Explaining Latino History

Summary

History 102: Explaining Latino History Hosted by Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett on the Turpentine Podcast Network

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Introduction

In the episode titled "Explaining Latino History," Rudyard Lynch, creator of the popular YouTube channel WhatifAltHist, joins Austin Padgett to delve into the intricate tapestry of Latin American history. They explore the unique sociological, geographical, and historical factors that have shaped Latin America's development and current standing in the global landscape.

Rudyard's Seven Emotions Theory

Rudyard introduces his Seven Emotions framework, an anthropological concept that categorizes societies based on predominant emotional drivers. This theory aids in understanding the diverse behavioral patterns and historical trajectories of civilizations.

• Notable Quote:
  Rudyard Lynch [03:50]:
  "Latin America is the place in world history the most divided between all seven emotions. It's the most average."

According to Rudyard, Latin America uniquely embodies a balance across all seven emotions, making it the most "average" society anthropologically. This diversification contrasts sharply with other regions, which tend to predominantly exhibit one or two emotions.

Geographical and Genetic Factors

The duo examines how geography and genetics play pivotal roles in shaping societal structures and resilience.

• Impact of African Diseases:
  Rudyard Lynch [15:55]:
  "The introduction of African diseases to the New World was a huge negative event for everyone involved, including the natives. 90% of natives died within European arrival due to disease."

The catastrophic impact of African diseases decimated indigenous populations, rendering tropical regions previously habitable uninhabitable for native peoples. In contrast, African settlers possessed genetic immunity to these diseases, allowing them to thrive and reshape the demographic landscape.

• Andean Genetic Adaptations:
  Rudyard Lynch [19:01]:
  "The natives of the Andes have genes that let them process oxygen significantly more efficiently than other races."

This genetic adaptation enabled indigenous Andean populations to excel in high-altitude environments, granting them resilience and physical prowess that impressed European conquistadors.

Colonial Legacy and Internal Institutions

The discussion shifts to the profound impact of Spanish and Portuguese colonization on Latin America's institutional frameworks.

• Colonial Institutional Capture:
  Rudyard Lynch [41:51]:
  "Latin America's biggest issue is the Spanish established a system which kept their colonies in a permanent state of immaturity."

Post-independence, Latin American societies inherited colonial institutions that were heavily skewed towards maintaining elite control and exploitation. These systems hindered the development of robust property rights, rule of law, and equitable economic structures.

• Cultural Immaturity and Elite Exploitation:
  Rudyard Lynch [39:14]:
  "Latin Americans love using America as a way to escape responsibility. A society has to make an active decision to go for excellence and its people commit to that."

Rudyard contends that Latin America's challenges stem from deeply entrenched cultural and institutional weaknesses, perpetuated by an elite class that prioritizes self-interest over societal well-being.

Political History and Regime Cycles

Rudyard and Austin explore the cyclical nature of political regimes in Latin America, characterized by alternating periods of dictatorship and populist movements.

• Cycle of Corruption and Dependency:
  Rudyard Lynch [41:51]:
  "Without property rights where you don't work because the government or the cartel will just take whatever you work. It keeps them in this permanent low trust equilibrium."

This persistent cycle of corruption and lack of trust in institutions undermines efforts to establish stable, transparent governance structures, making Latin American societies vulnerable to exploitation and instability.

Case Studies: Argentina and Colombia

The hosts delve into specific examples to illustrate broader trends.

• Argentina's Economic Struggles:
  Rudyard Lynch [75:17]:
  "Argentina never developed legitimate capitalism. They were stuck in borrowing and then spending their money."

Argentina's history is marked by oscillations between economic booms and crippling crises, largely due to monopolistic practices, lack of property rights, and hyperinflation. The country's inability to sustain competitive industries and fiscal responsibility has perpetuated its economic woes.

• Colombia's Civil Conflicts:
  Rudyard Lynch [92:21]:
  "Colombia has consistently had a trend towards individual warlordism... They signed a pact within the last five years."

Colombia's fragmented geography fostered regional warlordism and prolonged civil conflicts, impeding national unity and economic development. Recent peace agreements have opened avenues for growth, but underlying structural issues remain.

Foreign Intervention and Dependency

The conversation critiques the often-simplistic narratives attributing Latin America's problems solely to external interventions.

• Challenging the Marxist Narrative:
  Rudyard Lynch [35:26]:
  "Latin America's poverty wasn't caused by exploitation. It was due to sociological institutions established by their Iberian conquerors."

Rudyard argues that internal sociological and institutional flaws are the primary drivers of Latin America's struggles, rather than external exploitation or interventions by powers like the United States.

• Role of the United States:
  Rudyard Lynch [62:11]:
  "Latin Americans love using America as a way to escape responsibility. America never thinks about Latin America."

While acknowledging some U.S. interventions, Rudyard emphasizes that Latin America's dependency and governance issues are internally rooted, with foreign influence playing a marginal role.

Future Prospects for Latin America

Despite the grim analysis, the hosts discuss potential pathways for Latin America's resurgence.

• Optimism for Argentina and El Salvador:
  Rudyard Lynch [75:17]:
  "Argentina can grow to greatness if Milei and his regime can maintain power for an unnaturally long period of time."

Argentina's current political climate, under leaders pushing for significant reforms, offers a glimmer of hope. Similarly, El Salvador's innovative right-wing governance has shown promising results in reducing crime and fostering stability.

• Potential Challenges:
  Rudyard Lynch [77:34]:
  "Latin Americans are stuck in these fitful cycles of boom and bust... It's hard to move from a low trust to a high trust equilibrium."

For sustained progress, countries must overcome entrenched corruption and establish trustworthy institutions that can break the cycle of dependency and exploitation.

Conclusion

The episode provides a nuanced exploration of Latin America's complex history, emphasizing the interplay of internal institutions, cultural factors, and historical legacies. Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett offer a perspective that challenges dominant narratives, advocating for a deeper understanding of sociological dynamics to comprehend and potentially transform Latin America's trajectory.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Rudyard Lynch [00:16]:
  "Imperial Japan and wokeness have these hollow cultural similarities... they'll tell you to kill yourself rather than adjust because they're just so ridiculously hysterical."

• Rudyard Lynch [04:30]:
  "Latin America is the place in world history the most divided between all seven emotions. It's the most average."

• Rudyard Lynch [15:55]:
  "The introduction of African diseases to the New World was a huge negative event for everyone involved, including the natives."

• Rudyard Lynch [35:26]:
  "Latin America's poverty wasn't caused by exploitation. It was due to sociological institutions established by their Iberian conquerors."

• Rudyard Lynch [41:51]:
  "Without property rights where you don't work because the government or the cartel will just take whatever you work. It keeps them in this permanent low trust equilibrium."

• Rudyard Lynch [75:17]:
  "Argentina can grow to greatness if Milei and his regime can maintain power for an unnaturally long period of time."

• Rudyard Lynch [62:11]:
  "Latin Americans love using America as a way to escape responsibility. America never thinks about Latin America."

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Final Thoughts: "Explaining Latino History" offers an in-depth analysis of Latin America's historical and contemporary challenges, underscored by Rudyard Lynch's unique anthropological framework. The episode serves as a compelling resource for listeners seeking to understand the multifaceted dynamics influencing Latin America's past and future.

Transcript

[Whatifalth]

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.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You know, it's funny how Imperial Japan and wokeness have these hollow cultural similarities because imperial Japan is peak authoritarian imperialist right wing xenophobia and then wokeness is peak degenerate feminine lack of cooperation, anarchic insanity. And they're so off in their own directions. They meet up in a lot of ways in that they have these horrific virtue signaling issues where they'll kill their own movement because they can't tell their own people no and everyone will consciously virtue virtue being more in their in group. And they're also completely insane. And the joke I made before we started recording is that they're the two cultures where if you make the slightest mistake, they'll tell you to kill yourself rather than adjust because they're just so ridiculously hysterical.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, I guess in the the puritan sense you were kind of doomed from a deterministic perspective, so you might as well kill yourself. It gets into the analogies for how you would see a population as irredeemably degenerate, like. Like Hillary's terminology.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And it's funny that Japan is one of the few places in Asia where a decent portion of the country map is anxiety based psychology. I don't remember what the other one. They're mostly red from your map. I think that was shame. But they do have some anxiety based in Japan, which is the same as the Northeast and some northern Europe.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Good tie in. We have merch. We're selling maps as merch. Either soon or now where my seven emotions. Click the link, buy merch. This is good merch. I have some of it myself. And don't you want to be drinking your morning coffee thinking about Thucydides and Tolstoy rather than whatever brain rot contents in the rest of the Internet? But one of the topics I developed I'm most proud of is my seven Emotions. It's probably my favorite video I've ever made and I like it because I took an anthropological concept or different types of societies are powered by different emotions. And then through said anthropological concept I was able to divide up history in a way that three years later I'm still proud of it because you'll see pride based cultures which are the Vikings and the samurai and the Iroquois and the knights who don't have anything in common except warrior masculine vigor. And then Shame based cultures are oriental style collectivist societies where everyone lives in a clan and follows tradition. And so the similarity is that anxiety is decadence based morality. Thank you, Austin. Anxiety is decadence based morality or I will do whatever's popular because my society is decadent and rich that we lost all values. So the modern west, the left is anxiety and the Christian values are guilt and warrior cultures are pride. But then it's similar to see how anxiety or these hyper modernist urban liberal societies often end up like shame based societies since they're both, both oriented around emotional group approval. It's just for shame based societies, the system that determines the values is tradition and the group mentality. And then in anxiety it's trends and whatever is popular and fads. And the interesting thing for Latin America, this video is that of all seven emotions, Latin America is the place in world history the most divided between all seven. It's the most average. And on anthropological statistical basis, the society, the country in the world closest to the universal person or the aggregate norms of anthropological data is Mexico. In almost every case, Anglo and North European Protestant is on one side, Japan, Indonesia are on the other, and Mexico is the statistically closest to the median.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting. That's a good setup for this episode. And to corroborate what you were saying, you can see like the anxiety based pockets in East Asia run up right next to shame, which is what you said was similar. And then there's anxiety pockets in the U.S. yes. And then in Europe you can see, oh wait, where's Europe?

[Rudyard Lynch]

You're on Europe. Europe's middle of the map.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, there it is.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You're shining on Europe.

[Austin Padgett]

Now anxiety also rubs up against shame in Europe when you go into Eastern Europe because the green is guilt and.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Shame, would you bring it down to Latin America? Show Latin America. So the interesting thing about Latin America, and I will let you shine it on for a little bit because it'll take me a second to explain is Latin America is the most diversified between different types because it has guilt, which is a European emotion. It has shame, which is a collectivist, a collectivist non western society emotion which the natives had. Fear is tribal groups that the natives and Africans have. And then we'll go through the others where you can take the map down. Thank you. So to go through each seven emotion, how it relates to Latin America. Anxiety is urban decadent societies. That's really apparent, especially if you've lived in Latin America, because most of the expat locations for gringos are in these wealthy urban cities where you Meet people and they could totally be libs in America, they could be hipsters in New York City. So that's anxiety. Guilt is because so much Latin American ancestry is European in origin. Guilt is a Christian value system. Pride is honor cultures. And Latin America has its own honor culture. And it's more true in certain areas where like the Gauchois, the Gauchos of Argentina or, or the Paulista land pirates of Brazil, they had a strong honor culture. But Latin American concept of honor is really different from other concepts. I could explain it. Shame, as I said before, that strongest in the pre established native civilizations, which are the natives of the New World, especially the big civilizations are culturally closer to orientals than they are to Western. Where most anthropologists say the Mexican or Peruvian indigenous civilization is culturally analogous to some place in Asia. Asia. Fear is tribal cultures. Fear is the concept that the universe is all these spirits and you have to placate the spirits by giving them sacrifices. The Aztecs are easy examples. Disgust is social conservatism. You see that around caste systems in Latin America where disgust is propelled off. Keep away from me. Mostly for germ reasons. So social class, race, disease, the tropics, that's all in play in Latin America. Envy, that's big in Latin America because envy is the powering of socialism and communism as well as a lot of traditional cultures. So to simplify, Latin America is the most diversified between all seven emotions in my system out of any society in history. And I think that's interesting.

[Austin Padgett]

Well yeah, because it can give us some case studies for how those different psychologies can interact. Like you can basically predict all foreign policy off of what happened within the Greek isles. Maybe you'll be able to predict inter psychological relations just by looking at South American inner country dynamics.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, that's a good point. Because the biggest difficulty in explaining Latin American history and this video is going to be supposed to be focused in the post colonial period of the last 200 years. But the thing is that modern Latin America is so dependent on the Spanish colonization that in order to understand any of the context for recent Latin America, we're going to have to talk about the colonial period. But that Latin America is subdivided into what some historians say are five different regions that have, are just radically different from each other, but they're unified by the elite Spanish culture. But then once you get beneath the elite level, the regional nature of whatever part of Latin America that is radically changes almost every level of society.

[Austin Padgett]

And it seems like the livable land space in South America is pretty, pretty split up along multiple climate zones, Most of the landmass is in the hotter areas, but that's mostly uninhabitable jungle.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And in the hotter areas it's concentrated in the mountains, where as of 1960, a third of Latin Americans, Latin America's population were in highlands or mountains. And if you know the rest of the world, humans tend to try to avoid building in mountains at all costs. But in lots of Latin America, the only temperate climates in the tropics are in mountains. And so you see Mexico City, really high elevation. Peru, its core area, really high elevation. Lima is a weird case where it's high elevation. But also on the coast, Quito in Ecuador is high elevation. Bogota in Colombia is high elevation. In Venezuela, one of their cities, not Caracas, it might be Maracaibo, is high elevation. I forget if Santiago is high up, but it is. A lot of Brazil's major cities are as well. I think Sao Paulo's in the highlands. And so across Latin America you see this tendency to of building in the mountains because that's the area that's habitable, especially for Spanish settlers.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh right, because they would be the ones looking to set up different forts or new centers. But you said that even in ancient South American history, they generally targeted the highlands. Yes, but maybe not as biased as the settlers did.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Humans have innate biological tendencies that exist across humanity or the universal person. Anthropologically and for all humans, really hot climates are unpleasant and really cold climates are also unpleasant. And then you see from regional genetics or race distinctions about how different types of people process climate with different overton windows of potential settlement. And so Europeans as an example, Florida is basically the line where south of Florida, it's nigh impossible to establish a majority European settlement. And whenever Europeans tried, they would die off. The tens of thousands of Europeans moved to the Caribbean and they just died of disease. And so Texas, North Africa, that's the Middle east. That's the southmost point of European settlement. Europeans can also settle in the area around Cape Town, Australia. Australia, Asians have a wider overton window of settlement where the furthest Chinese have settled legitimately on the equator. And then up in Manchuria, which is the same latitude as Siberia, Africans don't really have any populations. The edge of African settlement is the temperate zone. And most of that is post industrial. So Africans are tend to be stuck in the tropics and subtropics. And so there's certain universally inhospitable climates. But when you're looking at Africa, you're seeing that all populations tend to prefer the highlands because they're cooler, where the Inca and the Aztecs built their empires in the highlands, but the natives had more coastal population centers in the tropics, which the Europeans had practically none of. And when the Europeans chose to settle, they were skewed heavily towards the highlands.

[Austin Padgett]

Where they would if you look at the genetic map of south and Central America, the majority white European ancestry is you get some in North Mexico and then basically at the bottom of the climate zone you get more. So the whole climate zone maps perfectly on to where European settlement is in South America.

[Whatifalth]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

Another important element of this is that the introduction of African diseases to the New World was a huge negative event for everyone involved, including the natives. Because the reason the Europeans are able to conquer the New World so quickly is that Europe had a better developed gene pool so that 90% of natives died within European arrival due to disease. And the tropics of the New World were habitable before the arrival of African diseases. Which is why we know that the Amazon had probably tens of millions of inhabitants in the medieval period in these cities in the jungle. And we only recently discovered that through satellite technology that could use various methods to assess what parts of the jungle had been broken and formulated by human settlement. Where from satellites saw these huge parts of the Amazon, where we realized wait, this doesn't make sense. As an old growth forest, this had to have been depopulated at some the, the trees must have been cut down. There must have been farming here within the last few centuries. And the same thing happened in the Yucatan as well, which is a tropical climate that had double the population a thousand years ago as today the entire Yucatan is covered in trees now. And, and it had practically no trees a thousand years ago. So what happened with the arrival of African diseases is that the former tropical areas the natives used to be able to inhabit themselves could not inhabit it because they weren't evolved for African diseases. And so you saw the removal of major civilization for most of the tropics. And William McNeill's son has a wonderful book on this topic called Mosquito Empires where he talks about the greater Caribbean, stretching from Washington D.C. to Rio de Janeiro as an area where Europeans had to move in African settlers Because the land had become inhospitable for natives themselves. But Africans who were evolved for the diseases that came from Africa, they had genetic immunity. And another example of genetics at play is the natives of the Andes have genes that let them process oxygen significantly more efficiently than other races. Where when I was in Peru I would get these horrific. I got four migraines a week. At one point when I was in Peru, altitudes really hurt me for migraines. And my migraines are for three hours. I go blind and I have stabbing head and stomach pains. I haven't had any for the last two years. I used to have them more frequently and I once had four of those a week due to the altitude. And I had just hiked the Appalachian Trail a few months before, so I was in great physical shape. Then I went to Peru and I was a friggin cripple. I struggled to walk more than a block without getting migraines, without getting winded. And then the locals were just skipping around and playing soccer. So they, we know scientifically they have a genetic ability to process the higher altitude.

[Austin Padgett]

I wonder if that came up. And as an advantage at any time when they were interacting with the Spanish. I'm just picturing like in full armor, huffing and puffing, bent over as they're like hopping across a rope bridge.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, that was something they wrote about. Where the Spanish wrote about how impressed they were with the indioces ability to handle high altitudes because they didn't have horses in the New World. Every Spanish expedition, most of the people involved were native porters who would carry bags around on their back. And they were consistently shocked at the toughness, inability to handle difficult altitude and difficult terrain that the native porters had. And the Spanish differentiated between different subgroups of native. So they were incredibly impressed by the natives of the Andes and this ability. And they just thought saw the natives of the Amazon as just barbarians who had none of the same toughness or ability to handle suffering that the virility. Well, they thought the natives of the Amazons had virility, but it was just virility. They used to shoot the Spanish.

[Austin Padgett]

Okay, right. I guess virility is also a broad, broad word.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

But not running any marathons is the same as successfully as the and these guys and then the African diseases. So I guess the Africans would have been acclimated to both European diseases and able to handle the malaria. So it's like a sweet spot where even the natives were having trouble. And then it's crazy to think because we know about all these ruins in the jungle and we've discovered them with lidar, etc. And I think we often think of them as, you know, really, really old or older than the ones we knew about because they were previously undiscovered. But there's a huge amount of potential with the spread of disease for these things to have collapsed post colonialism.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Before the Spanish or anybody ever knew about them or got out there, flew a helicopter over.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So that definitely happened. And part of the reason there was this disjoint on the story of El Dorado is that the Spanish in one of their incredible expeditions in a guire Wrath of God, which is a movie by Werner Herzog, is about it. Great movie. After Pizarro conquered Peru, the Spanish got stuck on the wrong side of the Andes and they just sailed down the entire Amazon river, circled back to the Caribbean to the Spanish empire. So it's one of the greatest expeditions of all time by people who had no idea where the Amazon was going. Its peak age of discovery vibes. And the Spanish talked with these enormous cities on the Amazon and the land being really heavily populated. And so the Spanish knew that there were cities in that region of the world and that's what spurred their interest in finding El Dorado or the City of Gold. And for centuries we thought the Spanish were just messing around because we didn't see any later records of said cities and large population centers because every later Spanish expedition saw the Amazon completely empty from disease. It's the same thing as the American South. And so we. It's one of the things I like to say. One of my new phrases is tall. We, the ancients weren't idiots where we write off historic records because they don't fit the later evidence. And then very many times we'll learn later evidence and realize that the primary sources of the time are correct.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Like we figure out that's why they said that. It's a hilarious example because we have a corollary. It's exactly what happened with Henry Hudson going down the Hudson.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

And seeing all the smoke and then that's all gone. So we've already. We have a perfect North American corollary.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. I am not happy with the 20th century field of history, which is why I read so many 19th century books. But it would take me too long to explain why. And we have to. We have to explain Latin America. So I'm going to divide Latin America into three different frames to help you understand it better. And I'm going to focus mostly on the third Frame. So first frame is that you need to divide Latin America between Spanish speaking and Portuguese speaking areas. And there are some other regions like Belize, Guyana, where British colonies that they filled with black people and some Indians. Then you have the Dutch and the French colonies. But most of Latin America is the former Spanish empire where the Spanish conquered this region from New Mexico and California down to Patagonia. And it includes hundreds of millions of people with the two largest former Spanish colonies being Peru and Mexico, where they hollowed out the remnants of the old Aztec and Inca empires to run their empire. The second region is the Portuguese speakers which is Brazil. And we're going to talk more about their individual histories. But Brazil is just a mammoth country. It's larger geographically than America if you take out Alaska. And so Brazil is a continent in itself. And Brazil is a settler colonial society where there's a division in Latin America between areas Europeans and Africans colonized or areas that had pre established native settlements where the two core Spanish regions former native centers. Then Brazil is almost entirely Portuguese settlements. You have Spanish Portuguese empires and they were fused for eight years as Portugal was in a joint monarchy with Spain. Second way to divide up Latin America is racially where there's three big racial or genetic components to Latin America. The Amerindian or Native American. I'm going to say Amerindian because Indios is the term that's used in Latin America today. The Spanish or Iberian component and then the African component. So the, the Amerindian component is biggest, as I said before, on the western Pacific fringe with India, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala being the most native nations. And there are some sub areas of Latin America that have majority native ancestry, that being Mexico, parts of Mexico and parts of the Andes region. Bolivia is the most native country today. Then the European component in the Southern cone or the area around Argentina and South Brazil, it's actually more white than America, where it's one of the whitest places in the world. Places like Argentina or South Brazil. And that was mostly original Spanish and Portuguese settlement because the natives were hunter gatherers who were almost entirely wiped out by disease. And then there was a lot of German and Italian and French and some even Japanese settlement in those areas. The largest population of Japanese outside Japan is in Brazil where they worked as in the agricultural economy. And then the third component is the African. And Latin America doesn't really have pure black populations in the way America does. Where in America we established a racial caste system where whites and blacks were not supposed to intermix, although lots of white men did sleep with their black slaves. So it did happen. But the average Anglo American's 98 plus percent white. But in Latin America, where Brazil is the greatest concentration of African slaves ever. And I think it's probably the biggest African population outside Africa, the northern half of the country has lots of black blood that's mixed with white. And then you have small black populations along Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico. But they're all something like between 1 to 10% of the population. So the Spanish didn't practice industrial level slavery in the same way other European countries did. Because the Spanish economy was so inefficient.

[Austin Padgett]

The Portuguese had larger plantation sizes on average. Interesting. And it sounds like Brazil might have the largest expat community of a lot of countries in the world. Like the largest Asian expat. The largest. Well, I, I know that Argentina etc has more Europeans on average, but Brazil's population is so long. Do they have some of the biggest European expat groups too?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, down there. So interesting. I made a map of the countries that have the biggest ethnic diaspora of other countries. I wonder if I still have it. I probably got rid of it when I changed computers. But the general pattern is that it's pretty common for northwest European countries that America is the country that has the most genetics of any place in the world. So that's true for every ethnicity. In the British Isles. The German diaspora in America is nearly as big as Germany. And so in a lot of Scandinavian countries, the American diaspora is nearly as big as the home country. That's northwest Europe. Southwest Europe's biggest diasporas are in Brazil. So Portugal and Italy have their biggest diasporas in Brazil. The Spanish diaspora is biggest in Latin America as well. And Mediterranean Europe mostly went to Brazil and Argentina, where the Italian diaspora in Argentina is enormous. And this was the end of the 19th century because they were Catholic and spoke a similar language. And at the end of the 19th century, it was unclear that America would become this titan and that South America wouldn't. Where people spoke about Argentina and Brazil in the same sentence, they spoke about America where they said once these countries get property rights, they're going to become wealthier than European countries. Because in the early 20th century, when their agricultural exports were really valuable, Argentina was a wealthier country than France.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, that's a great point. Argentina, I think, was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Cuba was also fairly wealthy at one point. And you. They. These countries definitely participated in the success of the Gilded Era. And a little bit beyond that, they had their property rights reform. And it looked like it was going smoothly. And I was thinking about this earlier. I think what happened is the South American country set up by Spanish and Portuguese, when they adopted markets, their oligarchies were too entrenched because of those cultures, you know, how Spanish colonies work, et cetera. And so that makes it really vulnerable for the the following global progressive backlash because it validates the progressives claims about capitalism when you have it locked up in a cartelized regulatory oligarchy. So they had that's why they were so susceptible to the Progressive Era revolutions where we kind of like made it through that a little bit better without getting although, you know, the same thing eventually happened to us. But I think that's why it looked like they were going well, they had potential and then they crashed. But now we're getting back to the point where we can revisit those eras for those, those countries. And it'll be interesting to see if Argentina can push Spain and France in the same way they did back then by kind of looking like they're about to have a brighter future economically.

[Whatifalth]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

Is why I said that this video is about postcolonial Latin America, which is a sentence I want to I just hate myself saying that list of words because this field's been so taken over by leftist propaganda where you say those words that you'll always think of Open Veins of Latin America, which is the most popular history of Latin America, even today. And then the author decades later said this book was complete Marxist propaganda. I don't even believe this book now where open veins to Latin America is why Latin America is poor. Which is a consistent thesis that everyone who studies Latin America wonders because it's this large parts of Latin America are ostensibly extensions of Western civilization, but they don't really act like it. There's always been this question why and the Marxist narrative, and the Marxist narrative will always be dominant in the 20th century is that this was due to oppression. But I studied this topic really deeply where I am the Anglo. I know who knows the most about Latin America because I went through an obsessive study phase about it and I don't even know that much about this topic. So no one studies this topic. And. And during my gap year I was obsessed with Latin America and I wanted to figure out why Mexico was poor and America was rich. So I read a bunch of books on those topics and I passed through multiple shit tests, one of which was the leftist narrative that had complete dominance that Latin America is poor due to exploitation. And I read further and for reasons I'll explain, I found that wasn't true. What I consistently found instead was that Latin America was poor due to sociological institutions established by their Iberian conquerors where Iberia and watch the Spanish empire video for a better descriptor about this. They through conquering the Muslims took on lots of traits of an Islamic like empire. And one of my favorite historians, Carol Quigley has an idea called the Peru Pakistan Axis that there's all these similarities in Middle Eastern culture and Latin American culture. These include large governments built around a crusading moral code, banning the printing press, banning intellectual curiosity. Established large class structures where the lower classes are kept down at the expense of a small elite, no real middle class. The destruction of capitalism due to tax farming and monopolistic practices of selling off the economy to government buddies. Constant infighting and civil wars. The need for a large centralized empire based around divine right to stop the regional powers, the regional elites from just getting stuck in silliness. Or after the Turkish empire fell, none of the former Turkish colonies could self govern. And that's what's true in Latin America. And these were just practices that took place across Mediterranean Europe in the early modern period. You see them in France, you see them in Italy, you see them in Spain and Portugal where they took on this very old world form of decadence. And through the French Revolution a lot of Europe was able. Western Europe was able to break out of that. The thing I call l regimeization or the capture of different sub parts of the economy by buddies of the government through monopolies and regulations. But the issues that absolutist Europe had at the time became fossilized in Latin America's social structure while they were a phase Europe was able to break out of.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, and the US normally is not in this conundrum, but after like 100 years of progressivism and the death of God, we're starting to flirt with an environment in which that false dichotomy that's presented in South American politics is actually our reality if we don't establish a clear third value. And it's funny to think of a lot of the people who are going in a more fascist direction buying into that dichotomy. Reference Spain and Franco and things like that and his interest in the anti usury. And it's interesting to see the connection between that and Islam, which is actually an anti Western kind of value structure. Which is, which is our point when, when countering people who say pre Reformation Europe represents all, everything that is good. It's, it's actually partly tied into that Islamization.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's a, that's a very good point. And it speaks to something I've said before, that lots of far right people want to establish a social code at complete odds with the Western tradition, just completely divorced from the values of their ancestors. And I've said before that you can see in Europe's three major frontier diasporas or Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Anglosphere or North America, you see traits that existed in muddled form. Medieval and early modern Europe get brought onto the scale of continents and you can see which ideas worked best. Where in Eastern Europe it was despotic absolutism and totalitarianism that won. In North America it was what I call heroic individualism or the free market democracy, the individual and the shared minuteman, hoplite warrior culture. And in Latin America it's corruption, monopolies, aristocracy. And you see the values that existed in Germanic Europe, Mediterranean Europe and Slavic Europe in muddled form become crystallized on vast scales due to these frontiers. When you're looking at Latin America, you are seeing an extension of Western culture in a lot of cases where the reason that Argentina or South Brazil, which are ostensibly Mediterranean societies, fell. Is that why Spain and Southern Italy failed to industrialize or failed to go through the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, is because their societies were captured by corrupt elites who were extractive and never established things like rule of law or free markets that allowed the Western revolution to seep through Them right.

[Austin Padgett]

There's. It's like the. The ancient regime is represented by the fascists and then you have the progressive regiment represented by the modern, you know, progressives. And that they have the same goals. Kind of a very similar structure. And they have a shared interest in denigrating liberalism or pretending it doesn't exist. Because if. If that option is around then it ruins their back and forth. They're the frame that they're comfortable sharing together as opposing enemies in a war. They don't want the. The liberalism to interject in that because it makes.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And validates their worldview.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's your. The Latins can't get past Hobbes and Rousseau point where their right is Hobbes and their left is Rousseau. And it's a very good point. And I'm going to summarize Latin America's biggest issue in one piece which is the Spanish established a system which kept their colonies in a permanent state of immaturity. And this is the trend I keep seeing when I read histories of Latin America that these societies were never capable of having self governance because the Spanish ruled everything out of the Peninsulares. And the Portuguese were quite similar. Although the Portuguese were more chill and lax. Which is why Brazil is more functioning in at least some ways than Hispano America. But the Peninsulares held all the power. And the second you were born in the colonies you were a second class citizen. So the local white who held all the economic and social power they didn't have real power. And so when Latin America got independence and it got independence not out of its own real desire. It's that Napoleon conquered Spain and Portugal which got meant the home countries couldn't hold them. Is that local elites constantly sputtered in nation building because there was this pre established Spanish structure and Portuguese structure to exploit the local population, bring the resources back to the home country. And then those very same institutions were used by the local elites to exploit the population and give it to themselves. And it created a low trust environment without rule of law which is Latin America's biggest issue. Without property rights where you don't work because the government or the cartel will just take whatever you work. So it keeps them in this permanent low trust equilibrium. And whenever people get into power they have almost no incentive to change the equilibrium because they can just exploit the system in Latin America. This is what something why nations fail talks about. Latin America hasn't established these high trust virtuous cycles because they don't have capitalism, they don't have freedom, they don't have property rights. They don't, they don't have any of these things. So there's no reason to change that because the second someone gets into power they will keep the system going. And it's why Marxists did the same thing as the old nobility, but worse because when they got into power they just use those pre established institutions to turn the public into slaves.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Which I guess is the only thing that eventually undermined the system. Because this dynamic, like we just described the logic for how this dynamic locks to you in, right? So what's the theoretical way to, to get out of it? And maybe the answer is hitting rock bottom like what happened with El Salvador and Argentina, because they are having legitimate movements against corruption in a way that wasn't possible before. And the evolution towards this is you have like Peron, right, who he was known as the non corrupt ruler, but all he did was not be corrupt himself while not calling out the corruption of all the cabinets. So he actually facilitated the corruption of the cabinet by whitewashing, by, by, by appearing as if the top of the government was not corrupt himself. And that, that eventually failed too. And it's just interesting to see the iterations as they try to escape this trap.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's a great transition for. There's two ways to talk about Latin America. One geographic and one time based where Latin America has this broader Iberian ruling class and whatever local populations have to fit inside of it. So you see these broad patterns over Latin American history. And because Latin America is a quite unserious and frankly hysterical society, what they do is they take certain political fashions from Europe that often didn't have much popularity inside Europe, incorporate them as a skin suit while maintaining the pre established Spanish structure. Because in most Latin American countries a dozen families own a majority of the entire economy and they're frequently the descendants of the original conquistadors. Although later on immigrants in the late 1800s were able to gain mercantile dominance in a lot of Latin America, including Lebanon, where there's a big Lebanese diaspora that's really important in a lot of Latin America. And the Bukele are part of that. I think Carlos Slim is Lebanese, Shakira is Lebanese, digression aside. And so Latin America you'll see consistent patterns of regime shifts that ripple across the entire region. And then what happens is that when the global fashion changes, Latin America will switch the ideology it pretends to have. While all of the ruling governments are somewhat similar because they frequently have to maintain power over highly diversified, non interconnected countries where what they're really doing is paying off local warlords to not be a failed state. So the first wave was Latin America got independence from Iberia in the early 20th century. And that was due to the Napoleonic government government conquering Spain and Portugal. And so in most of Latin America, the elites tried to actively maintain obedience to the Spanish government and the Portuguese. Gov, I'm just going to say Iberian from now on. The Iberian governments years after they chose not to where in Mexico they held on to power where they actively supported the monarchy even after the monarchy was dead. To keep the natives down because a small white elite controlled a majority native population. In Brazil, after the French conquered Lisbon, the Or I don't know if the French conquered Lisbon, they made it to the outskirts and the British might have held Lisbon itself. The Portuguese monarchy flee to Brazil. They actually liked Brazil. And so even when Portugal got independence and became a country, the the emperor of Brazil said, psych. Now you get to keep Portugal. Brazil's nice. And so Brazil remains a monarchy for the next 50 years under the enlightened Emperor Pedro. And Emperor Pedro was this Renaissance man. He spoke 20 native languages. He was seen as a benevolent despot. Brazil grew under him. And Brazilian monarchists, there's a sizable amount of them saying Brazil needs to maintain being a monarchy. And so this was this whole trajectory of Brazilian history.

[Austin Padgett]

That's probably why HAPA is so popular and among the ancaps libertarians in Brazil.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Definitely.

[Austin Padgett]

And that's not just a small movement. That's a really big movement in the south of Brazil. Yeah, among the other guys. But that specific monarch, that, that's really funny. It's really funny to think of a monarch going on vacation, deciding he likes it more here and then moving the entire. Yes, Regency.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I don't think the. I don't think the. The king in Portugal got the scale or the depth of Brazil. Brazil deserves its own video. But you saw these monarchist trends in Latin America and I. My dad got me a biography of Bolivar and I read it a few years ago and my dad got it because he said this is an interesting biopic of a person dealing with lots of uncomfortable situations because Bolivar was the liberator of middle mid. Of the greater Caribbean region, where he tried to form a monarchy under Grand Colombia, which includes modern Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador. And so he tried to form a monarchy around his own personal cult. And when I read the book, I was sympathetic to the. The democrats because I'm an American. Of course, I'm asympathetic to the democratic forces. But as I read about this time period I'm like, damn, Bolivar is right. This is not a society that was ready for self governance. Because you'll read about how Bolivar goes through in almost everyone's illiterate, there aren't roads connecting any of the major centers. They're basically self governing city states that have no reason to work together. And I do believe democracy, and I love democracy. But in most historic contexts, where the population's almost entire illiterate, where there's no trade, no national identity, if you become a democracy, your society will fail immediately. Which is what you saw in Iraq or Afghanistan. We tried to build states there, but you saw this attempt to construct monarchies across Latin America within the first generation. With Mexico under Santa Ana and Iturbide in Gran Colombia with Bolivar. And Bolivar he met up with the liberator of Argentina, San Martin in Peru, where Peru was the last holdout of the Spanish empire because it had a larger indio population that was dependent on Spanish landlords. And Peru was just completely ravaged by the Spanish. It's one of the most brutal examples of colonialism I've ever read about. And their armies, San Martin from Argentina marching over the Andes in Bolivar, marching down from the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, met up in Peru and they tried to establish Peru as a monarchy because they thought it wasn't ready for self governance. And what happened unilaterally across Latin America is the first generation of monarchies failed, failing last in Brazil because there wasn't enough genuine belief in random caudillo, which is a Latin American term for warlord, where the caudillos would often go into the mountain, get tribes of herds to support them, seize power in the city, make themselves monarch. But then they weren't, they weren't the king of Spain, so they couldn't pull it off. And then in the mid 19th century, almost all of Latin America was in failed state status with warlords trying to fight over to gain independence, of gain unity. And then in the middle of the 19th century what happened is that starting the furthest from the equator, in places like Mexico or Argentina, you saw the unification into these centralized countries that were aristocratic republics where tiny percent of the population could vote, it was still corrupt. Then in the early 20th century you saw the rise of technocratic militaristic military dictatorships which operated under. I don't want to give them the justice of being fascist because fascism requires a degree of ideological consistency Latin America doesn't have. But these pseudo fascist military dictatorships built around caudillos. And then the military dictatorships ran Latin America for most of the 20th century. But in the mid 20th century you saw the rise of Marxism ripple across the entire region where the Marxists only really seized power in Cuba, but the Marxists nearly seized power in most of Latin America which was crushed by a new wave of military dictatorship which allowed capitalism. Then you saw the rise of democracies in the early 21st century which are now growing weaker as we've seen a wave of both further left wing and further right wing politics where it's unclear who's going to gain victory over Latin America with a new ideological battle getting set up. And that is the shortest political history of Latin America I can give.

[Austin Padgett]

That's a really good one. It's great to visualize it over multiple centuries within a consistent set of dynamics to really give you a clear picture and help us like have a map to play around with the, the ideas. It reminds me a lot of Thailand because Thailand is literally a monarchy. That's actually a military dictatorship transitioning into a democracy. That's actually no different than the dictatorial monarchy which just represents Lucian regime.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, it's.

[Austin Padgett]

And so yeah, these systems aren't so like silver bullet solutions if you don't have the input to create the output you need.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, so that's a great point. And that you can draw similarities across the whole world where the Indian societies are more like an Asian society. You've got European influence, you've got African influence, but. But you see a certain unity across tropical cultures where climate and geography are one of the most important elements of how a society develops. So there are a lot of similarities between Southeast Asian culture and between Latin American culture, especially in the Caribbean basin. Because in tropical climates there's no pressure for survival because there's no winter. And so they often create these very inefficient, very bloated governments because in the tropics, the small elite who have the will to. The will to conquer, they seize power. But the general population never builds up the critical tension. And the big issue with Latin America is it's an ecosystem without enough tension. Europe is an ecosystem with too much tension, with hundreds of wars and religions and countries constantly eating at each other. And the constant war and tension of Europe built up the dynamism that let Europe conquer the world. Europe had so much tension it would periodically blow itself up like the fall of Rome or the World Wars. But Latin America, an ironic thing is that Latin America hasn't had enough wars where I can count again. This is a sign of my dad educating Me. My dad bought me every Osprey military history, these 50 page books on every major Latin American war because he said you'll learn this entire continent's military history in a weekend. So there's less than five of them. There's the grand chocolate.

[Austin Padgett]

I think my dad just, just bought me an Osprey book about the Indian Ohio war. He's saying it's so, so fun. That's hilarious.

[Rudyard Lynch]

My ancestor was the general of the Indian Ohio War, Matt Anthony Wayne.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, no way.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And so Grand Chaco War fought In the early 20th century between Paraguay and Bolivia over oil that didn't actually exist in this swampland that had a lot of Amish Germans there, which is depressing. They fought over the oil deposits and they weren't usable. And Paraguay won the war against Bolivia. You had the war of the Triple alliance which is one of the craziest wars ever. Where Paraguay again landlocked small country that was originally a communist theocracy run by the Jesuits who insert the local population and made them work for the Jesuits where all stuff was held in common. They had a crazy military dictator who declared war on Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay or areas with 20 times Paraguay's population at once. And the scary thing is he nearly he. It was a closer war than you'd think. He went on the offensive and made a lot of gains before getting crushed. And that killed the majority of Paraguay's male population. So the Catholic Church let them practice polygamy afterwards to replenish their numbers because so many of their men died. And in that war, the military dictator who launched it, he would walk around the capitol with a pistol and if you saw a single young man who wasn't in the army, he'd say you're going to fight now. And this was far the same time as the U.S. civil War. Bloodiest war in the western hemisphere. You have the Pacific War fought between Peru, Chile and Bolivia over. You know there's batshit that makes good fertilizer. You'd know the name for it. There's batshit fertilizer in that Amakat Atacama desert region.

[Austin Padgett]

It's all, it's whatever the word for batshit is in your language. It's literally the batshit is fertilizer.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes and no. Yeah, it's batshit.

[Austin Padgett]

Guano. Guano.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Guano. Guano. Exactly. So Chile and Peru and Bolivia. Peru and used to be the same country as they're part of the Peru district in New Spain in the Spanish Empire. Chile beat them, seized control of the driest desert in the world. And the funny thing is that the British and the German arms companies that funded this war, they were funding both sides. And that's not uncommon for Latin American wars. That the same European companies are buying the guns and producing the guns for both side of the war at once.

[Whatifalth]

Right.

[Austin Padgett]

It's the same as the African slave trade.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Gun races or whatever. So the same buyers and sellers. And it's interesting to think of the pressure on Latin America, the lack of the pressure. Is that maybe why, like, the only way for them to escape. The dynamic we were referencing earlier was hitting rock bottom internally. Because if you don't have the external pressure, the only pressure is going to be your own failure. So, and then is it like the trend will actually be people realizing their own? As soon as someone finds a solution to that cycle, then it unlocks a domino effect.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Latin America's never truly hit rock bottom. And what I mean by that is that historic rock bottom is a very bad place. It's in your entire nation getting genocided. It's half your people dying in a plague. It's a horrific ideological war that splits your population in half. And that's why Eurasia did so well, because the video game map that Eurasia is, is tense enough. It creates all of these really horrific events. And you're looking at world history and some breakthrough. Someone took a terrifying risk on that breakthrough in most cases because they're worried their people would die if they didn't. And when you're looking at our liberal societies as an example, liberalism was an outgrowth of at least a century of horrific wars rippling over Europe. And so we see liberal democracies and we don't see that there was a point where men died to have them established. So we're very complacent about the understanding of how difficult the gains that got to our current civilization were. And Latin America is in this really weird place where the border peoples at the borders in Africa make no sense. And that's true. But in Latin America they make too much sense. Where you have capital based around centralized, fertile land, then you have frequently mountains or deserts blocking off any of the other societies. There's no conflict of interests. And Latin America has been consistently dependent on the rest of the world for its entire history. And this is why I say Latin America's poverty wasn't caused by exploitation. Because in the 19th century, Latin America was completely economically dependent on Britain, which is who they traded out for after the Spanish. And Bolivar was simping for the British because he desperately wanted their industrial and commercial stuff to make his nation wealthier. And Peruvian officials trying to cross the Andes to sail to their own Amazonian provinces would sail Lima to Britain, Britain to Brazil, Brazil up the Amazon to inland Peru. And so that's how disconnected Latin America was where Latin America was less than 1% of Britain's external trade. But maybe it might be a little more just for Argentina. It was like 1 or 2% of Britain's external trade. But they were completely dependent on Britain and Europe in the 19th century, then they became dependent on America and in a lot of countries today, China. And the reasoning for that, and you can see this in the history itself, where it's obvious once you read enough Latin American history that this is society held back by itself, not by foreigners, is that in almost every case, military dictatorship asks foreigners for investment. Foreigners say yes and are gullible. And the investors always forget how so many investments in Latin America get stolen. Every generation of investors forgets this. It's insane. But foreign investors pour money into the economy. When you actually look at the degree of European control, it's often not that much. Where the Europeans never thought about Latin America or they're trying to pull resources out. What happens then is that that country falls apart. The regime can't last. New regime has no ties to this. They steal the wealth and then cycle restarts. So Latin America is stuck in these fitful cycles of boom and bust. And it's funny, for certain countries in Latin America, like Colombia, you can correlate the price with coffee for their regime stability. When the coffee price collapses, Colombia falls into military dictatorship. When coffee price is high, they can sustain democracy.

[Austin Padgett]

Right? Because the systems are so fragile with the dependencies and because they're based on grievances that when things tilt below a certain level, it, it breaks and you repeat the cycle. And yes, it's funny to mention, like to mention them complaining about foreign influence because like you said, the sheer overwhelming impact of the foreign influence is having really, really high developed markets to trade into and get investment from. And is an absolutely like, crucial and almost exclusively plus side. The, the negative influences that people blame a lot of problems on, at least with the US is say, foreign policy interventions, right? So they explain all of South America's problems based on what the CIA did to overthrow X regime or Y regime. And so then I asked someone one time, like, well, what's an example of a South American country where the US failed to do a regime change, where we didn't do an. Or where we didn't have an intervention. And they said, well, Venezuela. I was like, okay, well how is Venezuela doing? Maybe there's some other factors involved than just like minor imperial influence. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The more I've studied Latin America, the more I see that Latin Americans love using America as a way to escape responsibility. And America never thinks about Latin America. It's just only a peripheral concern to us. And I can give several examples of this where later on I want to use Mexico and Argentina as test cases for how Latin America holds itself back. But when you look at America's foreign policy in the region and you count the actual interventions, there's lots of places where you could have argued. We could have, and it would have had a positive effect to intervene, but we didn't. Examples are Cuba and Venezuela, when people talk at the CIA, manipulating and everything. If America was a less imperialistic country, there's no way Cuba would still be communist, one of the last communist countries in the world. Because at this point I think the Cuban people would not be unhappy if America conquered them and then established like a, like an American style ally client state that was a democracy with capitalism. Because the Cuban people or the Venezuelans have suffered so much. If Venezuela and Cuba are still communists within America's neighborhood, it means America's not doing that much actual regime change because it would make total sense, especially so Venezuela has one of the most oil of anywhere in the world. If we were a foreign policy genuinely based around killing communists and getting oil, we'd have conquered Venezuela a decade ago. And you'll get Mexico, where Mexico nationalized the oil company based out of Tabasco, which was built almost entirely by American talent and money in the 1930s. And that was stealing an enormous American asset. And then FDR did literally nothing. He just let our oil company. Yeah, go ahead.

[Austin Padgett]

That's all that Venezuela did, is they took our oil company because we invested there too. And they took it, went to socialism and stopped being able to produce oil at a rate that was lower than they could import it from the Middle East.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Which was really embarrassing. And that speaks to your point about when there's a revolution based on coffee prices. It was the same thing in Venezuela where like when the oil prices go down, then it doesn't sustain their, their welfare. Patronage system collapses. It's basically a patronage system on all levels of society. And I actually blame a little bit the Progressive era interventionism, imperial culture for the direction Cuba went because you no longer had the ability. It wasn't like the 16 or 1700s where like private interests could win out. You have it all. The interventions are now done within a bureaucracy which is much less likely to move or when it does move in more destructive ways.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, yeah. When you look at America's foreign policy in Latin America, it's mostly powered off ineptness and inability to understand local conditions, which I don't really blame the Americans for because internal conditions in Latin America are so complex and personal where Latin culture is so individualistic in a certain way that whatever political ideology the caudillo or the chieftain says is more dependent on his own private beliefs. And you'll tell the public something completely different. So as examples, America supported Castro when he first got to power, where Castro and his buddies took over the Cuban government single handedly and Castro said he was an old style democrat who wanted to get rid of the feudal estates. And America thought that would be good because it would turn America into a free market, smallholder capitalist country where the biggest issue in Latin America has been control of basically these huge feudal estates where the nobility never lost their control and Latin America never switched over to medieval to early modern style capitalism. And so Castro, after he got power, backstabbed us and turned it into a communist country. In Guatemala the opposite happened where Guatemala and a lot of the neighboring countries had a lot of power from American banana companies because their main crop was bananas. And the local, one of the local factions told us that a genuine democratic movement was getting voted in to Guatemala to get rid of the power of the landowners. America falsely assessed that these were communists and I don't know, they may have turned out to been later we shot them, put the pre established hyper conservative, hyper conservatives in charge. And most of America's overreach in Latin America occurred around World War I under the Woodrow Wilson administration with early style progressivism where American early 20th century progressivism was a strange ideology based on government power, monopolization, eugenics and white supremacy. Where Woodrow Wilson was both big government and racist, which is why both the right and the left hates him now. And so America invaded, I believe Haiti and the Dominican Republic and occupied I think Haiti for 20 years. We intervened, we conquered Cuba from the Spanish and made Cuba a client state which was the wealthiest country in Latin America besides Argentina for a while. And then we invaded Puerto Rico and we intervened around that entire Caribbean basin a bunch of times around World War I where we bombed Mexico, I think we might have bombed Venezuela or something like that. But besides that, people blame the CIA for all these interventions in Latin America. And that's partly true during the Cold War era to keep communism down. But on an individual basis it was almost entirely done by local military elites who just got thumbs up from the CIA. That's how it happened in Chile, what happened in Argentina, in Brazil, etc.

[Austin Padgett]

It's way infinitely more marginal than it's given narrative weight.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

The interventions were much more significant in other parts of the world.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, Leftism is indirectly incredibly racist by never letting local populations actually live out their own stories, which is the theme with the Native Americans, where the leftist narrative of the Native Americans is actually directly insulting because the natives were themselves virile warrior peoples. And you see it all the time, where leftists will always turn, turn whatever population around the world into the playthings of whites who whites have total control over. And you look at Latin America, all of the effort that the local elites did to crush communism, the left blames on the CIA, which is stolen valor for the local elites.

[Austin Padgett]

Right, yeah, it's, it's really frustrating. It's all, yeah, stolen valor. It's a victim consciousness, like applied to whatever thing you can find. An even more absurd example is taking away like the agency of the most powerful civilization in human history and placing it onto Israel. Yes, if we, if we can make that blame game, then you can see how South America could take away their own agency relative in the context of U S intervention. Or it's actually the Europeans and Americans who are taking away their agency in the same way that we're doing to ourselves.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The complete absence of masculinity in our society today means people are constantly trying to do victim blaming and constantly trying to make something else someone else's responsibility. But whether or not your country succeeds is the responsibility of the people involved. A society has to make an active decision to go for excellence and its people commit to that. And you can't force a society to be successful. That's borne out across the entire historic record. And for two examples at least, I'll touch on these two the most I'll jump around for how Latin America held itself back. Let's look at Argentina and I'll touch on Mexico a little bit. Where Argentina, majority white colony due to the deaths from diseases amongst the natives. And it has a climate and terrain very similar to Texas. It's a subtropical steppe grassland climate along the coast. And so it built up this society and Argentina went through a warlord's phase in the mid 20th, in the mid 19th century, it got unified under an old planter aristocracy that had a republic in the late 19th century. And as I said before, Argentina was considered to become a new first world country. But what happened is that first of all, there was no real property rights. So when the infinite Argentine grasslands were settled, unlike America, it wasn't around freehold small settlers, they gave huge estates, often the size of counties or small states in America, to single noble families who would import people to live on their land as a sort of peasant. And so Argentina never developed legitimate capitalism. And much like the rest of Latin America, it was under the domination of this aristocracy, who are the only people who truly had justice, because without rule of law, only the powerful could protect their own interests. What happened is that with World War I, the price of global agriculture crashed precipitously. So Argentina entered one of the worst depressions in one of the worst depressions in modern history, which lasted from World War I until past World War II. It was over 30 years in Argentina. Peron became dictator of Argentina, operating under a form of lukewarm fascism, which is why so many Nazis, after the end of the war, fled to Argentina. And Peron established these monopolies that made Argentinian industry completely non competitive, because it was according to government buddies, with these huge tariffs. So Argentina walled itself off from the global economy, and it never was able to develop the competitive ability with the rest of the world. Global capital artificially kept Argentina going across the 20th century because the rest of the world kept on thinking Argentina would turn around. But when Argentina broke out of its basically artificial, artificial walled off economy, foreign capital would enter. And then on average every 11 years, the Argentines would hyperinflate their currency to complete uselessness. And you hear all these stories of people continually going back to barter economies because there was no fiscal responsibility. And it's very similar to Greece or the Mediterranean countries, which, due to their own immaturity and their lack of delayed gratification, they took in foreign money, used foreign money to pay off their buddies, ran out of foreign money, and then did it again constantly and only with me lay are the Argentines capable of breaking out of it. And much like a lot of Latin American countries, Argentina has one of the most bloated bureaucracies, regulatory systems and government payouts. With government, huge welfare, huge stuff like pensions, they'll never pay that. Whenever they get money, they put it out in social welfare. They never develop legitimate capitalism. So they're constantly stuck in borrowing and then spending their money.

[Austin Padgett]

Right? And that's part of why Malay has been able to get them into a place where they can get foreign credit, because like you said, they would get investment and then Crash everything and inflate the currency and not pay it back. And I think it was just getting to the point where that was almost impossible to continue doing.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Or at least they were in con. They were continually diminishing concern returns to it. And I'm, I've obviously said I'm really excited about the direction that Argentina is going right now. I think it's, there's not many examples right now where you can say oh, that that country is going to be a superpower in 20 years or that country is going to be a superpower in 20 years that's not an already powerful country or maybe a historically powerful country or a country with a big population. Argentina is the first example in a while where it's going to be like how Sweden had the fourth highest GDP per capita after World War II. It's going to be a totally new entry at the top.

[Rudyard Lynch]

El Salvador is another example of new experimenting in rightist forms of government that done very well. El Salvador went from the most crime ridden and bloodiest country in the western hemisphere to one of the least. And Argentina can grow to greatness if Milei and his regime can maintain power for an unnaturally long period of time. Because my worry with Argentina is that the second that melee leaves power, it will default back onto their own ways. Because with Latin America there have been many noble men who have tried to change the trajectory and then the second that they lose the helm, they just devolve back into their previous behaviors.

[Austin Padgett]

I'm more worried about that happening with Trump, depending on how much of the bureaucracy they're able to eliminate. The reason I think that that's not going to happen with Milei is because it's too late. Once you break a cartel, it's really hard to reform. Once you get rid of the regulations around housing and construction, for example, and the prices go down 40% and people realize that like the buildings are actually better, then it's hard to go back to the previous system because you've lost the justification. It's similar to how it's almost impossible to argue for the reinstatement of a taxi medallion monopoly system after Uber has already showed us that it's safer and you don't die and you can actually text and get your money back. The only countries that have been able to, I mean the only states that were able to reinsert legal monopoly privileges around taxis were New York City and maybe a couple areas in California, like the most progressive areas. Everyone else was like, okay, this clearly works better. There's no going back now so that you have to, you have to break as many cartels as possible so that you get the resulting change that makes it important. So you have to move fast to prevent it from going backwards and to create the political will to continue because you're improving people's lives. So it's the speed and the aggressiveness I think determines how long it will continue. That applies to the US and Argentina.

[Rudyard Lynch]

He who puts his trust in Argentine economic growth is a fool. I'm just seeing their consistent pattern of behavior and I don't think a single man can break that unless it's under extenuating circumstances.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, I would say that you have it. There's a, it's like we talk about with the Netherlands and cartels, right? It's like once you break the monopoly on textile production and standards are able to change and you get like these positive results, it's going to be really hard to get the political will to reverse that. It's like you don't even have to argue against taxi medallions anymore. The progressives aren't even gonna, you know, so it's, it's. Yeah, if you can eliminate like licensing on doctors and things are radically improved and people have all these examples of these awesome things in their lives and they're getting healed and they're not losing all their money, then that's a, that's a. You've made the unseen scene. And that's a lot harder to argue against than before it existed.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So if we want to compare this to China, Latin America and China have both had western money pouring in to develop them for roughly equivalent amounts of time or the last 200 years. What happened is that China sputtered and failed for the first hundred and fifty years and then under intelligent communist leadership they were able to develop. But in developing they hurt the power of the Communist Party too much. So now they're trying to go back. And the thing is that Deng Xiaoping had enough of a unified leadership and he ruled for a long enough period that There was a 20 year timeframe where 20 to 30 year time frame where China was highly amenable to western investment. My worry for a country like Argentina is because they're a democracy and they have pre established control that they constantly. Regimes in Latin America never stay. But I worry that Javier Milei will not have enough power in a democratic system to reformulate the structure of Argentine government and society so that if he doesn't stay in power for long enough, they don't relapse. Because keep in mind cultures are Organic things that develop over the course of centuries. And it's very difficult, especially in Latin America, which doesn't have an elite, a cohesive elite culture, to break the society because the society is mostly formless.

[Austin Padgett]

This is another really good parallel to the U.S. like yeah, the, the formlessness is interesting. That's why it's kind of like you have to keep winning and proving to guide the like, if you're putting yourself ahead, then it's gonna, it's gonna draw that form, formless, already malleable country in your direction. But the, the plus side is, like you said, there's been a hundred years in Argentina of strengthening the executive. So the executives basically got, they can control all of the bureaucracy. And so by the same and empowering the executive, it made it easy to grow the, the bureaucracy. But because now he's empowered, you can also destroy it from that same position. So the corollary in the US is the bureaucracy, the administrative state developed unconstitutionally outside of Congress. So now the executive, working with the Supreme Court can actually eliminate pretty much 95% of the bureaucracy legally. So the same pressures that led to the centralization of the system will make it easier to dismantle it because you don't need to rely on some large congressional body and that if you had it, if Malay had to rely on Congress, he'd be screwed. He wouldn't get anything done. But he hasn't.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Two of Latin America's core issues are cultural and judicial or structural. And so the issue is that when you try to focus on politics in Latin America or purely economics, it doesn't work because changing the cultural structure and the judicial structure is there. They're bound together. So when you try to choose one, the other one inflames. The cultural issue is that Latin America is frankly a very culturally immature society where they're incapable of holding on to something or having a degree of depth for anything. They try, they constantly larp different things without the ability to actually dig deep. And I've spoken to multiple Latin Americans, I've had this conversation several different times where I'll say I would happily die for my nation's freedom or my personal honor. And those are things I put above my own life. And Latin Americans just like, what, what did you just say? You'll die for something? And I'm like, sure. Because in their society, idea of genuinely being sincere and committing to something as a culture for centuries is just shocking to them because they don't have the sociological impetus towards that due to the lack of property rights or the judicial thing, where due to the lack of fairness and property rights and rule of law, is that no matter what you try to move politically, you can't trust the courts. And so an issue in Latin American history is they there are generally two types of failed development or partially failed in Latin America. You have the first route, which is absolutism of both right and left, where you seize power, tried to purge the entire ruling class in order to murdering people, to artificially establish a new ruling class based on high social trust. But the thing in Latin America is it's impossible to actually get the population to commit to one of those new high social trust forms because people who try to do that tend to be low trust themselves. And it's hard to move from a low trust to a high trust equilibrium. The other is technocracy, which is the pattern where Latin America does grow, where a small, normally aristocratic elite seizes power, is unpopular with the general public, but they maintain property rights and foreign investment. What happens then is that because Latin America is sociologically weaker than the countries that are getting investment, said foreign investors bloat to an enormous percentage of the society. The local population grows envious, seizes power, kicks them out. And so over Latin American history you see this alternating. And the last 30 years, which have been the period of Latin America's most rapid growth, have largely been under the governance of technocrats and the technique the technocrats give the public social programs in order to keep the public from burning the system down. Because in Latin American culture the government has to give things to the people involved, because that's the family and the social structure. In an Anglo Saxon culture you can just say this is a democracy, the government doesn't owe you shit. Be grateful we uphold property rights. But that doesn't work in Latin America because it's a more psychologically immature society.

[Austin Padgett]

So I would say we are experiencing a similar technocratic progressive regime over the last 30 years. And I think that will work when capitalism is producing the results that dwarf the expectations of the previous system. So like the challenges you described with South America are a more extreme version of what we face regularly. So I would, yeah, I would, I, I don't know how to describe how. It's how I think it's different this time because I see your logic of if you're attracting a bunch of foreign investment, you're gonna start this cycle of resentment. But foreign investment into an oligarchy is very different. And then foreign investment into post cartel economy.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Whoa, man, everything is the same except when they're not. But that rarely happens. But you always have to be looking out for the new time that breaks the pattern. Right?

[Austin Padgett]

Right.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I am going to finish Latin America. And this is a funny topic because you have there's one of the best books in this topic is the History of Latin America by Hubert Harang. I loved this book a lot. It's from like 1961. This is when I was less nice to my book back in five years ago. But Latin America is divided up between a lot of different sub regions that have different destinies and different makeups. And then there's the broader trends built under the shared Iberian heritage. So I'm going to explain the different sub regions of Latin America geographically and then I'm going to say what the last 50 years have looked like in Latin America and what it means now. So the different sub regions. And Leland DeWitt Baldwin, who's written another great book on Latin America in the 40s, he splits Latin America into five different sub regions. You have Mexico, which is over 100 million people, the most important country in Latin America by besides Brazil, by almost any conceivable metric. Watch the Mexico video. Mexico's half native, half white. And it has struggled with warlordism and the inability to maintain a centralized government. And Mexico as of now is suffering under the cartels while it's experiencing an enormous industrial revolution due to its proximity to America. So in the future, Mexico is probably going to be drawn more so into the American orbit than the rest of Latin America due to the economic and economic ties and the Mexican diaspora. So Mexico's the first that was the core of the Spanish Empire. Then you have the Caribbean Basin, like the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia. And this area is tropical. It's one of the least inhospitable for settlement, some of the worst soils. And so areas like Colombia and Venezuela have often defaulted into city states, states because their countries are so big that it's difficult to maintain a centralized government. This is why. This is why Colombia keeps following and falling into civil war. But they do have an innate potential in that like Colombia is developing very quickly now. The Andes, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, that is mostly native the former Inca Empire. And they've been stuck in serfdom, in feudalism and domination by a small elite for longer. They've also been more socially conservative, more like Asian societies. Interestingly, Peru had a Japanese president or dictator for decades called Fujimori, who was one of their best rulers. You have the Southern cone, where Chile is half native, half white. It's been the wealthiest country for almost all of Latin American history and was able to be a democracy from 19th century until the 1980s when the Communists seized power. And then the military knocked out the communists, made a military dictatorship so that Chile wouldn't become another Cuba. Costa Rica has consistently been a democracy since the 50s, I think because they got rid of the military, because fundamentally the Americans are going to protect them. No one's going to attack Costa Rica. So the military couldn't keep putting in dictatorships. And the Southern cone, that's Argentina, That's South Brazil. We talked about that before. And then Brazil is its own animal. Brazil inhabits a huge area with tropical climate, with desert climate, grassland more temperate, and it's split between its north and south that are completely different culturally. And a fact I want to mention is it's so cool is that Brazil, as it was settled by the Portuguese, it first of all saw this enormous gold rush in Minas Geras, where you saw this culture form between the gold miners and the people from the coast settling it. But then in the area around that and around Sao Paulo, you saw the rise of this Brazilian cowboy culture. And these cowboys had war bands that raided across all of South America called the Paulistas, where they fought their way to the Andean Ecuador, across the Amazon. They raided as far north as Venezuela and the Caribbean basin and down into Paraguay, where Paraguay became a communist state under the Jesuits because the natives or the Guarani banded together to stop the Brazilians from enslaving them, because Brazil had the biggest slave trade of anywhere in the world, which incorporated natives as well as black slaves.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting. That was an awesome little summary of like the whole thing. It'd be funny to animate that with a map. Chile is a really good example of. I'm drawing a blank on who was the dictator of Chile that spawned the helicopter memes?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Allende. Allende was the communist and then Pinochet was the writer.

[Austin Padgett]

Pinochet. Right, right. So that's. Chile is a really good example of an Argentina potential level thing that ended up failing because Chile ended up right back at, you know, un, like strictest Covid response lockdown. Super globalists like getting regulated. Like they. They went through the stage of interventions lead to. Interventions lead to socialism really fast. And I think it's because they didn't do it. They did a better job than most people, but they didn't do a good enough job of getting rid of their oligarchy. Partly because the way that they transformed the economy was through a military dictatorship.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

So, and that. And that's the reason why I think Argentina is more likely to have a 100 year success where El Salvador might only have a 30, 30 year success. And I think it's. It's tied to that, that reason, which is kind of a. It could be an interesting thing to explore. But tell me more about Colombia.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Something in favor of Argentina is that they're one of the youngest countries in the industrial world. The thing with Colombia is that it shouldn't have been a unified country. But the problem is there's no other centripetal forces where you have Medellin, you have Bogota, you have the Caribbean coast and the Pacific coast. And these are all split by hundreds of miles of inhospitable jungle and mountain. So Colombia has consistently had a trend towards individual warlordism. And successful governments have to operate through giving different regional sub powers the ability to. To operate. And they're about half European, half native. Where in Colombia? They are one of the places in Spanish America where the effect of conquistadors having massive harems is most genetically pronounced. Where most European ancestry in Colombia is from a handful of European conquistadors. And they've struggled in the 20th century with. They've had strange alternating systems in military, dictatorship and democracy, where the military and the democracy shared power in the mid 20th century. But then they fell into communist leftist revolts with different communist insurgents controlling large parts of the jungle, with the centralized government only barely to keep them down. And they just signed a pact within the last five years. But Colombia is becoming, if they're developing really rapidly because they've been kept artificially poor due to the civil war that occurred for the longest time. So they're cheap to outsource to and their new government has tried to maintain property rights. But they've consistently had an issue that all of Latin America is having that as the. As the Reagan neoliberal world order spread wealth around the world in developing countries that congregated in the hands of the elite. But as the global economy is getting worse, the majority populations are like, hey guys, we saw you guys get rich. We want that now. So they're having issues with voting in communists, as is Peru, as in a lot of Latin America, where it appears as if they're going to end, they're going to. They might end their cooperation with Western development. And it's funny, you see the Passport Bro trend where one of the Passport Bros favorite countries is Colombia and my.

[Austin Padgett]

Brother is in Colombia right now.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And apparently it's become inhospitable for Passport Bros because the local Women have adjusted to the, to the, the foreign visitors. And on top of that, the local men are growing envious and they're building a culture where you reject passport bros. Really?

[Austin Padgett]

He said the women were really, really mad. When he brings up Pablo Escobar. He said it was like if you brought up Hitler in Germany or something because they all had a family member because he's in Medellin. Yeah, they all have a family member who was killed or affected by it in some way. And it's. It must be annoying to have like one of their greatest traumas be what they're most known for. I guess drug wars aren't as much fun in person as on. On tv.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I didn't.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, go ahead.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I didn't think drug wars were fun on tv. It's one of the least noble forms of warfare. I would rather see Siegfried kill a dragon or see, I don't know, Genghis Khan conquer China than see drug lords take out their enemies.

[Austin Padgett]

You're right. It's kind of a degenerate kind of fun because it's like the, the party culture is associated with the, the drug wars, the money, the girls, etc. That's.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

What people focus on on the tv.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I'm also.

[Austin Padgett]

They show it all. But yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I'm also from Philly, which is a city that legitimately got completely destroyed by organized crime. So I've seen too many of the effects personally. But to end with Latin America, they're in an interesting place where they were run by aristocratic republics. And then what happened in the 20th century is that with communism, you saw the general public push against the aristocratic control. And that occurred with differing levels of success across Latin America. But in most cases, you saw these compromises with limited forms of capitalism and foreign investment, with huge bloated bureaucracies, because when the socialists did get power, they almost always oppressed the public more than the old landlords. One of my friends likes to say that the political overton window of Latin American politics is the right saying you can continue to own your crappy farm and your daughter won't race mix if you follow us. And the left saying, let's take the richest land. And so both of these are fundamentally not optimistic positions. And people constantly oscillate between corruption, different factions, and in Latin American politics, it's just assume every single person is going to become corrupt. It's actually really sad. And when I lived in Playa del Carmen, which is the town in Mexico, it's a. I like to joke that it's a less Hispanic suburb of Miami because it's so commercialized and Americanized. A lot of euro trash there is that when we were there towards the end, they had these Covid restrictions. And this was June of 2021, where they had lockdown at 9pm where you had to be back in your house. No other Covid restrictions, no masks, no social distancing. And the only time I was robbed when I was there was by the police and then the mayoral candidate. Both candidates who were running had pre established corruption charges. So that's just normalized where they probably.

[Austin Padgett]

Wouldn'T have been allowed to run without it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, you're right. Where most Latin American dictators. Most Latin American dictators, sorry, in many countries like Brazil or Mexico, their drug wars or crime wars kill more people every year than actual wars in places like Syria or Libya. And nearly 100% of Mexicans have paid a bribe. So Latin America's got these huge issues. But then out of this sort of detent between military dictatorship and socialism after the end of the Cold War, you saw Latin America go from almost no democracies in 1980 to in 2005, almost all of Latin America being democracies, except for a few communist toeholds. And in the pre 1800 world, Latin America was dependent on Spain or Portugal economically. Until World War I, it was dependent on Britain, and then in the 20th century became dependent on America. And Anglo American culture is fundamentally more different from Latin American culture than Latin America is to Mediterranean Europe. Which is why Latin American elites constantly try to imitate France or Italy or Iberia culturally, because they can sense a greater degree of aristocratic connection. But then the cultural shift of the post Cold War world of American capitalism caused inordinate development in Latin America. And an interesting thing is that Latin America has a comparable share to the global economy as what it did 200 years ago. Because in economic development, there's actually fairly little shift in economic importance over the last 500 years. The same West European countries and their diasporas that were important 500 years ago are important five today. Same thing with the Middle east or China being poor. That's because the modern levels of economic development were side effects of the world that came out of the Black Death. But Latin America had a lot of development around the end of the Cold War. But what they were doing was the development was just catching up with their previous levels. And they were completely outpaced by development in places like Asia or Eastern Europe. And so now with the current crisis, which you can call it whatever you want, Latin America is Not really in a good position because they overbuilt on exporting natural resources which most of Latin America is still economically dependent on due to the massive Asian growth burst of the early 21st century where Brazil or Argentina or lots of countries in South America are dependent on China economically because China consumes all of their natural resources. China built a city of Rome's worth of concrete every year over the 2010 decade. So lots of weird economic stuff that's going on now are side effects of, of China's massive economic development. But as China is going into economic free fall and the global population is collapsing, Latin America stuck in this difficult position they always get stuck in where they have a top heavy government and they have a top heavy welfare state. While they're dependent on foreign capital, they're dependent on foreign export and the value of said the foreign export markets collapsed. So I expect Latin America to have lots of regime changes either towards the right or the left in the future as the global order falls apart. And I'm optimistic on a handful of countries, Mexico because it's in proximity to America, Argentina, they can get their crap together. But I'm not optimistic about most of Latin America.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, I think the thing that would make me most optimistic about Latin America is how unmoored they are, like you said, which maybe makes it easier, easier to pull them in a, in a new direction and it would be really interesting to see how like case studies for recovering breakdown of trust in society.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Because that's not something that you can just do every day. And but if, if we do see South American countries able to escape the false dichotomy of lunch young regime and progressive inter interventionism, then it'll be a great example for the rest of the world. Because if they can do it, then anybody can do it kind of thing.

[Rudyard Lynch]

They're just, they're descendants of the Romans. So if the Romans could build the greatest empire in the world, the Latins can as well. They're named after Latium or the area around Rome. Interestingly, the term Latin America is a term from the mid 19th century when the French were trying to build up an empire of conquering Brazil, an influence across the rest of Spanish America. Because the French were trying to say, hey, hello fellow Latins, we have more in common with each other than with the anglers. And so my friend Samo Bergia has a theory that Latin America is an extension of Mediterranean European civilization which had its whole trajectory going back to the Greeks and the Romans, which is something Mediterraneans, if you talk to French or Spanish or German, French, Spanish, Italians. They think Western civilization is a direct descendant from the classical world because so much of their institutions are classical. And what happened is that in the early modern period, Italy and Spain and France went from the centers of the world to sputtering out due to government corruption which caused a breakdown in social trust. So we know that Latin civilization has the potential for very high highs due to incentives and issues in their social structure they made within the last few centuries. They screwed up, but they could go back.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, I think we're actually about to see some crazy stuff happen, which is why I mentioned normally you don't see a new country making it into the, into the top. And you said stuff about how the general global available order has been the same for 400 years. Like this goes back to our earlier point about how South Europe might start moving in a positive direction faster than Northern Europe for the first time in hundreds of years because the north of Europe is too neurotic to get rid of their bureaucracy where the south is not as neurotic. So as long if they get over the oligarchy thing, they're not going to have the other pressures to the other blue pill neurotic pressures to maintain bureaucracy. So I think, I think you're going to see crazy stuff happen in Spain. I think you're going to see France have an anti red tape movement within five, 10 years. I think the whole board's about to get flipped. And in South America you have people dependent on foreign investment. Right. An environment where that is shrinking, then it's just going to be more competitive. So they're going to be put under even more pressure to follow Argentina, which is where all the foreign investments going right now. And then plus you have the investment leaving Asia, which creates a big opportunity for the whole continent. And it's funny in the context of you said South America getting passed up for investment over Asia back in the day. It's exactly the same as how the Philippines was supposed to be the first country in Asia to get investment because they spoke Spanish and English and then it went past them to Japan and then everywhere else and it still hasn't gone to the Philippines. So like I think all those trends are like they've been going on long enough where you're probably, they're probably ready to have a reversal. I don't know if the Philippines will do. It will do as well. But I think hopefully like it's for their sake, it's finally South America's turn.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I'm glad you brought up the Philippines because they're an interesting test case where they're a Spanish country. They were a former Spanish colony which the Spanish conquered as early as the 16th century. And they're Asian, they're out by Taiwan and Vietnam. And it's interesting and it speaks to how Latin America's issues are caused by the Spanish social and political structure. Because in an Asian context you see the exact same things. Lack of economic development. The rest of Asia had a dozen families descended from the old nobility run everything. Catholicism being really important. Lack of social trust. And in some ways the Philippines would fit in better being off the west coast of Mexico than in Asia. And yeah, I agree with the things you said. The thing though is that the Mediterranean culture has become so complacent where I, I feel kind of stir crazy in America. America doesn't have enough going on for me. Like I get the American context I find boring because we don't have enough cool stuff going on. I don't know how I would survive if I was born in France or Spain. I would just go completely crazy if I grew up in those places because nothing happens. And I lived in France for like six months. And when I was in France I thought this is a beautiful country but I would hate living here because it. They don't do anything and they're completely content to do nothing. And they'll need either extreme suffering or a psychological revolution for them to go back to their old ways.

[Austin Padgett]

I think you overestimate how content, how content they are. I mean maybe our trauma is like, you know, you have different types of trauma, like shocking trauma, instant trauma. You can also have like really extended insanity inducing trauma which is, I think what like with diminishing turns and an inability to put more energy into the system because it's, it's not working. But yeah, I think they're, they're, I think they're pretty miserable and they're despite the UN happiness stats and they're ready to change. I still going to put America at the forefront of any expected social change. But I wouldn't underestimate the Europeans and the younger European generations how sick they are of sclerosis.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Remember our long standing scheme to do outreach to Latin American young right wing men. That, that's a demo. We've had a plan to do various projects to reach out to them. I think that was a good idea. Anything else on the topic, Austin?

[Austin Padgett]

No, I think that's a good place to close with like look at the youth. The youth's opinions are changing on these things. In those areas.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Sounds good. Catch you next week for the Pax Romana.

[Austin Padgett]

All right, Peace out.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Adios.

[Whatifalth]

History 102 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.