← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining American Cultural History
02:17:19
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- [00:03]
Rudyard Lynch
Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in. Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of History 102, starring myself, Rudyard lynch and our recurring co host, Austin Padgett. Today's episode is a cultural history of America. And and I apologize for any latent background noise in this video. However, I do not control my neighbors.
- [00:36]
Austin Padgett
I apologize if there's any extra light or blinding brightness on this beautiful poster we have behind us which is available on our merch store, history102. In the description.
- [00:49]
Rudyard Lynch
It was so hard to make that map. I had to cross reference a bunch of different anthropological disciplines. I also just ordered our T shirt in the Age of the Last Men. So check out the merch store. The link is in the description. Don't subscribe, don't like.
- [01:04]
Austin Padgett
And this is a psychology map. The like seven different.
- [01:07]
Rudyard Lynch
Oh yeah. It's one of the theories I've made that I'm most proud of. The different my seven different underlying psychological emotions of societies. And to speak about cultural psychology. What we can probably play on that thesis a little bit in this video because there's several different reasons I want to make a specific video about the cultural history of America, one of which is that this is a topic that is one of my top specialities. If you've seen my maps, I've made maps about the different sub cultural sub regions of America, America's different ethnic regions, the geography. And this is one of the topics I find most interesting because I'm an American and my family's been here since the Mayflower and we've lived in all over the country. So I can look at my family genealogy and see the history of America in miniature. And that gives you a personal degree of attachment to it. Where to figure out who you are, you have to figure out who your roots are to a great degree because you are the culmination of all of your ancestors. And the modernist materialist mask of we're all the same. It's very thin and it's also a projector screen. And it's a projector screen designed so the people who look at it, they can think that their underlying assumptions are shared with others. But having. Because I grew up in Pennsylvania and as an adult I've come to realize how different the world is and how different America is, where I've gone through multiple phases of thinking, oh, Americans are Largely the same. And then I've gone through other phases of thinking Americans are different sub nations and I oscillate between them. But I've leaned more so towards America being a series of distinct sub nations with their own culture and heritage and values. And a nation is a people. So there's the Jewish nation, there's the Scottish nation, although Scotland is part of the uk, the Kurds are a nation. And so America, and this is the Colin Woodard book America is a series of sub nations. And that's why when we printed on our currency is E pluribus unum out of many 1. Because it was understood that the different states and the different regional cultures were different nations which the federal government had to bridge. And that's been lost. And a few other reasons I want to make this video. One is that this element has been nearly totally left out of American sort of state managed history where it's really strange that the regime talks about America being a multicultural nation, but then they won't go about explaining what the different cultures are that make up the multicultural soup, where they won't even talk about the Germans or the Irish. And, and when they do talk about minorities like natives or blacks, they do so in a very performative, propagandistic lens that alienates these people's actual stories and actual lived experiences where the leftist narrative on these groups is not accurate. And also I want to touch on these themes. I think it's very important to look at America as a culture and a people because it's not discussed. And after you, you say what you'd like, there's a handful of different framings or like sort of structural spines for how we can talk about American cultural history. I'll show you.
- [04:34]
Austin Padgett
Right. It's kind of like Mulan where she's looking to, into a puddle asking who she is and where does she find the answer. She goes to look at her ancestors. And if you want to know who you are, I mean it'll, it could be informative to a degree to, to talk about an Italian immigrant in America in the, in the 40s. But if you want to study your genealogy, you're not going to go back to Italy, you're going to go to England and Ireland and you know, wherever you go. So there's, there's these complex overlaps with like, is it a nation? Is it different people groups? There's clearly different people groups, but there's also time. And so will America turn into kind of a new national identity? Will there be like a fusion of The Saxon and Celtic identity will there be? Because that's happened a few times in different ways. And it's kind of like Iran versus Iraq, where they're both split up into very different groups. But Iran has been a country for much longer. So, like the Ziri and the Kurds in Iran are much more amenable to the nation of Iran than maybe in Iraq, where it was kind of popped up more in a more recent history.
- [05:51]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, I really want to make a Persian civilization video, but I have to read. I have to read these books first. This is my unread Persia shelf. And so when the war started, I thought, oh, God, I have a few months to finish this.
- [06:07]
Austin Padgett
But yeah, terrible timing to have to read about it now.
- [06:10]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. I'm also in the middle of a different research project. I'm currently. I've been finishing up my reading on the 16th century and the Italian Renaissance for those videos. I just finished reading up on Prussia, which is going to be the video for next week. So the way I'm going to frame this in several sort of, I'm going to make several spines for it. Where when you study West European history in the since the Middle Ages, it's always Renaissance, Reformation, rise of science, enlightenment, romanticism, 20th century, managerial order. And then if in the future they're going to write the 21st century as the Network Age. And that's the spine of European history. And people pick that because those are actually the historic time periods you have to wrestle with. If you were to look at Europe in any of those given centuries, that would be the guiding, animating spirit. And so I see this video as partly a successor to the series that David Hackett Fisher never wrote. And David Hackett Fisher is one of my favorite writers. He's the author of Albion Seed as well as the great African founders, Historians, Fallacies, Fairness and Freedom. And I've spoken about these different books to differing degrees in other videos. But part of the reason I wanted to make this video was I know that you're quite interested in Albion Seed. So I wanted to have a format to talk about those cultures outside of the colonial America video. But when David Hackett Fisher wrote Albion seed in the 1980s and 90s, or he was like, 1989, he said it was going to be the start of his Cultural History of America series that would cover all of American cultural history. And I was reading these books in like 2019 or something I read at the end of high school. And I was so disappointed that 40 years later DHF had not written another book in the series. And I think the reason is that the next book he was going to write is on the effect of black America on American culture. And he waited 40 years because that book would have been sort of nuclear grade titanium to publish. But he published it after the 2000s when there was enough cover for Madness. And I thought he did a really good job with African founders. But because he didn't write the African book we. I also did not receive his book on the Catholic migrants to America, the Effect of the Industrial Revolution in the Frontier on America. And so I see this video as my attempt to create that series that never existed. As if you were to write the books after Albion's Seed, what would they look like? And the way I'm going to roughly structure this is one of the things dhf, which is the moniker I use for David Hackett Fisher dhf In the introduction to Albion Seed talks about the different self conceptions of America's identity over time. And I should make a video on the main channel about this. But when America first formed as a republic, it was its sense of self was that we are a democracy that's opposed to the established European nobilities and monarchies. Then in the late 19th century, it's that America was an innately Nordic Germanic nation. Where you should see America through the lens of England or Germany or these societies in the early 20th century, it's that America was a frontier nation and that our sense of self was developed through having to face the frontier. And that was the Frederick Jackson Turner thesis. After that it was in around World War II, it was that America's identity was formed around diversity. But what they meant back then was that the diversity between Italians and Germans and Irish and different groups of white American. And in the 21st century, the thesis was that America was was a nation built on exploitation and beating the natives and enslaving the blacks. And I view this actually as a pretty useful like five point structure of the different elements of America's identity. And I'm going to add a sixth, that being our democratic institutions which do affect us, the frontier, our British heritage, the legacy of slavery, slash conquering the natives and white immigration, slash migration diversity. And then to layer on that, you have to also talk about for the six, the effects of the Industrial Revolution and the machine which culminate onto leftism.
- [10:51]
Austin Padgett
Right. And in the leftist framework, the ethnic or racial identity basically just relates to the class or the racial oppression dynamics, which is why white gets kind of bundled up in a way that ignores these very important cultural value differences. And by the same token, that's why you don't even. Because of the conception is based on racial color based oppression groups. You don't even analyze the differences between black Americans. Like are there any residual cultural differences between Angolan versus Nigerian or are the different areas that people came from? Because we actually have a lot of that information and could figure it out and that might be fun for people to know.
- [11:38]
Rudyard Lynch
The cultural disjoint in the early 21st century is massive. And it seems like our entire society is built to ignore it. Because I look at everything going on now and all of this seems profoundly implausible to me. Just all of the cultural things people talk about, the things they view as important, this just does not. It seems like we entered into a, like a psychotic fever dream and most people are not aware of this. And you can go back very recently and people had moral codes that were significantly more sane, views of the world that were significantly more sane. And the thing is that the underlying substructure of their worldview wasn't sane. And if you look at Back to the 1950s, this is already a nihilistic society. It's already a society that doesn't believe in anything that's egalitarian, that's delusional. But most people's daily lives in the 50s were more sane. And then the academia and the theories that built the government, they were more delusional. Utope utopianism. But it took a while for the logic from that systems to work through the population. I wasn't alive then, but if you would go back to the 1990et, you would. And this, this is written out by surveys of American public opinion. The vast majority of Americans were Christian. They were proud of being American. They had a general comprehension of where in Europe their ancestors were from. There was a fairly healthy grappling with slavery and the consequences of Jim Crow where for about a generation after the end of Jim Crow, it was understood. About a generation after the end of Jim Crow it was generally understood by a lot of Americans that our history with all of the things the left talks about had been grappled with. And I think part of the reason the left seized power was they wanted institutional authority so that they couldn't get fired. Because in a normal person would think if we elect a black president that should be a marker that we've assimilated blacks into the broader American society. But what the left realized is damn if we don't seize total power, the public will think they don't need us anymore. So we have to seize institutional authority. And it's really. It's crazy to look over the 21st century where it's like we had a psychotic break or like. Or the left, the woke had a psychotic break and then the entire global order made a conspiracy not to talk about it. And so we've just normalized it as the underlying reality. And it's really gross and it's weird. And I was talking to Marek yesterday and I said, a big element of life today is this is profoundly gross and it's profoundly perverted and weird. But the shared social compromise is you're supposed to pretend this is normal.
- [14:31]
Austin Padgett
It's similar to when the. The world didn't blow up in 12 years from climate change. So then you lose your excuse. It's like you elect a black president and then suddenly you lose the excuse for all your funding or your ideological justification for power. So that is an interesting lens on the Obama election.
- [14:56]
Rudyard Lynch
So I'm going to start with the English migration to America, because the thing with the Native Americans is they make up about 0.5% of America's genetics. And. And they impact modern American culture predominantly through inverses. As an example, the term white was a term developed by the Native Americans because they were looking for a. Because all the Europeans looked white to them. And so the Europeans would hear the natives call them white. And that formed their shared idea of, we're not just English, we're not just French, we're a shared racial group. Or the natives introduced the Europeans to corn. The natives had democracies in republics like the ones the American built. Both the Cherokee and the Iroquois were republics. And so there are these similarities. And part of me does wonder how much the character of the land will alter white American society to be like the Native society, where, as an example, white Americans and Native Americans are. They're both individualistic societies, and they're both the societies in history that have given women the highest social status. And you see these similarities. And part of me wonders if American style Protestantism is on a trajectory to develop like what Native American shamanism was. Because if you look at Pentecostalism, you look at the Protestant sects getting less structured and controlled in sort of European vibes. And so there is this underlying question I've often had of how much, as long as we live on this land, will we eventually turn out like the Native Americans? Because the reason the Native Americans had the culture they did was they were a culture that was responding to the same underlying geographic incentives as us.
- [16:49]
Austin Padgett
I hadn't quite thought about it that way. I mean, there's. There's a lot of classic stories of rubbing off, right? The stories about the early frontiersmen who decided to live with the Indians, the mystery of Roanoke and how maybe it. The fact that they disappeared was because they didn't die, they actually joined them. And then, like Ben Franklin, both hated the Indians, but took some, you know, distilled some, like, cultural things from them. So that psyche is bound to rub off. But I just don't mathematically. I can't picture how, like, the rivers and the mountains are going to repeat some of those dynamics. It's such a different context.
- [17:29]
Rudyard Lynch
It's because cultures are responses to the geography they're in. And so you can see similarities between geographies that change a society. As an example, Australia and California have a lot of cultural similarities because their Pacific Mediterranean climates settled in the 19th century. On the other side of the earth from Britain or the American south is. The American south has a lot of cultural similarities to other master morality cultures like the ancient Greco Romans or other subtropical cultures where you can compare the American south in certain elements to areas like the Middle east or India. Although I don't want to overplay that because they're all responses to a shared subtropical culture. And subtropical cultures develop these aristocratic societies with aristocrats who live in leisure and then have slaves or serfs who work for them so they don't have to work in the heat. And you can divide America, and this is an article I wrote for Palladium that I'm going to republish on my channel, the peoples of North America, where you can divide America between the societies that, due to geographic reasons, allow extensions of European culture. And this is the Albion seed groups. And about 60% of Americans fit into a genetic group that stems back to the colonial period. So we've massively overplayed the demographic importance of the later migrations, especially the European migrations. And so Virginia, or the Cavaliers, the Scots Irish, the Quaker Midlands and the Puritans, as well as the Quebecois, are all extensions of European societies where they could find geography that was similar enough to European that they didn't have to change their underlying substructure. And when I grew up in Pennsylvania, I was often struck by how similar the land looked to Europe, where I could look at pictures, especially of Germany or Central Europe. And I thought, yeah, this does look a lot like home. And in both the west and the south, you saw the need to radically recreate cultures around the geographic needs. And so in the American south, that was due to slavery and the importation of Africans to deal with the diseases that would often kill a majority of Europeans arriving in the subtropics and in the American West. The Mormons are an example of creating a Middle Eastern style theocracy that was able to adapt very well to a climate and geography like the Middle East. If you look, I often think of the American intermountain West in terms of the ancient Middle east, where I see some of the areas of the intermountain west as some of those degenerate places in the Bible that God burns. And then there are other areas like the ancient Hebrews that are these religious cults. Or you have the herder peoples like the cowboys or the Arabian herder tribes. And once you get to the west coast, the west coast is bordering on its own civilization because it's so far removed from the underlying European traits because it's practically on the other side of the world from Europe. Something I tell people from the west coast is that it takes as long to start in Pennsylvania to reach Europe by plane as it does to reach California. And that's how big the scale we're operating on.
- [20:54]
Austin Padgett
Right? And it makes more sense when you break it up into regions instead of trying to think of all of America, because like you said, people move to the region that matches it. Which makes me think it's more about these global kind of biomes than something intrinsic to the American Indians. Because like you have tropic area all across that band and similar for the other ones.
- [21:20]
Rudyard Lynch
This theory might be too schizo for modernity, but I think that different lands and different geographies have innate characters and spirits that rub off on their inhabitants in a litany of ways. And it's not schizo when you see it in a biological lens that you have to respond to the geography. And as examples, Anatolia has consistently produced these strong warrior, warrior, nomad, but also bureaucratic states. And I think of, because I've been trying to think of how the underlying American collective unconscious is different from the European. And one of the things is that America has this greater feral quality that does not exist in Europe. And there's this grander scale to it as well. Where as examples, when atheist managerialism developed in Europe, it developed through the total state based on rationality. In America it was machine worship and materialist nihilism. In Europe it's we should have the state do this for utopian goals. In America it's we don't like thinking about abstract concepts, let's just shove a machine in Rather than thinking of the human complexity. And when you look at the left or feminism, in Europe, it's more structured, and in America, it's more rabid and sort of. It's more. When Americans do leftism, it's less. It's something I don't know how to articulate. It's something wilder than when Europeans or other cultures do it. It's more. It's less so about. So when Europeans talk at the feminine archetype, they tend to think of the positive Earth mother. And in America with the natives, it's a significantly more sort of savage and wild archetype. And so when I look at when Americans relate to their environments, there's this degree of cosmic isolation against the wild that Americans have. And so I was talking to Grok about this recently where I said I was reading at the Italian Renaissance, and I said, I can read about all of these European authors who are glorifying the Renaissance, saying it's the high point of civilization, but I don't relate to that at all. I had to look at the Renaissance from a distance and figure out why other people cared about it, because I did not grow up in the European trajectory that was educated about this. My family left Europe before we got that. And what Grok said is that you have been formed by the American frontier psychologically. So your ancestors have selected against these localized status games like the Renaissance, at least like four or five times. So when you look at it, it smells like the reason you left Europe, which is why it's hard for you to relate to it. And in America, social institutions are contractual relationships, which is not the way it is in the rest of the world, where, as an example, if the government fails in America, you can get rid of the government. If the religion fails, you can make a new one. If you don't like your society, you can move to a different part of America. And in the rest of the world, these are not consensual relationships. You're born into them. You have to win the local status game. And there's. They see leaving as completely incomprehensible, which is why when Europeans look at America, they find the cowboy to be so symbolic of us because they think about their societies and their social structures as the world. And this is something Americans don't really get, where we'll make decisions that operate out of our frame of logic, and they'll come across as completely incomprehensible to other societies because we don't have the concept that practically every other society on Earth has that Your culture is non negotiable and it's very tight and it's very structured. And so I remember when I was talking to, I was in France and there was a political conversation came up and I said, oh yeah, the past is over. We could just make a decision to change this and like do something new. And she said, oh, I love your Americanisms. And I thought, wait, that wasn't an Americanism to me, that was just common sense. And there's a lot more stuff like this than we think. And Americans don't seem to realize how you're. So Western Europe is already a really different society from others anthropologically. But America is like an extra standard deviation or two out from Western Europe.
- [25:59]
Austin Padgett
Right. When what you're describing is basically just freedom and the things that separate the west value wise from the rest of the world. You know the really the things that people call weird the acronym for Western whatever. Yeah. So that is like that unique culture and it shows more strongly in America and I guess California would be an example of where it becomes unbound into kind of new age postmodernism versus, I don't know, some more healthy integration. But it, it also you mentioned it's contractual. Right. So it's kind of like the beginning of the network state, individual sovereignty, property rights and the transcending these all the ancient, the ancient regime. Right, that's, that's basically what you're talking about. That's this force and I guess it can manifest in both Calvinist theocratic dystopia or some, you know, better integration towards a positive hermetic dynamic that changes a lot of the previous cultural assumptions that have upheld most of human society.
- [27:17]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And a huge difference between America and Europe is that the cultures that became dominant in America were ones that were largely peripheral to Europe. Where I call America a North Sea society, which if you look at the cultures that made America, they're roughly the areas around the North Sea, the British Isles, Germany, Scandinavia, France and inside Europe. The North Sea cultures did gain a quite strong dominance in the early modern period. But Europe was dense enough that they were never able to become the European mainstream. Europe has always been predominant on a cultural basis, predominantly held together by the Mediterranean's legacy, that being the Greco Roman civilization or is the Israel's religion or Christianity. And Europe you also have the peasant substrate to the population. And so when you read a lot of European right wing thinkers, they're significantly more classist than American right wing thinkers because in Europe you have this huge peasant population that basically does have to be led to do stuff. They will not demonstrate initiative if they're not led. And among white Americans, we've basically sampled this population out. So when Americans and Europeans talk about class, it's nigh impossible to actually get them to listen to each other because their actual class structures are so different. And in America we have a class structure that's more like the older war band de Tocqueville remarked about America's top trait is our ability to easy free association. And so that means you, let's say we move to Texas, you find people are on a new shared interest. You do stuff. If that breaks up, you might move somewhere else. You might form a different group. And this is alien to almost all humans in history because it requires a very high trust society to do this and one with very long time delayed gratification, which the North Sea cultures did have. And also in Europe, you have the centralized state as a greater force in its own right, where modernity was smuggled into America through technologism. And a lot of European reactionary authors of a century ago said that America's core ideology was technologism and it's the worship of machines for their own sake. And in America, the North Sea culture gained predominance. In Europe, the North Sea culture are these ideas of self reliance and freedom and laissez faire. They were able to predominate when the North Sea area nobilities ran those countries. Once they became universal suffrage democracies, that culture lost out. But in America, that demographic became dominant. So we were able to keep those values while having a universal suffrage democracy. And if you take out this core North Sea culture from North America, the continent just does not work now because the Anglo culture is the shared glue that holds North America together. And then Latin America is its own world. But Latin America was never able to attain high enough levels of maturity that it could develop its own sort of generative. It could never break past its own issues.
- [30:49]
Austin Padgett
So would you say it'd be easier to move from Georgia to California than northern to southern France? And like 100 years ago.
- [31:00]
Rudyard Lynch
A hundred years ago is much easier to. I think it would be easier to move from Georgia to California. It might be harder to. It might. I might go for France today because it's interesting that globalization has increased regional differences inside America rather than decreased them, which is what everyone thought. Where as a Pennsylvanian, if I moved to California in the 20th century, it's radically different from when I went to California in the 2000s.
- [31:27]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. And France maybe is like consolidated more into a shared culture in response to, I don't know, being outnumbered more globally.
- [31:35]
Rudyard Lynch
A huge thing as well is that a century ago, France had only attained universal literacy within the previous generation. France only had universal literacy at the end of the 19th century. And this is another thing about class in America, where white Americans have been universally literate for basically our entire history. And that's a Protestant characteristic in inside Europe, except for the Protestant nations, most European countries did not have universal literacy through the 20th century. And so this gives America as a society a universal baseline that everyone can be treated as a responsible citizen. Because until the 20th century, the vast majority of Americans were property owners. They were literate, they owned guns, they could serve in a militia. And those are the characteristics that the classical authors and the founding fathers that were necessary for democracy. So that's why America became the most successful society on earth with universal suffrage, while universal suffrage in Europe caused the collapse of their empires very quickly.
- [32:40]
Austin Padgett
It's ironically smarter to have a gun than it is to learn how to read in a lot of contexts or allow norms that, that do that. And then, I mean, on one end we can highlight these huge differences between America and Europe in terms of the peasant tendencies to not want to think for themselves or make an executive decision outside of being told. And then you can, you know, compare that to Asia. And then all of a sudden we look very, very similar. But then the US also has many of its own problems with this dynamic where we still have this kind of value base where we'll say socialized healthcare is bad while chaotically spending as much of our GDP on it as Europe. So it's like that might relate to the way that leftism manifests more chaotically in America. Like you said, because we, where they justify the state openly, we kind of always say it's bad and then kind of sneak it through the back door based on entropy.
- [33:44]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. I'm currently reading Beautiful Losers by Sam Francis. It's a study of the failure of 20th century conservatism. And I read two interesting essays I'm currently on with one about Henry Clay, where Sam Francis was a southerner, and so he, and he came from a mental school of America as a series of different sub nations with their own interests. And he talked about how Henry Clay, who was this early 19th century politician, the way he reconciled these different sub nations competing inside America, because this was during the era of good feelings, which was an actual stated historic time period in the early 19th century when the average American was quite prosperous and we were settling The Frontier. And Henry Clay, when he talked about how a centralized tariff system would affect the different American sub nations in different ways and how you get the sub nations to agree to a shared national policy. Because, for example, South Carolina tried to secede in the 1820s and Andrew Jackson had to send the national military down to South Carolina to stop them from doing so. This is one of the first tingles of the coming US Civil War. And the reason was that South Carolina did not like the centralized tariff system because their economy was dependent on shipping the crops from their plantations to Europe and importing goods from Europe in exchange for it. The north was industrializing. So we liked tariffs because it gave us space to build up our own industrial base, distinct from the British one, which could produce more cheaply than us because it was better established. And Henry Clay was a Virginian who moved to Kentucky and used that as his. I was going to say his layer. He used that as his constituency in his region was dependent on exporting bluegrass and crops from the bluegrass area. So he didn't like tariffs because. Or he wanted tariffs to better protect areas production versus Europe. And his argument was. His argument was that the American states can disagree with each other on economic and cultural matters, but we have to bond together as a nation on the international stage. And we would figure out what to do on a case by case basis on the international stage based on what made sense in our shared context. And what Sam Francis said is this ended up creating a very schizophrenic foreign policy. Where the previous essay Sam Francis wrote is that the American foreign policy establishment is descendant, is, was when he was writing this in 1979, is built and descended by the descendants of Puritan Yankees. And so he said the Puritan Yankees in the Northeast have this very messianic, moralistic foreign policy that you can see with Woodrow Wilson or Jimmy Carter. And he said that this is at profound odds with the rest of the world. And what Francis said is that the American south would be better able to manage America's foreign policy because the American south has a society closer to most societies in the world where you have entrenched ethnic differences, a history of slavery and oppression, poverty, honor culture, comprehensions of stuff like kin networks being conquered by your neighbor. And so he said that American Southerners would be better able to understand other societies, while these Puritan Yankee descendants were sort of living in their own reality. And what you end up with the Henry Clay foreign policy is that there's no underlying plan or leadership to America. And so Francis was talking about how in other societies the aristocracy provided this role of this is a multi generation direction and identity for the society. And if you look at the great empires like Austria or the Ottomans, they thought about this a lot because they had multi ethnic empires. It didn't matter how many ethnic minorities there were because there was the centralized structure and America is the opposite of that. Where it would be as if the Austrian Empire, and this is an exaggeration, it would be as if the Austrian Empire was a unified democracy where the different sub ethnicities would take turns voting. And I wonder, I was seeing the transfer from Japanese reading American tweets and the Japanese were trying to figure out why do the Americans hate California so much. And I was thinking to myself, this would be so confusing if you're a foreigner because you can tell that America is super divided, but the Americans are not honest or coherent about talking about this. So you would just think we're schizophrenic.
- [38:38]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, I had some conversations with Japanese people when it was going on and they said, they said, oh, Austin's great, he's the best and I hope this organization is successful. And it was like an organization, a sub organization that I was like related to two years ago when I was talking to him. But it's actually like in opposition in some ways now. But they don't get any of that nuance at all. So I was just like, yep, thumbs up. Yeah, I'm going to keep it positive.
- [39:05]
Rudyard Lynch
I've spoken at the Albion seed groups a significant amount. And so the way I'm going to avoid redundancy on this topic is I'm going to briefly summarize how these groups formed and then we're going to talk about how they manifested over American history after the revolution. Because in all of the Albion Seed analysis, it's colonial. How do they reach England's to America? But it's not about after the revolution solutions. And that's covering terrain that the audience hasn't seen yet. Where Albion Seed is a. It's a very important book and it's written by David Hackett Fisher. And so how these different subgroups of British migrated to America during the colonial period, establishing America's different regional cultures. And you can find these in genetics today where as said before, 60% of Americans fulfill these genetic groups. And oftentimes these Albion seed groups are bigger than European countries. For example, there's more Americans of Scots Irish ancestry than there are black Americans. And hi kitty. It's easy to forget how there. There are more. So there are more Scots Irish or comparable people to as there are in England or France, which is pretty crazy to think about. And yeah, the first of these groups where even though the first colony in America was at Jamestown in Virginia, the first large demographic transfer was Puritans from eastern England to the American to New England. And they became the culture of the American Northeast. And they had some of the highest human development stats of anywhere in the world, some of the most technologically advanced, most intrepid, most equal. But they were also effectively a cult. Watch the Colonial America video for more context or my videos in the main channel. The second one was the sons of South English nobility who migrated from former Wessex to the Chesapeake. And these were both responses to their faction losing the English Civil War. And in their attempt to recreate the European aristocracy in America, they imported African slaves because the white English settlers were not willing to work as peasants like they were back in England. And the other culture of the American south that people forget about is Barbados, where the Deep south in South Carolina and Georgia. And Georgia is a strange case where it was a philanthropic society that banned slavery. But then they caved once the Oglethorpe the founder couldn't maintain power because slavery was so much more cost effective for that geography that the areas in that climate zone eventually caved to practice slavery. And he Oglethorpe wasn't able to maintain power. But the culture of the American Deep south actually stems from the white settlers of Barbados, which was majority white in the mid 17th century when Barbados grew tobacco, then when sugar became the predominant crop of the Caribbean. And sugar was done by these large plantations of blacks who would work 16 hours a day in the heat, work themselves to their work to death before more slaves were brought in. And so this caused a depopulation from Barbados to the American south, making the culture of the Deep South. Pennsylvania and the American Rust Belt were populated he bowl from the English Rust Belt, the area around Leeds and Manchester. And the Quakers were a pacifist religious cult who believed the opposite things from the Puritan religious fanatics. And the messianic religious origin of America has stayed for us ever since with our distinctive flair of utopianism. And this made the culture of the Midwest. And then the fourth Albion seed group is the Scots Irish migration from the Scottish lowlands and the north of England and the north of Ireland to Appalachian America. And this created the cowboy and country culture. And each of these groups colonized their own sub regions of the American west, creating cultures that spread out to the Great Plains.
- [43:20]
Austin Padgett
Yep, and that's kind of the intro version that's still pre Revolution formation.
- [43:26]
Rudyard Lynch
I was just. I was laying the groundwork there. So through their demographic expansion, these different groups, they evolved into something that was comparable to what they were in the colonial period. But they had to level up. And you saw the mixing of an industrialized, globalized economy with the American society where the south was about to abolish slavery in the early 19th century. And with the introduction of the cotton gin, they suddenly were able to expand over a much larger area and slavery became a more popular institution. And so the Deep south was the area of America with the most wealthy people, and it was 80% black. During the time leading up to the US Civil War with Virginia had the largest diaspora west of any of the American states, more than the entire north combined. And the Scots Irish and the Cavalier Virginians mixed together to produce a culture of the Upper south, where if you look at the genetics of the American Upper south, those two have been fused, where in places like Kentucky or Tennessee, it became a new culture. And so in Texas, Cavalier everywhere. But there's also very clearly the Scots Irish culture in things like the Defiance or country music. And both the Cavaliers and the Scots Irish had honor cultures. And David Hackett Fisher, in a study of the Upper south, found that there wasn't much social mobility on a local level, but the social mobility came from rapid growth and rapid change. Where in the early Republic, the American south was the culture that was expanding more rapidly than the north while the north industrialized. So in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, the North ended up with double the population. The south did well at the time of the Revolution. They were roughly approximate. And the south grew at twice the speed the north did. Because the south wasn't able to grow up partly due to its aristocratic culture that looks down on working or the climate, which stopped there from being large cities due to disease. Well, they expanded outwards while the north built upwards.
- [45:55]
Austin Padgett
And the cotton gin is funny because it's the only time the left will admit that innovation can actually lead to an increased demand for labor. Because you become so much more competitive in the global industry that you're producing more, even though, like, you need fewer people to do the same amount. Yeah, that's kind of ironic. The only time they'll take the anti Luddite case there.
- [46:20]
Rudyard Lynch
I hate the left's lack of consistency. They used to say that technology is our strength. We're going to get out of the debt through innovation. We're going to innovate our way out of these issues. And now when they actually have to face innovation. And it fires their people. They're against it.
- [46:33]
Austin Padgett
The lack of it turns out the way you do innovation is kind of undermines a lot of the rest of their grift.
- [46:40]
Rudyard Lynch
They lack consistency or clarity. It's like. It's like looking at a stream of dirty water. David Hackett Fisher wrote a book called Bound Away, which is his study of the anthropology of Virginia. And it's interesting because you can see he goes after the Revolution and he talked to the different Albion seed groups like the Scots Irish in the west, the Cavaliers in the east, and then the Africans as well. And then there were little colonies of Germans and Quakers in the Southern Piedmont. But Virginia experienced a total population decline from the period of the American Revolution until the US Civil War. And Virginia and New England actively actually lost population to the forest where more of their states became forested. And when you look at the Cavalier culture, because these cultures evolve in different directions. And you can see how the migration west changed them where for the Virginians, they weren't able to export their aristocratic society. And so part of the reason when the US Civil War came around, that Virginia provided so much of the South's leadership was that Virginia's uniquely, truly aristocratic culture could produce individuals of the caliber of Thomas Jefferson or Madison or Robert E. Lee or George Washington. And a lot of this was Sir William Berkeley, who was the lord of the area of Fairfax County. He was Lord Fairfax, sorry, Sir William Barclay was the guy who populated Virginia with the aristocracy. Lord Fairfax was the founder of Fairfax county and up by DC he held it as his own personal fief. And he brought over the ancestors of Robert E. Lee, George Washington, and I believe, Thomas Jefferson. And so he cultivated this social circle of excellence in his sort of woodland estate. But Virginia had that culture and the rest of the south didn't maintain it. They got progressively more Americanized, where on the east coast you saw more European, like cultural traits. And one of the things that Frederick Jackson Turner talks about is that the frontier Americanizes. And I often complain that there's only half a dozen cities in America that have their own distinct architecture and feel, and everything else is a strip mall. And that's the negative side of this. The positive side of this is greater social fluidity, greater entrepreneurialness, etc. And so we look at the south and there's an interesting book called Southern Honor that talks about this, how the south was often quite wealthy, but it didn't prize education in the same way the north did. So when the Civil War came around, they were heavily Dependent on Virginians to provide that sort of leadership. And it's why in the civil War, the army of the east in Virginia was able to hold out against the north for so long because they had the higher quality leadership, while the army of the west was just pummeled. And meanwhile, in the north, the migration over the west prized traits like self reliance and courage, while slavery did the opposite in the South. When de Tocqueville crossed the Ohio river from Ohio to Kentucky, he said it was a seismic difference. And he said that slavery colored every element of northern versus Southern life. Because in the north, doing work was seen as just something everyone would do. There was no shame in it. But then menial labor in the south became slave coded, which created a series of social incentives that rippled throughout the entire South. And as part of the master morality, the south developed to hold down the slaves. And there's a great book called Roll Jordan Roll by Eugene Genovese, which talks about when the southerners made intellectual defenses of slavery in the early 19th century. They were pulling on classical authors like Aristotle and Plato. And so that was a thread that they drew where the north, when it was popular in the colonial period, they were sort of larping as ancient Israelites and the south were larping as the. The Greeks and the Romans.
- [50:47]
Austin Padgett
This seems to relate to the modern use of the term wagey, where people will use wagey in a derogatory term like, oh, you lose, or you have to work for your money, or you're like you're a slave. Which ties into the left's conception of working as slavery, because rather than dealing with the consequences of nature, you're in this oppressive system where you have to work or starve. So that's kind of an interesting overlap. Might be indirect.
- [51:17]
Rudyard Lynch
There's this. So people used to say, oh, if you work at a fast food restaurant when you're a teenager, at character building. And that's true in a context where you're working with other teenagers and this is a rite of passage, you get to where you're all in this shared phase. When the people, when there's no social mobility and the job is worked partly by immigrants who don't speak your language, or by even older people or baby boomers, where this is the last way they have to make money, the context changes radically. And so this is why American society does not see work as degrading, while so many other. So many other societies, especially aristocratic ones, do. Because in America, there is the expectation that if you are working at a fast food Restaurant, you could be someone's boss in five years. And in most societies in the world that is not the case because they have radically built out class structures.
- [52:19]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. And tidal inflation and all that crazy stuff.
- [52:26]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And you can see the dichotomy of the Upper south and the Lower south through the time of the American Civil War where it was the Deep south in New England, they were set against one another and they wanted a war while the Lower north and the Upper south were against it. And you can look at Scots Irish culture where people talk about the pathologies of Scots Irish culture and they look at Appalachia, which is drug issues and fatherlessness and mass poverty, but they don't talk about Tennessee or Texas, which are some of the wealthiest places on earth and they're equivalently Scots Irish. And you can look at these different societies and you can see the same trend in the New England diaspora where the Yankees had a huge diaspora due to their rapid population growth, where New England Yankees populated upstate New York, Michigan, parts of the upper Midwest and then Utah with the Mormons and the Pacific. And as they went further west, the New Englanders became more Americanized. And you will get upstate New York or Michigan. And these are places that, as a Pennsylvanian, I feel more in common with these people than I think they do with New Englanders. Because when you look at a lot of these east coast cultures like Virginia or New England or the Dutch, the Dutch elite in New York that no longer exists, they came with these sticky European traditions that went back generations. And Quebec is the same and that didn't survive the migration west. And so you had the New England traits like their thrift, their intelligence, their hard workingness. But you lost the theocratic. Because everyone who left New England didn't like the theocracy. They didn't like the village structure that had the social judgment that went back to England. And so when you read H.P. lovecraft in the 1920s, he's talking about how New England was in decline versus the rest of the country because they had that mass migration outwards up to that point and in Pennsylvania amongst the Quakers. The Quakers themselves lost power in Pennsylvania very quickly. They didn't really care about maintaining it. And the Quakers were quite delusional. So they couldn't actually maintain the government because you can't actually have a pacifist government. But the Quakers created a foundation of what we would call what we see as sort of the Midwest of work hard, keep to your local town, distrust authority. And San Francis would call them the Mars or the Middle American radicals. And this cultural frame moved beyond the Quakers to become a useful structure for the Midwest and standard American culture, which is the culture that was seen as the automatic American. And it's since morphed over to California. But for, for over a century, standard American culture developed in Ohio, upstate New York and Pennsylvania, because that was the area where the Industrial Revolution occurred. And that is a mix of Quaker, Pennsylvania, New England, Yankee and German culture, which were able to form a synthesis of high trust North European industrial culture. And that region of the country dominated America from the Civil war until the 1960s. And so that's where the accent, the food, everything that was seen as normal American and that was what was dominant in the 21st century. The cultural locust migrated out to California. And California sort of forgot that this was the core culture that they had descended from where California wants in a huge cultural trajectory by itself post 1960s.
- [56:14]
Austin Padgett
And how did the culture emanate out from the Midwest? Because we're talking even before mass TV was a lot of it, radio was a lot of it. Just culture like what the politics had to cater to the it was because standard news was it goods based.
- [56:31]
Rudyard Lynch
Standard American culture became a useful aggregate for industrial America because in pre industrial societies, things like group cohesion matter a lot more in industrial societies. Skills that allow individuality, at least in the first few generations of the Industrial Revolution, things that allow separation from family cliques and roots and individualism and hard work and all those traits, they were the traits that were rewarded. And Southern culture came with a lot of cultural baggage from slavery. And New England Yankee Brahmin culture came with a lot of baggage around having a high trust society where everyone shared the exact same values. And standard American culture was right.
- [57:25]
Austin Padgett
And the modern standard of the time,
- [57:28]
Rudyard Lynch
it could be exported.
- [57:29]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, go ahead.
- [57:30]
Rudyard Lynch
It could be exported across the continent really easily. Where it crystallized around the Midwest. And then when these northern companies built factories and businesses in the south because the north industrialized the south far more than Southerners like to admit in the 20th century because the south didn't really industrialize till World War II, post Jim Crow era. And for example, in the industrialization of Texas, it was a lot of people from Michigan. And so people would say whenever you go to a local Texas factory or oil dress drilling thing, you would see Michigan license plates in the 1970s. And interesting. So when the north industrialized the south or when they built the Texas oil industry in Houston, it was New York capital. And they moved from New York to Houston once they could have air Conditioning because they didn't want to have to live in Houston before air conditioning. And so that brought a lot of these northern norms. But then standard American culture had a crisis of confidence because the post 1960s elite institutions, their predominant aim was killing standard American culture. And they attacked it on all sides. And its great flaw was that standard American culture did not have a frame for complex human issues like war or cultural attacks or that stuff. And in the culture I grew up in Pennsylvania, there was this profound. And it was treated as a virtue, strangely enough, this profound myopia about complex issues where they would think abstract concepts are like hippie B. Yes. And woo woo. They just work hard, don't worry about the government, don't worry about the big picture, just make sure your family's taken care of. And they treat it as a virtue. But it's actually a profound abdication of responsibility and it's an undercutting and it's a shared agreement to valorize mediocrity. And so standard American culture has that problem. So it doesn't have any immunological defenses against stuff like Marxist seizure of the institutions or foreign powers that operate of low trust logic. And standard American culture makes up for these lacks through very high social trust and very high competence. And so in the Midwest, as an example, part of the reason the Midwest has lost importance versus the south is that the Midwest, and this is partly a German thing, have this very earnest attitude of we're going to try our best, we're going to work hard, and if that fails, that's okay. And in the south they'll think we're going to go out of our way to cultivate these relationships with these corporations, give them tax liabilities, make this area as pleasant as possible. Where the south really bent itself over to cultivate the industrial revolution it received within the last century. And Southerners are more flexible in this regard and they're more pre industrial in their mindset. Where the south did not experience the effects of industrialization in the same way a lot of the rest of America. And when the settlement of the west occurred, you already had modern technology like rail. So it was harder to develop these coherent societies like Quaker Pennsylvania or the Scots Irish in Appalachia in the American west, because the train lines and modern technology and the radio and whatever that stopped there from being these geographic formations that were as thick,
- [61:05]
Austin Padgett
right? And the standard American culture conception of the 50s with the guy in his yard with the fence and the pretty nice car and kind of this urban sprawl of a suburb that's really like Midwest, because even the Northeast is going to have kind of older structures and trees. And we can think of that as 1950s America. But most of America didn't look like that was like the dominant culture.
- [61:29]
Rudyard Lynch
As you say, people would reference Ohio or Illinois as the all American states. And there was a huge glorification of the Midwest in the mid 20th century. And you can see it in the art or the culture where. When Captain Kirk in Star Trek is from Iowa, that's a statement that he's like a pure American Scottishman from Iowa. Same thing. Yeah, same thing as that. And when Ray Bradbury talked of the colonization of space, he says, oh, it's people from Illinois or the Midwest say it's like pure Americans. And the south was left out of that image. The south, they were sort of shunted aside because they weren't seen as part of the image of the new America. And trying to figure out. We talked about New England, we talked about standard American culture. I feel like I haven't done these groups justice, but is there anything else? I'm not saying.
- [62:22]
Austin Padgett
I don't feel that you've covered them all yet. Right. Which one are we on next? Are we on California next?
- [62:27]
Rudyard Lynch
We've covered the cultures east of the Mississippi. And now let's talk about the frontier where Frederick Jackson Turner was the big author in this field. Oh, we need to talk about the effects of slavery over the frontier. We talked of the South's development of master morality. And Africans in America are a distinct racial caste. That's the best prism through which to perceive them, because it's not like slavery in the classical world where slaves are just. They're a distinct population that if they perform well enough, they could get freed. In America, it was split along racial lines, and that was the way of reconciling. Slavery works for the geography of this region because the Africans had immunity to the local diseases which killed Europeans. And for example, Florida was nearly totally unpopulated until World War II because it was malarial. The south had very few major cities until the Post World War II era for the same reason that the cities were congregations of disease. And you only hit the disease breakthrough around World War I. And that was why DDT was so widely used in the south. And why DDT caused this moral panic about killing off the birds. Because it was a genuinely useful technology to kill off all the mosquitoes.
- [63:41]
Austin Padgett
And it's like air conditioning in Houston. You actually can't live there in those conditions. Yeah, we opened it up. We terraformed parts of America like we would Mars.
- [63:50]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, yeah, I've said that before and it's pretty crazy. And the South, I'm trying to figure out what I've. Because I made an entire video on African American history and I've talked to different American regional cultures. Slavery had deleterious consequences across the board. It's why the south scores the lowest in any HDI stat. And slavery was an institution which was foundational to the south directly or indirectly until the time of Jim Crow. Because when the north conquered the south during the Civil War and liberated the slaves, that was an economic repatriation bigger than what Prussia did to France at the end of the Franco Prussian War that inspired generations of relentless revenge by the French against the Prussians.
- [64:43]
Austin Padgett
And so it was basically like starting over, wiping the slate on the economy.
- [64:47]
Rudyard Lynch
And so the south was poor for a century afterward and they eventually were able to get wealthy and experience some of the most rapid economic growth of anywhere in the world post Jim Crow due to the technologies we've already discussed. But they were also the only area in the western world that went out of their way to maintain laissez faire libertarian style economics. And that's why the south is one of the very few psychologically healthy places in the western world left because they kept more of that in. Its easy to forget that a lot of the south was very lightly populated until super recently where we are in Texas now. I often forget that the suburbs around Austin, they were nearly entirely built in the 21st century because if you're from Pennsylvania, where nothing's been built in the last century, that's a very different mindset. And you have to see a lot of the south as a recently settled frontier. And there is a concern that as the south modernizes and industrializes that we will, the south will experience the same pathologies that have already hurt the industrial world, which the Unabomber talks about. But another thing is that in red state America, red state America has not experienced the demographic effects of urbanization in a way that the rest of the industrial world has, because there was no phase where everyone lived in an apartment. You move from the countryside to a suburban house. And so America has a lot more of these pre modern cultural traits than other Western countries because in the other Western countries, peasants move to the city, move to apartments, become factory workers. And this is a significantly greater cultural severing and severing of autonomy. Then you're a farmer and then you move to a suburban house where you already have space.
- [66:42]
Austin Padgett
This is like in Austin where there's neighborhoods with houses that are 15 minutes away from downtown. And that's pretty much unheard of in most northeastern cities.
- [66:54]
Rudyard Lynch
It is, yeah. I remember when I lived in Pennsylvania, people would say Austin's the only walkable city west of the Mississippi. And I moved here and became disappointed.
- [67:04]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, it's like when I. Even Berlin is so spread out that you, it feels like you can't walk it. You have to bike it compared to Paris or another city. And then you get to Houston or Dallas and it's a whole nother dimension because if people have the space, they will use it in, in ways that surprises you in building cities.
- [67:23]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. Another thing is that if you don't have coherent leadership, you will default onto standardization. And so the reason that the world's cultures are so homogenous today is that we have removed sort of structured leadership. And if you don't have that, committees or voting publics will default onto the easiest answer. And so that's why I say there's about half a dozen cities in America that are distinctive. And I'd throw New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, Washington D.C. and a handful others.
- [68:00]
Austin Padgett
Boston.
- [68:02]
Rudyard Lynch
I actually don't think Boston's distinctive. I think they've totally destroyed their downtown. If you go to downtown Boston, there's very little that's historic. It's skyscrapers, it's concrete. Like, I was once hanging out in Boston with Merrick and it was the weekend. Like, okay, what do people in Boston do? Like, what do you do at night? And he said, I think we just stay at home and drink.
- [68:20]
Austin Padgett
I'm mostly thinking about the number of one way streets I've been stuck on in Boston, where the GPS didn't say it's one way. Who makes one way streets anymore? This was designed in the 1700s.
- [68:30]
Rudyard Lynch
I've had some real nightmares driving in Boston. It's the absolute worst. And the people there, it's like they're unthinking. They don't process the spatial existence of others. It's like I'm driving and one of us has to give way. And it would be so much easier if you stopped for half a second. But you need to barrel ahead, causing all of this discord for no reason. Why? Just because it saved you half a second?
- [68:56]
Austin Padgett
Well, that's what happens when you put Italians in 17th century cobblestone streets.
- [69:01]
Rudyard Lynch
Italians are like less than 10% of Boston.
- [69:05]
Austin Padgett
They're doing the driving
- [69:08]
Rudyard Lynch
frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner talks about how the frontier changes America's character over time. And you can split the frontier between east of the hundredth parallel. The hundredth parallel is the line of the Great Plains where trees don't grow anymore and America is starkly divided on the hundredth parallel. That's when the European derived societies can no longer survive. And west of that line, you have to have cultures that mold and work with the geography better. And frontier societies are more fluid, they're. They have more grit. And frontier societies often conquer back in the civilized world. That's a consistent thread that goes back to the chin in China or the Romans or the Assyrians, because the frontiers really stress test people. And a lot of why Americans are not obsessed with social status in the way other societies are is that on the frontier, the family is a unit in its own right that has to live with the world as it is. And this creates the American idea that we have to deal with the outside material world in soft. Human issues don't really exist. Where I grew up, our nearest neighbors were miles away and we would often get snowed in for days straight. So we just keep a bunch of food and water lying around in case we got snowed in. And that's an attitude. That way of life is very alien to a lot of cultures in the world. And it's also interesting that the only area of America that has village life is New England. And a big part of that is America. Disproportionately pulled from places in the British Isles that didn't have villages where people lived on homesteads, where the north and the west of the British Isles people lived on homesteads, and in the south they lived in villages. And. And the difference there is that in village life, and this is one of the things that I didn't realize it. City people don't turn off the social performance part of their brain when they're talking. They're always thinking how someone else who doesn't know me perceives me. And if you live by yourself, you have a stark division in private and public life. It always confuses people because there are certain things where I'm like, I would be comfortable saying this in private, but I would not be comfortable saying this in public. And a lot of people don't have that distinction. That confused me. And I realized, wait, if you're always among strangers, you won't develop the private public distinction. And in the rest of the world, the reason that they have much more performative or structured social hierarchies is that in village life, that distinction is significantly more blurred because you're always within earshot of people and you're always Being seen by others. And once you get to societies like that, you need to have conformist religions and social structures, just that people cooperate with each other. And it's why when Americans moved into cities, we picked up leftism as a conformist unifying ideology, which was opposed to the earlier American self reliance and freedom and that stuff.
- [72:25]
Austin Padgett
Because we picked up the conformist ideology that broke the previous conformities of the village, which is the postmodern deconstruction into the leftist landscape.
- [72:35]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. And in the north, or in New England diaspora, they built towns around churches and the church grain. In the middle states, they built them around a market in the middle of the town. And in the south, they built them around courtyards. And the reasoning was that courthouses in New England, the village, everyone lives around it. It's the shared community. In the middle states, everyone lives in their own homestead. And then you go into the town to trade. And then in the south, each plantation is a self enclosed organism that's self reliant. And part of people have often said how come poor southerners would support slavery even though they wouldn't own slaves. And about a third of southerners before the Civil War owned slaves. So it was fairly widely dispersed among the population. But most slave owners had one or two at most, where it was like a nanny or someone who could take care of the house or do extra work on the farm. And then there was a small amount of people who owned a lot of slaves. And so the plantation owners would have these extended kin networks where if you needed something, you would have a friend or you would have a relative who was one of the bigger plantation owners, who was the local leadership. And you would go to him if you needed extra iron or you needed to get your cart fixed, because he would have the social institutions to do that. And that's why part of the reason why honor was so important in southern society and why they did lynchings, because the society was the one making the decision in a way where in the northern states, you would elect governments to do that rather than the society itself. And. And then the courthouse was. When we have disputes among these distinct plantations or Scots Irish clans, we go into town to arbitrate these different disputes between the different families.
- [74:29]
Austin Padgett
Right. So there's an assumption of cohesion unless there's a conflict between two entities within that cohesive group, which would be two different families fighting.
- [74:39]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And there's this geopolitics author, I think he's either named Kaplan or Kagan, and he wrote a book about how the settlement of the open deserts of the American west created the same social technologies that allowed the creation of the American empire, where the railroad is what unified the west coast with the East. And I don't think without the railroad that California could be part of the same country as America. I guess the Russian czars prove that pre railroad, you can still still have continental empires. But California is geographically in its own world, same as the rest of the west coast, because you have a huge intermountain desert in between. And the American west was settled by reaching the hundredth parallel. And we actually populated the west coast before we populated the Great Plains. Because the Great Plains had technologies such as the soil is so fertile we needed a special type of plow we developed only in the 1880s to farm it. We needed barbed wire because otherwise the cowboy herds would eat the farmer's land. And there was this period where the different ranchers would divide up the water supply like some German board game. The Germans love board games of tile placement and resource capture. And it's to make up for how much they liked war games a lifetime ago. And Lelands DeWitt Baldwin, one of my favorite writers in the 40s, he divided America between the north, the south and the West. And that was an easier designation in the 40s because today as a Pennsylvanian and I've lived around the country, I consistently find them close, culturally closer to Texans than I am to New Englanders. And my best friend's a New Englander, and he seconded that as well. And that was because red state culture has merged the north and the south to a greater degree. And then the coasts, due to cosmopolitanism, have become more of their own thing. So it used to be that a Pennsylvanian and a New Englander were closer to each other than a Southerner when you had Jim Crow and you had the north industrialized. But then the north has taken on a lot of Southern cultural attributes. The south has modernized using a lot of northern cultural technologies. And the west used to all be this cowboy, rugged, individualist culture where if you were to go around and I have multiple friends from old west coast families who have been there since the 19th century. And it's crazy to talk to them because they're like an extinct endangered species where if you're from an old family in California or Oregon or Washington State, the world you grew up in no longer exists. And it's been replaced by these large 20th century migrations. And so it used to be that all the cultures from Wyoming to California were roughly comparable. And horseback riding used to be A very manly, loved thing because it was part of the cowboy culture. And the cowboys spoke to this American individualist spirit. And now horseback riding is mostly for women. Like, 80% of horseback riders are women pets. Yeah, exactly. And so the American West, I stand by my comparing it to the biblical Middle east, where you have places like Los Angeles or parts of Salt Lake City or parts of Scottsdale. They're just deeply degenerate. And I often think of the meme of they should make an American girl doll for a Scottsdale zillennial girl as the part of American history where, you know, the archetype. You go to Scottsdale, which is one of the places in America with the highest concentration of beautiful women, but it's like boba tea. And like, how do you even articulate this? Like, they live in white houses with influencers, and then they'll go to, like, mega churches, and their child will be named like Braylon. And they believe, like, weird New Age stuff on top of it. This is an arch.
- [78:40]
Austin Padgett
They max everything out.
- [78:41]
Rudyard Lynch
This is an archetype. They max out everything except, like, how do I say?
- [78:47]
Austin Padgett
Quality.
- [78:48]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, without quality. Everything except quality or durability, super size or authenticity. And so there is this demographic in the Sun Belt, and no one's really talked about them, but they have sizable. They're quite sizable now. And so inside the American west, you have cowboys, you have desert trash. And I see the sort of, like, zillennial white influencer house people.
- [79:11]
Austin Padgett
Mm.
- [79:12]
Rudyard Lynch
They're like the higher social class version of desert trash. They're the same demographic, but they've moved up several tiers in social class. And then you have the Mormons, you have the massive recent migration. And the American west, it has a lot of amorphous cultures where whenever I study the culture of the modern Pacific Northwest, it's just become inextricably linked to leftism. Leftism has become their religion in the same way Puritanism was for their ancestors. And I think the American west is going to go through a stress testing in the next few decades, and we're going to see its culture radically change. Because I think the current version is amorphous. And once it gets stress tested, it's going to end up in a very different direction. And also keep in mind that Yankee populations and Yankee diasporas are liable to very rapid cultural shifts. If you look at the Yankee, right, you look at Yankees and their descendants, you have the Pacific Northwest, and the Mormons are Yankee descended. Is these populations will jump from Calvinism to atheism to Hardcore eugenics, racism to being like the most anti racist people. And so when you see how much they veered with leftism, keep in mind that this is a cultural trait. They have to veer this much culturally, this quickly.
- [80:35]
Austin Padgett
That means they can veer back. And there's been conventional wisdom for a long time that whatever California does, the nation does after. Right. So to think of California changing from its a trajectory that's not its own is kind of unthinkable. But if California is getting to the point where they're stopping to lead American culture, which seems largely the case, then of course the next thing that follows is they would flip. And there's a British guy running for governor of California right now under a Republican. I don't know, people are saying he might do well. The only reason I thought it might work is because he's British and he's speaking British. So like, the Californian liberals might be able to stomach voting for Republican if he sounds like a fancy British guy, which is kind of the opposite of Trump's ethos in a way.
- [81:23]
Rudyard Lynch
I had a.
- [81:23]
Austin Padgett
But maybe the only way they can elect a Republican is if it's a foreigner. I don't know.
- [81:28]
Rudyard Lynch
I had a conversation with a friend of mine that works at a Republican election agency and I told him I don't think the left can elect Gavin Newsom because he's a handsome upper class white guy, which is everything they hate. And my friend said, yes, but their voters are all cat ladies.
- [81:44]
Austin Padgett
Well, yes. Which they ironically like that. And there was this really terrible new Pixar movie. I'm not going to say the name of it, but it was the hero was this like environmentalist chick in California, this teenager who was saving turtles from the classroom and grew up from that. And the villain was Gavin Newsom because Gavin Newsom represented the capitalist society. But at the same time, they couldn't make like Gavin Newsom a total bad guy because they need Gavin Newsom to win. So the plotline developed into them fighting the forest fire together because the forest fire kills more animals than both the capitalist. And so that, that was like that very interesting propaganda spin on California, but I don't think they have a lot of juice left in their cultural leadership tank.
- [82:30]
Rudyard Lynch
Does anyone else see this current culture as like a drug induced haze? Am I alone in that?
- [82:35]
Austin Padgett
That movie was like that. They couldn't keep a coherent plot line. It just kept changing from who's the villain? Because they're like, they're totally incoherently lost.
- [82:42]
Rudyard Lynch
One of the realizations I made is modern America makes a lot more sense if you realize a significant part of the population is permanently stoned.
- [82:52]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. That. That might have a. An impact. Well, with the schizo stuff.
- [82:57]
Rudyard Lynch
Right.
- [82:57]
Austin Padgett
I mean, it kind of feeds into the new age unboundness of California.
- [83:02]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. But they're not schizo in a cool way.
- [83:05]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [83:06]
Rudyard Lynch
Next comes the waves of migration over to America, which people tend to think they matter more than they do, although they do, in fact matter. Where people undercount British ancestry in America, where about 60% of white American ancestry is from the modern U.K. more of that's from the British Isles. In Ireland in about half of white American ancestry is from England itself. So it's a huge demographic preponderance. And you wouldn't get that from the UN census, which says that America is about 6% English ancestry. And I was able to accurately predict America's demographic profile before the genetics data came out, because I cross referenced census records, migratory patterns of the 19th century, and last name analysis. So I got it to the exact percentage points where America is about a third British ancestry, a third continental European ancestry, and about a third other. And the first groups of migrants were from the rest of Northwest Europe, where after English Americans, the biggest group is German Americans. And these populated in the greater Midwest. They started out in Pennsylvania when William Penn was recruiting Swabians who had religions similar to the Quakers to populate in Pennsylvania. And the Amish settled in Pennsylvania. And from there they populated the Midwest where German Americans are biggest, around Wisconsin, in Minnesota and Iowa, but through Ohio, through Indiana. And there used to be a lot more overt German culture. I find it surprising there aren't more German restaurants in America, considering how many German Americans there are. But their identity was crushed during the World wars when they tried to assimilate into Anglo culture to avoid the associations with World War II. And growing up in Pennsylvania, people would say they had, quote, clean or dirty German ancestry. Clean German ancestry is Pre World War II. Post World War II is dirty German ancestry.
- [85:18]
Austin Padgett
That's funny.
- [85:19]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [85:19]
Austin Padgett
Cleaner, dirty. I'm trying to think of another comparison to that. Oh, it's kind of like how I make fun of the potato Irish versus the early Irish, because the potato Irish are more part of the progressive politics.
- [85:30]
Rudyard Lynch
We're cooler.
- [85:31]
Austin Padgett
No offense.
- [85:36]
Rudyard Lynch
So German Americans were predominantly from the Rhineland, but they were from of the greater German world too, where the upper Midwest was heavily populated by Germans from the Volga and Russia, and the upper Midwest was populated by Scandinavians, where there's actually an equivalent amount of Scandinavian Americans as Scandinavians in the old country. And there are seven times as many Scottish and Irish Americans as in the old countries. And there's more English Americans than there is English blood in the rest of the world combined. But in Scandinavia, you can see a similar number. And there's less German Americans than there are Germans, but it's a close enough number that they're comparable. And the reason that they were recruiting people from Scandinavia was that Anglos didn't want to settle in the upper Midwest because it was so cold. So they were looking for people who were willing to live in that climate. And if we read records of the Scandinavian settlement of the upper Midwest, they'd often talk about, it's crazy that we don't have nobility in America. And that was what the Germans said too, where we took out the Germans who didn't like the Prussian state, the Germans who were more like the English or the Dutch. And the Germans were often more intrepid, more hard working, more intelligent in the local Anglos. And they built a tremendous amount of businesses across the Midwest, and they were widely respected as migrants, and they gradually assimilated into the Anglo community.
- [87:13]
Austin Padgett
You can see why people distinguish between good or bad migrations. Because when you have a situation where it's the people who are most intrepid separating themselves from the Prussian system, it selects for something different than when you have a disaster in the country, for example, that sends a large wave of people out, many of whom may have been caught up in that very same mania. Or it could just be a random disaster, like the potatoes.
- [87:36]
Rudyard Lynch
And even with 19th century levels of racism, they couldn't really rationalize why German migration was bad, because for the Irish and the Scottish, they could say that the Celts were barbarians and savages or Catholic papists. And for the south Europeans, they were decadent and slavish and lacked freedom. But for the Germans, they said, they're Anglo Saxons, they're Saxons like us, they're Protestants, they like freedom. People did grumble about the German migration at the time. Ben Franklin said they weren't real white
- [88:07]
Austin Padgett
people, but he was onto the Hun thing early.
- [88:10]
Rudyard Lynch
But Even in the 19th century, they could assimilate. They could assimilate where I'm like 7% German ancestry and every single one of my German ancestors married an Anglo American when they got off the boat.
- [88:24]
Austin Padgett
Yep, same for mine. Right away, Anne converted from Catholicism to Protestantism and started a brewery like Lancaster, 1870.
- [88:33]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. I have a friend, he used to work for me as my researcher. We're both half Irish, but then I'm like 40% British ancestry and less than 10% German. And it's flipped from for him, he's like 10% British ancestry, 40% German. And we were talking about how my family converted to Protestantism. Although one of our parents was Protestant, the other one is Catholic, and for him it's the same, but he converted to Catholicism. And the conclusion we came to was both of our German ancestors were Swabians, but my Swabian ancestors were Protestant and his were Catholic. So what happened was that when my German and British ancestry refused, it was half Protestant, half Catholic. So in a Protestant country, my parents decided to raise me Protestant. For him, his German ancestry was Catholic, so that neutralized the English, so he grew up Catholic. And I'm stating stuff like this because this is very common in America towards sort of syncretism in deciding we're going to appeal to this part of our heritage and this is normal. When I was in France, I would say, I'm an American, but I'm of British and Irish ancestry. But they would say, oh, you're an American? And I'm like, yeah, why is this a contradiction? And it's because in Europe, firstly, the state had to enforce a uniform identity through violence. And then secondly, the state tried to destroy that identity so it can manage the society more. And the Europeans do this thing where they're like, we don't believe in ethnicity, we don't believe in blood, and that makes us morally superior to you. But it's actually a deeply dehumanizing destruction of what is one of the most vital parts of human identity. That being your ancestors, that being the cultural context you grew up in, that being the mythology in every pre modern society would see this as a brutal soul, death and a brutal destruction.
- [90:25]
Austin Padgett
It is funny that the Europeans mock Americans for looking into their ancestry because, I mean, they can get away with not caring. Because if you're in France, it's obvious you're French, at least if you're not Algerian or something.
- [90:38]
Rudyard Lynch
So when I was in France, there's lots of people of Polish or Italian or Spanish ancestry who passes French. Because France had a significant wave of migration in the 19th century from Latin Europe due to the Industrial Revolution. And so a lot of people in France do have mixed ancestry, but this goes against the state formation that occurred in Europe. So they paper it over,
- [91:05]
Austin Padgett
right? And it is kind of interesting that when you have Americans with a split ethnic background, that there's an impulse to choose one. Like, why is there an Impulse to choose one is because, like, mentally you can't be part of multiple people groups. Which then gets into like the implications for the formation of an American identity. Because, like I said, I identify with Celt. I'm not all Celtic, you know, my last name is Norman. But why I picked that because I don't like the government people.
- [91:35]
Rudyard Lynch
So in this society, people cannot sustain attention for longer than a minute. And so you have to simplify every message down to a minute. And a lot of intractable political issues now could be solved by five minutes of openly discussing the issue in front of witnesses to make final decision. And the fact that we cannot generate that five minutes in our society is deeply damning and incriminating. Because for lots of things, like how we kill the west, like the way we conduct a lot of our economics, or a lot of different things, this political discourse is dependent on no one thinking about this for longer than a minute.
- [92:21]
Austin Padgett
And what elements of that political discourse could be broken down really quickly, just like exploring it and then. Yeah, yeah, because it's complicated, right? Because it's like, it's. So you can dismiss it as either you can get caught into like analysis paralysis and reverting it to meaninglessness, or you can just like go with it and explain, yeah, there's people groups, yeah, it's a country. Yeah, Both these things exist. We don't have to exactly figure it all out. We can still talk about it.
- [92:50]
Rudyard Lynch
Until World War I, you had coherent, global, holistic worldviews where this. And they would make these charts of the great chain of being, or these are the charts of the different layers of philosophy in thinking back then in worldview and culture was a structured thing that worked under certain rules. And you have to have that to make a functioning system, because otherwise it just collapses. And modern people don't even have a concept that should exist. So modern, right, Of a series of disjointed, different arguments that don't connect at all. And if you understand the pre modern worldview, this just looks like madness and it just looks totally incoherent. And so if you were to set someone down and say, okay, you want to dispossess the successful groups to unsuccessful groups, and you have no interest in teaching the unsuccessful groups the strategies that the successful groups used to attain this success, you're going to create an incentive structure that's going to radically decrease growth and innovation. I did that in 30 seconds. That's not hard. And the fact we cannot sit people down and say stuff like that is a damning indictment of our society.
- [94:06]
Austin Padgett
And they want to mock you and separate you from your ancestry if you look into it, because that's part of their deconstruction goal.
- [94:13]
Rudyard Lynch
The left is deeply psychologically abusive and they look to atomize and tear down and degrade all of their opposition, so much so that they lose the ability to fight back. And the reason the current GOP is cucking out on stuff like immigration or a variety of topics is because they've been so worn down for their entire lives that they don't even have a mental frame that winning would be a. Okay. And that's horrible, right? That's the only explanation that makes sense to me.
- [94:43]
Austin Padgett
The confidence to even stand on your feet.
- [94:45]
Rudyard Lynch
It's become a psychological, spiritual motivation in its own right where people keep pushing the decay and the suicide because they've gotten so far already that it's become a motivation in its own right where if you gave these people this is a loaded gun, you could fix this tomorrow. And let's say you have to through opinion equivalent to opiate withdrawal for a several day period to fix this. Most of them would not go through a three day opiate withdrawal if their society could survive because they have lost the moral clarity to even make the decision.
- [95:20]
Austin Padgett
They've lost the hope. We need a it gets better campaign for conservatives so that they can proudly stand for their values and know that. That eventually they'll gain ground.
- [95:30]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, exactly. But I mean, the thing is, when people talk about the mating crisis, what they don't say is that in a culture where there's no positive cultural representation of couples meeting and having happy marriages with children, that young people do not have social scripts for that, where they don't have evolution, they're not fed strategies that work where people learn their culture through osmosis over their lives. And a lot of what society is, when you hear the birds twittering, they are marking territory, they're mating, they're doing mating calls. I don't know, maybe they're doing philosophy dissertations and bird thought. But if you're a bird, you grew up in that world, you're constantly hearing those signals. So when you have to mark territory or you have to do a mate call, you know how to do it automatically. As a society, we have banned both marking territory and making mating calls. So when, if you're growing up, there is no cultural vocabulary for first of all you to do that action and for another person to look at it and see that it's comprehensible and know how to retort because you in a healthy society, you have scripts of romantic or social escalation that move you from we are just peripheral friends to you are someone I can genuinely trust for serious things. And when you remove that, you create a society of entirely peripheral contacts where nothing can. Nothing serious can actually occur.
- [97:06]
Austin Padgett
Not only that, but we're like two cycles or generations into this where not only are the little birds not learning anything, but all they see is the. Their two parent birds get divorced or something because the relationships broke down in the last generation from something they didn't figure out before that.
- [97:23]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, exactly. Just people's inability to see context always shocks me. It's like people are half blind where. Because if you're psychologically healthy, you see the world as a web of context, where you look at the mating crisis and you think this is caused by these downstream effects. People today can just see, why aren't young people getting married and having kids? It's because they're lazy. They have completely stripped any contextual web from this. But reality is a contextual web. So when you've stripped context from the world, you have stripped your ability to think or act or do anything. And the world will come across as discordant motion, which is what zoomer music is. Zoomer music is like frigging car alarm noises
- [98:10]
Austin Padgett
without a pattern. You will divert to something crazy, and maybe some people will figure it out. Right. So then like a lot of zoomers, the way they're approaching relationships and marriage may be younger, maybe with actually a really good relationship, maybe with like zero intention to break up. But then there's like a larger set that completely forgot how to do the behavior because not everybody can figure it out from scratch without a pattern. You're picking up pieces.
- [98:35]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, by and large, for stuff like this. The people who would figure this out are sort of like alpha male types or great men, which the left hates. So the left is institutionalized social tragedy of the commons because you've shut down these alpha male creator great men types who could genuinely establish new cultural institutions. And then you've enabled all the people that will never do that.
- [99:04]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, because like, the only. Your only option without the pattern is if you have that vision quality, which is like a default rare aspect of humanity.
- [99:14]
Rudyard Lynch
And the other demographics of Northwest Europeans who migrated to America are the Celts or the Scots and the Irish. And Leland DeWitt Baldwin, writing in eight writing, said, he said in 1880, America is broadly a third Germanic, a third English, a third Celtic. I don't know if that's exactly true, but it seems broadly accurate to me. And so the Scots, the later waves of Scottish migration were very different from the earlier ones where to Appalachia and the forest. And the later ones were after Scotland had industrialized and had the Enlightenment. It was the migrations to the northern industrial cities. And this demographic of Scots assimilated very rapidly. And people forget this. But one of the biggest waves of migration to america in the 19th century, more so from Italy or Austria or a lot of places we think about, was from Britain. It just. They assimilated very rapidly. And the Irish migrants, they came over in a short time window in the mid 19th century, where it was due to the Potato famine, which killed two thirds of Ireland's population. It kills one third, one third migrated out. And the Irish concentrated in the Northeast where they lived in these impoverished ghettos at the bottom of the social totem pole. And they were widely hated at the time. There was discrimination against them because unlike the rest of the Northwest Europeans, the Irish were. They were pre modern. They had not experienced the Enlightenment or science or the Renaissance. They might as well have been pre medieval or ancient. Ireland had not even experienced the medieval unification of countries and the establishment of these class structures. And the Irish took over the Northeast's institutions and cities and they assimilated after World War II, after over a century in ghettos. And Irish Americans are a smaller demographic than people think because most of the people who self identify as Irish are actually Scots Irish who are not ethnic Irish. They're Scottish people who colonized the north of Ireland. And the genuine Gaelic Catholic Irish live in the northeast of the country. And it's interesting that when JFK's mother was talking to the local. The term for the Boston elite is the Brahmins, because the Puritans developed a theocratic social structure much like the Indian Brahmins. And talking to the local Anglos, JFK's mother said, how much longer till the Irish and the English assimilate? And then the Brahmins said, at least another century, at the very least. Wow, this is like World War II era. And it's crazy how stuff like this lasted until quite recently. Where I heard stories in Pennsylvania of people in the 60s saying, we're going to elect an Irish Catholic and this will make America emboldened to papism, where America will surrender to the Pope and this will destroy our values.
- [102:11]
Austin Padgett
Well, the Catholics are always trying to get up to shenanigans to make us worship the Pope in Rome. But yeah, that's a really funny one. It's not even worth going into the modern political manifestations because it's so fractured in a million ways. It's not even on one side or another. So they, they. Oh yeah. And one reason that why would, why do they create an elite in those northeastern cultures is partly because of the, the predeterministic aspects of Calvinism means that there's an elect and a non elect. So it also ties into the reason why they have strict social regulation. Because if you're predetermined to go to hell, then the only way to keep you in check is, is through social regulation. Because you're going, you're going to never going to stop being a deplorable. And then that's why you need to find the elect and put them in these positions of leadership. It's based on their idea that some people are predetermined to go to hell and some are predetermined to go to heaven versus like the concept of putting God outside of time. Because yeah, he knows if you're going to go to hell or heaven, but it's because he's outside of time.
- [103:21]
Rudyard Lynch
That's a very good point. And it also is a better narrative than just industrial revolution because if we're looking purely at the places that industrialized the Midwest and the Mid Atlantic states would have generated said elite and they didn't. It was because the New Englanders had this theocratic elite that want elite tradition that went back to England. And I want to talk about the managerial America, but the different other groups of white Americans are. There was a big Italian migration and a Jewish migration and a smaller Slavic and Polish one. America has lots of people from smaller European ethnicities in America like Czechs or Yugoslavs or French or whatever. And they haven't really hit a demographic tipping point in America. There's Polish Americans, but there's not states that are predominantly Polish. There's one area code in America that's plurality Polish and that's Scranton. And they populated during the industrial era. But the later migrations pre1920 when we closed off the border for fear of having too many non north European migrants, was people who due to the steamship would migrate to America. And the steamship allowed radically cheaper communication vis a vis what it was earlier where it was just you grabbed a ship at any given a ship that was already trading with America. So northwest Europe had pre established trade relationships with America. And Italians clustered in a similar roles to the Irish in the same northeastern cities, the same jobs. They mixed together a lot. Italians like 6% of America's population, the Jews are less than 2%. They also started out in the poverty in ghettos and then rose upwards. An interesting element is for each of these groups they had earlier migrations of the same demographic that disliked them. The Scots Irish disliked the Irish Catholics. The German Jews who were in America since the colonial period, disliked the Ashkenazi Jews from the ghettos of Eastern Europe who they saw as savages. And the earlier North Italians, just like the South Italians.
- [105:38]
Austin Padgett
Sure.
- [105:39]
Rudyard Lynch
And these groups color the Northeast and the Northeast has these stronger European identities that don't exist in the rest of the country because the Italians, the Irish, the Jews are large enough they could form their own self enclosed communities. But that doesn't exist in Texas or California or the Midwest to the same degree because everyone there is white. Because you were not able to hit demographic tipping points in different group of ethnic white. And so people in a lot of the rest of the country genuinely do not believe how much these European ethnic identities have survived in the northeast into the 21st century. Where I grew up, everyone knew you're either British, German, Italian or Irish.
- [106:26]
Austin Padgett
So the cohesiveness of these various cultural blocks from differences in Europe is the main factor towards how the US will turn out in the next few hundred years in terms of will we have a shared identity or not? Because when it's so fractured like that, it kind of disappears, but on a, on a large scale it's really not. And the fact that northern Italians are pretty much more similar to Austrians than southern Italians, even though Italy's been in that block for a long time, kind of makes me less confident that the US will go into like a new single kind of identity. I mean these, these differences are going to be persistent.
- [107:13]
Rudyard Lynch
Wokeness and mouse utopia are such huge cultural compressions. I don't know where this is going to end. It's going to end in a really weird way and however weird way, because Nietzsche talks about the last Men era as a bridge and whatever makes it across the bridge gets into the new age. But most things don't cross the bridge. And so people talk a lot about white Americans getting replaced. And that's been a demographic trend that's going on for decades. Where in 1960America was nearly 90% white, now it's in the 50s. But something else to keep in mind is that this is a demographic tipping point caused by Latin America having like two generations of rapid population growth. And now nearly every nation in Latin America has a lower population growth rate than white Anglo Americans. And mouse utopia. If it Continues will just cause people to murder each other. And so you're hitting demographic populations that are going towards zero on top of the mechanism where the mice murder each other. And so whatever group survives this will maintain a demographic preponderance. And you can still overrule the demographic trends going on today. Because if everyone's population goes towards zero replacement, if you just have three kids and have three kids over multiple generations, you will gain a staggering demographic in advantage.
- [108:40]
Austin Padgett
If you escape mouse utopia, you rewrite the whole landscape and birth. Birth rates kind of get mocked as part of the discussion in demographic replacement as like an excuse to not do deportations or things like that. But forget about all of that. Like, just look at it as a variable, and it's very important. And the easy way to highlight that is the fact that the diaspora of England is larger than the population of France. And these dynamics are like exponential fast. They. It can swing back. Like these number blocks can explode in a lot of different ways. So it's important to escape mass utopia and not all die for many reasons besides that.
- [109:19]
Rudyard Lynch
The idea of mockingbird. I know a lot of people mock the birthright crisis, but that's just so staggeringly stupid. It's like making fun of the rising water in Noah's flood, where especially when
- [109:32]
Austin Padgett
you know what it's connected to, it's not just like a minor.
- [109:35]
Rudyard Lynch
I just. I hate it so much, the discourse, Because I don't think most people even logically parcel the words. Others say they just listen to the tones and then mock the tones. Be like, oh, my God, you're worried about birth rate. Mouse utopia, go, brr. Because they cannot perceive this outside of content cycles. Like, oh, my God, this content cycle is getting tired. Like, dude, this isn't a content cycle. This is an existential crisis, right?
- [110:00]
Austin Padgett
It's not just like, oh, why do you care? There aren't more people. I want more parks. It's like, no. This is like a dynamic that trends to. To zero because it's connected to a collapse of a social structure and society. So it's not just like in modernity, people have two instead of three. Now it's going down.
- [110:20]
Rudyard Lynch
It's. People do not have opinions formed in things. People just say shit. Their opinions are not ground in underlying logical systems that would give them value.
- [110:30]
Austin Padgett
And maybe they're right. It'll work out. And I agree. But that will be only because we escape mouse utopia. It won't be because we just, like, ignored it.
- [110:38]
Rudyard Lynch
I hate this peasant mindset people have where you, like, rudd you're not qualified. Why are you doing this? You're only like 24. And I'm like, dude, if I can get away with this, I will do it. And I think that's the appropriate. I mean, if you can get away with something and if you can see something, why aren't you doing it? You'd be like, what? You should wait for more qualified people. Like, why? Like what? Incentive.
- [110:57]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, someone who can pronounce that word correctly, who cares? Just like.
- [111:02]
Rudyard Lynch
And why do I care about the societal structure of qualifications of the society doesn't care about me? I mean, we voided that contract already and it's just time to ignore the
- [111:12]
Austin Padgett
haters and retard Max.
- [111:13]
Rudyard Lynch
It's such clear. I mean, that's an example of it. Retard maxing. I don't. I'm not. I don't want to be dumb. We've watered down the language where the only way to convey a point is to convey its opposite and then assume the other person can see through the irony of you stating an opposite that loudly.
- [111:31]
Austin Padgett
I. I like it, though, because I know. I think, I think that's effective in various ways. It also matches the bell curve.
- [111:37]
Rudyard Lynch
You are going to get very tired of it within the next two years because it's fun for a little bit. And then when other people don't progress past that stage and you realize they've degraded their own psyche that they legitimately cannot, it gets very tiring.
- [111:52]
Austin Padgett
I think that's a. Yeah, I think that's like yolo. YOLO is like the ironic version of it. Retard maxing is slightly more clinical. Eventually people will understand it as like an analytical concept. But anyways, we don't have to get derailed on that.
- [112:07]
Rudyard Lynch
This is what living in India is like. Just constant inchoate noise. And I literally have constant inchoate noise outside my window construction. Yeah, but American managerial empire, how much of this do we have to cover? Because we did the corporate America video. So with World War II and the world War era, you saw the creation of the American empire. And this created what I call imperial American culture. And in my cultural maps of America, I've deviated from Woodard and Garou and David Hackett Fisher by making a few of my own cultures that I think manifest distinctly from the older ones in Imperial American Culture. I also call it areas where SNL is funny. And that includes sort of the areas that feed the American empire, like Washington, D.C. parts of New York City, parts of Boston. And these cultures see the previous Anglo inhabitants with Contempt. If you go to Boston, it's really shocking that their elite has completely turned on the local Anglo population and they import immigrants, they automate, destroy their social mobility and the imperial American culture. I think we're going to have to grow to see it as twisted as Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. But we don't because we don't have a moral frame for passive evil. And this is something I've been writing about lately, about. I would drive up and down the Northeast and I thought that these were people who when shit hit the fan, we were part of the same structure. But what I realized is that they would actively enable and crush anyone who would push against civilizational suicide. And it is psychologically scarring to a certain degree to realize that these seemingly brittle cultural differences on a historic scale will matter a lot. Because the thing with the current era we're in is it does matter. It's just we're in a cultural frame that we're not allowed to say it's the difference in red state and blue state America. As Sam Francis would say, they're different civilizations at this point, but you're not allowed to say it. And if you say I am driving from West Virginia to New York, I'm crossing over civilizations, people think that's insane and schizophrenic. But to look at the structure of a civilization, different religious structure, in all reality the left is a new religion, different economic structure, different family structure, different social formation. And so blue state America became its own civilization around turning mouse utopia or social degradation into a religion. And I think this was done. I have a saying that leftist social hierarchies are mirrors to feminine ones. And so you have the genuinely high status attractive people like the Clintons or the Trudeau's or Obama or whatever, and these are people or the Newsoms and these are people where they can use the left to not be held to moral standards. They can wield authority and not be held accountable because they're part of the same power structure. The mid tier people like Jon Stewart or Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Stephen Colbert, they're of like middling levels of attractiveness and intelligence, but they're put in positions beyond their genuine capability because they constantly mouth the regime statements. And then you have the people at the bottom of the hierarchy like the trans, Muslim, queer, bipoc and these are put in positions of authority because they can be controlled and they can be pitied. And this is how feminine status hierarchies work as well, where if you look at girl groups it's either highest status, most attractive girl, most mediocre one, or the one that they pity. And what all of these are is an alliance against merit. The high status people don't want competition. The mid level people don't want to accept their midwest. And the low status people are brought into a game they would otherwise not be playing in because they lack the actual talent. And so you look at blue state America, it's an alliance of the American empire, the midwit bureaucracy, and then oppressed groups, they pay off. And so they have seized control of the American empire and they created anti cultures. Imperial American culture is an anti culture. Same thing as modern California where their structure is the destruction of previous cultures. And I'm going to be honest, Red state America has largely been cut to this. Red state America has not generated its own culture. It's largely gone along with this. And partly it's justified because we haven't had the structures of elite power that would let us push back against stuff like TV stations or the federal government. But it also was something that we agreed to, we didn't fight back very hard. And so if you drive across Red theta America, a lot of it's looking a lot more like blue states. In Texas, a lot of Texas is starting to look a lot more like blue states like California or New York or whatever. And red state culture, it's this very, it has a very peasant mindset to it of oh, let's not fight over the culture, let's not develop grand narratives, let's not develop our own elite networks and to fund right wing associations. And it's the shared lie of red state America, it's we are going to pretend that we're still the cowboy rugged for frontier culture, while in fact we are part of the managerial bureaucratic modern system. And when red state culture has this artificial philistinism, you see it in country music where older country music is way smarter and more clever and complex than new country music. You can see it in the old murder ballads or the folk songs. And red state America, they act like oh, our philistinism, this peasant culture, this is because we're real frontier people. It's a descendant of how rugged we are. But if you actually looked at their frontier ancestors, they were smarter, they were more intrepid, they were more creative. And they're rationalizing a deliberate dumbing down by the 20th century Managerial system as the continuation of frontier culture.
- [118:34]
Austin Padgett
Right. I saw someone kind of making fun of Cernovich for this, where he'll like drink gas Stainless Ste coffee to prove how American he is. But, like, it's not like, we can still seek out quality. And you don't want to, like, revert into eating crap food because you don't like Europe or something.
- [118:54]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah,
- [118:57]
Austin Padgett
we have to be able to build.
- [118:59]
Rudyard Lynch
I think we cover the. So what am I missing on the managerial class in America?
- [119:05]
Austin Padgett
Well, I would say with the. The broader consequences of the. Of the broader feminization of culture, which includes most of the right. Like, what does a feminine culture do? You cater to the craziest person in the room to keep the peace, the one that's most insistent. So then the. The left is more willing to stand on their feet, Right? They're willing to, like, they would bomb the entire Middle east if it enabled them to carry out their social agenda where the right is, like, exaggerating things just to compromise their own side. Like, we don't have the same kind of prioritization and mission focus will always. We'll always, like, be the ones who lose in a contest over agreeableness. So we have to get past that kind of a culture. And it relates to, like, how passive evil is one of the worst things, right? And it slips by that barrier, which is. Gets to the actual, real, valuable analytical point, beyond maxing or whatever, which is, how do you get past the inability to deal with the uncertainty that is used to paralyze you from doing anything? Right? Like, you don't have to prove it. I don't care. I don't have to prove it. I want to try this. Like, I don't need to get caught in your endless bureaucratic framework of, like, first approval, second approval, revision of the first and second approval. Like, we have to break through this barrier, which is like a passive evil net.
- [120:27]
Rudyard Lynch
Whoa, man. If we structured our societal institutions to not produce slavishness, we would revert back to our previous cultural norms. But the school system and the school system and the media and the corporations all promote slavishness.
- [120:41]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, exactly, which is why we need not only policy. We need policy, but we need it combined with, like, some sort of technological accelerationism that disrupts the way we learn information not in 40 years, but in 5 or 10 years, because otherwise it's too long of a tail.
- [120:57]
Rudyard Lynch
What I will also say is that history is decided by small groups of quote, radicals who pick historic moments and then grab them by their tongue. Where you look at the last century of history, whatever demographic seized authority around World War I kept it for the next century because World War I was the tipping point. That was when the progressives took power in America in World War I era. Progressivism was racist, it was eugenics focused. But they built the institutions around these New England Yankee principles. And so for example, I Woke up at 5:30 in the morning for school. I deeply resented that. I thought that it was just deeply counterproductive. Because if you actually want kids to learn, you want them to stop sleep. But this is about social controls. You're going to wake them up early, which is going to make them tired and easier to follow orders. And that's a New England thing, because the earlier Pennsylvania Quaker system, its first aim was introspection and spiritual awareness. The New England system was sports structure and constant work because that was the Yankee culture. And so you see these things set up. And so even though early Progressivism would be a very right wing ideology by today's standards, because they seized control of the institutions, they could totally change their platform. But because they held the mantle of command, no one noticed. And the same thing occurred in Europe. The same thing occurred at the Chinese Communist Party after World War II. So if you guys are black pilled and hopeless, remember, small groups of radicals can organize at critical junctures and then instantiate their ideologies and opinions through broader institutions which ripple across the population. And because most people are normies who don't think about this stuff, the vast majority of people will go along with whatever the elite opinion is. And so that's why America has seen such rapid cultural change. Because we have attacked anyone who would question the elite consensus. But we did it through five layers of psychological manipulation.
- [123:07]
Austin Padgett
And the good news on that is we're already breaking through it. Because if it weren't for some level of elite reorganization, the US would not be re industrializing right now. It takes a lot of effort to shift the momentum on something like that.
- [123:22]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [123:24]
Austin Padgett
So there's a lot to build off of there.
- [123:25]
Rudyard Lynch
As the final thing, America had a huge wave of migration from non white countries, countries since the 1960s, especially in the 20th century, where in the year 2000America was still 3/4 white. So a huge amount of this is just 21st century. This was done for a series of reasons. Partly cheap labor, partly the left's attempt to destroy a coherent culture, which they say, and the West's desire for suicide as well as when you have things like the Third World's rapid increase in population. Population, you naturally see demographic balances like water pressure. And we could have avoided it through immigration controls. But it's a natural, it's a natural mean when you don't have controls like that. And I say this every time I talk about it, but it's hard to fully realize what the consequences of this wide scale migration are. What I think is going to happen a lot of the country is I'm going to shock a lot of people. I'm unclear how demographically sustainable a lot of the recent migrants are because they're heavily urban concentrated and cities are never demographically replaceable. But also after it, they don't have enough demographic points that they can maintain their cultural structures that allow things like intergenerational mating and families, because they've also been atomized by American urban life. On one hand you could see mouse utopia. Rural populations have a much better chance of surviving mouse utopia. But a Brazil ification of America is also very reasonable, especially certain sub regions of America. And it's harder to push back these demographic transfers in the Southwest because here we're on the border with Mexico and that means it's easier to maintain coherent cultures. And it's very difficult to maintain a multi generational stable population structure if you don't have a coherent culture. Because that's what maintains the organic structure that allows people to find mates, that allows them to pass on their culture and that stuff. And it's interesting where in California especially you see the creation of people who grew up entirely in this anti culture, where you find it with people who. They're probably the most culturalist people in history of people whose ancestors are recent migrants from the second or the third world. They grew up in an America that had no interest in impressing itself upon them what American culture was. But their older society is totally alien to them too. And so for them, their core identity is stuff like Marvel or commercial Apple or buying Apple products or, or their
- [126:18]
Austin Padgett
family or they go back to the other way. I'm going to be more traditional.
- [126:22]
Rudyard Lynch
Those people exist, I'm talking about a specific demographic here because I find them interesting on a historic level because stuff like this never happens historically. It's very rare that you see culturalist populations develop. And there's surprisingly demographically big in major cities. And I don't think they're going to be demographically sustainable. But you also do have populations which maintain their older culture in America as well. And you can see it in ethnic neighborhoods in major cities.
- [126:50]
Austin Padgett
Right. But like part of that is that their family is their only anchor so they decide to separate from their family. I'm not doing Ramadan, I'm not married, doing the arranged marriage or whatever. Then there is Literally nothing. That is the last little line. So you could see how that leads them right into the culturalist society. And it is pretty crazy historically to be dropped in from like a third world country into level five of mouse utopia.
- [127:17]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, it is. I've thought about that. Because if someone's from a Middle Eastern country and they move to California, of which there's a significant amount of people, that's a huge cultural jump. I'm going to finish on this. But when you look at the recent migration from the third world to America, this is an industrial grade population transfer that only makes sense with stuff like highways and airports. Because beforehand you just can't have population transfers this rapid. And you look at California or the American Southwest and this is one of the most rapid population transfers ever in history. And it's not discussed even states like New Jersey, New Jersey's approaching minority white and Maryland's too. And a negative of America, especially in the west, is because it's dependent on these staggering infrastructure projects, whether manufacturing or water aqueducts or the railroads, is that going back to the 19th century, a lot of America has a negative tendency of treating the people around these infrastructure projects as cogs whose role is to serve them. And you can see it in the railroad companies recruiting from different areas of Europe to populate the upper Midwest or parts of the West. But in California, I don't think it's a coincidence that they're dependent on a water supply from hundreds of miles away on the railroads. And what you see is the American technologism of these infrastructure projects end up dominating the land. And these industrial interests, they are happy to replace the old population and culture if they can keep these systems running. And this is what America's totalitarianism versus Europe. Because in Europe it takes on easier to understand garbs like the Nazis of the Soviets is the hysterical Karen and the impersonal all consuming machine. And these are the two manifestations of American totalitarianism.
- [129:27]
Austin Padgett
Is interesting to relate like the industrial dynamics of a Midwest factory town to kind of a broader part of the culturalist mass culture. And if you can flip the perspective and you can feel bad for some of these immigrants because you imagine an immigrant from the third world who's the most well meaning possible. It's like what is the most responsible thing to do? Okay, let me try and figure out the culture, let me assimilate to it. And then there's actually like nothing. We're not, we're not portraying a good culture to them. And they're another dynamic that I Learned, I think from the 11American nations book is there's this effect when new people move into a group. Say you have like a Manhattan that's Dutch or something. Right. There's 50 population space. They're all colored blue. A red one moves in another red one. And as even 20 red ones, they, as long as it doesn't exceed the total in one go, they get assimilated into that culture, at least on. On some level, or at least if you're presenting a strong culture. So there would be better ways to. Like, that's a. That's a foundational defense mechanism against cultural degradation which we don't have activated at all.
- [130:47]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [130:47]
Austin Padgett
And that's why, like, there's still some Dutch characteristics in New York City. Like, even though, like the straightforwardness, even though the Dutch were only ever.005%. It's a first mover advantage dynamic.
- [131:00]
Rudyard Lynch
A society's childhood determines this trajectory for the rest of its life. I have a practice where every day I write down a memory and the memory I'm going to write down today was a conversation I had with a Pakistani Uber driver in Los Angeles where I said, do you like, prefer Los Angeles to Pakistan? And he said, no, I prefer Pakistan, where he said, people in Pakistan are starving and it's horrible, but in Los Angeles, I can't afford anything. It's super depressing. And he's like, moving to America was not a huge step up. And I often think of that because it's just, it's really stark and it's not the narrative you want to hear. It's like a switch where you're like, holy shit. If someone's saying that, that means something, right?
- [131:43]
Austin Padgett
There's. There's different elements. Part of it is because the failures of American society makes it hard to like, do the American dream. The. The other part is that there is this strong pull towards being with your culture, even at the expense of poverty. So what that leads you to believe is if the rest of the world develops, then there will be more re immigration where people will just like you're moving within states in America when there's. When. If there's not less of an incentive pushing you away, like your country starving or it's on fire, then things will trend that way and similar to how manufacturing will trend local, all else equal because you take out the transportation cost.
- [132:21]
Rudyard Lynch
The vast majority of Italian Americans who migrated Pre World War I moved back to Italy, so only a minority stayed here. Most of them made money to afford a bride price in Italy and then move Back to take an Italian bride.
- [132:35]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, even a lot of early English immigrants moved back to England after establishing some. And then that would be another thing that would be fun to explore or think about is that huge wave of English people that came in the early 1900s. Like, were there. If you walked across the streets of America, then would you hear an English accent? Would that be common to hear an actual English accent? Like, how much did they change? And then it reminds me of the guy running for governor in California. I'm now seeing him in that. That light, which is interesting.
- [133:09]
Rudyard Lynch
That's the way Canada is now. When I lived in Canada, they had a significant migration from Britain in the 20th century. So it's not abnormal outside the cities in Canada to have an English neighbor who moved here when he was young because they kept more of that culture.
- [133:25]
Austin Padgett
Yep. And then the. The last thing is, if people can be confused about, like, how are. What do you mean that different groups of people in America are more different even than some European countries? Well, think of the English accent. Right. Think of how you have the island off the coast of Virginia that is closer to how The English spoke 400 years ago than today. Because if you separate, it actually can make you preserve stuff longer than it was preserved in the home country where they had some sort of assimilation or alternate change. So those distinct cultures are more present in America even than within England.
- [133:59]
Rudyard Lynch
Also, to be totally real, the internal differences inside America affect the rest of the world more than the internal differences inside Europe. On a global stage, Europe is a single bloc. Well, the culture war inside America, between the different sub regions in Brazil, their conservatism is from Miami, and then their leftism is from Los Angeles. The American conservative culture war ripples into Europe and even ripples into the Far East.
- [134:26]
Austin Padgett
Even Iran copies leftist talking points.
- [134:29]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. And so this. And it's hard to see the American culture war and not see it as a representation of very different societies stuck in the same political union. If you want to say that everyone inside that is the same, that's just delusional. And to pull back further, these political differences will, of course, be downstream of other cultural differences, because that's always how anthropology works. There's always underlying deeper differences that mask whatever religious or political difference people are fighting over.
- [135:05]
Austin Padgett
Right. And kind of it's funny, because the foreign countries have an idea that they can fuel these different blocks to create conflict.
- [135:11]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [135:12]
Austin Padgett
But by spurring a conflict, all you're going to do is make one side win, which is what we actually need because we need the right to wind and transcend civilization. So hopefully that all backfires on all the foreign AGI prompters and we we magnify to the future.
- [135:28]
Rudyard Lynch
This is a good episode. Next week's on the Prussian empire.
- [135:32]
Austin Padgett
Yep. And oh yeah, it's funny being in Thailand in office with Filipinos, Thais, Europeans all talking about Donald Trump all the time like it mattered way more than their own politics.
- [135:44]
Rudyard Lynch
America.
- [135:45]
Austin Padgett
And they only cared about Filipino politics because of how contentious it was relative to American politics, because Duarte was like a Trumpian figure even though there were Filipinos in the office. That's why they cared, because it related to Trump.
- [135:57]
Rudyard Lynch
All of world politics is a gossip circuit because even our own politicians don't control our own circuits. And I think will care about is the gossip
- [136:07]
Austin Padgett
deep. I'll stew on that.
- [136:09]
Rudyard Lynch
Okay, I will.
- [136:10]
Austin Padgett
And I'll gossip about it.
- [136:11]
Rudyard Lynch
I will slow cook it in my crock.
- [136:14]
Austin Padgett
All right.
- [136:14]
Rudyard Lynch
Okay. Catch you next week. Bye bye. History102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.