Explaining Mexican History

Summary

Podcast Summary: History 102 – Explaining Mexican History

Podcast Information:

• Title: History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
• Host/Authors: Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
• Guest: Rudyard Lynch (WhatifAltHist)
• Episode: Explaining Mexican History
• Release Date: April 28, 2025
• Network: Turpentine Podcast Network

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1. Introduction to Latin American History

The episode begins with Rudyard Lynch emphasizing the often-overlooked significance of Latin America in global history. He argues that excluding Latin America from historical narratives limits our understanding of the human condition, much like ignoring regions such as India, Africa, or Southeast Asia. Lynch highlights Mexico's unique position in North American history, noting its rich indigenous heritage and enduring native civilization.

Rudyard Lynch [00:27]: "Mexico's got a pretty interesting history, one of the more interesting in North America because Mexico is the only Mexico."

2. Mesoamerican Civilizations

Olmec, Maya, and Aztecs

Lynch delves into the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica, starting with the Olmecs, often considered the "mother culture" of the region. He discusses the complexities of these societies, their advanced calendrical systems, and their rich mythologies. The Maya and Aztecs are highlighted for their sophisticated social structures and monumental architecture.

Rudyard Lynch [04:17]: "Mexico's got the longest history of any North American country... the Olmec were the oldest civilization in Mesoamerica."

Religious Practices and Human Sacrifice

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the religious practices of Mesoamerican civilizations, particularly the Aztecs. Lynch describes their elaborate human sacrificial rituals, which were integral to their belief systems and societal control mechanisms. He compares the scale of Aztec sacrifices to those of Roman gladiatorial games, underscoring their intensity and regularity.

Rudyard Lynch [15:59]: "The Aztecs killed 2 million people... the Aztecs were the culmination of the Mesoamerican tradition."

Patterns of Rise and Fall

Lynch identifies recurring patterns in the rise and fall of Mesoamerican civilizations, attributing collapses to factors such as environmental pressures (e.g., El Niño), internal social strife, and the inability to sustain large populations through rigid social structures.

Rudyard Lynch [05:27]: "There are two kinds of empires... Great nations are capable of cleaning out, cleaning up their own act."

3. Spanish Conquest

Hernán Cortés and the Fall of the Aztecs

The narrative shifts to the Spanish conquest led by Hernán Cortés, detailing the swift downfall of the Aztec Empire. Lynch explains how Cortés, with a relatively small force augmented by indigenous allies and European military advantages (such as cavalry and steel weapons), was able to subdue the Aztecs.

Rudyard Lynch [42:00]: "Cortés arrived in Mexico and within less than two years... he had conquered them and burned their capital to the ground."

Impact of Disease

A pivotal factor in the conquest was the introduction of European diseases, which decimated the indigenous population, leading to a catastrophic mortality rate of approximately 90% by 1600.

Rudyard Lynch [47:32]: "Mexico's population in the year 1600 was 10% of what it was in the year 1500."

Social Stratification and Caste System

Lynch outlines the imposition of a rigid caste system by the Spanish, categorizing society into Peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain), Criollos (Spaniards born in the New World), Indios (indigenous peoples), Mestizos (mixed heritage), and a small population of Afro-Mexicans. This stratification entrenched social divisions and hindered cohesive national identity.

Rudyard Lynch [51:53]: "Mexico developed this complex racial caste system with the peninsulares and positions of power."

4. Post-Conquest Mexico

Colonial Society and Economic Structures

Under Spanish rule, Mexico's economy was structured around encomiendas and later haciendas, systems resembling serfdom, which exploited indigenous labor for agricultural and mineral production. Lynch compares Mexico's colonial economy to that of Russia, highlighting prolonged serfdom and limited capitalist development.

Rudyard Lynch [55:56]: "Mexico was stuck at this, at this stagnating level where Mexico had 2 million people in 1600 and it had like 8 million people in 1800."

Cultural and Regional Divergence

Lynch discusses the regional diversity within Mexico, noting significant differences between the industrialized north (e.g., Sonora and Monterrey) and the predominantly indigenous south (e.g., Oaxaca and Yucatán). He attributes this divergence to historical settlement patterns, foreign investments, and internal migrations.

Rudyard Lynch [70:57]: "Mexico is highly regionally governed... northern Mexico is more white and industrialized, while the south remains predominantly indigenous."

5. Mexican War of Independence

Miguel Hidalgo and Early Rebellions

The episode covers the Mexican War of Independence, initiated by Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a creole priest who led a rebellion against Spanish colonial rule. Hidalgo's movement, while initially successful and swelling in numbers, ultimately failed due to poor military leadership and internal divisions.

Rudyard Lynch [82:38]: "Hidalgo formed this army of native people who rebelled... but he kind of dawdled around where he didn't take Mexico City when he could."

Consolidation of Power and Continued Strife

Post-independence, Mexico struggled with factionalism and the inability to establish stable governance. Lynch compares the leadership struggles to those of notable historical figures like Napoleon, emphasizing the recurring theme of charismatic leaders seizing power only to be overthrown.

Rudyard Lynch [86:24]: "The Mexican War of Independence is a multiple tiered thing and it killed 10 times as many people as the American War of Independence."

6. 19th Century Mexico

Santa Anna's Turbulent Leadership

Lynch highlights the role of Antonio López de Santa Anna, a caudillo whose erratic leadership mirrored that of Napoleon. Santa Anna's repeated seizures of power, military campaigns, and eventual defeat in the Mexican-American War significantly impacted Mexico's stability and territorial integrity.

Rudyard Lynch [95:08]: "Santa Anna is Diet Napoleon. He is Napoleon light... he seized power multiple times and got burned out."

Mexican-American War and Territorial Losses

The Mexican-American War resulted in Mexico losing vast territories, including Texas, California, and New Mexico, to the United States. Lynch emphasizes the profound psychological and cultural impact of this defeat, leading to a national inferiority complex.

Rudyard Lynch [99:28]: "They saw the Spanish as innately cruel and inhuman... within a few years, the Americans wiped Mexico out."

7. French Intervention and Maximilian

Maximilian's Short-lived Empire

Lynch narrates the French intervention in Mexico, where Emperor Maximilian, a Habsburg archduke, was installed with the support of Mexican conservatives. Despite initial successes, Maximilian's inability to navigate Mexico's complex factionalism led to his downfall and execution.

Rudyard Lynch [97:36]: "The French thought this is a former colony only a generation ago of a European country... Maximilian was shot."

Juárez and the Restoration of Republic

Juárez, an indigenous leader from Oaxaca, emerges as a national hero who successfully opposes the French and restores the Mexican Republic. His leadership symbolizes a shift towards liberalism and attempts to unify the fragmented nation.

Rudyard Lynch [97:36]: "Juárez was able to hold Mexico together when few others could have."

8. Porfirio Díaz and Industrialization

Modernization Under Díaz

Porfirio Díaz's long reign (Porfiriato) brought significant industrialization and modernization to Mexico. Lynch discusses Díaz's efforts to attract foreign investment, develop infrastructure, and implement economic reforms, which transformed Mexico's economy but also exacerbated social inequalities.

Rudyard Lynch [100:28]: "Diaz optimized Mexico for foreign investment... but created enormous inequality."

Social and Economic Inequality

While Díaz's policies modernized parts of Mexico, they left the majority of the population impoverished. Lynch compares this to the robber baron phase of industrialization, where wealth concentrated among the elite while the working class suffered.

Rudyard Lynch [103:21]: "Diaz's reign saw the development of the fringes of Mexico... but the average Mexican was incredibly poor."

9. Mexican Revolution

Causes and Key Figures

The Mexican Revolution, ignited by dissatisfaction with Díaz's regime, was marked by intense factionalism and brutal conflict. Figures like Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and Venustiano Carranza emerged, each representing different regional and ideological interests.

Rudyard Lynch [112:35]: "The Mexican Revolution could be Game of Thrones... it's a horrific race war."

Outcome and Legacy

The revolution led to significant political and social changes, including land reforms and the establishment of a one-party state under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). However, Lynch notes that these changes did little to alleviate widespread poverty and entrenched inequalities.

Rudyard Lynch [117:07]: "Mexico is a highly regional government, regional society... more people die in Mexico every year due to the drug war than people die in actual wars like Syria."

10. Modern Mexico: Challenges and Prospects

Drug Cartels and Violence

One of the most pressing issues discussed is the rise of powerful drug cartels, which contribute to pervasive violence and corruption. Lynch compares cartel violence to large-scale wars, highlighting its devastating impact on Mexican society.

Rudyard Lynch [117:44]: "Mexico's got a really big crime issue... a quarter of the budget for the new revolutionary regime was put into education."

Economic Development and Foreign Investment

Lynch remains cautiously optimistic about Mexico's future, citing ongoing industrialization and economic growth, particularly in the north. He envisions Mexico becoming a significant global player by the century's end, provided it can navigate its profound social and economic challenges.

Rudyard Lynch [118:54]: "I think by the end of this century, Mexico will become one of the most important countries in the world."

Cultural and Social Dynamics

The episode concludes with reflections on Mexico's complex identity, shaped by its indigenous heritage, colonial past, and modern influences. Lynch underscores the importance of regional diversity and the ongoing struggle to unify a nation marked by profound historical divisions.

Rudyard Lynch [119:56]: "Mexico is the country in the world where the highest percent of the population is paid a bribe to get something done... Mexico's got serious issues."

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Notable Quotes:

1. Rudyard Lynch [00:27]: "Mexico's got a pretty interesting history... the Olmec were the oldest civilization in Mesoamerica."
2. Rudyard Lynch [04:17]: "Mexico's got the longest history of any North American country."
3. Rudyard Lynch [15:59]: "The Aztecs killed 2 million people... the Aztecs were the culmination of the Mesoamerican tradition."
4. Rudyard Lynch [05:27]: "There are two kinds of empires... Great nations are capable of cleaning out, cleaning up their own act."
5. Rudyard Lynch [47:32]: "Mexico's population in the year 1600 was 10% of what it was in the year 1500."
6. Rudyard Lynch [51:53]: "Mexico developed this complex racial caste system with the peninsulares and positions of power."
7. Rudyard Lynch [82:38]: "Hidalgo formed this army of native people who rebelled... but he kind of dawdled around."
8. Rudyard Lynch [86:24]: "The Mexican War of Independence is a multiple tiered thing and it killed 10 times as many people as the American War of Independence."
9. Rudyard Lynch [95:08]: "Santa Anna is Diet Napoleon. He is Napoleon light... he seized power multiple times and got burned out."
10. Rudyard Lynch [117:07]: "Mexico is a highly regional government, regional society... more people die in Mexico every year due to the drug war than people die in actual wars like Syria."

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Conclusion

The episode offers a comprehensive overview of Mexican history, tracing its roots from ancient Mesoamerican civilizations through Spanish conquest, independence, and modern socio-political dynamics. Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett highlight the enduring patterns of empire rise and fall, the impact of colonization, and the ongoing challenges Mexico faces today. The discussion underscores the complexity of Mexican identity and the nation's potential trajectory amidst historical and contemporary pressures.

For those interested in a deeper dive into these topics, the hosts hint at future episodes covering broader Latin American history, Pax Romana, and the Napoleonic wars. This episode serves as an enlightening resource for understanding the multifaceted history of Mexico and its role in shaping the modern world.

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]

Hola. Como estas? Austin, how are you?

[Austin Padgett]

Hola. Hola. Muchos buenos senorita C Estabien.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So today we're covering Mexican history and people forget Latin America exists, which is partly justified and partly not in that if you choose not to study Latin America in the history of the world, you can generally maintain your narrative of world history. If you ignore Latin America, it's the same issue that India and Africa and Southeast Asia run into. Um, at the same time, what you're effectively doing is you're cutting out the vast majority of the human condition. Where our current narrative of history is mostly written for educated West European intellectuals. And our narrative history is getting progressively smaller as people know less. History where as of now, expecting normies to know about World War I if is just out of the pale or expecting them to know about basic facts of the American Revolution is again beyond the pale, which is sad. But Mexico's got a pretty interesting history, one of the more interesting in North America because Mexico is the only Mexico. And if you throw in Guatemala and El Salvador is the only place in North America where you had a pre established native civilization that has survived until the present in some form with half of Mexico's blood being of native origin today.

[Austin Padgett]

Right, we touched on that the last episode where it's kind of a surprising statistic most people don't realize. And yeah, I think the most interesting period of Mexican history that I know the least about or that I would find would be the most interesting to expound upon would be kind of the early colonial history in the 1500s and 1600s.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So the part two Jewish civilization video is basically done. And the video I'm writing now is Mesoamerica. So you're going to have a Mesoamerican civilization video on the main channel and then you're. We're making the Mexican history where I was in Mexico for a month a few weeks ago and I spent a lot of time in Mexico. It's a country I've grown quite fond of. And I read up a lot on Mexican history, which is why I'm making this video. And the reason I'm roping it back to your point is one of the best history books I've ever read is Fire and Blood by Fehrenbach. And this guy ran the Texas Historical Association. And it's a civilizational analysis of the history of Mexico. And what he says is that you can split Mexican history into three different substances sections. The first is tyranny by the land which is under the natives, tyranny by the Spanish under the colonial period, and then the tyranny of the past with independence. And he said in each case Mexico has this key issue where it can't hit escape velocity of, of breaking out of its context. Because great nations are capable of basically cleaning out, cleaning up their own act. So much so to the point that they start organically spilling all around them. Where great nations don't make the decision to be great, it's just they clean up their acts to a degree where they're innately superior enough that they just gradually consume their entire ecosystem. That's Rome, that's Britain, that's the ancient greeks, the Chinese, etc.

[Austin Padgett]

That makes sense because if you're trying to force it, it's not going to happen anyways. And if it's going to happen, it's not conditional to you forcing it. And then people put the cart before the horse. When they get to the end of those empires and try and figure out how they're supposed to maintain them, it's like, hey, maybe restore the generating force.

[Rudyard Lynch]

There's two kinds of empires. There's the ones that form organically, like the ones I described before, where Britain, Rome, America never really intended to form empires. Kind of just happened in a lot of cases. If you asked their elite at any given time, for each of those three powers in their imperial growth, their elite would say we don't want an empire, we don't want these colonies. It just gradually happened. And then you have the, the great man empires, examples of which are the Macedonians under Alexander, Napoleon, Genghis Khan. And what happens is that you take a people who are militarily superior to their neighbors in a certain way and then they just roll the dice and get supremely lucky on an incredible leader. And then that leader conquers the empire and unilaterally. The issue all of those empires get is that they can't maintain it because once that leader is gone, they split up into different sub factions that, that can't really maintain themselves. And that happened with each of those three empires with, for Napoleon, it just did. The empire didn't survive.

[Austin Padgett]

It's like a temporary super organizing principle where you can squeeze the juice out of an orange.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Without, without the orange tree. And you can get a little a boost or whatever.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

But not make it last.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So Mexico's got the longest history of any North American country. And I was in Oaxaca, which has the ancient site of Monte Alban. And that site stems back to 500 BC at least. And with the ancient world, especially with the ancient New World, assume everything is vastly older than you think. Where if it. If the site goes back to 500 BC, assume it's 1500 BC actually the oldest sites in Mesoamerica. And I want to make an independent video just on Mesoamerican civilization. So because they were doing all their own stuff that I don't want to squeeze into the total narrative of Mexican history, where the Olmec were the oldest civilization in Mesoamerica, and they were based around, I believe, Tabasco, where so many Mexican. Mexican states have just become known for various food products. And Tabasco is the area around the Gulf of Mexico where there's a lot of oil production and it's a tropical climate. It's one of the few jungles in Mexico. And Ferenbach does this really well. He explains the different trajectories of Mesoamerican civilization, where it's hard to put the pieces together because first of all, the Spanish destroyed most of the records. And secondly, this is a study that just didn't have that many records in the first place. And a thing with other ancient. With ancient societies in general is they tend to prioritize completely different things than usual. The thing they tend to write is mythology. And their understanding of mythology is that it's symbolic, and that's okay. And so when you're reading the things that they prioritize, it's like the Popovol, where these two brothers go to the underworld and kill demons. That's very important to them, but that's not how our society perceives the world. And so Fehrenbach does a really good job of reading between the lines of the different subcultures in Mesoamerica and how they developed. And through that, he had studied. He's clearly studied all the authors I read, like Spengler or Carol Quigley or these civilizational thinkers. And so he's fitting Mesoamerican civilization into those civilizational cycles, which, of course, I love that. That's my thing. And as I said before, the first Mesoamerican civilization were the Olmec. And there's been this theory that the Olmec were black because the statues they make look like black people. And so there's all these theories that black people sailed from Africa to Mexico 3,000 years ago. And that's relatively unlikely. Black people didn't even make it to Madagascar until a thousand years ago, which is right off the coast of Africa. And what probably happened instead is that as we spoke about in the last Native American video, that the racial composition of North America thousands of years ago was vastly different than today. Which is why we have the Kennewick man, who is a European skull in Oregon from 9,000 years ago, is why we found an Australian Aboriginal guy in the Amazon, where all of these discrete racial groups mixed together to form Native Americans. And in Native American ancestry, we have this genetic group who are Australian Aboriginals, are a population called Negritos. And the Negritos are a Pacific Islander population, the indigenous people of Southeast Asia. And people constantly confuse them for Africans. But the thing is, they're not actually Africans. They have a similar look in a similar skin tone due to inhabiting similar climates, but they're genetically as different from Africans as anyone else. And so when you're looking at the Almec, assume that it's a sort of like Australian Aboriginal Negrito population, which we mentally assort as African because that's our big. That's the thing that we're most familiar with in America.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And yeah, I don't think they had the sailing technology. The Canary Current is right off the coast. So if they. If they did have the sailing technology of the Phoenicians, they could get swept out there. But, yeah, I think that's pretty unlikely. And it sounds like you have every. Every area except for Africa ended up inhabiting North America and forming the Indian identity. It's like. It's like it's the spillover server or something for everyone out of Africa.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. Keep in mind that with the way this worked, where they were going over, they were going over the North Pacific, is that Africa is as far away from the North Pacific as possible.

[Austin Padgett]

Right.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So it makes sense where these peoples were concentrated around Asia. And Asia had a completely different ethnic composition then too. But the thing Fehrenbach talks about is that the start of Mesoamerican culture was shamanism, where Olmec culture puts a high premium on shamanism, where shamans are individual mystics. And in shamanic cultures, it's about increasing the individual mystics power, where shamans go to the underworld and they kill demons and they gain power. And then upon suffering in hell and killing demons, they return back to the physical world with heightened gifts and they use it to try to help their people. And so all religions Start with mystics and magicians and then you systematize them until you hit a religious bureaucracy for the general public. And then what occurs is that that religion becomes so distant from God due to the bureaucratization that it's incapable of actually providing people spiritual solace. And so a new religion emerges that reconnects people with God directly. This has happens to every major world religion. And that also happened in Mesoamerica, where Mesoamerica has one of the strangest religions I have seen of any society in the world where I'm going to keep shilling Ferenbach because he's that good. I ordered a few. I ordered a few of his other books because I was impressed where one of the points he makes. And this is the thing about Carlisle, I was reading Carlisle. He's also amazing. I also ordered Carlisle's other catalog where he said, when you're looking at these ancient cultures, we tend to see their religious ideas as abstractions. Our society is so disassociated that we. Yeah, exactly. And this is one of the things I think about, because when you have ptsd, you end up disassociating a lot. And so you intellectualize things. And so we did that as a society. And we can't actually perceive these ancient people authentically believing the things they say because we don't authentically believe anything. And one of the things that Carlisle says is that when you're looking at early Christianity or Norse paganism or, or the Prophet Muhammad is that people authentically believe these things because they're symbolic representations of their lived reality. And our beliefs in a lot of ways are sillier than theirs.

[Whatifalth]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

Stuff like equality or the blank slate are the things I constantly harp on or progress happening just because so I don't want to throw stones when we live in a glass house, but Mesoamerican religion is kind of horrifying. Where there's the God of flayed skin, there is the Cthulhu monster God Tato local who has 10 different tentacle arms. The top Aztec God Huitely is the Sun God who demanded millions of sacrifices in order for the sun to rise every morning and in Mesoamerican rituals again we all know the human sacrifice. And the human sacrifice was horrifying and we've downplayed the scale of it. But The Aztecs killed 2 million people. But the Aztecs were a culmination of the Mesoamerican tradition. They were the worst iteration of this, where the Aztecs would kill thousands of people in one day. And for the Mayans, they'd kill like 60 people at most for human sacrifice. So it was a manageable scale until the end of Mesoamerican civilization. But there was lots of stuff where in Aztec feasts they would eat the flesh of the men they sacrificed, or they would take the flayed skin of the people they destroyed and wear it as garments and religious rituals and loads of stuff like that. The Maya would cut open their own, would cut open the nobility's testicles to take the testicle blood and then burn it with paper as a religious offering. So this is a highly heavy metal civilization and this is how they. Oh yeah, the Mayans would also, they would have religious rituals. They'd throw people into cenotes and cenotes. Are these open there? There, there's these sort of ponds. And the Yucatan doesn't have any major rivers. And the Yucatan, its geography is heavily impacted by it being the main place where the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs head. And so these deep ponds, they're the main source of water in the interior Yucatan. And they're the shattered out remnants of the places the asteroid knocked through. And there are certain mineral types in the Yucatan that only exist there from the asteroid. And so they would throw, the Maya would throw men in these cenotes, wait until they're nearly dead, see their entire life flash before their eyes, have spiritual experiences, pull them out the moment before they die, and then interview them at what they saw.

[Austin Padgett]

Wow. And why would they almost die in these cenotes? Would they get dragged down by a current or something? Or was it just like tread, treading water?

[Rudyard Lynch]

I think they just threw people who couldn't swim.

[Austin Padgett]

Okay. Because I'm picturing the Disney movie El Dorado and I know that there was a current in that one.

[Rudyard Lynch]

There's no current in the cenotes. I've been. So I used, I lived in the Yucatan for like six months. I've. I spent a month in Oaxaca and like six months, the Yucatan, I've been like six provinces in Mexico. Mexico is a very diverse country, which is something Americans don't think. And there's no current in the cenotes. They're basically just these ponds and they go really deep because they were hollowed up by the asteroids. So lots of cenotes. Literally, they're. I think they're like 70ft deep. It's something ridiculous like that.

[Austin Padgett]

And did they get any information about the afterlife out of that? Probably got some good.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I want to emphasize that there was differentiation among the Mesoamericans in their religion. Different. There were broader gods like Quetzalcoatl had a lot of different archetypes in different areas. And Huitzilapotli, the Aztec God, he was an originally very obscure God that gained dominance due to the Aztecs rising from obscure swamp bandit peoples to the dominant empire. And the Maya had an incredibly developed underworld mythology where their understanding was that the human world and all of life is this pale imitation of this infinitely deep underworld and that we are the archetypal dreaming of said underworld. And the popple Vol. The big religious document we still have from the Maya, was based off two brothers having to go on a quest through the underworld to, I think lift. I forget exactly. I think it's like lifting a curse and two brothers. Exactly. And the Popo vault is really weird. I read it once and I can't really remember the plot, but I remember being like, what did I just read at the time? And so they conceptualized their mythology as the underworld. And Mesoamerica is probably the most heavy metal civilization ever. Where you look at their standards of beauty, they would shove a wooden plank through your lower, through your, your, your lip as a thing of beauty. They would elongate your skull like a Martian as a sign of beauty and all that sort of thing.

[Austin Padgett]

Wow. That. Why were they looking for all these signs for beauty? Couldn't they just have like regular beauty? But yeah, that's insane. That's a very heavy metal civilization. It fits with, like you said, the sacrifice because you're kind of sacrificing your own body there. But the, the, the scale and the unmanageability of the sacrifice is because it's basically was their replacement for war. Right. It was their way of like eliminating the surplus population app absent improvement of social institutions.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

And so it's like war is super horrifying, but when you turn war into an assembly line and a ritual and you're trying to get the same body count, it's almost even. It's like way too intentionally and consciously, consistently sadistic. At least with war, it's like a rage. And you're like, oh, well, that was messed up. Maybe, maybe we shouldn't have done that. But this is, this is a continual slow Drip way of life. And it sounds like the population kept increasing and they were unable to improve their social institutions. And then they had other ecological problems with the system and that. So they just tried to ramp it up towards the end to the point where the dynamic just, yeah, broke down.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That was the Aztecs. And I'm clarifying that because the Aztecs, they are, to the rest of Mesoamerican civilization, they are the industrial grade parody of Mesoamerica where they're taking all these social institutions that function on a smaller scale. And because the Aztecs are the first people to unify the entire sea to shining sea of Mexico, they took these social institutions, put them on what's effectively an industrialized scale. And so you're seeing them, for all their horror, where the Aztecs in this concept called the Flower wars, where they were, the. The Aztecs were the triple alliance of Tlateloco, Tenochtitlan and a third state, Texcoco, and they conquered the whole region and they demanded sacrifices. Where the way they got them is they had these things called the Flower wars where they had all these subject states. And the equivalent would be, imagine if America had these simulated wars with Great Britain, which is effectively our vassal state. I'm sorry, it's true. And the British were forced to lose these wars and then we use them for human sacrifice in order to honor George Washington. And you said before in our Age of exploration video, it's deeply dystopian where it's these false simulated wars the other side has to lose in order to generate this industrial grade human sacrifice. And Matthew White, who's the big atrocities historian, he puts the number as 2 million. And Matthew White's really fair, he's bipartisan. He reads all the historians and there are several historic time periods where Matthew White is like whatever narrative, whatever narrative that you believe was biased about this time period is actually correct. And he pulls that for the Aztecs and for the gladiatorial games, where the gladiatorial games in Rome killed an equivalent amount of people, or 2 million, for the entertainment of the Roman audiences.

[Austin Padgett]

Wow. Yeah, that's a lot. I didn't know actually that many people died in the arena.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Keep in mind that Mexico at the time of Spanish conquest had 20 million people, which is equivalent to France's population at the time. Germany had 11. The Holy Roman Empire had 20 million. England had 4 million. Spain at 10 million. So it was a relatively large amount of people. And when you're looking at Rome, rome had like 70 to 100 million. Over a period of centuries. So when you're operating at 100 million people, where the Romans had huge entertainment industry over the course of centuries, 2 million deaths is not that much.

[Austin Padgett]

Right, okay, that and what was the period of the mix of the Aztecs? 2 million deaths, how long was that?

[Rudyard Lynch]

That occurred over a very short period. And it's for interesting reasons as well. And this gets into one of the big themes for Mesoamerica, where I want to emphasize the timescale here where the olmec are in 1200 BC the Aztecs are in 1500 AD in between hand you saw many different civilizations. So the Olmec were first, then the Olmec died out by like 208, 200 BC then the Maya were like a thousand BC until like a thousand AD they were in the Yucatan. The Toltec formed around the central valley of Mexico. The Toltec were like roughly the birth of Christ until like a thousand AD and they culminated in Teotihuacan or no Teotihuacan. Teotihuacan was pre Toltec. And then the Toltecs were barbarians who came down from the north. And the Toltecs were a medieval civilization. The Aztecs formed in the high medieval period. They're like in the 13th century. And they unified that region a few generations before the Spanish arrived. And in Oaxaca they had their own civilization that went back to 500 BC. And the interesting mechanism with Mesoamerica is that they had these highly complex calendars. And these calendars existed to simulate the El Nino, where Mexico's got a very dry climate, where it's already on the edge of subsistence. And another variable here is that because there weren't any domesticated animals, the Mexicans were completely dependent on, on the three sisters or corns, beans and squash. And when it didn't rain, they couldn't rely on goats or sheep or the things that Eurasians would have. So they were at the mercy of the irrigation and the rains and the rain. And so the El Nino is this pattern, in this pattern in the South Pacific's reign where there will be multi decade periods with almost no rain and then multi decade periods of flooding. And the Mesoamericans had arguably the most advanced calendar ever, because I think they were trying to guess when the El Nino would happen. And so with this weird mechanism you saw Mesoamerican civilization fit this pattern. Where a civilization arises, it collapses. After a few centuries, another distinct civilization arises in another part of Mexico, it collapses. And so the Aztecs knew that they were. I think they said they were the. They called the fifth sun. They were the fifth cycle of civilization. Where the Aztecs said every cycle civilization grows, the gods hate them. The gods wipe them out. And they wipe that through, through jaguars, through flooding, through earthquakes and all those things. And the Aztecs, their priest class predicted they were the fifth sun and their civilization would not last past them. This was the last time their civilization would exist. And the really freaky thing is they predicted the exact year their civilization would collapse due to comets and in calendars. And so when the Spanish arrived, they were like, holy shit, this is actually our end. And so the reason that they ramped up the human sacrifices so much is that they knew that their civilization was about to die. And so they were begging the sun God, which de la portly, if we kill millions of people, will you please let our civilization survive another cycle?

[Austin Padgett]

You know what it sounds like? It sounds like because killing people was their mechanism for social control. The bloodletting to manage the population and the resources, etc. And as their society was failing, they exponentially increase their mechanism for social control. And our, our mechanism of social control is the ability to print dollars. And as we fail, we're exponentially increasing our. Our mechanism of social control. So it's an interesting analogy.

[Rudyard Lynch]

One of the things that, like one of the patterns I found in history is that a society under pressure normally doubles down in its worst trait. So a lot of Asian civilizations that fossilized and were too socially conservative, when the Europeans arrived, they became even more socially conservative, which is what you saw in Islam really recently with ISIS or the Taliban. The Nazis killed more Jews when they knew they were going to lose the war. And we are becoming even more leftist, even more inflationary as our civilization falls. It's not going to fall because we're going to stop it from falling.

[Austin Padgett]

Exactly.

[Rudyard Lynch]

But the Mesoamericans, they killed more people when they knew their civilization was going to end. And there's a sort of divine irony to it that they thought that the practice of the rest of history would judge them the most for would be the thing that they would, would save them. And one of the things Fehrenbach talked about, which is really good is he said the Spanish conquest completely shattered the Mesoamerican concept of, of their sense of self. Because first of all, they saw this completely distinct civilization that actually, I don't want to get into that now. It's spoilers. We'll get there. Put a pin in there. But yes, that's A very good point. And speedrun Mesoamerica. I'm going to keep this short because it probably deserves its own video. And we need the rest of Mexican history. You have these multiple civilizations. The height of Mesoamerican Civilization was around 800 A.D. where you have the pre classical period, which is before the birth of Christ. You have the classical period, which roughly approximates the European Dark Ages, which was the high point of mesoamerican civilization, roughly 800 AD. And then Mesoamerica saw civilizational collapse, birth a little bit for the birth of Christ, um, around the 10th century AD and then in the 16th century with the Spanish and they had the fifth sons. There's probably two we don't know about because I expect them to know their history. That there were five civilizational collapses they kept track of. And there was this profound unity of civilizational symbols and stuff across Mesoamerica. So you see the same artistic styles and patterns between the Olmec and the Aztecs in the feathered serpent, the pyramids, jade, chocolate being the currency and all those things. And so it's this singular civilization that keeps stopping and starting, never really able to hit the critical mass where it can self sustain. It's like an Asimov novel. And they feel completely indebted to a brutal natural environment they can never master. And so the greatest native sites, I would say are Teotihuacan, which is outside, outside Mexico City. And I've been there. I had a horrific migraine there. One of the worst migraines of my life. The Mesoamerican sites. And I've been like a dozen different Mesoamerican old cities. They have this eerie feeling to them I haven't felt anywhere else in the world. It's difficult to articulate where I climbed the top of this pyramid, Teotihuacan, and I had a horrific migraine and I was in pain for four hours straight with stabbing pain in my stomach and my head. I get migraines where I go blind and I have stabbing stomach and head pains. I haven't had them in two years, but I used to get them really frequently.

[Whatifalth]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

Was the high point of their civilization and their artistic height of complexity was around that Dark Age period. So you could argue that the Aztecs were an era of civilizational decline after their former greatness. Although the Aztecs had the greatest degree of political and social scale they were operating under.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Sounds like a really frustrating process with the kind of water version of Game of Thrones where you know, drought is coming young one and they never able to get started and it's like you can probably feel like you're going insane. Happens five times in a row, culminating with a mass sacrifice. Probably creates some pretty negative psychic energy.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. The impression I get is that something really bad happened in the history of Mesoamerica that we don't know about. It wouldn't surrender if there was some horrifying political or social event because you don't get conditions like this for nothing.

[Austin Padgett]

And Right what happened to you?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah. So there was a huge earthquake in Teotihuacan and they just completely abandoned it. We don't really know why. And Teotihuacan, the later Toltec people called it the land of the Gods because they had no idea how anyone could build anything as advanced as Teotihuacan through their Dark age. And the Maya collapse happened in a similar time where the Maya had these highly advanced city states that were constantly at war, like Tikal or Chichen Itza or like Palenque. And the Mexicans also had barbarian invasions where we think the Aztecs came from the modern US where they spoke like a language related to Comanche. And so the Aztecs came down from the north and the Toltec invaded Mech invaded the Yucatan, establishing estate there. And the one Maya state that survived their collapse was Chichen Itza in the north under Toltec governance where the Maya had A complete civilizational collapse. Where the Yucatan in a thousand AD has a higher population than the Yucatan today, where the Yucatan is all trees. I drove across the Yucatan and it's more empty than Canada. And the Yucatan was completely deforested. These huge cities and civilizational collapses largely happen for the same reasons around the world. And we don't really know what caused the Maya collapse but it's always a combination barbarian invasions. The peasants stop seeing a stake in the pre established social structure. The the society becomes too top heavy. I imagine that it was these oppressive temple priests societies like the Bronze Age. And so when the priests couldn't get rain, which was their big raison d'etre that the peasants thought you guys can go screw yourselves. Your one job or one of your, your biggest job is getting rain and pleasing the gods. The gods clearly don't like you so we're not listening to you. And so the Maya language survived until the present where the Spanish defeated the last mayan states in 1697. And then the Maya rebelled again in Mexico and the modern Mexican government only defeated the last mayan revels in 1903. So the Maya have been doing their own thing forever and they're still Maya today. But the Maya stopped being this advanced developed situate civilization and the Aztecs were. I'm so excited to show you guys the Mesoamerican civilization video because I want to keep this video a rough approximate length and there's too much going on in Mesoamerica so I'm perfectly keeping out details. We have time to talk about the Spanish and the modern Mexico. But the Aztecs were a barbarian poor desert people. Where in the central valley of Mexico or modern Mexico City which used to be this temperate climate wooded paradise around Lake Texcoco. Is that the Toltec kingdoms they forced the Aztecs or they call themselves the Mexica. Mexico is from Mexico or what the Aztecs called their own country. The Mexico were forced into this uninhabitable swamp in the middle of Lake Texcoco where they established a city state and they were known for their toughness. And so through having to deal with this harsh society they also had an incredible leader who I forget who, I think his name was Kukulkan, but I'm probably getting that wrong. Where the Aztecs formed this trinity of allying with Texcoco and Texcoco and I'm forgetting the third one where it was this alliance where the Aztecs had a strategic genius, they had a warlord and then the leader of it was either Texcoco or Tetslati Copta. I forget. The other city state they allied with was run by this philosopher, strategic genius who actually helped develop the Mesoamerican concept of monotheism, where Mesoamerican philosophers had developed the concept of monotheism, but it hadn't percolated down through the population. And they were able to form this confederacy that could conquer the entire region, probably because the rest of Mesoamerican civilization was in this sort of state of decay. And the Aztecs, over time, became more oppressive where they were originally a form of aristocratic democracy. And their. Their speaker or dictator gradually turned himself into king, superseding the tribal councils. And Tenochtitlan started oppressing the other states. And the Aztecs were interesting because they had, like, no chill. They were this authoritarian, communitarian, highly aggressive, warlike society where the rest of Mesoamerican civilization was more laid back. But it. I mean, if you compare the Aztecs and the Nazis, that's the thing Fehrenbach literally does. It's not an unfair comparison.

[Austin Padgett]

And so when I thought Assyrians.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Assyria is a better comparison than the Nazis. And. And another thing is that around a thousand A.D. you saw a switch from the priest class dominating to the warrior class. Where a reason the Aztecs gained such military dominance is they established this warrior nobility, like knights, who. Who are the jaguar and the eagle warriors, where they had this marked military advantage through establishing this noble class. And they developed this. This good social structure that balanced the interests of the common people and the nobility and the monarchy and the priest class. And so the Aztecs were highly unified. And when the Spanish reached Mexico, this was their read on it. They admired the military ferocity of the Aztecs. They admired how polite they were. They admired their degree of morality. They were horrified by the human sacrifice. Oh. They admired how clean Mexico was. They admired how populous it was where Tenochtitlan had more people than any city in Europe except Constantinople. And they had turned Lake Texcoco into this beautiful irrigated farmland where the Mexicans would build these floating farms out in the lake.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And I've been to. The only floating farm in the world left right now is in Myanmar in their lake, which we talked about. It's wild going through a floating farm because you a canoe through and you can move the rows and it looks like a farm because all the rows are spaced out. It's really cool. So I imagine that must have been something amazing for them to see too.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And the Spanish thought The Aztecs were innately demonic. And so when they conquered the region, they just burned everything down because they thought this is a satanic civilization that we just do not want to partake in. And they thought the Aztecs were innately cruel and inhuman and all of those things. And with the Spanish's arrival, which occurred very rapidly and I. So I feel kind of sorry for the Mexicans because Cortez arrived in Mexico. In Cortez, with the Spanish commander, arrived in Mexico and within less than two years of discovering the existence of the Aztec empire, he had conquered them and burned their capital to the ground. Which. It's War of the Worlds. The. The Aztecs didn't even know who the Spanish were before they arrived. And the Aztecs called them gods. And this was a controversial thing, but the way to conceive it is that in the Aztec culture, the creek can be a God, the mountain is a God. They viewed their kings as gods because in the pre axial age world, everything is innately divine. This glass of milk could be divine if there was a miracle that occurred around it. And Cortez showed up. And I admire Cortez in a Nietzschean level and he's probably the most admirable of the conquistadors, which is such a low bar. But he actively tried to respect retreat, restrain the Spanish from doing horrific things to the Aztecs, although it didn't really work because when you look at the conquistadors, imagine them as the archetype of a Russian guy who sells Bitcoin in Miami. Imagine if they formed a military together and they formed alliances of these people who hated the Aztecs, like the Tlaxcala, which is, I always surprise them, prank them toxicala, which is unpronounceable. And they got all of these hated the Aztecs to support them. So 90% of the Spanish army were, were, were native. And the Spanish arrived, the Aztecs invited them to the capital because they fulfilled the prophecy of Quetzalcoatl, which is an interesting story. I have a theory there. I'll talk in the other video, but if you're interested, you can ask me. I have a theory. Who gets the Coatl was. And so they came to the capital, they seized the emperor, they used the emperor to get a lot of gold, which they then accidentally dropped in the lake. So a lot of the Spanish didn't actually make that much money from conquering Mexico because when they were fleeing the capital, they dropped the gold in the lake and they weren't able to retrieve it. So they seized the Capital demanded the Mexicans give them stuff, which actually worked because it was such a hierarchical, communitarian society that even after the emperor had been captured by a foreign population, the people still served them. They got too oppressive. Then they tried to flee. They had a lot of losses. The Aztecs followed them out to the place they fled. Further east, in Tlaxcala, the Spanish were able to wipe out a vastly larger army at the Battle of Otumba using a cavalry charge. And interestingly, the Spanish's biggest military advantage was with cavalry and steel, not with guns, because guns had issues firing in Mexico's humid climate. And. And the Mexicans had no basis on how to fight cavalry. And they. None of their weapons had cut through European steel armor.

[Austin Padgett]

So how many people did they have in the calvary charge?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Cortez had, like, less than a thousand men total, so probably less than 100 cavalry.

[Austin Padgett]

Why are cavalry charges so effective? Like, in the last episode in the Frontier, we talked about it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I grew up in a place with a lot of horses, and horses are terrifying. They weigh, like a thousand pounds and they're charging at you. And European militaries had to spend thousands of years developing all of these techniques to hold against cavalry. And even in the medieval period, a handful of knights could wipe out. Could wipe out much larger armies of infantry. So the Europeans, they struggled to fight against cavalry, and you took them against the natives who have no background in it, and it's just slaughter. Where cavalry can wipe out vastly larger armies, you're effectively fighting against a tank. And the only way to really counter cavalry is with pike warfare, which demands immense cohesion and the development of so of a social structure which can get these guys to stands together. It's actually.

[Austin Padgett]

And the confidence.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly, yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And the confidence that you can actually stop it, because like you said, you were going to say, probably it's hard to actually get people to stand in a line and not move when they get charged by horses or something like that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, this is one of the things.

[Austin Padgett]

And they also thought that they were gods when they were on the horses for a while. So that helped too, I guess.

[Rudyard Lynch]

They said the Spanish were riding elk. They didn't know what a horse was. They said it was a giant. It was an elk.

[Austin Padgett]

That makes sense.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Joe Rogan. And so in the time between the first attack and the second attack, Mexico faced European diseases, was killed in 90% of the population. And so Mexico's population in the year 1600 was 10% of what it was in the year 1500. It had 2 million people in 1600. And it had 10 million, it had. And it had 20 million people in 1500. So this is effectively nuclear war, sci fi, Mad Max levels of horror. And after the disease, the Spanish were able to build these huge barge armies to attack Tenochtit line by land. And they burned the Aztec capital to the ground. Which is why if you go to Mexico City, you'll find practically no Aztec buildings. And on top of that, the Spanish built their empire using the Aztec imperial structures. And the natives were defeated as much by psychological breaking of their worldview as as the actual fighting. Because what occurred was so traumatic that the natives had no concept on how to deal with it. And they complied with the Spanish afterwards. And Cortez divided Mexico up between his various officers. And the general trend in Latin America is that 12 families own a majority of the economy in almost every Latin American country. That's still the case. And also Most cases those 12 families are the descendants of the of the initial conquistadors, where Latin America today is an aristocratic society with these hereditary wealthy families that are the descendants of the original conquerors or the conquistadors. And Cortez could have named himself an independent king of Mexico, but he chose not to out of patriotism. And there was enormous faith in the shared Spanish project where Spain in the year 1500 was an incredibly vigorous, manly, intrepid society. And it's sad to see how over time the growth of big government in Spain. Watch the Spanish empire video. Drained it of its initiative.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, totally. And it's interesting to think about because you're getting kind of a revival in South American politics and that's going to have an impact on Spain because they're still connected to their diaspora. And the language is also similar. So I think you could see that it might be one of the few examples of reverse colonization that's actually good where they there they teach the Spanish how to get out of their socialist malaise because Spain is incredibly bureaucratic.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Malay will get them out of their malaise.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, exactly.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So the Spanish originally enslaved the local population and there was a push against that where the Spanish government actually went to profound effort to help the. Help the Indians, or the indios as they called them, keep them from degrading slavery. Where there are three interest groups in Spanish America and Spanish America is 1500 until 1800, roughly those being the monarchy, the nobility in the church. And the natives have been forced into the ground on such a level that they had lost all leadership ability. Where most native communities were actually self governing for most of this time period where the Spanish gave the natives their own reservations. And these reservations frequently made up a majority of Mexico's population. So when we have Indian reservations in America, there's the, these tiny out of the way places. But the Indian reservations in Mexico were huge. And they're these pre, there, these pre established societies and people like the Tashkala who worked with the Spanish had functional independence until the Mexican independence, where the Tashkala actually acted as a nobility inside Mexico where it's.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, it sounds like they created special economic zones more than reservations for themselves. It's like, okay, well we don't have to. Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Like the Yucatan took forever to conquer because the Maya kept fighting these brutal guerrilla wars. And so the Spanish used the Tashkala to internally colonize the Yucatan. And so there's, there's Tashkala place names in the Yucatan as examples. And certain native peoples fought way harder. The Chichi Mecca in Central Mexico took 40 years to conquer because they were a warrior more they were like a warrior step people that didn't have horses, although they got horses later. And inside the Spanish government system, the monarchy was, was largely parasitic. Where the biggest thing Fehrenbach talks about is that he says the biggest issue with Mexico is infantilization. And you get to Mexican independence, this is a highly immature society and we'll see why. But the reason Mexico had such an immature ruling class is because under the Spanish, only the peninsula race could rule Mexico. And the peninsula race were the, the SP from the peninsula of Spain. So the second you were born in Mexico, you were a second class citizen. And Mexico developed this complex racial caste system with the peninsulares and positions of power. The creoles or the native whites, they were the dominant landowners and businessmen and that stuff, but they weren't allowed to have legitimate power. So they became obsessive over this very strange concept of honor. And honor is anthropologically a word that means completely different things in different contexts. The Chinese vs. Celtic vs. Latino concepts of honor are completely different things. But if I'm being honest, the Latino concept of honor is just kind of just being like being petty. Where in early Mexico you had all of these issues where you had certain political deals where people would sit at each other with their carriages pointed at each other and they would refuse to sign the deal for days because whoever got out of their carriage first would dishonor themselves or the Spanish would dole out these titles to, to, to the Creole elite. And the Creole fought over these honorary titles because they had nothing else to do and you had the creoles on top. Then you had the indios in the indios were the Indians. And over the time period in 1800, I think 80% of Mexicans were indios at the time of independence. And now 10% of Mexicans are indios. And the Spanish actually protected the indios a lot, keeping them in this permanently infantilized position where they didn't let the indios have positions of power. They didn't let them become priests. They didn't let them even drink alcohol. And there were dozens of regulations, no, probably thousands of regulations. What the indios could do in the indios actually became profoundly resentful. Every single part of their life was circumscribed, where they were constantly treated like children because this was a formerly incredibly proud people that had ruled these huge empires. And then there were a few blacks in Mexico in the area around the Gulf coast. But they're like 2% of the population. And then you had the mestizos form. And the mestizos grew from being a tiny part of the population to the overwhelming majority. And the mestizos were hated where they didn't fit into either the white or the indio world. And there were no women. There were very few white women in Mexico, which is a huge difference in Latin America and Anglo America, where Anglo Americans are basically as white as Europeans. But because very few Spanish women came over, the conquistors would have these harems of native women, which is why Mexico is 5050 white, white native, where one Spanish guy beds 20 native women. So that's how the white genetics become disproportionate. And. Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Do you think that's why they didn't invite the women over after they went there the first time? Because they're like, oh, no, actually, we can't let our wives see this.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Let me think about that. So one of the big reasons there wasn't mass migration from Spain to the New World in the same way there was from Britain to North America, because roughly half as many people migrated from Spain to the New world as from Britain to the thirteen colonies. Which matters because the Spanish New World stretches from Argentina to New Mexico and California. So it's a huge region. And it's because they didn't have capitalism and the Indians already filled the bottom niches. Because if you're moving from Liverpool to Philadelphia, you can move there with the assumption that you can start up a trade, you can start a farm. But because the Spanish empire wasn't capitalist, where you could only trade in these designated Fleets where they sailed from Seville to Veracruz and then all trade had to operate within that bi yearly fleet. And then the local lands were divided up by these huge income and basically serf estates where until very recently, the vast majority of Mexicans lived as serfs with practically no rights. Their landlords could whip them, rape them, work them however much they wanted. And so Mexico's got a history a lot like Russia due to the prevalence of serfdom. And so very few white people wanted to move to the New World because it was just this low growth society. Which is why Mexico had such a large population in the pre colonial period. But it took forever for Mexico's population to recover while colonial America's population doubled every 15 years. Because they're just all of, all of the, a very high percentage of the extra resources that were extracted just went to the nobility. And they didn't have capitalism or property rights. So there was no incentive to just grow and have this virtuous, this virtual virtuous economic cycle. So Mexico was stuck at this, at this stagnating level where Mexico had 2 million people in 1600 and it had like 8 million people in 1800. And for a frame of reference, America's population, the 1 million British that migrated over in the colonial period have 100 million descendants today.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, that is a big difference. And I guess so they were stuck in a dynamic where the type of person who was going to go over there for an opportunity was not the kind of person with a family. Maybe it relates to your Russian Bitcoin salesman in Florida.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, kind of thing.

[Austin Padgett]

Like you're expecting him to be more of a kind of bachelor opportunist maybe than a whole community migration.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, Slave societies have a tendency towards really bad behaviors that aren't just related to slavery. It's a big reason why the American Deep south scores the worst part of America on literally any statistic. And it's. Mexico isn't technically a slave society, but in a lot of ways it's very similar to a slave society. It's a serf society like Russia. And I don't want to make Mexico sound that bad because especially in the 18th century, lots of Europeans were very impressed by Mexico because European tourists or explorers or adventurers or scientists would go to Mexico and they were, they were surprised at how high the standard of living was and how stable the society was because this was an era of history that valued social stability for its own sake. And keep in mind that the 18th century is a time period when eastern Germany and Poland had Mass serfdom. And those were societies that later had the Industrial revolution just a few generations after. And so in the 18th century, it was a widely held opinion that Mexico could be a new America if you changed a few variables. That in the same way that America was decided, everyone that went from a frontier to one of the most powerful places in the world, that Mexico could do the same. And it was only after independence that that Mexico, you saw this huge differentiation in America and Mexico, and there it fluctuated a lot. Whereas example, in the late 16th century, the average Mexican lived in absolutely horrific poverty because the slave system was that bad. And the Spanish also, they had mass conscription for the silver mines in central Mexico. And they would just get young men from across Mexico. And this just killed off. I think this killed off hundreds of thousands of local Mexicans, because if you were conscripted to go to the mines, it was a death sentence. You were assumed that you would never go back. And by the time you get to the early 18th century, Mexico actually had a very high standard of living because their population collapse had plateaued. And so they had this low population density that was artificially kept at certain levels due to the serf economy. So the serfs actually ate relatively well and lived in relatively good conditions.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting. Well, even today, I think Mexicans are almost as fat as Americans.

[Rudyard Lynch]

They're more fat.

[Austin Padgett]

More fat. Right. And India is actually fairly close. Despite their levels of poverty.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Progress.

[Austin Padgett]

Eat a lot of butter, grease or oil. I forget ghee. But yeah, that's. So when. Because I know in the 1600s period, they're the biggest cities. The biggest European cities in the Americas were in Mexico, or at least one of them. And there's that one city that I always get the name wrong, where the Japanese were coming through in the 1600s. It was. It was. Yeah, yeah, it was very like. How big was that city? Because it was. It was the international center of the world in the new World. And I just feel like that's a really crazy, amazing time and environment, and that city's not really talked about that much. And I'm trying to figure it out in context of when did it switch from like one European to 100 natives to a 50, 50 genetic mix.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I can't find the stats for that. If the cities in Mexico were bigger is because there were no major cities in colonial America. So interesting fact that you touched on that. There was a Asian community in western Mexico in the 18th century because the Philippines was a Spanish colony. And so from the galleons that went from Acapulco to Manila. There was this. And they called them the Chinese, but it also had Filipinos and Malays and those people in western Mexico. And they introduced the dish ceviche to Mexico. And the Mexican nobility loved having Japanese prints. And the Mexican nobility would collect Japanese art. They were the first weebs. And, and, and so there were those connections I think you probably got. So in the year 1800, the vast majority of Mexicans were still indios. And so the shift from a majority Indio society to a majority mestizo society occurred over the course of the 19th century.

[Austin Padgett]

Okay, so kind of with industrial era population growth. Yes, the European populations. So you have more immigration from Spain at that point.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You had some European immigration in the 19th century. I also could also just. I also don't trust the population stats because Mexico is such an elitist society. They just barely consider the lower classes existed. Where the biggest difference in Mexico and America, not the biggest. There's lots of differences. One of the big differences is that America was a middle class society where it was split in different, very distinct subcultures. In the South, New England's the middle Mexico had this unified elite. Actually the entire Spanish empire had a unified elite. Then you had these very distinct tribal populations that had very little in common. And part of the reason the Spanish keep the majority Indio population down is that the leadership class were all these creoles where if, and these things were very common, where if an elite Spanish woman moved from Mexico City to Lima in Peru, thousands of miles away, she would enter into a culture that would seem very close to what you knew back home in Mexico. And through the unified elite culture, the local population were oppressed and under it. And there, there's a point I was trying to make there. I'm going to forget it though. The, the, the. I would imagine the genetic tipping point actually occurred earlier than that because you did not see the only way you can get that 5050 number is through mass polygamy in the part of the Spanish. I don't think they were doing that in the 1800s after independence, because the natives got more political authority with independence. So that just that sort of thing was no longer acceptable. The other.

[Austin Padgett]

So maybe polygamy into the industrial era where the cities are growing faster and the cities are more European.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Possibly. I know that into the area era of Porfirio Diaz there was concubine age was a huge thing. And at the same time, a lot of the machismo in Latin American culture stems from having this creole elite that had nothing to actually do so they showed off their masculinity and sexual exploits. And as a general rule, a society which prizes masculinity based around sex is an innately emasculated society. Because true masculinity is killing dragons, conquering your enemies, discovering things, those sorts of things. And so if your concept of masculinity is built around sexual conquests, it means your men don't have other outlets for masculinity, which is what's going on now.

[Austin Padgett]

It also necessitates that nine out of the other ten men are incels.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

If one guy is the super chat. So you have by default a less manly society.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I, if, if, if I was one of the local Mexican nobility, I would have literally just killed myself. I would not want to live in that Spanish world. It would just be too degrading. And the Spanish, so the mestizos, I want to focus on them. Where a lot of Mexico's identity stems from the mestizo identity. Where in Mexico's elite culture you saw Mexico's got three different subregions. And I'm going to ridiculously oversimplify. In the same way historians split America into the north, the south and the west, which themselves have their own subcultures that are highly distinct. In Mexico, it's north, middle, south. And Mexico is this gradient where the north of the country is like 80% white and in the south of the country is, is like 80% native. And this is why the effects of Latino immigration have a lesser impact on America than America's genetic composition. Composition people think, because America is actually selecting for the more white Latinos, the average Latino Americans, two thirds European.

[Austin Padgett]

And it's funny if it's 80% technically North Mexican immigration would increase the level of whiteness in America.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And, and, and so south Mexico is highly native. And these are parts of Mexico I spent the most time in, like Oaxaca and the Yucatan, where you have these forms native. You have these pre formed native cultures that survived. And periodically, whenever Mexico has anarchy, the south forms into these, I don't want to call them communist because they're not ideological into these bandits to just kill the plantation owners and re establish native control. That's happened in the Yucatan and Oaxaca multiple times. And it's the.

[Austin Padgett]

We don't need no stinking badges.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. That's in, that's in the north of Mexico though. Middle of Mexico had, it was the old Aztec core. In that area, the creole elite established this highly advanced aristocratic culture, which is why so many of the cities of Central Mexico are super nice. Where if you go to Pueblo, if you go to Carnavaca, it looks like Italy. Pueblo and Carnevaca literally have castles downtown with walls and towers, and there's cobblestone streets with European style cafes. And lots of Mexico is built like 19th century French architecture because they loved the French and they had this white elite that were trying to imitate the Europeans.

[Austin Padgett]

Right, that's what I'm saying. There was something going on down there before. North American settlement, similar to the Quebec architecture is pretty medieval and it was early. And so it sounds like they were literally using those castles to effectively conquer. They were conquering with castles and horses and swords. Yes, for like a hundred, two hundred years. Where it's kind of like. I, I don't feel like we have a really. I would like to see some movies around that time period or something just to get an idea of it, because it's. It's a little bit of a fantasy.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. The Latino sphere is artificially stuck in the medieval level of development where the Spanish banned the printing press, they banned Protestantism scientific thinking. And so the Catholic Church had a complete monopoly on all education and most thought. And so Mexico had this fossilized version of the Middle Ages. And I don't like saying that because medieval Europe itself was actually a highly dynamic, scientific, forward thinking society. So it's this sort of just fossilized medieval period. And it had this feudalism that lasts basically until today Mexico's Mexico is only. Is only like one step away from feudalism even now.

[Austin Padgett]

And they just recently, in the last 10 years, was the first time in over a century that they moved on from single party rule.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, exactly. And the Latinos really have an issue with regulation. And this is what the Spanish did, where every single subcomponent of Spanish life was regulated. Your racial caste determines what you did. Your city had different legislation and it just. Every single element of life was bureaucratized. And so you have the center of Mexico, which had this highly cultured creole elite, and then this huge disaffected indio population beneath them. And to the north of them was the frontier where Mexico had its own frontier period comparable to America, where they had to fight the tribes of north Mexico in the desert and mestizos became the majority in the north because you saw the mixing up of the strict social hierarchies further south due to how frontier cultures work. And Mexico had its own cowboys. And a lot of cowboy culture actually stems from Mexico. And this is why so many of Mexico's most important leaders in the, the, the, the early 20th century were from the north of Mexico, like Sonora, where you had the Sonora clique after, during the time of the Revolution. Because on the Mexican frontier you saw the ability to realize new social structures not dependent upon the old feudalism, which is why Mexico's industrial hub is at Monterey, which is right south of Texas. And the reason Monterey became Mexico's industrial center is that the governor, I believe, of the province of Nueva Leon, which is where it is, he ended the debt slavery peonage system where until the early 20th century, almost all Mexicans lived in permanent debt slavery to their landlords. They weren't allowed to leave the land, no matter how much money they made, it went to the Lord. And so he ended debt slavery. So the peasants left the land, moved to the city, started working in factories. And in Sonora you saw these huge industrial haciendas or plantations with cattle and agriculture that could form because proximity to the US rubbed off a lot of Americanized attitudes onto Mexico like capitalism or independence from, or individualism or those things. And the rest of Mexico like to call the nortenos honorary Americans.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, it's like you mentioned with the collectivist attitude before and how easily the Spanish shifted into that because they're not used to thinking outside of an authority structure.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And you can't underestimate how pervasive like a mentality like that can get throughout a whole society. Yeah. So it's interesting to see that that's the point where they kind of started to transition from that and awaken from this. Go there, go here, you know, 400 year slumber and. Yeah, go ahead, you go.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Oh. The thing with mestizos as well is that mestizos were called bandits for most, for most of the colonial period where mestizo was synonymous with criminal because the society was so stratified and it was so bureaucratized that if you didn't belong to a pre established racial group, you had no place in the society. So the people who were neither Indian nor white, they existed on the fringes of Mexican society until they became the majority. And so.

[Austin Padgett]

And then it broke all at once.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. There's this profound resentment inside Mexico from the mestizo heritage, where Mexico's always had this identity issue where they're neither European nor native. And the Mexicans have constantly tried to oscillate over what their identity is. At certain times they thought they were Spanish, at certain times they thought they were native. And the problem is they're actually neither. They're Mexican. There's something New. And the only way the Mexicans can form an identity is by letting go of the past. But letting go of the past is also innately very dangerous because you need some new grounding. And once we're going to get to the independence period, we're going to see how the governance of Mexico by Shitlibs backfired.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, that is a really tricky dynamic to navigate because you could. You could just see the narrative falling apart if they tried to pretend they were Spanish or if they tried to pretend the other way because of everything that's tied up in the story. And then. Yeah, then. Then you also have people living in Mexico who are totally Spanish. And not only are they totally Spanish, but they have actually connections back to their family in Spain.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, don't say his name.

[Austin Padgett]

And. Yeah, exactly.

[Whatifalth]

And then.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, and, and, and they were.

[Rudyard Lynch]

They're.

[Austin Padgett]

So you got these Iberian Celts. And I know a lot of Iberians went over as conquistadors because that was the region of Spain that the nice. That the, the conquistadors came from was, you know, the Iberian warrior, sailor Celtic culture. And so you have, like, it's surprising enough that you have Celts in Spain, but you have Celts, Spanish Celts in Mexico that have family in Spain who. Who play weird bagpipes and wear kilts.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, that's a real thing. So in colonial diasporas, first of all, say hi to Walter. Walter is a cat.

[Austin Padgett]

Walter.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So the. In colonial societies, diasporas are disproportionate, which is why the Scottish and the Irish are disproportionate in America as well as the rural regions of England rather than London and the hub of England. And in Spain, it was the Asturians, the Galicians, the Sephardic Jews and the Moors who are overrepresented. Interestingly, the Catalans were vastly underrepresented because they were a different monarchy from Castile with their own culture. And so Galicians and Basques are vastly overrepresented in Latin American populations than they are in Spain, because Galicia or the Celtic area is to Spain what Wyoming is to America. And this is.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, well, yeah, this is exactly the same as how the Irish and Scottish diaspora multiplied drastically in North America, where there's not that many of them left in the UK versus the English is more matches evenly.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So this is the last thing I'm going to cover before independence, where the Greater Mexico stretched from Costa Rica up to, like, Colorado in California, where the north of Mexico was not really habited by settlers until the end of the 19th century. But then the Spanish punctured across the northern desert where they established colonies in New Mexico, California and Texas. And they mostly built these so as to prevent other Europeans from colonizing the region where for California, which they settled around the same time as the American Revolution, they built it because there was a Russian fort outside San Francisco called Fort Ross. And so San Francisco, St. Francis, Los Angeles, the Angels, San Diego. St. Diego, you could tell this is a highly Catholic society. And in Texas they built it against the French. In Louisiana, New Mexico, there was the native Pueblo population who were the only large farmer population the Spanish could enslave. And so in Texas, they built San Antonio. St. Antonio, they built San Marcos. St. Marcos, just pick any Catholic saint and it'll be a city somewhere in Spanish Hispano America. But the Spanish Southwest was very lightly populated. Latino Texas had like 3,000 people. Same thing as California, same thing as New Mexico. And in Spanish Texas it was so poor that the governor lived in the jail because it was the only sturdy building. And on top of that, they were still using pike cavalry into the 19th century, while across the entire Southwest they were fighting a defensive war against the highly aggressive and capable native peoples like the Comanche, the Apache and the Navajo, who built these basically Mongol warrior confederacies that were larger than European countries. And so San Antonio was this walled monastery where the church, the church had a nasty practice of insurfing the local natives against their own consent. But at the same time, the natives loved the church and converted to the church with glee. And because the church were the one group of people who viewed the natives as even slightly human. And so, and also, I mean, Catholicism is just a nicer religion than Huitz de la Portly. And so the natives became Catholic very quickly and very devout Catholics where they loved the church. And the 19th century Mexicans getting rid of the church was actually, it was a profoundly anti native move. But the Mexicans had this outcropping in the American Southwest that was declining and very peripheral to them. But it's the foundation of the modern Southwest.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, that is like I mentioned in the frontier episode about how there was Kit Carson, the guys, the American guys exploring west ended up fighting Spanish people on horses with pikes. Yeah, like, so that was the, the last of the guys who had just spent hundreds of years conquering South America. Just like this historical remnant, but still effective. Like they, they got beaten by those, the pike horse horsemen. And, and then there's these, this basically flag planting all over the Pacific and Mexican area. But as soon as A population showed up, then all the flag planting didn't really matter.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Now for Mexican independence, Mexico never really had a war of independence, quote, unquote. Where what happened is that in the Napoleonic Wars, France conquered Spain and Napoleon sold one of his brothers as the King of Spain. The Mexican elite didn't really want independence from Spain because they were dependent on Spain to keep the natives down. But then what happened is that as the Spanish government fell apart and the new Spanish government that reformulated were liberals who believed in democracy. And the Mexican elite were highly conservative, they hated democracy, they didn't want the locals to vote, and they broke off functionally from Spain, although they still want to be part of the Spanish monarchy. And the first step of the Mexican War of Independence was. This is so embarrassing. I'm forgetting his name. I've read like five books on this guy. Mexican War of Independence figures.

[Austin Padgett]

This some guy with a blue hat had a feather and it was a priest, okay?

[Rudyard Lynch]

It was, it was Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, okay? People call him Hidalgo. So Hidalgo was this creole local priest who was also a radical liberal. And liberal meant classical. Actually no liberal at the same thing back then as now in the Mexican context. But he was this liberal and he was really angry at how this. The Spanish treated the natives poorly and the natives loved the church. So Hidalgo formed this army of native people who rebelled and they wanted to turn Spain into a society without legal. They wanted to turn Mexico into a society without legal racial castes, where it was a free society with the destruction of all the different private interests that the Bourbon monarchy had established. And so he launched this army and he nearly marched on Mexico City because the army swelled to really large sizes. But the problem is that the military wasn't that well, it wasn't that well led. And he kind of dawdled around where he didn't take Mexico City when he could, he kept wandering around the land, just taking resources. And what happened was that Hidalgo provoked this reaction amongst the creole elite where they wiped him out. Where the Mexican War of Independence is a multiple tiered thing and it killed 10 times as many people as the American War of Independence, although Mexico and America had comparable populations at the time. Because the Mexican War of Independence became this horrific race war where the breakdown of the Spanish monarchy meant all of these resentments simmered up where north, the British colonies were functionally independent beforehand. And that wasn't true in Mexico. And so Hidalgo was the first tier. And then what you, what you saw occur afterwards is that there were multiple warlords who gathered Factions between. Between different sub regions of Mexico. Where Morelos as an example, he was a guerrilla commander, I believe coming out of it was one of the states next to Oaxaca might be Guerrero. And he was, as far as I remember, he was one of the more moral players where he tried to build Mexico as around a more stable fact check me on this. Try to build Mexico around a more stable state. That was a liberal. It was a, a liberal. He was a functional liberal. And then.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh yeah, the one that started their single party state in the late 1800s.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Different. So there's. There's two Mexican war, there's two Mexican wars. There's the war in early 1800s and then late 1800s. They're different wars. And the problem with Mexican wars is they always occur through multiple. They're built around these cults of personality or the caudillos. And then the caudillos get these rough approximations of political positions where they're really serving the interests of them and their buddies. And then they seize power, they burn out. Because entropy, entropy was the biggest issue in Mexico because they didn't know how to self govern. And so they. And so they try to change the system and then the entropy of the system ultimately destroys them.

[Austin Padgett]

Got it. And then, so in the. So you do you have three groups at this point, like the Spanish nobility, the mixed, and then the Indians and then the 1800s, early 1800s. How did those factions line up in that war? Was it. So you got the nobility who, who got the middle on their side in that war?

[Rudyard Lynch]

There was no middle class. What effectively occurred is that over time, the modern Mexican country was not established by these heroic cults of personality who are leading these Robin Hood battalions of natives and mixed people. It occurred because the white Creole nobility realized that they would have to band together to hold the rest of the population down. And as Spain as a country stopped having the ability to exert power, the Mexican nobility formed Mexico as this country under white dominance in order to maintain their power with the collapse of the Spanish system. So after these cults of personality had failed through these horrific wars, and after all of the forces of liberal social, social justice had died out, you saw this reversion to the continuation of the Spanish social structure just without the Spanish.

[Austin Padgett]

Got it. Okay. So basically they managed to keep the old system consistent for a while. Up until we get to the late 1800s war.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. So Morelos established an effective constitution and congressional system, but he lost due to the constant forces of entropy and backstabbing. So he's been Looked back upon as later Mexican historians as this potential George Washington figure that failed. I don't have that much faith in Latin American governments. I don't think Mexico, even if it had incredible leadership, could have become America because a singular leader can't break the trajectories, right? But after the independence from Spain, Mexico was effectively a failed state for the middle of the 19th century. And this is a really weird period of history, one which I'll explain because they had the differentiation in the right and the left, but their right and left are not our right and left, where they had the continuistas and then you had the leftists. And their conservatives were capitalist and technologically progressive, but they were also monarchists. So their conservatives are that we should establish a monarchy and then import Europeans, deregulate the economy and then industrialize. And their idea was that Mexico was not ready for a democracy and they had to experience the industrial, they had to experience a commercial revolution first. And the liberals were basically shit libs. And I use the term shitlib as like Rousseau leftist, where you have the eastern left and the western left and the Latin sphere, and I'm including France, they have their own variety of leftist that we don't really have in America. It's this combination of romantic, anti capitalist, pro emotional expression, feminine, French Revolution style leftist. So the liberals in Mexico were French Revolution style where their goal was mass centralization. They were technically federalists, but the reality is that they really wanted a centralized government to standardize all of Mexico. And they stood for reason and they stood for the unification as Mexican citizens. And there is multiple ironies going on here. One irony is that when the liberals gained power, they actually ended up indirectly hurting the natives because they would get rid of the native special rights. They would create a single Mexican country that destroyed the independent native privileges. So the natives actually suffered under the liberals. And the liberals got rid of the church several times, which was one of the few social, social institutions that held Mexico together. The conservatives, at the same time they were. The conservatives fell out. And of course you guys know my bias of these two factions, I would have probably been a conservative in this equilibrium. But the I say my biases, you can take them and ignore them if you want to, but the, the conservatives, they had the first flush of leadership under Santa Ana, who is this strange Chad where the relationship between Santa Ana and the Mexican nation is like a bad boy boyfriend with a girl in a toxic relationship. Where as an example Santa Ana seized power multiple times and he was an officer under, I believe iturbide who is the Creole commander who got Mexico to form its country from the Spanish. Santa Anna multiple times seized power, got bored of power, and then is dicked off to do his own thing. And there were multiple times where he lost power, showed up to Mexico, made an impassioned speech. The Mexican people loved him so much, reinstalled him in power only for him to make an issue, and he declared himself emperor, and then he wasn't actually able to maintain power. And I can't remember all the details of Santa Anna's biography. You should look. Look him up in Wikipedia. There was a time when he was holding against a French blockade in Veracruz and the French shot off his leg with a cannonball. So you walk around the wooden peg leg for a lot of his career and, and he had constant affairs. And he. He started the war in Texas indirectly, where the Mexicans imported in the Anglo Americans to populate Texas because Texas had very few people. But within a few years, there were 10 times as many Anglo Americans as local Mexicans. And the Anglo Americans asked for political independence. And the Mexicans were originally very conciliatory to the Anglos, but then the Anglos didn't understand the Latino concept of honor. So the Mexicans took their. Them asking for independence as a slight. And I think I actually had an ancestor who was part of the Texas delegation to Mexico in that war. Yeah. And so he started the war with. He was part of that whole process with the Texan War of Independence, where he led an army up to the Alamo, which beat the Texans, and the Texan Texans beat him at San Jacinto. And Santa Anto was largely responsible for Mexico's loss in the Mexican American War, where at the time people didn't. People didn't know that America would end up becoming a vastly stronger country than Mexico by any conceivable metric. So a lot of commentators actually thought Mexico would win that war. And what happened is that the Americans wiped Mexico out within a few years. They took out Texas, took out California, took out New Mexico. Then the Americans sent an army to Vera Cruz under Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor marched over the mountains, took the capital, Mexico City, which is on top of old Tenochtitlan. And one of the great parts of Mexican mythology is when the military cadets at Chipultepec, which I've been to, they charged the Americans and all got slaughtered. So one of the seminal moments of Mexican mythology is losing so hard to the Americans. And in the book Ferenbach has, he calls it the death of honor, because Beforehand Mexican culture had prized this concept of dignity and they were innately superior. Where they saw the Americans as savages, they called them Goths or Vikings and those things. And after they lost so hard to the Americans, Mexico spiraled into this inferiority complex where they couldn't justify their earlier noble aristocratic pretensions.

[Austin Padgett]

But then when we became way more powerful than Europe, did that help them be able to re identify as Spanish again? Because they're, they're, they were not uniquely defeated. I guess that's kind of a joke.

[Rudyard Lynch]

But Mexico has gone through multiple identities. In the period initially after Mexican independence, the, the white elite identified a lot with the Aztecs, which is strange because they were the least Aztec demographic. And then in the area under the era under Porfirio Diaz, they identified as European. And then in the 20th century they identified as native again. So they've, they've oscillated between this and Mexico. The effect from America due to commercialization which occurred in the 20th century has affected Mexico as profoundly as the Spanish colonization did in the 16th century.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, that makes sense because it forced a big change in the society. And I mean we have to make the obvious French Revolution comparison here because the factions are the continuars, the continuers of the monarchy versus like the Rousseauian left. And so, yeah, they are, they're stuck in that paradigm. Like you said, liberal. And that sense would have been fairly close to how we mean liberal in the modern world.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And basically when your option, when your society is overwhelmed with these values, your options are are either a strong man or like leftist catastrophe. And so the only solution out of the scenario is to establish a clear alternate value which North America was able to do through its connection with England and the classic tradition.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. After Santa Ana had discredited the conservatives, France invaded Mexico where Mexico was a failed state with all the independent subparts spiraling into effectively different countries and their local warlords or caudillos. And the Mexicans were completely broke. And France was in one of their colonial periods where they were trying to recover their ego from the loss of the Napoleonic Wars. And so the French were eyeing Mexico where they thought this is a, a former colony only a generation ago of a European country. It's got minerals, it's underdeveloped. And so because the Mexicans defaulted on their debts, the French sent an army under Maximilian to conquer Mexico. And Maximilian was a Habsburg, he was a German Habsburg. And they were actually able to conquer Veracruz in Mexico City. And the pre established Mexican conservative elite actually approved of Maximilian which is something that you'll never get anyone to say.

[Austin Padgett]

And makes sense because it restores their connection to Europe, which is what really they were stressed out after they lost that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And the Mexicans got one of their best leaders, Juarez, who is from. Who is a pure blood Indian from Oaxaca, and he is their first Indian leader. And he fought a pretty heroic war. He was a liberal and he solidified generations of Mexican liberal leadership. And through that he was able to hold Mexico together when few others could have. And the French ultimately ended up losing because the Americans, after the end of the U.S. civil War, pressured the French to leave. They said, we have this huge field army we just conquered the Confederacy with. We can march it over the Rio Grande. And so the French had to pull out, which left Maximilian by himself. And then Maximilian was shot. Ironically, Maximilian was considered not brutal enough because he was part of that 19th century romantic tradition. And. And so he wasn't willing to get into the nitty gritty of these different warlord factional disputes. And if he did, he probably would have won.

[Austin Padgett]

And why didn't he want to get into the nitty gritty of that again?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Because he was soft.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, well, that'll do it. Yeah. So they lost their. Their. And then it. And then, you know, Germany kind of tried to make an alliance with Mexico during World War II, and that was kind of the last one. It's interesting to see the. The connection between the Habsburgs and the Germans later and just the constant opportunism to make a European connection where there wasn't one. Because it's not like you could do that in the US where it's obviously connected to England.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

But Mexico, there was an opportunity for a general, just someone to work with the nobility and then just real quick to make the comparison, to finish the French comparison. Santa Anna sounds exactly like Napoleon.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Conquered. Exile. Conquer some stuff. Exiled. It's just funny to see that, that so many elements of that pattern matching up and this being the broad context of South American politics, is stuck between Hobbes and Rousseau without the ability to establish Locke. So, yes, it's just cool to see all these connections.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Santa Anna is Diet Napoleon. He is the. He's Napoleon light and the. So that's a great transition because out of Juarez came Porfirio Diaz. And Diaz is a polarizing figure in Mexico today because the Mexican right likes Diaz and the Mexican left dislikes him. Which is funny because I believe Diaz came from Juarez's posse. And Diaz straddled the line where he was technically a liberal. But at the same time, he was. He was really a conservative. And I have a friend, I have a friend who lives in Mexico, where his rule is he only dates girls who support Porfirio Diaz because he said if a girl is willing to accept Diaz, she is willing to accept something that's good enough, but kind of has bad optics. And Diaz, Diaz is polarizing because he was the guy who got Mexico to get the first step of the industrial revolution, where he made all these corrupt deals with the local warlords just to get Mexico to be a unified country. And he optimized Mexico for foreign investment. So he basically bent his back over to make Mexico as attractive as possible to foreign investors. And their influence mostly came from Europe, not America, where French and British and German capital went into Mexico, where you saw mass plantations arise, you saw the original tapping of the Mexican oil industry, you saw factories getting built in Mexico. And so Mexico saw this breakthrough towards industrialization and modernization that got Mexico to be. To stop being a failed state. And the reason he is a divisive figure is that through this process you saw the rise of enormous inequality because Mexico didn't get rid of serfdom. Where the average Mexican at the start of the 20th century, where Diaz ruled for 30 years, was significantly poorer than he was a century earlier. Where the average Mexican, where this growth in foreign capital caused mass population growth, which caused Malthusian pressures. Where I don't really blame Diaz per se for the poverty, it's that. It's just that they. The first stage of industrialization always causes inequality, which is the robber baron phase. Then it percolates downwards and Mexico is going through the natural Malthusian pattern. And yeah, yes, this is the issue.

[Austin Padgett]

With foreign investment is if you don't have. And foreign investment is not bad, but just issuing a sense of the example. If you don't have the social institutions to generate your own industrial revolution.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

There are more advanced nations around you that can find a way to make development work within your country. When you get that and the rest of your social institutions aren't evolved to it, the growth is going to be extremely imbalanced and create these Malthusian traps, so.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

That's what we're seeing a lot of the developing world deal with right now.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And Diaz's reign saw the development of the fringes of Mexico, where the Mexicans finally beat the peoples of the northwest and populated Sonora, which again, the wealthiest part of Mexico, Sonora is across from Arizona and they defeated the Apache and the Yaqui and the north of Mexico is where the growth is most concentrated, with these huge industrial grade haciendas and the manufacturing in Monterrey and the Yucatan, which is the poorest part of Mexico. Mexico's wealth gradient is north, south, much like its ethnic gradient. And so the Yucatan, I believe, has one quarter the total GDP per capita of Sonora. It's that pronounced. And the Yucatan saw these huge agricultural plantations which produced this ludicrously wealthy elite who would do stuff like they would send their clothes to Europe to. They would just casually get shopping from Europe and when they got their clothes dirty, they just buy new clothes from Europe. And Diaz himself felt kind of grossed out by the decadence of the Mexican white elite, which saw itself as an extension of Europe, removed from the local population. But Diaz's reign is marked by lots of kind of gross compromises which got Mexico to stop being a failed state. And the average Mexican was incredibly poor, suffered malnutrition. There was like a lot of Mexicans worked like seven days a week and there was horrific sexual depredations and that stuff. And bubbling up under the surface came the Mexican Revolution, which is a horrifically bloody war. And the Mexican Revolution came about because Diaz faced this, this, this, this son of a wealthy family who was really into spirituality, who was a liberal leader. And he, Diaz, would run these fake elections. And it's so embarrassing. I keep on forgetting these names. Mexican Revolution names. I apologize, Mexicans. I know, I promise. I know the history. Just forget the names. Mexican Revolution leaders. It was Madero. That's it. So Madero ran against Diaz and he was surprisingly successful. And Diaz was an older man. He just threw Madero in jail. And he didn't think about it because he threw so many people in jail. And then this sparked this horrific war that rippled across Mexico, where Mexico went from a society that seemed incredibly peaceful to an incredibly bloody war, which I think it killed millions of people. It's the bloodiest war in the Americas, I believe, excepting maybe the war of the Triple alliance in Paraguay, which killed 80% of Paraguay's population. The same time of the US Civil War. Different story. And you saw Mexico split into the three different brackets where the Zapatistas were these rebels in the south of the country who formed these bandit armies that just burned the plantations that, that took over Oaxaca and Guerrero and Yucatan. And then you saw the Sonora clique, which included Pancho Villa, who's become this mythic figure, who was this cowboy warlord who had a bandit army as well as Obregon and Carranza. And these were all different Factions and the Mexican. The Mexican Revolution could be Game of Thrones because there's so many different sub factions that believe in things where they were mostly unified by Marxist politics. This is one of the things people forget where Mexico in the 1920s had their own equivalent to a Marxist revolution. And the reason we don't know that is because the U.S. was fighting World War I. And the U.S. said, hey, Mexico, if you call yourself, and this is what the Oxford History of Mexico says, he said, if you call you Woodrow Wilson said, if you call yourself Marxist, we have to invade you. So don't call yourself Marxist because we don't want to have to justify a war to our own population.

[Austin Padgett]

And talk about domino theory.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

It's already there. It's going to knock us over.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And so you saw Pancho Villa's army make it close to Mexico City. You saw attack the centralized government under the remnants of Diaz's regime. Then that regime fell. Then you saw, then you saw Carranza fight against his fellow Sonoran, Pancho Villa. And in the end, Pancho Villa attacked Arizona because he was getting tired. The Americans stopped backing him because he was. We saw that Carranza would be the rising figure and, and so Pancho Villa was wiped out. And then you saw the unification of Mexico into this socialist state where you saw the breakdown of. The breakdown of the old European feudal structure where the start of the 20th century, the Mestizos gained power over Mexico for the first time ever. And a lot of the land, they created these communist land grants where the state had the land and then the natives were the employees of the state, where like everywhere else, Mex Socialist revolution. Socialist revolution did not actually result in the population getting better off. It did lessen it less than the population pressures and the envy of inequality that occurred under the Diaz regime. And funnily enough, a quarter of the budget for the new revolutionary regime was put into education. But the average Mexican only became literate in the mid 20th century because all of the education went into revolutionary propaganda. And they were radically anti Christian. So they illegalized the Catholic Church. And there was a war called the Cristero war in the west of the country where the Sonorans were anti religious, but in the Indian western parts of the country, Catholicism was deeply entrenched. And these Catholic rebels fought against the centralized government. And because the Cristeros were backed by the U.S. they, they, they actually changed and they won. And then they re legalized Catholicism. And so for the entire 20th century, from the 20s to the 90s, Mexico was under this one party state that was vaguely left wing, but they never really committed to communism where every Mexican regime who does has to have these broadband coalitions where they stretch from the radical left to moderate conservatives, because Mexico is so mountainous and diverse and it's so broken up that it's impossible to have a singular Mexican regime without an incredibly wide coalition. And so Mexico was kind of this lame. I just shouldn't say lame. I'd rather live in a lame dictatorship than a hard dictatorship. Mexico was this soft authoritarianism where the average Mexican lived in horrific poverty. And Mexico was vaguely a US ally, but it also wasn't. And Mexico started to loosen up in the 1960s, where the student protests of the 60s had a bigger effect than Mexico than elsewhere because Mexico had no pre established institutions of free thought or student universities or those things. And over the course of the mid to late 20th centuries, Mexico started to see the commercialization of society coming from the US where the north of Mexico was more closely connected to America than it was the rest of Mexico. And the Americans built these factories called macchia doras across the border to make stuff cheaply with Mexican labor and ship it back to America. And Americans built tourist facilities in Acapulco. And it's crazy that some of the wealthiest tourists in the world go to Acapulco in Guerrero province, one of the poorest province of Mexico. And Cancun similar, where Quintana Ru is one of the poorest provinces of Mexico. And America has had profound effects on Mexico where we are changing their society, where their old feudal aristocratic system can't hold up against the American industrial revolution because we bring too much destabilization and chaos. Where Mexicans started seeing Coca Cola. And I think Mexico is the country in the world which consumes the most Coca Cola per capita. Mexicans got cars. Mexico experienced the industrial revolution. And I'm actually profoundly optimistic about Mexico in the future. I think by the end of this century, Mexico will become one of the most important countries in the world.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, it sounds like their regional differences have, were not wiped out by the Communist party revolution. So they'll keep reforming. And you know, it was a communist revolution because they banned the church, there was an unusually high death toll and a lot of bureaucracy popped up afterwards. So yes, you put two and two together. And in terms of right now, yes, it's very interesting because Mexico's place ties into both our bureaucracy and their bureaucracy, where they increasingly see themselves as they increasingly see an opportunity for development. And a lot of the previous US elite realized, you know, there was a problem with outsourcing and maybe a problem with becoming entirely dependent on China. And their great plan to save America was move the manufacturing from Asia into Mexico because removing our own bureaucracy was inconceivable. Now the plan has shifted to where we're actually trying to remove our own bureaucracy and not just shift everything to Mexico. And the significance of shifting to Mexico is not just the political implications of China, but the fact that you cut out Trans Pacific shipping and that's 10% of manufacturing revenue on average, when labor costs only differ by 3%. So getting that in Mexico close is, is a. Is a big change, but you need to have Mexico capable of producing similar things. And now we're not going to be solely reliant on Mexico as a plan B since we can actually manufacture at home, which is nice. And the other plan was a little bit sad.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Mexico is a highly regional government, regional society, you're correct. Even today where if you go to the Mexican parliament, it's a really shitty area. The downtown capital of Mexico City is this bizarre ghost town that's really eerie. The nicest parts of Mexico City are towards the west around Chapultepec. And the reasoning for that is that Mexico is highly regionally governed due to the cartels, where in the last generation Mexico saw one enormous, very positive and one enormous, very negative trend. The negative trend was the rise of the cartels due to the American need for drugs, where Mexico did not have stable rule of law. And thus the cartels seized effective control over most of Mexico, more so than even the government in a lot of cases where Mexico's got a really big crime issue, and I can't overstate that, where more people die in Mexico every year due to the drug war than people die in actual wars like Syria. And it's why Mexico, out of the top 10 most violent cities in the world, Mexico has the most of any. And it wouldn't surprise me if a majority of the top 10 are in Mexico. So Mexico's got a real issue with that. Mexico's also got a huge literacy issue. It's got a huge bureaucracy issue. Mexico has serious problems and I. This video is too long. I've got plenty of crazy Mexico stories that illustrate the issues Mexico has. At the same time, Mexico saw the industrial revolution, where having lived in Mexico, if you're of a certain, like, social type, Mexico is a nice society to live in than America. And they don't have a lot of the issues we have like wokeness or just rampant silliness because they're too poor to be silly. And even not even just the north of Mexico, lots of Mexico's industrialized. If you drive around Mexico City, it doesn't look like Vietnam. Lots of Mexico City looks more like America's level of development than Vietnam's level of development. Development. And Mexico is a huge class bifurcated society. So when Americans go, they tend to see the nice expat areas and they ignore Mexico's issues. But Mexico is clearly developing. And I think Peter Zeihan's got a good take here. Whereas America becomes more isolationist due to maga. Mexico was probably one of the few countries we can still maintain trade with because we are balanced where they are poorer and younger and we are wealthier, more technologically advanced and older. Where I would like us to move our factories back to America, not to Mexico. But no matter what, there's still going to be some factories in Mexico because they have this underlying cheap labor in proximity to America that America doesn't.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, we're going to develop a lot together. And the, the Mexico plan was that I referenced was something Peter Zion used to talk about is where we're going to be okay, we're going to be safe against China because we can do all our manufacturing in Mexico. And it's like guys, that's such a sad vision. Can we, can we make it possible to manufacture in the US also? And the Mexican bureaucracy is funny because it's more efficient in its maintenance of oligarchy and less broad in a helicopter parent style. So there's things you can do in Mexico that you can't do in the US but they, but their system is also pretty good at maintaining their oligarchy.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Mexico is the country in the world where the highest percent of the population is paid a bribe to get something done, more so than any other country in Latin America. And the amount of journals and politicians who get shot in every election in Mexico is horrifying. So Mexico's got very serious issues and a lot of Mexicans are still illiterate today. The ones who are literate often read at a barely middle school level. And it's got a lot of issues. But at the same time, my hope is that over the course of our lifetimes the legitimate trade will be large enough that it can counterbalance the cartels in the same way that southern Italy and Ireland gradually getting wealthier is what got rid of the power of the IRA or the Mafia.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, good point. I'm trying to think of how it's also, you have the, the big consumer market in the US for drugs, and then you have the prohibitions and then you have the supply coming from South America. So, yeah, that's a big part of it. But like you said, I think development will overwhelm even that incentive.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So to a degree, we're done now. This video was too long. I like that. The video. I think our videos are getting too long now. I think the audience doesn't mind that much if you comments say if these videos are getting too long or you like the length. Next video, I'm going to give you choices. Do you want the Pax Romana, the Napoleonic wars, or Latin American history in general?

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, my gosh. I'm evenly split between all three because Pax Romana relates to the empire stuff. We have the Napoleon connections and then obviously the broad Latin American. Yeah, I want to talk about all three. What's a.

[Rudyard Lynch]

We're doing Latin America?

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, that's a. Maybe that's a better order. Latin America.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Okay. Adios.

[Austin Padgett]

All right. Adios, amigos.

[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.