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57 - PEG on the French Aristocracy's Selective Breeding Program
2k Plays1 year ago
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry discusses the rallye mondain, a private network of social events held by French aristocratic families to ensure that their children marry well.
Follow him on X at pegobry_en - and check out my retrospective writeup on the EXIT blog:
https://blog.exitgroup.us/p/57-peg-on-the-french-aristocracys
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey, everybody.
00:00:18
Speaker
Welcome to the Exit Podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
This is Dr. Bennett, joined here by Pascal Emmanuel Gobri.
00:00:22
Speaker
He's a Twitter account guy that I've been following for many, many years.
00:00:27
Speaker
I think we've been mutuals for many years.
00:00:30
Speaker
He's a Frenchman, and he's got a sub stack, which I think is pegobri.substack.com.
00:00:39
Speaker
It's called the accelerationist, but I don't actually know the URL.
00:00:44
Speaker
I prepared for this.
00:00:46
Speaker
No, it's accelerationist.substack.com.
00:00:48
Speaker
Accelerationist.substack.com.
00:00:51
Speaker
Okay, cool.
Selective Breeding in French Aristocracy
00:00:53
Speaker
Bringing him on here because one of the exit guys encountered your post on the French aristocracy selective breeding program.
00:01:02
Speaker
You, like many of us in the scene, read...
00:01:08
Speaker
Kostin Alomariou's dissertation, Selective Reading and the Birth of Philosophy.
00:01:12
Speaker
I don't know why people were interested in this obscure dissertation all of a sudden.
00:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, some academic, some Romanian academic who went to school with P.J.
00:01:21
Speaker
Novak.
00:01:22
Speaker
So you were addressing...
00:01:28
Speaker
partly this concern about like, you know, should we all sort of abandon politics?
00:01:34
Speaker
Should we abandon elite institutions?
00:01:38
Speaker
How do you maintain or how do you build actually a counter elite?
00:01:44
Speaker
And I wonder if you could just real quick kind of recapitulate a little bit of what you talked about in that essay.
00:01:50
Speaker
Sure, yeah, so the post was inspired
00:01:54
Speaker
part by reading that book, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, which I found fascinating because I studied philosophy in college.
00:02:04
Speaker
Of course I did.
00:02:06
Speaker
But also because I had an interesting angle on it, given my own history and background, which is that there is this sort of secret is not the right word, but it's certainly like, you know, sotto voce, as we would say, institution in the sort of world of the French aristocracy sort of broadly understood, which
00:02:32
Speaker
Because there's obviously lots of debate about who counts as a bona fide aristocrat, but there's sort of that social milieu.
00:02:40
Speaker
And that institution has a strange name, which is called, it's called Le Rally, so like a rally race, and nobody really knows how it got its name.
00:02:52
Speaker
And they're basically organizations run by women whose job is to essentially select...
00:03:01
Speaker
children really is, I mean, nobody puts it so crudely, but it really is what they are.
00:03:08
Speaker
Their job is to select children of the French elite and breed them together.
00:03:14
Speaker
I mean, to get them married together.
00:03:20
Speaker
For the purposes of marriage and the natural end of marriage, which is reproduction.
00:03:28
Speaker
Sure.
00:03:28
Speaker
And so it's the sort of centerpiece of it is something that's also exists in the sort of Anglo-American world, which is the debutante.
00:03:38
Speaker
It's also a French word, right?
00:03:40
Speaker
Debutante is a term from this sort of social world.
00:03:44
Speaker
You know, a debutante is a young woman who's, you know, who's at the end of her teenage years and so is ready to sort of mingle and be courted.
00:03:55
Speaker
But it's much broader than that because children are selected or families, I guess, are selected or invited or co-opted when the children, I mean, it depends because you have different rallies.
00:04:10
Speaker
It's not like one central organization.
00:04:12
Speaker
There are many and like many have like different vibes and all of that.
00:04:16
Speaker
But usually children are co-opted when they're
00:04:22
Speaker
11, 12, 13, 14.
00:04:23
Speaker
And there's, you know, they, as children, they sort of do activities together.
00:04:30
Speaker
There are like museum tours with like parents acting as chaperones and the kids hang out together.
00:04:36
Speaker
There are, you know, classes on things like dancing, because again, like it progresses up to these, you know,
00:04:46
Speaker
where dancing is a big part of it.
00:04:48
Speaker
So there are dancing lessons, history lessons, etiquette lessons.
00:04:55
Speaker
It's a whole thing.
00:04:57
Speaker
And the sort of, you know, obviously the goal of that is to sort of select children for future breeding potential.
Evolution and Decline of 'Le Rally'
00:05:10
Speaker
And then when you're 14, 15, 16, you sort of have these social events happening
00:05:16
Speaker
with other kids that are chaperoned by adults.
00:05:21
Speaker
And then when you're essentially in college, you get into more formal soirees where it's like black tie or you're well-dressed and you dance with your partners and so on and so forth and you socialize.
00:05:40
Speaker
The expectation is that by the time you're 20, 21, 22, you found the person you're going to marry.
00:05:49
Speaker
You're ideally engaged, but if not engaged, you know, in a, in a, in the kind of committed relationship where everybody knows you're going to get married eventually.
00:05:59
Speaker
Um,
00:06:00
Speaker
and you're definitely married by 25.
00:06:05
Speaker
Obviously not everybody sort of follows that entire trajectory.
00:06:10
Speaker
And as with everything else, things get more degenerated as time goes on.
00:06:15
Speaker
Some of the rallies today are basically like glorified party groups and they rent out, it's just rich kids renting out nightclubs in Paris and all of the other stuff.
00:06:28
Speaker
uh has sort of been forgotten but the the general idea the general concept is that is it as granular as like i'm bringing this boy and this girl because i think they would in particular be a match or is it just like i want to loop in this sort of cluster of kids and you know let the magic happen uh it's it's more the latter
00:06:56
Speaker
But again, like the parents are involved at every stage.
00:06:59
Speaker
And so it's, you know, there's also a very informal component.
00:07:04
Speaker
It's like, oh, you know, oh, that boy, you know, he looks nice.
00:07:09
Speaker
I like his parents, you know.
00:07:13
Speaker
But yeah, no, you're not...
00:07:15
Speaker
At least theoretically, you're not arranging the specific marriages of individuals.
00:07:21
Speaker
You're taking groups of people who have been selected and letting the magic happen on its own.
00:07:30
Speaker
But this is the sort of European tradition of marriage.
00:07:35
Speaker
If you read books about 18th century aristocratic families,
00:07:41
Speaker
They had things like this.
00:07:43
Speaker
It wasn't, you know, oh, the two parents meet and, you know, Bob and Stacy, you're going to get married whether you like it or not.
00:07:51
Speaker
It's this much more informal and complex process where there's a bit of that.
00:07:57
Speaker
But also, you know, if Stacy meets Bob at a ball and really likes him, then the parents will meet.
00:08:05
Speaker
And if it's a fit between the families, then Stacy and Bob are going to get married.
00:08:09
Speaker
So it, you know,
00:08:11
Speaker
That's that's one of the things we're finding out with this sort of moment of cultural destruction that we're in is how subtle and complex.
00:08:23
Speaker
How much more subtle and complex those institutions were than we imagined to that that we imagined them to be right.
00:08:30
Speaker
It was it was a sort of balance between this sort of, you know, young, you know, sort of young romance and picking your own partner and the sort of familial
00:08:41
Speaker
patriarchal aspect.
00:08:44
Speaker
It was an either or.
00:08:46
Speaker
If you, I know it's a complicated, the breakdown is complicated too, but how would you explain or how do you think about why those institutions have degenerated as far as like, if the rally just becomes a party with rich kids at a nightclub, like what's behind the decline?
00:09:11
Speaker
So to be clear, it's not all of them.
00:09:13
Speaker
And again, like they're, they're, especially in Paris, there are many rallies and by the way, they're all over the country.
00:09:19
Speaker
Like usually in small cities, there's like one and it's, it's much less formal.
00:09:23
Speaker
It's basically just, you know, parents sort of, you know, hosting house parties for their kids and sort of chaperoning them.
00:09:33
Speaker
Uh, and the more formal ones are in, you know, Paris and the other big cities.
00:09:40
Speaker
Uh, and, and so some rallies, uh, yeah, have become party clubs.
00:09:45
Speaker
Some rallies, uh, are very, are very explicitly religious and it's really, you know, it, the religious component is very strong.
00:09:57
Speaker
Uh, some are, you know, very money oriented.
00:10:04
Speaker
It's re it's really about whether your parents are rich.
00:10:08
Speaker
Um,
00:10:10
Speaker
Some are very sort of lineage oriented and it's sort of much more artistic way.
00:10:16
Speaker
Like you have to come from like a particular aristocratic lineage.
00:10:22
Speaker
And if you're sort of, you know, you know, there are, and it's always in these sort of like self-contained worlds, you have like the narcissism of small differences.
00:10:36
Speaker
And obviously because these organizations are kind of secret, like none of them have websites, you have to be invited, you have to know someone like there's a lot of like moms, you know, I mean, uh, you know, when you have a preteen child, like all of the moms are like exchanging information of like what, unlike which rallies are the good ones, which ones have the good values, blah, blah, all that stuff.
00:11:01
Speaker
Uh, like, you know, like
00:11:02
Speaker
parents do when they're trying to like find a school for their kid oh you know saint mary's is it like oh it says catholic on the website but do do they actually teach that or is that just bs is it you know a sort of more you know really academically focused school or is it more like it's the same kind of thing where you know you have these different institutions that are sort of competing that have
00:11:33
Speaker
that share these stuff and these characteristics in common, but also are differentiated and, you know, they each have their own vibe and sort of culture, but it's sort of hard to like write down on a list, you know, oh, so, and, you know, first of all, all institutions decline, right?
00:11:56
Speaker
That's the even absent sort of post sixties or,
00:12:02
Speaker
post-French Revolution craziness.
00:12:03
Speaker
It's just a law of nature that all institutions eventually decline.
00:12:07
Speaker
And so the rallies, the history of rallies that they got started after World War II when arranged marriages became, well, I don't want to say illegal.
00:12:21
Speaker
It's not like there was a particular law change, but there was just this sort of vibe change.
00:12:27
Speaker
And it was seen as a way to sort of like preserve the goods
00:12:32
Speaker
of arranged marriages in a more quote unquote liberal in the broad sense setting.
00:12:37
Speaker
So some of these have been around for 80 years.
00:12:41
Speaker
So, you know, sometimes institutions just decay because they've been around for a long time.
00:12:47
Speaker
It's the third generation of leadership or whatever, and they just suck now.
Survival Pressure and Elite Institutions
00:12:51
Speaker
Yeah, I wonder if, I mean, what do you make of, so Bap, it's not really, you know, his thesis, it's kind of Nietzsche's thesis.
00:13:00
Speaker
Who, Bap?
00:13:01
Speaker
Who's that?
00:13:02
Speaker
Oh, sorry, Costanella Maru.
00:13:05
Speaker
Oh, oh, yeah, the Romanian guy, okay, go on.
00:13:10
Speaker
His thesis that it's the tension of like real,
00:13:17
Speaker
survival pressure, real like martial pressure that, that forces, forces things into this channel of like, we all know what competence is.
00:13:27
Speaker
We all know what excellence is because if, if you're not excellent, you lose and die.
00:13:32
Speaker
And, and, and now we're in this situation where, and you're talking about how all these rallies are different and they're based on values or money or lineage or whatever.
00:13:39
Speaker
And it's like the, and I mean, he doesn't even necessarily characterize this as a bad thing, but it's like,
00:13:48
Speaker
the the release of that tension the absence of the uh the sort of discipline of of of existential uh threat allows people to kind of explode off in all these different creative directions and a lot of them suck but some of them are good and and maybe that's sort of
00:14:11
Speaker
It is the process of decline, but it also generates this variety of approaches.
00:14:20
Speaker
What's interesting about that to me is like, so I'm, you know, like all Americans, maybe from the French perspective, a total like parvenu, like I would have no...
00:14:35
Speaker
no roots no like no background that i could point to that says like you know i deserve to be part of this i i deserve to belong to this or or uh you lack privilege that's uh that that means that you're you're entitled to my money yeah yeah um and my status that's even more important
00:14:57
Speaker
Right, right.
00:14:59
Speaker
And so for me and maybe some of the people even who are on the inside of this, like if the elite institutions have collapsed or decayed or non-existent or you're not part of them and you want to build a new one, do you have thoughts on how that can be done?
00:15:28
Speaker
I mean, that's the... I mean, I wrote the selective breeding thing also because, I mean, it's just funny, but it's part of this broader thing that I've noticed.
00:15:43
Speaker
And, you know, we know noticing is criminal, but, you know, I believe in elite theory and all this stuff about elites is now very popular on the American right.
00:15:55
Speaker
On the European right, it's sort of taken for granted.
00:15:58
Speaker
But one thing that I've noticed, I've been in sort of like conservative spheres in the US, in France, in the UK, in a few other countries.
00:16:09
Speaker
The main difference that stands out to me in France versus every other country that
00:16:17
Speaker
that I can think of, including places like Poland and Hungary that are supposed to be like mega based, is that France has successfully maintained a conservative elite.
00:16:28
Speaker
Not meaning that the French elite is conservative, obviously it's not.
00:16:34
Speaker
But within the French elite,
00:16:39
Speaker
there are sort of pockets of conservative excellence.
00:16:45
Speaker
So for example, if you were to take the list of the top 10 prep schools in the U S the top 10 most ranked, most prestigious, purely status, most likely to send your kids to Harvard, blah, blah, blah.
00:17:00
Speaker
How many of them would be considered conservative?
00:17:03
Speaker
None.
00:17:04
Speaker
None.
00:17:05
Speaker
If you were to do the same thing for France,
00:17:08
Speaker
Out of the top 10 schools, probably five would be considered conservative.
00:17:13
Speaker
What does that mean?
00:17:15
Speaker
So, for example, recently there was a sort of like two minutes hate in France because the new minister of education,
00:17:27
Speaker
who's married to the CEO of the second biggest bank in the country, was found to be sending her kids, her four kids, to Collège Stanislas, which is an extremely prestigious prep school, which I attended,
00:17:42
Speaker
And which is known for being conservative and Catholic and having classes where they teach you that abortion is wrong, that masturbation is a sin, that premarital sex is a sin, that blah, blah, blah.
00:17:54
Speaker
And they really do teach that.
00:17:55
Speaker
And they also, you know, are considered extremely prestigious, extremely hard to get into, extremely academically selective.
00:18:07
Speaker
This aspect, and it's not an outlier, like there are other schools, like I can name them.
00:18:13
Speaker
And again, like if you were to ask any educated French person to name like the five top prep schools in the country, they would have a list of them.
00:18:26
Speaker
And at least two or three of them would be schools that are known to be sort of conservative, Catholic schools.
00:18:33
Speaker
religious and seriously so, like not just on the website.
00:18:39
Speaker
And, you know, there are many other examples like this.
00:18:43
Speaker
You know, you have, I mean, I've been in this world my entire life.
00:18:47
Speaker
Like if you speak to like senior people and so on, like I would guesstimate that about 10 to 15 people
00:18:56
Speaker
percent of any sort of elite, you know, CEOs, senior civil servants, whatever, would basically be completely at home in like a right wing group chat.
Quality and Craft in Cultural Production
00:19:12
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:19:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:17
Speaker
And it's not that such people don't exist in the U.S. Obviously, they do.
00:19:22
Speaker
And like we see, you know, with doxes that the people who get doxed turn out to be, you know, surprisingly impressive or surprisingly from the perspective of like the resentful left-wing journalists.
00:19:36
Speaker
But the numbers aren't the same.
00:19:38
Speaker
And there's an institutional aspect in France that's lacking.
00:19:46
Speaker
There's no, uh, there's no like professorship at a conservative university where we just had one of our guys, uh, get doxxed.
00:19:56
Speaker
He's an Irvine professor.
00:19:59
Speaker
And, uh, you know, in, in France, maybe there's somewhere he could land that, uh, that, that, uh, would, would be friendly.
00:20:07
Speaker
And here there's, there's nothing basically, uh, you know, and you know, uh,
00:20:13
Speaker
he got doxxed for being like a kind of a new media guy.
00:20:17
Speaker
And that's sort of where if you want to live the life of the mind, the life of ideas, and you're a you're a right winger, you kind of have to, you know, carry your own backpack, build your own thing on the Internet.
00:20:31
Speaker
And that's.
00:20:35
Speaker
various attempts at giving that elite polish.
00:20:40
Speaker
And it's like, not to knock any of it, but it's like, it's a struggle to, and I think Yarvin, I don't know what you make of Yarvin's take, but I basically agree with the idea that propaganda is sort of a,
00:21:01
Speaker
a withdrawal on an elite account.
00:21:05
Speaker
You get the privilege of producing propaganda by being extremely reliable, extremely accurate, extremely valuable all of the time.
00:21:17
Speaker
And once you've built up that credibility, then you can burn some by being a propagandist, but you can't start being a propagandist.
00:21:26
Speaker
I compare it to...
00:21:28
Speaker
like one of my guys was talking about kind of being a being a right-wing children's author.
00:21:34
Speaker
There's tons of right-wing children's books in France.
00:21:36
Speaker
That's another example.
00:21:37
Speaker
Like there's a store I know I can go to and there's like a giant wing which is full of like children's books and it's literally all right-wing propaganda.
00:21:47
Speaker
Like I even found a comic book on Mussolini.
00:21:50
Speaker
I'm not joking.
00:21:52
Speaker
Sorry to interrupt, but those are sort of specific, concrete examples.
00:21:57
Speaker
I could go into my children's room right now and bring you back examples of comics glorifying saints, glorifying military heroes from ages past, that sort of stuff.
00:22:12
Speaker
And part of the... And high-quality stuff, by the way.
00:22:16
Speaker
Not sort of cringe.
00:22:17
Speaker
That's the thing.
00:22:19
Speaker
which is the other problem.
00:22:21
Speaker
Part of the crutch that I think people lean on with media is they really do go like, ads for kids, you know?
00:22:31
Speaker
It doesn't have to be that good because kids will eat up whatever, which is to some extent true.
00:22:37
Speaker
But in order for it to like...
00:22:40
Speaker
bury itself in your psyche and be something that you come back to as an adult and something that like, like, you know, the, the most influential.
00:22:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:50
Speaker
What's that?
00:22:51
Speaker
It would be true if it wasn't competing with other things.
00:22:54
Speaker
Right, right.
00:22:55
Speaker
The really influential children's media is the stuff that you still think about when you're a grown up, where you retain those values and you don't look back with embarrassment on it.
00:23:06
Speaker
And that's something that is sort of a junk food thing where you don't...
00:23:14
Speaker
you don't receive the consequences of dumping junk food on your kids until significantly later on.
00:23:20
Speaker
And it's the same thing with media.
00:23:23
Speaker
It has to be high quality.
00:23:25
Speaker
And what I was saying about the Daily Wire is they can afford to sell crappy chocolate because they have this audience for other reasons.
00:23:35
Speaker
But that doesn't mean that you can just go out there and sell crappy right-wing chocolate and get away with it.
00:23:40
Speaker
Probably not.
00:23:41
Speaker
Yes, that's true.
00:23:43
Speaker
And by the way, it's popular in this sphere to sort of like dump on the daily wire, but you know,
00:23:51
Speaker
You build a website that's got, you know, 100 million visitors and however many millions of paying subscribers.
00:23:59
Speaker
Like, I mean, honestly, like if you'd asked me, you know, 10 years ago whether something like this was possible, I would have said no.
00:24:05
Speaker
That's my point, actually, is they got there by having value, by delivering something.
00:24:10
Speaker
Yes.
00:24:11
Speaker
And like, honestly, I mean, you can always like find things to pick on, but it's not that bad.
00:24:19
Speaker
I mean, yeah.
00:24:20
Speaker
Like the trans, you know, the trans like sports team movie was, it was like a solid B plus comedy.
00:24:27
Speaker
Really?
00:24:28
Speaker
I didn't see it.
00:24:28
Speaker
You know, I mean, as like a first effort at like a genuinely, you know, good movie.
00:24:36
Speaker
I mean, honestly.
00:24:38
Speaker
Okay.
00:24:39
Speaker
Like filmmaking is a craft you learn by doing.
00:24:42
Speaker
Like if you look at, I'm also a film nerd because I have every disease.
00:24:49
Speaker
you know, if you look at the industries, you know, when countries or like groups started to build film industries, you know, all of the first 10 or 20 years of movies were shit, right?
00:25:02
Speaker
Because filmmaking is a craft and the difference between a craft and an academic discipline is that a craft you have to learn by doing.
00:25:09
Speaker
An academic discipline is something you can learn from a book and then you can do it, right?
00:25:13
Speaker
Math, you learn it from a book, you can do it.
00:25:16
Speaker
Woodworking, you have to produce bad woodwork before you can produce good woodwork.
00:25:23
Speaker
And so filmmaking is a craft.
00:25:25
Speaker
And so whoever, whether it's The Daily Wire or Peter Thiel five years from now or whoever is the right-wing billionaire that decides to actually like, oh, I'm going to do conservative Hollywood for real.
00:25:40
Speaker
Even if they do everything right, the first movies are going to be shit.
00:25:47
Speaker
Even if it has all the right money, all the right people, all the right everything, because it's the nature of like doing something complex.
00:25:55
Speaker
Just like, you know, the first SpaceX rockets crashed.
00:25:58
Speaker
Because yeah, like he's building a freaking rocket.
00:26:04
Speaker
I don't know what the cursing situation is on this on this podcast.
00:26:09
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:26:09
Speaker
So, sorry.
00:26:10
Speaker
Just sidebar rant here.
00:26:13
Speaker
I just get tired of this sort of, like, right-wing circular firing squad.
00:26:19
Speaker
But I think... I guess the point that I would make about the filmmaking situation, the story situation, the media in general, is, like...
00:26:32
Speaker
I think that stories, if they start from like, I am going to tell a right-wing story.
00:26:40
Speaker
I am going to paint a right-wing picture.
00:26:41
Speaker
I am going to sing a right-wing song.
00:26:44
Speaker
It's like you have to keep your eyes open and your mouth shut a little bit.
00:26:52
Speaker
You have to be observing reality, observing the world around you, and then articulating what you see.
00:26:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:58
Speaker
And if you come with the message, it's really, it feels false because what people are looking for is like a perspective on the real world.
00:27:08
Speaker
And so like, what I hope to see from these artistic projects is like, give me a right-wing guy and have him just tell a story.
00:27:23
Speaker
Yeah, 100%.
00:27:24
Speaker
I mean, this is what Lomaz, since we're talking about him, and he's a wonderful guy, and I cannot say in public what I think should happen to the pond scum who doxxed him.
00:27:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:41
Speaker
Same guy who got me, by the way.
00:27:43
Speaker
Oh, really?
00:27:43
Speaker
Yeah, same guy.
00:27:45
Speaker
Absolute, absolute, just the worst drugs of humanity.
00:27:50
Speaker
It's the worst filth.
00:27:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is what Lómez understands, and this is why he's so successful.
00:27:55
Speaker
This is why he's ten times more successful than the pond scum going after him, and this is why he's going to be extremely successful, is because he understands that quality is like the prime directive, and the rest will follow.
00:28:10
Speaker
And, you know...
00:28:14
Speaker
I go back to this idea of craft and excellence in craft.
00:28:23
Speaker
make a good story and like polish it a hundred thousand times and then decide you're going to write a good story.
00:28:30
Speaker
So another example I think about is, so in the Renaissance, the Catholic church commissioned all sorts of Catholic art.
00:28:42
Speaker
Leonardo da Vinci was not a Catholic.
00:28:44
Speaker
He was a sort of Platonist, deist kind of guy.
00:28:48
Speaker
Michelangelo was a very devout Catholic.
00:28:53
Speaker
Can you tell from just looking at like their respective religious paintings?
00:29:00
Speaker
Oh, this man is like a true believer.
00:29:04
Speaker
Like he believes that when he paints the Virgin Mary, that's the mother of God versus, you know, I'm just doing this for a paycheck.
00:29:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:13
Speaker
No, because they're both just excellent.
00:29:16
Speaker
And so if you tell them, you know, I will give you, you know, I will give you
00:29:23
Speaker
money and status for expressing these ideas, they will do it really well.
00:29:31
Speaker
Obviously you prefer the person to be a believer, but what matters is the underlying excellence of the artist.
00:29:41
Speaker
And so... And probably Da Vinci was at least immersed enough in the religious milieu that he was depicting that he could
00:29:53
Speaker
he could catch what was being expressed.
00:29:56
Speaker
He could catch like, this is what it means to these people.
00:29:59
Speaker
This is also part of the artistic excellence.
00:30:01
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:30:02
Speaker
It's like, oh, when they asked me to paint the Virgin Mary, I understand that that doesn't just mean like painting a woman, but I understand that this is what this means to the people who will be first paying for the painting and then looking at it.
Challenges in Funding Cultural Projects
00:30:19
Speaker
Right.
00:30:20
Speaker
You're at minimum telling the truth about them.
00:30:23
Speaker
you know, even if you don't agree with them.
00:30:25
Speaker
Right.
00:30:27
Speaker
And yeah, I think that's incredibly important.
00:30:31
Speaker
And I think that the biggest, the biggest obstacle that we face in, in what, what culture is this sort of luxury phenomenon.
00:30:47
Speaker
It doesn't, it doesn't have like this obvious ROI.
00:30:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:52
Speaker
And when you're trying to bootstrap these kinds of projects, either by getting investors or by getting customers, buyers, guys on our side of things face this pressure of, you know, like, what's, you know, how's this going to make, like, what percentage is this going to make me, you know, versus what I could get from an index fund or something.
00:31:20
Speaker
And it's like,
00:31:23
Speaker
I'm interested in your take on like, how do you, is there a way to get guys with money to catch that vision or is it something where like,
00:31:32
Speaker
I sort of am torn like, do I just need to go make money so that I can try to be that guy?
00:31:39
Speaker
Do I, do I, you know, try to pitch these guys on like, here, here are some really excellent people who you should support and here's why.
00:31:47
Speaker
And maybe you're closer to kind of those kinds of people in that world in that background to say, you know, what, what, what drives them?
00:31:58
Speaker
you know one of the things i really like about uh bap's podcast is he always says like i don't give like personal advice because it's it's so specific to so you know like standard disclaimer but also like sincere disclaimer like nobody should watch this and like draw conclusions from oh should i become an artist or an investment banker well peg said
00:32:24
Speaker
Please don't do that.
00:32:27
Speaker
You know, your mother will hate me.
00:32:31
Speaker
So that's, that's, I mean, it really depends on like your own personal circumstances.
00:32:36
Speaker
Like, honestly, you know, are you good as an artist?
00:32:40
Speaker
It should be like the number one.
00:32:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:47
Speaker
In terms of the funding and the sort of funding environment and donors and all of that stuff, I mean, I know this is like a perennial topic of conversation in group chats and everybody's sort of trying to pass off intel and it's like, oh, you know, I saw Peter Thiel walking through, you know, he was...
00:33:15
Speaker
here at a party and like my friend talked to him and blah blah blah it's like okay whatever uh i mean it's very difficult um and it's it's very difficult in part for bad reasons and in part for good reasons um the sort of
00:33:46
Speaker
The bad reason is that, you know, I'm trying to say something that will neither get me in trouble nor reveal too much.
00:34:00
Speaker
Let's just say that, yes, there is a vision deficit on the part of conservatives who have a lot of money and want to donate that money to right-wing causes.
00:34:11
Speaker
Sure.
00:34:15
Speaker
That being said, so that's, let's say that's the supply problem.
00:34:19
Speaker
The demand problem is that there is a IQ deficit, not really, it's a sort of U-curve, you know, we, you know,
00:34:36
Speaker
We have lots of really dumb people, God love them, our retards.
00:34:40
Speaker
And then we have this like tiny outlying core of like 150 plus IQ people.
00:34:47
Speaker
The real problem.
00:34:49
Speaker
And this is, this is, I mean, this is a problem in the world in general, but maybe it's worse in the right wing world for reasons.
00:34:57
Speaker
I don't know.
00:34:58
Speaker
We, maybe we can sort of riff about that, but you know,
00:35:03
Speaker
Again, art is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.
00:35:07
Speaker
Like when, when I've talked to people about fundraising, they want to fundraise for this project.
00:35:13
Speaker
And it's like, oh, I have this amazing idea and I just, I just need Mr. Moneybags to give me, you know, three, 300 gajillion dollars and it's going to be amazing.
00:35:27
Speaker
And then when Mr. Moneybags says no, they're like, oh, you know,
00:35:32
Speaker
oh, I'm so black-billed, we're all doomed because they don't understand, they don't get it.
00:35:37
Speaker
And again, he built an actual business.
00:35:43
Speaker
He built a thing with his bare hands.
00:35:46
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:35:49
Speaker
He did the thing.
00:35:50
Speaker
He selected the authors for the prize.
00:35:54
Speaker
He put the book together.
00:35:56
Speaker
He found the designers.
00:35:57
Speaker
He found the printers.
00:35:58
Speaker
He found the
00:35:59
Speaker
And I'm sure there's like a million difficulties, you know, there's the million difficulties involved in starting and running a business.
00:36:06
Speaker
And then you add on that, the million difficulties of doing it as like a right-wing dissident.
00:36:13
Speaker
Like it's just hard and it requires, you know, the sort of like grind set entrepreneur
00:36:23
Speaker
kind of mindset, which our world is filled with intellectuals.
00:36:29
Speaker
And there's a classic quote from a classic French movie.
00:36:32
Speaker
It's a war movie where three guys are, they're stranded in the desert behind enemy lines and they think they're going to die.
00:36:40
Speaker
Two of them just sort of like philosophically prepared to sit down to die.
00:36:45
Speaker
And like the third one who's this like blockhead sort of starts, you know, says, you know, whatever.
00:36:50
Speaker
I'm just going to get up, start walking in direction.
00:36:53
Speaker
Maybe I'll find a noasis.
00:36:54
Speaker
Maybe I'll find a patrol.
00:36:55
Speaker
Maybe I'll find something.
00:36:56
Speaker
I'm not just going to die here.
00:36:59
Speaker
And the other two guys sort of mock him.
00:37:02
Speaker
And then he just starts storming off and walking in a random direction.
00:37:06
Speaker
And then the two guys sort of look at each other.
00:37:08
Speaker
And one of them says, two sitting intellectuals go less far than a single brute walking.
00:37:13
Speaker
And so we've got a lot of sitting intellectuals.
00:37:17
Speaker
And for people who brag about being bodybuilding retards, I, it, it's a perpetual sort of right-wing problem.
00:37:25
Speaker
And, you know, with all respect to sort of like HBD nerds, it's not true that IQ directly.
00:37:34
Speaker
I mean, it correlates in the sort of strict scientific sense, but it doesn't directly lead to like ability to get things done in the real world.
00:37:44
Speaker
Um, and yeah.
00:37:47
Speaker
Intellectuals are great, by the way, intellectuals are wonderful.
00:37:49
Speaker
You know, some of my best friends are intellectuals.
00:37:52
Speaker
I love my intellectuals.
00:37:55
Speaker
Doers do more than people who don't do.
00:37:59
Speaker
And if you put yourself in the mind, sorry, just finishing this.
00:38:04
Speaker
If you, if you put yourself in the mind of somebody who's made a lot of money in business, maybe he's a Christian.
00:38:11
Speaker
or he's some sort of right winger and he goes, all right, I've been very successful, very fortunate.
00:38:16
Speaker
I'm going to devote X of my net worth to like funding good things to sort of retake America.
00:38:23
Speaker
For every dollar that you're allocating, you've got like 10 guys sort of like holding out their hands saying, mister, please.
00:38:32
Speaker
And, you know,
00:38:34
Speaker
Frankly, a lot of these people are just not very impressive.
00:38:37
Speaker
Like, you know, a part of being right wing is being in this world is being able to say sort of like unpleasant truths.
00:38:44
Speaker
As much as a lot of our people are very impressive in certain ways, you know, this sort of phenomenon of like the intellectual who sort of like can't, you know, can't put together a camping trip.
00:38:57
Speaker
And this is not to say that the donors are sort of like perfect or whatever, but
00:39:03
Speaker
It's also like a legitimate perspective.
00:39:06
Speaker
Yeah, I was in a conversation with, well, I was witnessing a conversation between Lomez and a funder.
00:39:18
Speaker
And I got to hear him make the pitch and describe what he had accomplished.
00:39:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:24
Speaker
And getting a yes was just smooth as
Role of Human Curation in Content Quality
00:39:28
Speaker
butter.
00:39:28
Speaker
It was easy to hear a yes because he had done the work and he had already built something that was real.
00:39:38
Speaker
And so I think that there's an element of acting as if the billionaire isn't coming.
00:39:47
Speaker
that makes it so that if the billionaire does materialize, you're in position.
00:39:53
Speaker
Absolutely, 100%.
00:39:54
Speaker
There was a point that Peter Thiel made in an interview, and he sort of... I'm saying he made it in an interview because I don't want to be like, oh, I'm privy to Peter Thiel's thoughts, which I'm not.
00:40:05
Speaker
I'm just using it as an example.
00:40:08
Speaker
He sort of phrased it very politely, but he was asked this question about, oh, why aren't there...
00:40:14
Speaker
Hollywood movies, you know, blah, blah, blah.
00:40:18
Speaker
And he was like, there's two theories.
00:40:19
Speaker
You know, the first one is, oh, right wingers are discriminated against by the evil Hollywood, blah, blah, blah, which is true.
00:40:28
Speaker
But there's another theory, which is that, you know, we just sort of suck.
00:40:36
Speaker
He didn't put it that way, but he was clearly thinking it.
00:40:39
Speaker
And he said the control for that is if it's the gatekeeper, look at the industry without gatekeeping.
00:40:45
Speaker
And that would be online publishing.
00:40:47
Speaker
You know, if you look at online publishing is, you know,
00:40:52
Speaker
Is there some really cool stuff like what Loomis is publishing, like, you know, other stuff?
00:40:58
Speaker
Yes.
00:41:00
Speaker
Is it like this sort of avalanche of like, you know, new Conrad's and new, you know, with all due respect to
00:41:10
Speaker
Zero HP and all those, like, I'm not saying they're bad.
00:41:13
Speaker
I'm just asking like, where are the like 20 other guys like them?
00:41:17
Speaker
Like, it's still a very small percentage of like the book publishing worldwide and, and the, the, the sort of lack of critical and publishing success is not entirely attributable to sort of like, you know, media and publishing industry gatekeeping, because guess what?
00:41:34
Speaker
Like 50 shades of gray, you know, was not a psyop.
00:41:39
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:41:39
Speaker
Like it's possible to have a hit.
00:41:42
Speaker
Yeah, content curation is incredibly valuable.
00:41:45
Speaker
The curation of social opportunities, the curation of content.
00:41:52
Speaker
Basically, I have a theory that we're coming into a world in which the sort of floodwaters of slop are just going to, you're going to be up to your neck in slop in terms of your search engine results, in terms of like the content that's out there.
00:42:09
Speaker
what there is to read, what there is to watch, what there is to listen to.
00:42:12
Speaker
It's all going to be algorithmic artificial intelligence slop.
00:42:16
Speaker
And so there's going to be this immense value in human vetting and curation.
00:42:26
Speaker
And I view sort of my project as maybe the first tier of curation, of curating social and professional opportunities.
00:42:36
Speaker
and bringing together people who are on side enough to start having those conversations.
00:42:41
Speaker
And I think what Lomas is doing similarly, you know, the fact that he was like the service that he performed was reading the avalanche of dog shit.
00:42:53
Speaker
He read, I mean, I know he didn't, he never complained about the quality of what he received.
00:42:59
Speaker
He was very gracious about what he received.
00:43:02
Speaker
I just know from having seen on the outside, there's so much of it that was awful.
00:43:07
Speaker
And he had to, yeah.
00:43:10
Speaker
I mean, the man had a poetry contest for crying out loud.
00:43:14
Speaker
Yeah, imagine.
00:43:15
Speaker
Just imagine.
00:43:16
Speaker
And so, yeah, it's basically somebody with a lot of taste coupled with a lot of patience has to make those calls.
Social Curation and Elite Culture
00:43:25
Speaker
And yeah, going back to the selective breeding thing, it is what you described in the rally, it's almost...
00:43:38
Speaker
it's almost silly how simple it is where it because basically what you're describing is just like, what if adults took an interest in the social opportunities of their children?
00:43:48
Speaker
What if adults like did something to curate, you know, who they would be around and like, what could you accomplish if you, if you number one just made the attempt, but number two, and maybe, maybe this is a little bit harder.
00:44:06
Speaker
creating an adult culture that adolescents aspire to grow up into.
00:44:17
Speaker
Rather than either creating something that they don't really want and that they think is cringe, or attempting to pander, attempting to sort of reach them where they are, so to speak, and failing to actually
00:44:35
Speaker
inculcate a culture i mean again like the the rally is not perfect so full disclosure speaking of like doing things that your kid i was invited to a rally when i was like i don't know 12 or something uh and i declined because at the time as an idiot i thought it was cringe and my parents didn't particularly feel like i mean they sort of like tried to talk into me but they also weren't gonna fight me on it
00:45:02
Speaker
So, and now I regret, I mean, I'm happily married with kids, but, and so I don't regret in that sense, but if I had known then what I know now, I would have chosen differently.
00:45:15
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, so the way that sort of traditional, I mean, not traditional, the way that our existing elites, meaning liberal, liberal in the broad sense, like the, just like, you know, rich people in Manhattan,
00:45:30
Speaker
get the benefits of the rally is just by sending their kids to $50,000 prep schools.
00:45:37
Speaker
Like schools and universities are sort of like, you know, a big benefit of them being the place you find your spouse is not a new thing or a secret thing.
00:45:47
Speaker
Certainly, you know, elites are completely hypocritical about all of this stuff.
00:45:52
Speaker
Like, you know, when it comes to like, which schools their kids go to and, and who they're,
00:46:00
Speaker
daughter brings home, like they understand very well what IQ is and how it's transmitted.
00:46:11
Speaker
So in that sense, you know, I mean, this is why the rally is so politically incorrect, right?
00:46:16
Speaker
It's because it was like, oh no, we want, we want to select for something more than just like, you know, having a high IQ and sort of upper middle-class parents.
00:46:27
Speaker
Yeah, having a gate that is, I mean, and you see this with housing too.
00:46:32
Speaker
There's always sort of this slow burn of discourse about housing and segregation and the NIMBY YIMBY thing.
00:46:43
Speaker
I said a couple of weeks ago, no one is seriously discussing should segregation exist or not?
00:46:51
Speaker
We're just saying, should there be segregation on another basis than money?
00:46:57
Speaker
Like that is the basis of segregation in the United States.
00:47:00
Speaker
It's completely legal.
00:47:02
Speaker
Everybody does it.
00:47:03
Speaker
The question is, should poor people have access to control of their neighborhoods at all?
00:47:09
Speaker
And it's like, well, I think we frame it that way.
00:47:12
Speaker
Same thing with vouchers, by the way.
00:47:14
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:47:15
Speaker
Exactly.
00:47:16
Speaker
Should poor people get to do what rich people get to do?
00:47:19
Speaker
It's not school choice, yes or no.
00:47:21
Speaker
It's just school choice.
00:47:22
Speaker
Should school choice be reserved to rich people or not?
00:47:25
Speaker
Right.
00:47:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:26
Speaker
You mentioned on the essay about sort of plumber discourse, you talked about Ashkenazi Jews being rejected from Harvard and Yale.
00:47:34
Speaker
They didn't become plumbers.
00:47:36
Speaker
They went to City College and excelled anyway.
00:47:38
Speaker
And I think there's two things that I would tease out from that.
00:47:43
Speaker
Because like when you get...
00:47:46
Speaker
an elite education, you're getting hopefully two things, one of which is an actual elite education where you're learning some things that other people don't know and to do things other people can't do.
00:47:59
Speaker
And then you're getting a credential that affords you status and puts you in a particular position.
00:48:06
Speaker
The other thing that I would tease out
00:48:11
Speaker
is you, by virtue of an elite education, you are hopefully gaining the ability to generate real value in addition to the ability to seek rents.
00:48:26
Speaker
And I'm not actually like categorically opposed to rent seeking.
00:48:30
Speaker
I think that to some extent having elites who have some rents to sit on so they can do interesting things is cool and kind of good for everybody.
00:48:41
Speaker
But if you are frozen out of the institutions of the sort of status credential and the rent seeking,
00:48:51
Speaker
It's interesting to think about how could our guys, and again, I know we're not talking about particular individuals and what individuals do, but how could our guys
00:49:02
Speaker
get the most in terms of like learning how to generate value and, and, and the, the, the elite education itself, if they are not welcome in the elite education circles and are not welcome to receive the sort of rents and the sinecures.
00:49:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:19
Speaker
I mean the plumber discourse.
00:49:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:21
Speaker
I mean like endless, endless.
00:49:24
Speaker
It's so gay.
00:49:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:26
Speaker
This is, like, I'm going to be, like, extremely elitist and, like, extremely sort of French aristocrat.
00:49:32
Speaker
But, like, the, you know, people mocked Curtis because he talked about elves and hobbits and maybe the words weren't chosen.
00:49:39
Speaker
But, like, he's absolutely right.
00:49:40
Speaker
Like, you know, people are either elves or hobbits.
00:49:44
Speaker
And, like, hobbits, you know, God bless them.
00:49:49
Speaker
You know, I love my hobbits.
00:49:53
Speaker
But seriously, like, I don't mean that in a condescending way.
00:49:57
Speaker
because unlike meritocratic elites, I don't have status anxiety vis-a-vis other groups of people.
00:50:03
Speaker
But, you know, this is the most frustrating hobbit-like trait of sort of right-wing people.
00:50:11
Speaker
It's, you know, when an institution sort of becomes hostile, you retreat.
00:50:19
Speaker
It's like, you know, similar to the plumber discourse is, oh, you know, don't go into the military because it's woke now.
Military Service and Elite Access
00:50:28
Speaker
And it's like, all right, well, you know, maybe you can give up on college.
00:50:33
Speaker
Maybe you can give up on the military.
00:50:35
Speaker
But like, if you give up on both, like, that's it, you're dead, you're over.
00:50:39
Speaker
And like, you know, first of all, you know, Zog's not gonna send you to die
00:50:48
Speaker
in Ukraine, like, I'm sorry.
00:50:49
Speaker
And, you know, like 99, literally 99% of military occupational specialties are non-combat.
00:51:00
Speaker
All right.
00:51:01
Speaker
Nobody since, you know, since, since 1945, no American has been in combat without having wanting, without having at some point, like even the guys who were drafted into Vietnam,
00:51:19
Speaker
90% of troops sent to Vietnam were non-combat.
00:51:23
Speaker
That's the glorious thing about the American military, which us Europeans, we find hilarious, which is that they have to have like 20 guys to build a Walmart to have like one guy holding a rifle shooting it.
00:51:36
Speaker
That's very inefficient, but from the point of view of like your own career goals, like, you know, if you don't want to get shot at by some Bedouin in the desert, it
00:51:49
Speaker
it's not going to happen to you.
00:51:52
Speaker
Or we're in a very different world where none of this matters anyway.
00:51:57
Speaker
And so the best response to the plumber discourse was, I believe it's team age mindset.
00:52:05
Speaker
I sometimes get my Anon's confused where he sort of like did the like white boy career plan.
00:52:11
Speaker
And it was basically like, go to the military, go to a highly technical specialty, get the free college, get VA disability if you want.
00:52:22
Speaker
Obviously, I'm not like a specialist on like, you know, VA disabilities and like which kind of student grants you get for what kind of service, blah, blah, blah.
00:52:31
Speaker
But I like I hang out with a bunch of Americans and I know a bunch of Americans.
00:52:34
Speaker
I know enough.
00:52:36
Speaker
about America to know that that, you know, if you're like a middle class white kid, that is that is totally the best thing to do.
00:52:44
Speaker
And you want to know a great example of who did that.
00:52:50
Speaker
And, you know, I know a lot of Anons don't like him, whatever.
00:52:54
Speaker
It's J.D.
00:52:55
Speaker
Vance.
00:52:56
Speaker
Like J.D.
00:52:57
Speaker
Vance is sociologically, he's one of our guys.
00:53:00
Speaker
What did he do?
00:53:00
Speaker
He went
00:53:01
Speaker
He went to the Marines for his four years out of high school.
00:53:07
Speaker
He served in Iraq in a non-combat role, even as a Marine.
00:53:12
Speaker
Did two years at Ohio State for free because you get basically two years of free state school.
00:53:19
Speaker
Worked his ass off, ASDLSATs, I presume, got into Yale Law School, and then the entire...
00:53:26
Speaker
elite world opened up to him.
00:53:28
Speaker
And so, you know, whatever you think of J.D.
00:53:31
Speaker
Vance's career path or ideologically, his career path is certainly very inspiring.
00:53:38
Speaker
And obviously, you know, writing a million dollar bestseller or befriending Peter Thielen in law school are, you know, optional.
00:53:45
Speaker
But you know what I mean?
00:53:46
Speaker
Like, it's a totally legit career path.
00:53:49
Speaker
And, you know, our guys should be doing that.
00:53:52
Speaker
Probably Yale is not going to let any more, you know,
00:53:56
Speaker
Marine from Ohio in at all.
00:54:00
Speaker
But there's still Harvard and Stanford.
00:54:02
Speaker
There's a total unwillingness to accept that we are talking about multiple different types of guy, which is so ironic.
00:54:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:10
Speaker
For, for you sort of hierarchical, inegalitarian right wing to be like, no, no, no.
00:54:17
Speaker
Everyone should go work at Fang or everyone should go be a plumber or everyone.
00:54:21
Speaker
It's like, no, right.
00:54:23
Speaker
There's all, it takes all kinds.
00:54:25
Speaker
There's lots of us and we have different destinies and different capacities.
Social Hierarchies and Harmony
00:54:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:29
Speaker
And I think there's, there's a deeper point to be made here about just acceptance.
00:54:36
Speaker
And this is, this is the, the, the Hobbit and dark elf thing.
00:54:39
Speaker
This is even like the role, the sort of gender wars between men and women.
00:54:43
Speaker
It's like,
00:54:45
Speaker
if you cannot accept comedy and harmony between superior and inferior, and being straightforward about it, and sort of like someone, and the easiest example that I can offer,
00:55:03
Speaker
where a relationship of superiority and inferiority is still mainstream and accepted and understood is between a parent and child.
00:55:12
Speaker
And it's like, who is the master and who is the servant in a parent and child relationship?
00:55:18
Speaker
It's like not obvious, right?
00:55:20
Speaker
Like, you know, you as the superior in that relationship
00:55:25
Speaker
are putting in an awful lot of work and you are bearing with some weaknesses and you are, and at the same time, can you abuse power?
00:55:36
Speaker
Yes, you absolutely can.
00:55:39
Speaker
Do even good parents sometimes abuse power?
00:55:42
Speaker
They do.
00:55:44
Speaker
And I think you can extrapolate that to this whole question of hierarchy in general.
00:55:49
Speaker
It's like, we're so sick
00:55:52
Speaker
as a society in part, and I think this is actually true of the right as well, because you go from no admission of hierarchy whatsoever, like pretending it doesn't exist,
00:56:07
Speaker
to like, oh, I've noticed that some people are better at things and worse at things.
00:56:13
Speaker
And therefore, I'm going to engage in class conflict from the top.
00:56:18
Speaker
I'm going to have contempt for my inferiors.
00:56:24
Speaker
And it's like that is in its own way as destructive as the resentment from below.
00:56:33
Speaker
And so you have to get to a point where that enmity and that tension is resolved.
00:56:40
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, like, I agree 100% with everything that you say.
00:56:46
Speaker
I have so much, you know, I could respond to that.
00:56:49
Speaker
The first is that this is, like, this is the sort of the power and the truth to me of the sort of Catholic slash medieval slash European slash aristocratic sort of
00:57:04
Speaker
which is that it views society as this organic pyramid where all of the parts work together.
00:57:16
Speaker
And, you know, it's, I mean, you know, Paul...
00:57:24
Speaker
St.
00:57:24
Speaker
Paul, you know, the church is a body and every part has a role.
00:57:29
Speaker
It's that kind of mindset.
00:57:31
Speaker
And so every, you know, every part of the whole has respect for the part, no pun intended, that the other parts play.
00:57:44
Speaker
And so that's, and that's, to me, is like the fundamental, this is like a debate that's so boring, I don't want to get into it, but I'll just say it.
00:57:54
Speaker
This is like the fundamental worldview difference between the sort of like Christian version versus the sort of Bap Nietzsche atheist version of this, which is, which is, yeah, like, oh, I'm better than you.
00:58:13
Speaker
I'm superior to you.
00:58:14
Speaker
Therefore, fuck you.
00:58:16
Speaker
You know, lick my feet.
00:58:17
Speaker
Ha ha ha.
00:58:19
Speaker
Which is self-destructive, ultimately, because, you know, it's also in the enlightened self-interest of the elite to sort of, and like the Italian school of political science that Bernheim talks about, like,
00:58:39
Speaker
you write this, like, it's in the interest of the elite to sort of, like, work for the interest of the good of the society as a whole, as opposed to their own interest.
00:58:50
Speaker
And they become degenerate, where they sort of become, like, these taking elites that don't have respect for the rest of society.
00:59:00
Speaker
And so this sort of, you know, this sort of,
00:59:04
Speaker
oh, you know, I'm a Bronze Age warrior.
00:59:07
Speaker
I've, you know, I've taken your women, I've taken your country, go slave in the coal mines to, and, you know, feed me grapes as I recline and write poetry.
00:59:21
Speaker
The one good thing about that worldview is that it's sort of stark about reality because the problem is that ultimately, you know,
00:59:30
Speaker
Elites also rely on their status in also hold their status in at least in part based on their ability to physically overpower the rest of society.
00:59:44
Speaker
And if they lose that, then they lose the mandate of heaven and they need to be aware that, oh, you know, sometimes.
Force and Elite Status
00:59:51
Speaker
the lower orders are like hobbits happily living their lives and everybody is working together.
00:59:57
Speaker
But sometimes the lower orders are a mob and the mob needs to be put down.
01:00:02
Speaker
And if you spend too much time in Versailles and you've become a fag, then you can't put down the mob.
01:00:07
Speaker
And so the mob will cut off your head.
01:00:10
Speaker
And so in that sense, the sort of Nietzschean perspective is sort of clarifying and it sort of like prevents you from like getting high on your own supply.
01:00:21
Speaker
But it's still fundamentally, in my view anyway, untrue.
01:00:25
Speaker
Well, and he even talks about that in, I mean, he talks a lot about Critias and sort of the 30 tyrants in Athens.
01:00:35
Speaker
He's like, once upon a time, there were people who were forthright about their intentions as overmen, amoral tyrants.
01:00:46
Speaker
And guess what happened?
01:00:48
Speaker
They pissed everybody off and they got killed.
01:00:51
Speaker
And the subtler point that he makes about that sometimes is like,
01:01:02
Speaker
you know, the elite who views himself as sort of ruling by the consent of the governed is to some extent sort of slave of popular opinion, even if he's not formally, you know, democratically appointed.
01:01:18
Speaker
And so, yeah, like you're saying, it does sort of rest on force.
01:01:23
Speaker
But at the same time, like a lot of people, and you see this especially with gender discourse
01:01:31
Speaker
a lot of guys come out with this very like, you know, men should be in charge because we're sort of physically bigger and stronger and can overpower and, and, you know, you know, through, through coercion and violence be in charge.
01:01:47
Speaker
And it's like, but, but you're on here on Twitter, like trying to make that case.
01:01:51
Speaker
Like you're trying to like, you're trying to make it like it's a persuasive case.
01:01:54
Speaker
And it's like, no one's persuaded by that.
Conclusion and Follow Pascal on Twitter
01:01:57
Speaker
Like,
01:01:58
Speaker
You know, if you want to if you want to rule that way, then you're going to have to actually prove it and like do it.
01:02:05
Speaker
You're not going to get like a woman on board with that rhetorically.
01:02:08
Speaker
Like that's ridiculous.
01:02:11
Speaker
And so, you know, and that sort of rhymes with the whole with the whole conversation.
01:02:16
Speaker
Like, are you playing democratic politics or not?
01:02:19
Speaker
Well, anyway, this has been a really good conversation, man.
01:02:23
Speaker
I appreciate you coming on.
01:02:25
Speaker
If we were to send somebody somewhere, it would probably be the Substack, right?
01:02:28
Speaker
Yeah, or my Twitter.
01:02:31
Speaker
My Twitter is better, actually.
01:02:32
Speaker
Just follow me on Twitter.
01:02:34
Speaker
P-E-G-O-B-R-Y.
01:02:36
Speaker
Awesome.
01:02:37
Speaker
Thanks, man.