're in Tennessee, sorry if I got that wrong, but um ah but but it's it's really enduring a flood of a lot of people who just don't belong there. And ultimately, I know this is going to be an an ironic statement to say to a group called EXIT, ah but I think the worst part of kind of the neo-cameral Jarvan strategy ah was the idea that ultimately kind of his patchwork would allow for infinite exit. I think that actually infinite exit is a problem, ah that the mobility of human capital is a huge problem for the stability of societies. ah This is actually the thing that probably feeds into land's hyper-capitalist explosion more than anything else.
00:14:10
Speaker
um And please understand here, i'm not I'm not talking to you as a communist, I just mean there's a very real ah way in which ah these things do deteriorate traditional structures and make it difficult for people to commit to communities, to build families, to build generational identities inside these structures.
00:14:29
Speaker
ah So right now, the best thing you can do is make your state as inhospitable to blue stators as possible. But I think the long term goal probably should be ah to create as much of a hard ah restriction on mobility, at least coming in, you know, you don't want to trap people inside, ah really, but you you certainly want to keep the wrong people out as much as possible.
Cultural and Societal Critiques
00:14:50
Speaker
Yeah, Scott Alexander did a great review of um On the Road, Kerouac. He obviously thinks that Kerouac is just a giant piece of shit. and it's it's a It's a fascinating read because it's it's basically all about the automobile.
00:15:10
Speaker
And like the the whole story is that the automobile allowed people like Kerouac to just get in a car and go like defect, defect, defect on every so like every little town, every farmer's daughter, you know ah take take money and don't get ah take money and don't do the work. Just defect you know across the board as aggressively as possible for like a decade. And of course, that led to a massive amount of of of social cohesion falling apart. Yeah. what What happens if Rome builds the roads, but the only people traveling them are barbarians. Uh, that really is a situation we're in. Right. Exactly. And, and I, I, I totally agree with you what you're saying about, um, making it in hospitable. I think, uh, and, and you, you have to simultaneously, uh, you have to draw these lines and then you have to defend them against the feds, which means you, you, you not only need.
00:16:08
Speaker
this sort of aggressive culture warring, but you also need ah a certain willingness to nullify, a willingness to push back and demand that they sue you, demand that they send troops. like At some point, I think i think Abbott ah fighting the feds on the border was a good example of this. like Instead of secession, it's like quiet quitting. like We're just not gonna cooperate on any level ah from now on. And I think it's important that, and I'll stop talking here in a second. I think it's important that only a handful of states have the internal muscle and economic and political power to do that meaningfully, which is why it's so important that they do it. And that's mainly Texas. and
00:16:56
Speaker
Um,
EXIT Group and Strategic Promotion
00:16:58
Speaker
Brendan, go ahead. Hey, Oren, thanks for joining. Um, I'm a fan of your work. I've been listening for a while and, um, the thing that I'm often left with once I wind down your podcast is, um, I, I always think, wow, that was really incisive, you know, trench and analysis, great stuff, but also, oh shit, that was dark. And, um, so I guess my question is,
00:17:23
Speaker
A lot of the stuff that you're talking about is kind of at the government level. I think DeSantis has had a lot of wins, et cetera. There are other states, the one that I'm in right now, for instance, Vermont, which is sort of going hard in the other direction. So whatever Florida is doing to sort of push blue people away, Vermont is doing kind of the the inverse of that and and become basically like a magnet for you know, revolutionaries. I won't be here long, obviously. But but mike my question is, what do you think, um be outside of the government stuff, to me that's interesting, but not something I want to be directly involved with. My question is, if you have an organization like this one, to what degree does it make sense to publicize it, um given that you might actually kind of attract the ah eye of Sauron?
00:18:17
Speaker
Hey everybody, hope you enjoyed this preview of our Q and&A with Oran McIntyre. The full recording is available to our sub-stack subscribers at blog.exitgroup.us. At exit we have 12 calls a week, most of which are mastermind or accountability formats so we can help each other with our various entrepreneurial and personal projects. But the Tuesday night full group call is when we tackle big picture strategic topics, and about once a month we bring on a special guest to talk us through some area of their expertise.
00:18:42
Speaker
So we heard from David Kilcullen on the security environment in the west, Johan Kurtz on navigating elite education and employment, Clay Martin on preparedness, and Charles Haywood on building a black hair care empire. So if you want to be part of these conversations and build something new with us, you can apply for membership at exitgroup.us. Thanks for listening.