Explaining the 1950s

Summary

History 102: Explaining the 1950s with Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett

Podcast Information:

• Title: History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
• Host/Authors: Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
• Episode: Explaining the 1950s
• Release Date: February 24, 2025
• Network: Turpentine Podcast Network (www.turpentine.co)

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Overview

In this episode of History 102, Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett delve deep into the complexities of the 1950s, challenging the commonly held perceptions and myths surrounding this pivotal decade. They explore how the 50s have been mythologized by both the political left and right and argue that the reality of the era was vastly different from its portrayal in contemporary narratives.

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Mob Psychology and Political Manipulation

00:29 – 03:52

Rudyard Lynch opens the discussion by examining how crowd dynamics and mob psychology play into the manipulation of political outcomes. He posits that modern society has been overtaken by mob psychology, particularly influenced by leftist ideologies that prioritize immediate emotional gratification over rational thought.

Rudyard Lynch [00:29]: "Mobs operate...without the prefrontal cortex...the mob is a strategy for group abdication of responsibility."

Austin Padgett concurs, highlighting the challenges of articulating the opposite effects of mob behavior and its impact on political discourse.

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The Mythology of the 1950s

03:52 – 10:40

The conversation shifts to the central theme: the 1950s. Lynch argues that the 50s are often misconstrued as a purely conservative and prosperous era. He believes this is a false dichotomy, asserting that the 1950s were actually a period of progressive socialism disguised as conservatism. Both political factions have co-opted the 50s to support their narratives—liberals reject the era, while conservatives attempt to emulate it.

Rudyard Lynch [05:00]: "The history of the 20th century is vastly different than what we believe it to be... we're too close to the 20th century to be able to have any degree of objectivity."

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State Intervention and Post-WWII Prosperity

10:40 – 19:48

Lynch and Padgett discuss the significant expansion of government intervention post-World War II, citing the New Deal as a foundational element that has shaped modern governance. Lynch references George Friedman's analysis of American history cycles, linking the prosperity of the 50s to FDR's policies and the subsequent growth of the managerial state.

Austin Padgett [15:48]: "There's a lot of key foundational myths from that era... the 50s were set a lot of precedents that led to our current situation."

Lynch acknowledges the alignment of historical predictions made in the 1950s with contemporary issues, indicating a continuity of political and cultural dynamics.

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Challenging Contemporary Perceptions of the 1950s

19:48 – 36:44

The hosts critique the widespread portrayal of the 1950s as a golden age of stability and prosperity. Lynch argues that this narrative overlooks the underlying complexities, including the lack of genuine masculinity, pervasive materialism, and the nascent stages of consumerism that laid the groundwork for future societal issues.

Rudyard Lynch [22:07]: "The 50s were really just... the formation of the blue pill era... a moral code based on platitudes."

Padgett expands on this by discussing how the 50s were a transient movement away from pre-war ideologies, which inadvertently set the stage for modern neoliberalism.

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European Post-War Trauma and Decline of Empires

36:44 – 54:31

Transitioning to a global perspective, Lynch and Padgett examine Western Europe's post-war decline. They highlight how countries like Britain struggled to maintain their empires post-WWII, leading to significant socio-economic transformations and the eventual formation of entities like the European Union.

Rudyard Lynch [50:20]: "TV is the best propagandizing device in history... it's been completely controlled by the managerial state."

The discussion underscores the contrasts between American and European trajectories during the 1950s, emphasizing the differing impacts of government intervention and cultural shifts.

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The Influence of Communist Narratives on Historical Perception

54:31 – 84:38

Lynch delves into the pervasive influence of communist ideology on the historical narratives of the 20th century. He argues that communist thinkers strategically shaped cultural and political discourse to entrench certain social policies and ideologies, which continue to influence contemporary society.

Rudyard Lynch [84:05]: "Our entire narration of the 20th century is controlled by communists... they were using demographics to gain power."

Padgett agrees, noting how leftist culture foundationally altered societal structures and continues to propagate its influence through academic and governmental institutions.

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Conclusion and Future Directions

84:38 – End

As the episode wraps up, Lynch and Padgett reflect on the importance of re-evaluating historical narratives with a critical lens. They emphasize the need to preserve technological and cultural knowledge to prevent potential societal collapses and advocate for understanding the true complexities of past eras to better navigate the future.

Rudyard Lynch [85:51]: "History is a pattern that helps us predict the future... understanding the 50s is crucial for that."

The hosts encourage listeners to question established historical perceptions and consider alternative viewpoints to gain a more comprehensive understanding of societal evolution.

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Notable Quotes

1. Rudyard Lynch at [00:29]:

   "Mobs operate...without the prefrontal cortex...the mob is a strategy for group abdication of responsibility."

2. Austin Padgett at [15:48]:

   "There's a lot of key foundational myths from that era... the 50s were set a lot of precedents that led to our current situation."

3. Rudyard Lynch at [22:07]:

   "The 50s were really just... the formation of the blue pill era... a moral code based on platitudes."

4. Rudyard Lynch at [50:20]:

   "TV is the best propagandizing device in history... it's been completely controlled by the managerial state."

5. Rudyard Lynch at [84:05]:

   "Our entire narration of the 20th century is controlled by communists... they were using demographics to gain power."

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Key Takeaways

• Re-evaluating the 1950s: The decade is often idealized or vilified by different political groups, but its reality was more nuanced, characterized by significant governmental intervention and the beginnings of a managerial state.

• Mob Psychology: Modern political manipulation heavily relies on mob psychology, undermining rational discourse and decision-making.

• State Expansion Post-WWII: The post-war era saw unprecedented growth in government size and power, laying the foundation for contemporary socio-political dynamics.

• Communist Influence on Historical Narratives: Communist ideologies have profoundly shaped how the 20th century is perceived, influencing policies and cultural shifts that persist today.

• Preservation of Knowledge: In facing potential societal downturns, preserving technological and cultural advancements is crucial to prevent regression and maintain progress.

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Final Thoughts

History 102: Explaining the 1950s offers a critical examination of one of the most pivotal decades in modern history. Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett challenge listeners to look beyond the surface narratives and understand the deeper socio-political mechanisms that have shaped today's society. By dissecting the myths surrounding the 1950s, the hosts provide valuable insights into the patterns that govern the rise and fall of civilizations, offering tools to better predict and influence future developments.

For more insightful discussions on critical historical moments and their impact on the present, subscribe to History 102 on the Turpentine Podcast Network.

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]

Hi, Austin. How are you? Are you having a good day?

[Austin Padgett]

Well, you have my full attention with your strange. What do you call it? Intonation. Your strategy is worse.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, so the thing with, like, crowd work or, like, dealing with the audience is that opposite results are the same. So if you want to go for a voice that's, like, so saccharine and child life to its extreme, it will also come across as horrifically, like, horrifying. And so when you're dealing with the audience, remember that, like, whatever stimuli you push for, you'll get the opposite because just. I mean, it's partly because the society's hysterical, and it's also because audiences have, like. Or the mobs have weird reverse psychology.

[Austin Padgett]

It's hard to articulate weird reverse psychology. Right. In terms of.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So mobs don't actually think they're operating mobs. I want to read a book on mob psychology. But mobs operate, I think, without the prefrontal cortex, and that's the part of your brain that controls for rational planning and reason and delayed gratification. The difference between us and all other mammals is that we have a larger prefrontal cortex. Like, the difference in a dog and a human is basically just the prefrontal cortex with a few other things, but that the mob removes that, and that's on purpose, because the mob is a strategy for group abdication of responsibility. So humans innately form mobs when they can attain a result as a group, which would be morally impermissible on a smaller level. And our entire society has been taken over by mob psychology because the left is fundamentally the mob religion. It's the religion for the mob because it speaks to all the things that the mob enjoys, such as short gratification, immediate emotional enhancement, and just anger and rage. And the French Revolution is the easiest historic example of the mob, although the Internet completely exacerbates mob psychology. And there's a few interesting rules of mobs. The first is that they're quite easy to. Is that for skilled handlers, mobs are very easy to manipulate, which is what the Democratic Party does. It's like their entire gig at this point, their entire gig is psychologically manipulating the mobs that work with them. And it's also like, Trump is very clearly good at. Of course, it's not a mob when it's our side. He's very good at influencing our mob. And it's just depressing to watch because I have a degree of objectivity about my environment because I have to like wake up and scroll through comments and various conservative. And I do a decent amount of work with this because whenever I periodically check the comment sections for every part of the political spectrum. So I'll check leftist comments, I'll check different conservative factions comments. And it's the scary thing about mob psychology is that they can't think for longer than five minutes. Their time horizon is really slow. And it's depressing to see stuff like Comey where. Remember Comey? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I remember the. And I was 15 at the time. The left flip flopped on Comey four times. And I spoke to some of my relatives about it where I'm like, guys or one of my relatives said, oh my God, Comey said blank. And I said, yeah, a month ago you said the exact opposite about him. Like you have no internal logical consistency.

[Austin Padgett]

And they were mad when Hillary was mad at him. Yeah. But he apparently thought he was doing that to actually help Hillary because they were so confident she was going to win anyways. They're like, hey, if we don't clear her before the election, it's going to look corrupt if we clear her after the election. So I'm going to push it through.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And then Hillary was very upset at him.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So everything the left says is projection. So I do Wonder if in 2016 the left was being supported by. If they were being supported by foreign powers. We just haven't realized it. I think, yeah, there's a non low chance the Democratic Party is getting funding from Russia or China or one of those countries. And they'd be very good at hiding it.

[Austin Padgett]

I don't know about Russia or I'm sure with China there's tons of overlap with globalist.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Plans. But I mean just you can stop. Go no further than the European elite.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Right.

[Austin Padgett]

They may be disempowered militarily, but they have absolutely have had huge influence over the US especially since the 50s, like Europe.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So YouTube's in the pocket of China where they've had multiple YouTubers with large audiences have tested this, where if they make a video that appears as if it's pro China, it will get five times the viewership as anti China. And when I say China, I mean Chinese Communist Party. I don't mean the beautiful civilization that goes back to the Shang dynasty. And I was, I've been stuck thinking about this like, why would YouTube be in the pocket of the Chinese Communist Party? Because keep in mind, YouTube's blocked in China. They don't have a sizable audience there. And also, YouTube must be working with the US government in some way. Like, that's just obvious. And the Chinese are our enemies. And it's funny, I was talking to my dad today, and I said, it's very funny that the current elite has all the worst opinions where, like, they're pro Islamic terrorism, they're pro Chinese Communist Party, they're pro promoting, like, trans and countries that don't want trans. They're pro. They're pro bizarre mental disorders in the West. They're for, like, degrowth. They're for de. Industrialization. I'm like, you just constantly pick whatever the wrong opinions are in any situation. If you were somewhat logically consistent, you would pick the correct opinions sometimes. Because if you want to be genuinely pro lgbt, you'll be like, it's not cool that the Muslims or the Chinese aren't behind this. But then they support the Muslims and the Chinese in invalidating their own moral code.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, it's. Well, you know, all those things you listed kind of maybe sound synonymous with the millennials or younger generation, but if you actually think about it, all that stuff started with the boomers. And the current elite are old. They're not, like, they're not being influenced only by their kids. They. They created the seeds for what.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, their kids currently believe, which is a wonderful transition. Thank you, Austin. You are truly amazing. Where this video is the 1950s, and I've wanted to. So let me tell you how I thought through this video, I am not that particularly interested in 20th century history, and that's for a handful of reasons. The first is the timeframes you're dealing with. And our society has such low attention spans that we really can't mentally conceive of the world before World War II. And so in our mental time horizons, where we don't draw examples from anything before that timeframe, and so the 1950s are our mythological origin point for our society, if that makes sense. Where the 50s is the time period where both conservatives and liberals use it as this symbol for what our current society derived from, where the left tries to reject the 50s and then the right tries to get back to the 50s. And I think this is a false dichotomy. And I think if you want to get back to the 50s, you're not a true conservative, because the 50s was still this progressive socialist lib society. Like, and we'll Talk about this in the future. And the point of this video is that the history of the 20th century is vastly different than what we believe it to be. And that's important. And you'll see it across different parts of the 20th century in different ways. But we're too close to the 20th century to be able to have any degree of objectivity. And so the world wars are the opposing example to the 50s, where we've built the world wars into our mythological war. It's like Zeus fighting the Titans, and it brought our current social order. And I just wish we could make everyone stop talking about the 20th century for five years so that they could attain a Zen like state of detachment. And then after that they can look at it objectively, because so much of the 20th century is not what we think. Where we've typecast the 50s as this conservative era of stability and prosperity, and it was the richest and the most psychologically stable. The 1950s in America was the best time to be an individual human in any time in human history. And I can explain why that, I believe that. But the 50s, they, if you told them how we perceived them, they'd be in complete shock. And over the course of the 20th century, you see, just as a brief example, this is a tangent. In the culture we exist in, the 60s is seen as this empowering moment where humanity breaks away from the shackles of the patriarchy and was able to attain like, true freedom. And then the thing we're seeing now is the 60s was a completely disastrous, suicidal decision that enabled greed and degeneracy and just the complete breakdown of society. Where the best way to see a lot of the culture of the 60s is as a sort of revolt by upper class Americans against having any social duties while they screwed over the lower classes in World War II. Or we see the 20th century as reaching enlightenment. While the reality is that the 20th century believed all these deranged delusions that everyone else in history would just be as, what's wrong with you people? And so I think the study of the 20th century in our society is not very good because simultaneously we don't know where to focus. And we've been so propagandized by the psyops of the 20th century that if you actually want to look at our opinions of the 20th century and then take their opposite, that's not a bad place to start. Like, if you follow that principle too far, you'll end up in just like being a neo Nazi, like idiot. But it's a time period where we need a degree of detachment that we don't have.

[Whatifalth]

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[Austin Padgett]

There's a lot of key foundational myths from that era. Era, like World War II being justifying kind of all interventionist foreign policy since then, the New Deal being cited for pretty much all governing policy over the last 30 years. There's a lot of our foundational myths come from there. And it's also a little bit confusing because. Well, first of all, this doesn't track with the progressive view of history, but the 30s, the 20s, obviously were kind of a liberalism liberalizing period. And the 30s were really kind of more degenerate. And there was very lewd stuff and cartoons and movies.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Like stuff that would shock you because it's even older than the 50s. But they're. They're talking, you know, about sex and making jokes.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Spanking each other. And the 50s was a very temporary, like, counter.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Movement that lasted like, basically 10 years post World War II, when kind of socialism and fascism had gotten a bad reputation. And there was a temporary pivot into neoliberalism, which was, you know, not central planning, but regulated markets with Social Security nets. And that led to stacking up interventions which brought us right back to basically the socialism fascism that we're dealing with today that we're kind of fighting against. So it's the 50s were set a lot of precedents that led to our current situation. But there was also temporary direction, temporary movement in a positive direction. And it was a bit of a unique time because it was like post Depression, we opened up our economy more. We were the world's creditor now. We had like 11% growth in some of the years, but it didn't last yet.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, I'm glad you said that. And it makes me think of two things. One of the things, George Friedman, who is a political thinker who was really instrumental in me getting into this whole field. So thank you. And I'd like to, if any of you know of a contact, I'd love to meet him. But he's got two different. He has two different cycles of American history. There's the cultural cycle and there's the political cycle. And so are the cultural slash economic and the political cycle. And so the last social economic cycle is Reagan, where we're reaping the fruits of Reagan's system between globalization, the rise of technology, the rise of inequality, just a bunch of things. And then the origin of our current political system is fdr. And James Burnham, who wrote the book on the managerial class. He calls. He calls. He said he wrote this book in like 1941. He said that the new ideology that will control America is New Dealism. And the nature of New Deal ism is that the state intervenes into the economy on the behalf of oppressed groups, and then the state artificially tries to help the support of these oppressed constituencies who the bureaucracy rationalizes their power for. And I heard that and I thought that's such a bullseye for the 40s because that's such a bulls. That's such a bullseye. A bullseye thing to say in 1940. Because if you look at us 80 years later, it's the exact same thing. Like if you just wrote that this is the cultural current for American political and cultural philosophy for the next 80 years, I don't know what that's leaving out.

[Austin Padgett]

It's literally the same thing. Because the Green New Deal was one of the biggest talking points of politics in the last 20 years. Yeah, it's recently crashed in popularity and we're pushing back against that trend. But that so this guy's prediction came true and is already kind of failing. Or we're in the beginning of its potential failure.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So yes, yes.

[Whatifalth]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

To talk about the 50s here, I'm talking about the long 50s. So 1945 to 1965 because I'm speaking about the spiritual 50s rather than like the physical 50s because there is this cultural vibe of the 50s which was what we experienced the 50s as because the the 60s were pretty short. They were less than five years where like if you watch the Twilight zone, made in 1962, it looks identical to 1955. And if you listen to the music from the time period where until you get to like 1965, all of the sounds we associate with the 60s are not there. Like early 60s rock and roll is complete teeny bopper garbage. And this song isn't bad, but like an example of early 60s music is that thing you do by the Wonders, which is it's a fake movie about a band from Erie, Pennsylvania who. Or it's a movie telling the story of a fictional band in like 1961 from Erie, Pennsylvania. Okay, great. And then they have like a one hit wonder and then they break up. And so to get into what the 50s are about, the 50s are really just if you lead the 50s back to World War II, that's going to explain almost everything. And the issue. One of the issues of our society is that we don't have any concept of what the Pre World War II world looked like. Where the 50s are the they are the formation of the blue pill era. And the blue pill era is something very, very important which I coined as a term where if you're, if you know red pill terminology, the red pill is the rightists who realize that our entire global, our entire narrative of life is wrong. The blue pill are people who hold onto the regime. The black pill are people who are just depressed and nihilistic. And the white pill are those who have hope. And so our current entire narrative of the world was really formulated in the 50s. And then the door was kicked out in the 60s, where if you go back to the 50s and the Twilight Zone is my favorite TV show ever. Actually part of the reason I wanted to record this video was I was watching the Twilight Zone is that people in the 50s actually were relatively blue pilled. And this is one of the things that both narratives disagree on. Like the conservatives say that the 50s was this golden age of conservative values and the leftists say that, that the 50s was this like patriarchal, horrible society. But watching the Twilight Zone and Rod Serling is an author who I trust. And what I mean by that is there are certain authors who you can see as relatively objective narrators of their era of history symbolically. And then there are those who have agendas. And I see Rod Serling, the writer of the Twilight Zone as a pretty honest guy. And it's interesting that you can tell that this was a society that was more naive than ours because the characters will just casually. The 50s was the start of the blue pill because it was the start of. It was the start of a moral code based off platitudes. And what I mean by that is the platitude moral code is, is like, let's say one of your buddies is struggling with a job. You'll say, oh, just keep trying. Like you'll find a job sooner or later. But in reality, what you should tell him is you lack skills. If you actually attained skills, then you would be able to go back to the market, but stop wasting your time and then give the market what it wants. Where that's a hard thing to say, but you are fundamentally responsible for helping your buddy out. And so the 50s is such a wealthier society than every previous era in history that it allowed the creation of an entire moral code based around herd morality. And it's interesting to look at like characters and actors from the 50s where you can read their body language and you can tell that this is a society absent of nihilism. Which is strange to me, where among young people nihilism is so omnipresent that it's interesting to go back in time to see a society where there just doesn't have the nihilism. And you can see almost that once I look at more historic societies, you can see the nature of that era of history carving itself into the bodies of the people involved. Where like you look at the photo reels of the 20th century. And you can see that the. Just the people themselves and the cities are different. Where, like, I'm from Philly, and all the buildings are the same in Philly because Philly's declining between the 50s and today. But then the people walking around, they were much better dressed in the 50s. They appeared more psychologically healthy. They had better fashion. They had better. They appeared generally more healthy. But I also want to say that they were still the last men. The society of the 50s was still innately nihilistic and godless and egalitarian, and it lacked any sense of purpose or meaning. And I can empathize with that a significant amount, because the 50s was suffering, horrifying PTSD. And this is something to keep in mind where the stable society of the 50s was. This outcome of a generation of young men who saw things that basically no person should have to see. And they came home and they coddled the boomer generation. And then the boomer generation, because their fathers thought they were shielding their children from. Because the World War II generation, they saw that stuff and they thought, I love my kids, so they're never going to see that. And so they coddled the boomers and they built this very safe society. And then the boomers grew up to just destroy society. And it's interesting where I can empathize with the greatest generation, because if I fought in World War II, I wouldn't want to deal with that crap either.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, it's easy. You can see what happened them psychologically, because they came out of depression. They came out of the world wars into this era of unlimited prosperity. The Jetsons were on tv. You know, there was a real kind of vision that we were in a new world. And they didn't. But they didn't understand how to maintain it. So it was like, you know, when you get through something tough and everything and then everything looks like beautiful, you don't even want to think about going back to that dark place. So psychologically, you come up with this construct that we're past it, and then you have all this capital to spend, like both cultural and economic capital, that allows you to build up historic levels of fragility. So basically, that's what we've been doing the last 70 years, is building up fragility and slowly degradating all the systems that actually protected us in the first place.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You put it. You put that incredibly well. And we got hit by a double whammy where the trauma of the world wars was so enormous, and then we immediately had enormous prosperity right after. So it's two opposing extremes that haven't had the ability to cancel out. And there's a couple points I'll tease out there. The first is that the major. There's a handful of responses to the World wars which you saw manifest really strongly in the 50s. And one of the best history books ever read, Tragedy and Hope by Carol Quigley. It was written in 1959 and it's really interesting because he does the best job of explaining everything going on in the 50s culturally. And he actually again writing in 1959, he predicted wokeness, he predicted the population collapse, he predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, he predicted the collapse of traditional values with the rise of hippies. He said that hippie values would take over America, which would cause cultural degradation. And he said the biggest issue the west had was lack of religion. And if the west didn't fix its religion due to the rise of a cancerous anti religion, that would destroy the West. So he was a very prescient thinker. But the reason the book's called Tragedy and Hope is that the thesis of the book is that the tragedy of the World wars killed the west soul. But then through learning lessons from the world wars, the west has the ability to derive a new hope which could in turn bring about a cultural revival. And it's interesting where in the field of the science of history, and I've read basically every author in that field, they were all writing around the World wars era. And then we just dropped having the science of history totally because it ran up against too many boomer notions about like infinite progress and equality and pacifism and that stuff. Because if you look at history, it teaches you some difficult lessons. The 50s was reaping the cultural capital of an earlier era of Western history, where as an example, the government was huge in the 50s. And this is a point that I can't overemphasize for conservatives, where the top tax rate in America was 90% and in Britain, in Western Europe it was, in Britain it was 95%. And then certain people in Sweden were taxed over 100% for complex legal reasons.

[Austin Padgett]

There is a little caveat to that. And the American rate, if you look at actual taxation collected, it's been basically 33% since that time. Because when it was 90%, it was almost exclusively ignored through loopholes. It was a system completely built off of loopholes. It's like basically you prove you don't owe us all your money and. And essentially nobody did according to the law. So that's a little bit of a. But the point about the empowered government is completely accurate. The government was radically larger than before. The U.S. even with that government had a little bit more of a laissez faire approach, but only for 10 years. While the French and English, they did much, much worse than the Germans after the war. Not because of the Marshall Plan, which was like an infinitesimally small amount of money relative to the economy, but because they had a guy that ignored the Marshall Plan, which actually also included a lot of regulations on price controls, and their government was completely destroyed. So they grew. Germany grew as fast post World War II. That was a graph, make it a graph as they did Pre World War II. But pre World War II was a Keynesian debt fueled boom that left them completely bankrupt on the verge of the war. Their growth post World War II was actually sustainable. And yeah, so they, they, and then that, that led right into the 70s and 80s where they were, you know, the powerhouse. And England had, you know, England was rationing for like a decade after the war.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Germany.

[Austin Padgett]

So it's kind of funny how it works out like the losers won in some ways.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Germany had a very laissez faire economy, or I won't say very, because nothing laissez faire's 19th century, but Germany had, they had one of the more laissez faire economies in Western Europe. And laissez faire means libertarian. And that's why Germany's economy grew so fast. And I'm glad you brought that up, because in the biology, in biology's model that the 19th century, God ruled the 20th century, the state ruled in the 21st century, the network rules. And so the 1950s was kind of the apex of state domination ever in world history. And it's hard to overstate how much bigger industrialized states are vis a vis pre industrial states, because in almost every pre industrial system ever, the state made up less than 3% of the total economy. And then post World War II, in lots of Western countries, it was 2/3. In America, it was like half. And so this is a huge state. And you can see America as a society going through three different phases. The first phase is the early Republic, which ends in the centralization of the U.S. civil War. The second phase ends in World War II, where you saw the formation of the imperial apparatus that's destroying America, which we need to gut asap. Where you look at the things Trump is destroying. These are all creations of the FDR era in the 50s where the. So people forget this, but there was A time when we were once free. Where the FBI and the CIA are creations of the World War II era. The entire, every single federal department, or almost all of them were creations of this era. And there was a huge shift in American politics that occurred around World War II due to nuclear warfare. And it's. We'll get to nuclear warfare later. But it's. Nuclear warfare is seminal to the identity of the 50s in a way that's difficult for us to articulate today. Where Congress gave away the ability to control on matters of war and foreign policy, because nuclear war is determined in a moment, a matter of minutes or hours. So you have to give direct power to the President. And this had enormous downstream effects because once the President had the ability to declare war, which is every single US war since World War II was undeclared. So Congress has no say in it, whether Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan is that you gave the executive branch power. And as the executive branch gained power over the military and as America became a transcontinental empire, you saw the growth of the executive branch. And all of what I call the imperial bureaucracy is the executive branch. But then over time said imperial bureaucracy, as always happens, started to strangle the American people. And Wokeness, and this is something Richard Hanania has a great book. Wokeness is a rationalization that the state and the managerial class can use to destroy the American people and the American culture. Because America is an innately anti authoritarian culture where at its core America is a society that rejects the state. And thus the in America was also a federation of different British subcultures that all agreed we want a limited state so that they we can't control each other. And due to that, the left realized, and this was something that started in the 30s, the left realized that they had to destroy Christianity and the West's culture to win. And so you can view all of Wokeness and Wokeness's attack on culture itself as a rationalization for the state and the managerial bureaucracy to just destroy the culture itself.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And it's strange that the 1950s are, are viewed as so conservative because when you look at the expansion of the executive power and how it led to war, and then you look at what George Washington said, he was like super clear on how empowering the executive would lead to more wars. And that was a very specific thing we should watch out for. So this is not conservative, it's not Americana. And because of the brief like flash of strict social attitudes in the 50s, which is probably largely connected to everybody being so disciplined from the military, because of that is kind of like the whole thing. And because Iraq was associated with the conservatism, this whole. The origin of this empire is kind of painted as very conservative when it's.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, that's great. You say that because there's very little genuine masculinity in the 50s. Because I look at a lot of conservatives, they're trying to go back to the cultural aesthetic of the 50s and like the ideas of the. Like the ideas of masculinity and America and those things. And our entire society is predicated upon the cultural foundations of the 50s, where we are the same age as the 50s, we're just a degree degraded version. And this normally happens where an empire forms, it creates cultural ideas, and then those cultural forms degenerate. So we are the same society as the 50s. It's better to see the 50s as a reflection of our era than anything else because it's got the same issues between nihilism, between, like nihilism. The 50s is actually a very feminine society, which is something you'll never get anyone to say. It's a very statist society. It's innately materialistic, it's innately shallow. And one of my personal pet peeves is that we cannot pull artistic aesthetics from before the 50s. Because I refuse to use an Americana or a 1950s aesthetic because it's so overused, where like half of the music videos in pop are a 1950s diner. And I'm like, this is just boring. And I think the reason we don't use pre 1950s aesthetics is that people would realize that they're innately superior and that our society is a joke. Because if we were taking aesthetics from the 1600s or the ancient Greek Greeks, we'd be like, wait, these. We didn't. These societies were patriarchal, like militaristic. Like what? Like imperialist, whatever. But they're so clearly cooler than us.

[Austin Padgett]

Right? It's much better than just chrome. But that's funny you say Americana because what is America? America is like you said, this collection of British people who wanted to be more free America. Americana is the Founding fathers. Americana is 1776. But now Americana is this weird social experiment in the 50s.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, that.

[Austin Padgett]

And then I saw an interview with a cab driver from the 50s recorded in maybe the 80s or 90s. And he's. The way he described the 60s was such a big change because the 50s was like a really temporary flash in the pan thing. But he said the 60s was so different from the 50s. And then he kind of said. And you know what the. It's changed, you know, since the 60s to today. But the way you could tell in his mind that he conceptualized it was the jump between the 50s and the 60s was larger than the 60s.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And today I think that's accurate in some ways. Where the boomers got cultural. The boomers. The boomers have held cultural authority for so long. They grabbed it in the 60s when they were like teenagers. And they've held on the cultural power since, which is. There's something almost admirable in that. Just the sheer tenacity and will to power.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes.

[Rudyard Lynch]

But like we are a continuation of the order of the 1960s. And it reminds me of two stories. The first is that when I went to school, we had to read five books on the Vietnam War. And very few of them were actually at the Vietnam War is that people like doing drugs and protesting the Vietnam, Vietnam War. And we only read one other book on any other war, that being the American Revolution. And I'm thinking to myself, you guys, you boomers really did this. You really assort doing drugs before the Vietnam War as five times as important as the rest of human history combined. Like, this is really your mental model.

[Austin Padgett]

That's funny you say that because the cab driver also, he was confused. And it's so funny. It was ultimate like blue pilled confusion vibes. You know how they got like blue pill and confusion goes together when something happens outside of your narrative. But he was like, yeah, because he was. First of all, he was talking about how much it changed, but then he said they didn't make an impact at all. All they did was have. What's the name of the big concert with the Woodstock. Woodstock, which was, you know, it was great. It was a big. It was a big party. But parties don't leave any legacy. So I'm not sure what they're. They just kind of disappeared and what they. And then this guy is a guy who still believes in the 1950s institutions. What he doesn't realize is that they disappeared into the institutions. Like post. All those 60s kids took over those 50s institutions. But, you know, kind of like in a subterfuge kind of way, we're going.

[Rudyard Lynch]

To have to the 60s as the next episode because I have too many tangents here at the 60s that I don't want to get into. But the. I mean, portraying the 50s as conservative is, I don't think, fundamentally accurate even from how they perceived their environment. Because if you were to go back to the 50s, they saw themselves as a science fiction society because the World wars was science fiction for them. And then the fifth and you could do this. All of our society's architecture is the attempt to make science fiction architecture. Where like the blocky concrete buildings we have, they used to be nice. I know it's shocking. There was a time when they were new and shiny and you watch the old photo reels, we're like, these buildings look like garbage now. They were super nice when they were first built. And like you look at photo reels of Los Angeles and that city was beautiful in the 50s. And their idea is that we want to make Star Trek architecture. It was almost this like mythical thinking of if we establish the architecture and the values of a Star Trek society, we can reach a Star Trek society. Because Star Trek was the mythology of that time period. And like a collective zeitgeist of we want to build this utopian, egalitarian, progressive, constantly colonizing, constantly exploratory society. And I think the atom bomb is useful symbolism here where the like the atom bomb completely freaked out the 50s. And it's hard to overestimate how much it weighed on them because we've had the atom bomb for nearly an entire lifetime and like the world hasn't blown up and it was complete. I am happy they were freaked out over the atom bomb because if they weren't freaked out, we might have all died. Like I try to be collectively grateful on a pretty frequent basis that the Cold War didn't get hot because in an instant we could have lost all of. All of industrial civilization. But the way the 50s perceived the world is almost Promethean, where it's. Prometheus is the story of. Of a titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to the mortals. And then the gods tortured him for a very long time till Hercules liberated him in the 50s was stuck with this mental quandary of we've been handed this godlike power that we don't really want, but now the genie is out of the bottle. And a lot of our societies neuroses stem from this where the reason we're obsessed with pacifism is there was this huge pacifist push after the World wars of we nearly fucking died. So let's like calm down a little bit on violence because we could all die. Or the idea when I said earlier that the 50s has very little genuine masculinity because masculinity is the act of accomplishing things. And the way things were accomplished in the 50s was through the bureaucratic impersonal system that strips individuals of any heroism and so you look at like the 50s ideal of masculinity. It's like a guy with like you had to wear a buzz cut because that was what the military was. Where there was this egalitarian conformist ideal that stemmed from the military. And that's where we are today, where our society's ideal of masculinity is that you shut up and you serve the system because that's what the World War II era military was. But that's not what almost any military in history was. And the 50s didn't see themselves as socially conservative because they saw themselves as the continuity of a previous era of history that gradually got more liberal. And it always blows my mind that feminists used the 50s as this like idea of traditional gender relations because that couldn't be further from the truth. Where the 50s was this weird time frame where women were stuck at home doing nothing because for the rest of human history you had these intact social and village communities where the women would. So they take care of the kids, they gossip with each other, they'd like it took 10 hours a week to wash your clothes. And so in the 50s what you saw is that because these, the bureaucratization of industrial civilization meant that the men were away at work and all day and then the kids were at school, which created this huge population of women who were just bored out of their minds. And you could see feminism as the outgrowth of this. And I was once speaking to my grandmother who, where she said, and she grew up in the 50s, she said, and she grew up in Nebraska too, she said that it was so boring and it was so sterile that we wanted to rebel in the 60s against it. And I think that is fundamentally true, but not in the way people think. It was boring and sterile because it was already too leftist and it was too feminized, it lacked vril. And so whenever, like when I watch the Twilight Zone, I'm thinking this is an innately not very edgy society. This isn't a materialistic and a shallow society. And I think people could pick up on a subconscious basis that this was all a lie that was removed from the natural order. But they rebelled by doing the exact opposite thing where they made it even more shallow and fake and they grew the lie even more.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. A lot of the bearded hippies were probably more masculine than the clean shaven, but there's different types of hippies and the.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I also find it shocking that modern feminism complained at the 50s so much because there's like no rational argument where that Makes sense or big, oh, they were on drugs, they had horrible mental health. By any conceivable statistic you'd pick, women's mental health now is like so much vastly worse than the 50s. It's not even comparable. I think that women might have like five times the mental health issues now as they did in the 50s. And also same thing with drug use, same thing with the 50s was a socially cohesive society. Like even in the 50s, black people in the 50s were actually great for black people, which is not something you're allowed to say where black people had more intact families than white people did in the 50s. And on top of that, black people saw enormous gains in income from 1930 until 1960 because that was gains in income for all lower class Americans. From 1970 onwards, blacks saw basically no income gains because lower class Americans didn't in general. And it's interesting that the civil rights movement actually ended up indirectly hurting the cultural changes. The 60s ended up indirectly hurting the black community, which we'll talk about next. More so in the 60s video. But the thing with feminists in the 50s is that it was this very specific moment. And it's also like one of the best the times where women were treated the best in human history, where if you want to look at the long duray of human history, the European high Middle ages is in the top 10% of societies was treated women the best. If you want to look at India, China, Greece, Romeo, it's way, way worse. And I chuckled to myself because I'm thinking if you think the 50s were sexist, look at the rest of human history. But this was also a society which believed in gender equality, women had the right to vote where it was a relatively blue pilled society on women. And also the 50s removed the difficult parts of life between just working in coal mines, long long hours in factories, horrifying diseases and the 50s were of that where the 50s was when everyone entered into the global monoculture and they left. You stopped being like a midwestern cowboy, you stopped being an Irish peasant, you gave up your local identity for the global monoculture because you it was a huge tipping point in western history or around the world wars when the population of the west became majority urban and thus denatured from their roots.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And then radio and TV also were coming through and they were all coming with a imperial message, essentially.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. My friend Kurt likes to say that TV is the best propagandizing device in history or it's the best preaching device in history.

[Austin Padgett]

Especially when they shut off the radio wave spectrum. So there's only a certain amount allocated to cable. And then they manage who has access to those cable licenses. So they've completely controlled the information waves until the radio and then the Internet.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. And it's funny that when Trump showed up in 2016, all these leftists said that, oh, we're entering the post truth era, where Trump just makes stuff up and then you look at the entire century beforehand and the amount of stuff the managerial class made up is just insane. It's just the entire worldview, the blank slate, progress, genetics, doesn't matter. Men and women aren't the same. Men and women are the same. And it's interesting, where I was Dan, this was such a big rabbit hole. Like, I read a thousand pages of the CIA's reports on the spirit world where they, like, wrote. They wrote a trilogy of books on it. And I read the entire trilogy. And it's interesting because when the guy who did this, the CIA spirit world research, he got into it, he started having these religious experiences he couldn't explain. He went to church, he spoke to professors of Eastern religions, and none of them could explain it to him. So he started doing it himself and started getting a team of people. Then the CIA started funding them. And it's interesting that the 50s is probably the era of history, the most genuinely opposed to spirituality ever, where it's a very materialist society. And this is something that we had a. We have a huge cognitive dissonance around, where Until World War I, every society in history and every major intellectual ever believed in the spiritual, believed in a physical God, and believed in the occult, or even thinkers that portrayed themselves as secular on the outside, like Freud or Karl Marx or those people, we know that they were actually. They actually believed in the occult and dabbled in it in their private lives.

[Austin Padgett]

As UKA boards or whatever.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. And that's true of the Greek philosophers. It's true of even people like Charles Darwin or Queen Victoria or Nikola Tesla, the very most educated people, until, like, World War I. Then from World War I until, like Joe Rogan, you have complete taboo on discussion of these things. And now we've entered a space where it's basically normalized, like, no one cares.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. We talked about it with science, Right. Actually scientifically studying the spiritual or non kind of physical phenomenons. Because if you can replicate people's experience with a certain drug, or if you can pick up brain waves connecting from one person in a dark room to another person with a room in a strobe, light, then there's some replicability there.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And the thing with the 50s is it's probably the era that's the most materialist ever. And materialist as in you think all of reality is contained within material or physical things. And it's interesting that the Monroe, the guy who did the research, he faced a complete black wall talking about spiritual experiences until he carved out his own field about it. And that that's not the case today. And it's interesting that again, it's socially conservative and this is my main ax to grind for this video is that. And this is one of the things I do genuinely dislike at the 50s order is that it's completely hypocritical on religion, where it's a society that claimed to be Christian on the outside, where 99% of Americans in 1960 were Christian, or 99% of Americans were religious, almost all of whom were Christian, and there's a few Jews in there as well. But then it was a society that had no concept of an abstract concept, where this is a society that viewed all of reality as purely material. And so we as a society are trying to conserve this fundamentally materialist, socialist, progressive society.

[Austin Padgett]

So it's almost like you said, there was no nihilism in this era. So they didn't have any of the, like, the right philosophical grounding or the intellectual understanding. They were products of kind of the post progressive era trauma, but they were not nihilistic at all. So they kind of knew what they were supposed to do. They're like, okay, well, we're gonna like have freedom in the economy, you know, for 10 years after World War II at least. We're gonna, you know, respect our, our wives, we're gonna try and be monogamous, we're going to, like, behave, we're going to show up, we're going to do, yeah, you know, community stuff. But they didn't know what to do to maintain it. And then once the nihilism crept in, plus the bad ideology, it was kind of accelerating towards where it was always going to go.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. Yeah, you're right. And the reason for that is the 50s was genuinely an incredibly prosperous era. And it's so prosperous compared to like every other society. And people back then were vastly more wealthy than they are today. And people are going to give me crap for that. But it's objectively true by any conceivable metric. And the thing as well about the 50s is that it was wealth and success that transcended just the economic, where if you assess people for Family formation. If you assess people for chances that your children survive, for psychological stability, for size of friend groups, for physical health, for sleep time for it was incredibly equal as a society. There was social mobility just across the board in almost every conceivable metric the 50s is. The 50s until the 70s was the best era to be a person ever. And this is why the boomers are so arrogant, because they took it for granted. And, and the reason that, that people were willing to maintain a fundamentally nihilistic moral code while still having the will to live is because there was actual social mobility and actual material gain for complying with the order. But the problem is that when you remove said material gain is the society has no ground.

[Austin Padgett]

Right, Exactly. And then the seventies were really depressing. Right? It was a big kind of letdown. Seventies are often described as a hangover.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

That means there was like a kind of unnatural jubilation.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Something else that you brought up earlier that I want to bring up is that we see the 50s as sexually repressed, but in a lot of ways the 50s is less sexually repressed than today. And this is something we wrote out where you look at the idea that the 50s are conservative is a useful myth for both the left and the right, where for the left it's that they want a bad. They want a bad time that they can say, this is what we're avoiding. And for the 50s it's that we want a recent time that we can emulate. And like, you know, the musical Grease, I frankly don't think it's that good a movie. But like in Greece it's people who grew up in the 50s making a movie in the 70s and like the teenagers are constantly sleeping together and there's all these like, there's all this drama going on and it's a very decadent society. And it's much like Texas where if you're from the coast and you come to Texas, you might think that it's a very stuck up society. But like under the covers it's relatively degenerate. Right.

[Austin Padgett]

Because the men could actually attract women back then also as compared to today, where the sex rate's gone down and down and down.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And it's interesting, it's this inverse reaction where on the outside it was a more repressed society. And the one thing that porn was illegal in the 50s, 50s and homosexuality was illegal. So we flipped on that stuff where we have really bad porn and then we also have. Then we also have homosexuality very open in the public. And then it was a Much more sexual society under the covers.

[Austin Padgett]

And there was also a lot less demand for it because you had strong monogamy. Right. And then you break down the monogamy and then you have a huge distribution of sexual partners. When there's eight girls stuffed in the trunk of Andrew Tate's Bugatti, that means there's like eight guys or seven guys standing around being like, all right, what do we do now?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I remember when I was a kid, I thought polygamy was completely unreasonable. And I thought, like, it's. Isn't it crazy that some societies were polygamous and now it's like so normalized or some variety of polygamy. Right.

[Austin Padgett]

It was like, hard to imagine, like in 10 years ago or 20 years ago.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. And so in the 50s, as an example, and this is like a. Like they. They had bikinis in the 50s, and I think Playboy stems from the 50s. This is not as sexually repressed as society, as they think, as we think. But then also in other ways, we are a significantly more sexually repressed society where we're a society that. So it's more that we're against goodness than we're against, like, sex per se. We just dislike good things. So when sex is antisocial, it's supported in our society. And when it's pro social, it's against like, you'll never see a happy white family in Western cinema anymore. But if it's like Weimar shit, then it's okay. And we're such terrible people. But. So I think we covered America pretty well. And I'm going to do the rest of the world an injustice, but I'll still fire some shots their way. So Western Europe was fundamentally disastrous. The 50s was fundamentally disastrous in Western Europe. And I feel sorry for them where they were ravaged by World War II. And that's hard to overstate. And so they saw. It's crazy. Europe actually saw a decrease in income over the World wars era, where the average Brit in 1948 was poorer than they were in. Or it's hard to measure. Some ways they're richer, some ways they were poorer. Britain as a country was significantly poorer. And it's interesting to see that their. Their culture became entirely quotidian when. Quotidian. I. It's a French word I love for daily. And it's an important concept where, like, you watch the BBC from the 1950s and their production value is garbage. Because whenever I Look at, like mid 20th century culture, I find it so cringe. And it's like, so it's corny and it's like not done. It's like it lacks taste or class. And Western Europe killed its higher culture, which was the thing that had propelled European culture going back thousands of years. And Britain, as you said, they had rationing until 1955. And this was the gradual collapse of the British Empire. And I think symbolic of this is that Churchill was kicked out of office right after he won the war by a socialist. And you can see whether our society will thrive or not based off how it treats its heroes. And so right after that Britain threw away the empire. And the Suez Crisis is a great example where the British had a huge empire that spans every continent. And they let Egypt have peripheral. They let Egypt have nominal independence starting after World War I, which had been a long standing thing for Egypt under the Ottomans going back centuries as well because the Egyptians had their own pre established state structure. And the Egyptian, the Egyptians under Nasser said, sorry, we're not going to be your nominal puppets anymore. The Egyptians rebelled. The British and the French teamed up to take the Suez Canal so that they could maintain their empire. And then the Americans told the British, no, we're not going to support you. And then the Brits kind of cucked out and they just gave up their empire and.

[Austin Padgett]

Go ahead. The Brits had still like a very flash in the pan temporary. They, they weren't ready to let go of their empire. They didn't quite realize after World War II how unsustainable it was for them. You can see by how they dealt with Eastern dividing up Eastern Europe with yeah, Stalin the way they were kind of resistant at first to giving up Egypt. Like they, they checked, basically they're like, are you sure we don't have to let go? And I don't know, maybe, maybe they realized because Churchill was a hero for England especially after the war, but maybe they kind of rationalized it as he's a wartime president and but kind of subconsciously realized that the game of empire was up. And the way I think about World War II is in the pattern of European history in which England is trying to be the most powerful. They're threatened by a continental power and rising like Napoleon and then Germany, which centralized as a response to Napoleon and they do not want that central power to like grow. They don't want the continent to be able to outpower them. So they're going to do whatever they can in terms of political manipulation to stop that. And they were in a bit of a Thucydides trap.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Situation with Germany. So I see it kind of similar to the Ukraine, Russia conflict etc in some ways. But yeah, so I, I, they saw Churchill as a hero, but I'm not sure he totally was. Although he definitely did some very cool Chadley things.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I love Churchill. He was actually reading his autobiography when I was suicidal as 16 was a big reason I, I chose to live because I read out Churchill, because he wrote it when he was 24 and I, when I was 16, I read it and then he was a depressed teenager. He also didn't do well in school. And I thought, wait, if I can study Churchill's life and then understand the subcomponents of what led him to greatness, I can engineer it myself. And so I, that gave me the inspiration because he was a chad. Like in his youth he fought, he escaped the Boer concentration camp by himself. He fought in like six different countries. He was a best selling author. He was one of, he was like one of the youngest like sea lords in British history. He got like his, he became a PM in his early 20s. He was a popular nonfiction writer. It's just like he was truly a man.

[Austin Padgett]

Nobody has that kind of background anymore. No, it was like from the time of the age of Adventure or something.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And, and I just don't like the dissident rights attacks on him. And I see it as a sort of symbolic attack by the far right against the classical liberals where it's true.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, go ahead.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You where the way I perceive that is that. So I think Churchill's a good conservative hero and I would not blame the. Oh, so the only narrative where you can blame Churchill for losing World War II is where you're a fascist because. And for losing. The argument people use is that Churchill killed the British Empire and that's just demonstratively not true. Churchill was such a dogged defender of the British Empire that he was considered too reactionary and he was considered too imperialistic for the time period.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The left criticized Churchill for decades for being a fascist imperialist. And Churchill actively tried to fight. Churchill hated. Actually I think Churchill and I have almost identical political positions, but he was against totalitarianism. And so he hated the Soviets more than he hated the commi. The Nazis, but he hated both of them. And the argument, that fact that people online give is that Churchill should have basically cucked out in 1940 and then given up and let Germany take the continent so that he could maintain the empire. And history is complicated. There's 100 different places. I think the British Empire sealed their collapse earlier. They sealed it decades Earlier.

[Austin Padgett]

Exactly.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And he was just a guy trying to hold things together. But like when you're in a war, you have to commit to the war and like you can't just cuck out and lose. If you can win, like that's just not cool. That's an insult to your honor. And like, I don't see. It's just the, the, the, the non liberal right is trying to destroy one of the heroes of the liberal right in a synonymous move, in a symbolic move so that they can gain leadership of the right. And I completely reject that.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, it's tricky because there is an overlap where libertarians obviously very, you know, non interventionist, like technically classically liberal, at least from an American sense on foreign policy, get lumped in with that reactionary movement now where over the Churchill battle they're forced to like side with people that I agree are, do not have a correct narrative and are arguing because they're. But you could say England gave up Japan to the Pacific to Japan in the late 1800s. They were definitely already scaling back their empire. It was too expensive. And I agree Churchill was trying to maintain the empire and that's a lot of the context in which they tried to go after Germany and trying to maintain the empire. When the writing's on the wall, you can create more damage. It's a tricky situation because you can say it's not fighting a war you can win, but with, with or Without World War II, their empire was unsustainable on a 40 year basis or whatever. And I just like, I obviously hate World War II and you can play around with alternate history narratives, but you know, there's reason to think that Germany wouldn't have attacked England. I also think that the way that people talk about World War II is very blue pilled in the sense of if we didn't do this, we'd all be speaking German. Yeah. And that's not how this works. Like the French were not going to start dressing in gray and making like toast and sausage. The places that, for which that would have been true would have been if they were success, more successful against the Soviets on the eastern front and increase some of their German diasporas in the areas where they were kind of actually colonizing with people. But like England, Germany, I mean England, France, the U.S. spain, they were not Italy, they were not going to start speaking German.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I completely agree with all that and I think also fundamentally it would. It's impossible to maintain the European colonial empires with universal suffrage because it was always the upper classes that drove the empires and so once, once you moved to universal suffrage, the average European derived almost no benefit from the empires, so they got rid of them. Like the average British person, he voted for welfare and for labor improvements and it was always like the nobility who pushed for the empires because their sons needed stuff to do. And I mean, I agree that I think our World War II narrative is completely blue pilled. But also I see this more as a power game with, between various political factions than a search for truth, because that's how they perceive it. And the fascist right, I mean we have the numeric superiority, we have the institutional superiority, we have the moral superiority, we have the intellectual superiority. And I don't believe in giving them concessions because they won't respect the nature of those concessions and they'll just ask, ask for more. You only give concessions to players who understand, who are capable of sharing a moral framework with you.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, and maybe I'm too autistic, but I would prioritize the Churchill argument lower and rather like libertarians and classical liberals, libertarians who don't like Churchill and classical liberals who do like Churchill team up. That's a coalition that I like versus the, the Rhinos and the fascists.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I agree. I say that my, my worldview is heroic individualism. I believe in a society that act that creates incentives which cultivates greatness among the people in the society. And then when you have the state or constrictive social norms or, or like a too constrictive family structure is that you destroy that and you destroy the ability for that society to cultivate itself. Itself. And yeah, Europe in the 50s is just depressing where the Europeans just lost their long standing dominance in every field. And Amalri Duriancourt writing in like 1955, he said, when Europeans complain about American culture, I'm going to tell you this American culture is a real thing. There is no European culture. When you talk about European culture, you're talking about the fossilized corpse of an older age. While European culture today is just a pale imitation of the Americans. And I thought, damn, Amory, that's just brutal, but it's accurate. And Western Europe became a de facto American colony. And you saw that they're, they subliminated their previous like aggressive tendencies into capitalism or into the great wealth that came after the world wars. And you saw the standard as the standardizing of Europe with the European Union, where the European Union was actually formed by the Americans, which is a weird thing to think because it's turned into this bizarre organization Completely opposed to us, much like the un. But yeah, the European Union was established and there grew to be this sort of, I would call it, new religion in Europe. It was bureaucratized managerial atheism. And we should view the Western bloc in this time period as roughly comparable to this. So we had a lot more in common with the Soviets in the Cold War than we give ourselves credit for. In a lot of ways, the Western block during the Cold War had more in common with the Soviets than they did themselves 50 years earlier. And between agnostic social code, managerial bureaucracies, continental sized empires, the state is the predominant driver of the economy. Materialist philosophy. And it's interesting to see after the constant cacophony of the world wars that Europe went from just this constant gutterdammer of insane violence to just being willing to work together to form this unified, peaceful Europe overnight. And it's crazy. It's the exact same people. Like, it's funny that I saw this. There's this YouTuber called Like Master. Like his name is like Master of Rolf, like rolling on the floor. And then it's. He's like similar to wow, Mao. And he made this clip of this German general who fought under the Kaiser, the Nazis, and then NATO. And I'm. And I'm thinking, wait, this was all one lifetime, right?

[Austin Padgett]

And kind of one structure in a way, like. Yeah, and I forgot. It would be fun to mention my granddad joined the army right after World War II when he was 18 or whatever, and he was stationed in Germany and he said it was the best time of his life. He would go around on a motorcycle with a sidecar filled up with nylon stockings and cigarettes that his mom would send him from the US and those were like the currency a lot in Germany. And he would go around and sell those. And he was like a tank commander on the front. And they shot at the Russians. They shot, not at them, but they were playing games where they'd shoot near each other just to kind of test each other. I don't think that's even in the news or historical record. Yeah, yeah. So Germany was kind of like a fun time after the war because their government was destroyed.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I mean, I get the impression just the entire post war era had this sort of like youthful joie de vivre because like, you know, in America in the year 1960, half the population was under the age of 25. And that's just an insane thing to think of because it's 40 now. And so you had lots of bored young people and so Even if there were economic issues, I'm sure they were doing interesting stuff. And it's interesting, and this is a useful segue where I've studied the origins of leftist culture a good amount because I'm trying to figure out how to reverse engineer it for the right to figure out what the left did right to seize control of power. And it's interesting to see that the foundationals of leftist culture thought is always like young people meeting up in cafes talking about politics. And it's. I think about this because so much of the important social breakthroughs that are have taken over our society were like young Europeans hanging out in cafes in Germany or France or Britain, just like making up completely ridiculous theories about the world that then were imprinted through academia and then the managerial state. And I was thinking about this because you look at Africa where decolonialism, which occurred in the six so Britain gave up the Middle east and India in right after World War II and then they gave up the rest of their empire alongside the French around 1960. And so we'll talk about that in the 60s video. But the thing with that is that these countries could have never gotten independence without first of all World War II and losing the Europeans, losing the will to fight. Because if the Europeans wanted to, they could have held on to their entire empires because none of the natives had military abilities even somewhat equivalent to the Europeans. Look at how the Soviets held onto their empire.

[Austin Padgett]

There would have been a big lag in technological advantage. Similar to how like a good way to to Describe Kabov this like 50s era is because we talked about them using the cultural and economic momentum of the previous civ. But they're also so much more advanced technologically that it's hard for your brain to understand how that works. And it's because when you introduce all these sub layer components, there's suddenly a lot you can do with the current technology without innovation. Plug and play like compared to a thousand years ago. Like if the Romans had this technology, they could build as many roads and aqueducts as they wanted.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's such a good point. Yeah, you're right. And I think it's important that if our civilization has a downturn now, which I don't know it will, and I pray to God it won't, is that it's our responsibility to just shove all the information somewhere that we can preserve. Because for genetic engineering, genetic engineering is going to do something good for humanity. It's probably going to do bad stuff too. But if we lose the ability to have genetic Engineering, it's going to put us back thousands of years. Same thing with nuclear technology, same thing with AI where we have all of these technologies that we just developed that if, let's say due to the collapse of values and the birth rate and whatever, that if our society lacks the social institutions to hold on to this, that we need to develop some way to hold onto the technology that we held for very short period, a very short period of time.

[Austin Padgett]

But yes, and those institutions are like it's complex systems that can only be maintained by markets. And you have this 50, this, you have this technocratic vision over the last century and you see it in like the post war era as well as the pre war era and then you see it reflected in today where people, you know, even 15 minute cities where people are like we have the technology, we can make a utopia. We don't need all this like wasteful capitalism and consumer blah. We can just like make these systems where water's transferred here and then we can transport ourselves this way. We just build it out. And it doesn't work that way because it's a complex price system. So you can't. Technology gives you the illusion that you can centrally plan, but there's also a reality there where you can play around with those Legos for a while and think you're remaking the world before it collapses in a way you don't understand.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I don't want to get derailed on this tangent, but it's very worrying that academia is our society's social institution for verifying the accuracy of information. And then academia completely stops doing that and there's no replacement because especially with, with what deep fakes and AI allow it just allows you to completely manufacture information is in the future it's going to be very, very hard to distinguish truth from illusion. And because you can't trust any news source and that feels like something that occurs before a dark age, but not to get derailed by that. And again, I'm not saying there will be a dark age. Knock on wood is with these African independence figures is that these are people who are basically LARPing where they studied at western universities like the Sorbonne or Oxford and they picked up this socialist vision of the world. And in some ways it's a form of mate suppression that the west gave the advice to other societies on how to develop themselves, which was not in fact the things the west had done to develop itself. We gave the third world the purposely incorrect advice.

[Austin Padgett]

Amazing.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And then you had this entire generation of post colonial rulers and it's fascinating. Like, I love. One of my favorite authors is John Gunter, who he, he's amazing. Where he was the biggest journalist of the World War II era and he was writing for like 1930-1960 and he wrote the inside series, Inside Africa, inside Asia, inside North America. And what he does is he travels around parts of the world and he looks at the culture, he looks at the geography, he looks at the people, the politics, the economy. And it's like this travel log of the entire human world on a very deep level. And John Gunter's got, he's a good writer. He has a couple different quirks as authors where you should just skip his interview segments. They're just not good. But it's interesting because. And he's indicative of his entire like social class and era where he was this journal, he was this roughly leftist journalist from Chicago where he would glorify these third worldist independent leaders like Kenyatta or Nayere or Nehru or Gandhi. Gandhi, whatever. And it's interesting that that year of history glorified these leaders as like new statesmen of their independent countries. And these people were almost all thugs. Like if you actually look at any of these, these actual leaders policies, it was just, I am going to repackage socialism to steal shit for my tribe and use the state as a tool of extraction. Where as an example, that guy in Tanzania, he was a socialist, he tried to make Tanzania into this utopian society and that just completely backfired. And that's the entire post colonial era writ large where because the Europeans just gave up, it saw the formation of basically these countries in Africa and around the world gaining independence before their leadership class inside those countries had the ability to really wield power.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And it's just so funny with the Europeans and giving kind of incorrect, moralistic advice. It's like if someone creates something like your dad builds a car or something and you're driving it around and you're really cocky because you have a car and it's tied to your identity. And then other people ask you like, how do you do that? And then you just start talking like how you got the car.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

You start making stuff up because you're like, yeah, yeah. Like you think you know or you're supposed to have an answer because this wealth is attached to your status so you should know. So you just start talking, but you have no idea and you give them the bad advice. And we talked about this in another episode with like child labor rates, etc, like we don't understand. We didn't pass a law till after child labor was gone. So we tell people with child labor to pass a law and then they work more because it's. You get paid less in the black market.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And there's. And it's hilarious. I forgot where I was going before my tangent. Oh, yes, but so you combine that bad advice with the rejection of the colonialism. So simultaneously there the. The third world countries are attributing connecting colonialism to, like, capitalism.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

But then also listening to the people from Europe who are anti capitalists, it's like, well, both these ideas are coming from Europe. You're just listening to the losers in Europe.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Our entire narration of the 20th century is controlled by communists. Our vision of the world today, which is propounded across all of society, was basically ironic propaganda by communists made in the mid 20th century. And I find it hilarious because I've actually read the communist authors involved and the communist authors like Gramsci or Adorno or like Marcuse or Foucault or that guy with a Jewish last name from Chicago who was a labor organ, Alinsky. Yeah. So they all made these decisions out of pure strategic acumen where they said, we're going to support black people and women because these are the demographics we've calculated we can use to get power. And then people take these things that commies in the mid 20th century said were purely strategic calculations as religious truth.

[Austin Padgett]

And that's how you know you've made it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. And it's just, you look at the 20th century and our entire narrative of that era is controlled by communists. As an example, CNN made a Cold War documentary series where they put as much emphasis on McCarthy as on Stalin, which is insane, where Stalin killed 20 million people and McCarthy killed no one. And the other thing.

[Austin Padgett]

Right, yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Like we, our institutions were actually controlled by communists.

[Austin Padgett]

Nobody can see it because they were all communists. So they're like, I thought that was just being blue pills.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, we're like, communists were really big in FDR's regime, where it was true in the federal government. It was true in labor organizing. Our labor wasn't that bad for communists outside the West Coast. It was true in Hollywood. It was true in a variety of fields. And Richard Hanania's thesis is interesting that the reason that civil rights law had such a big sociological effect on America is that the people who are enforcing civil rights law in the government were. I love saying crypto Marxists, because I imagine Marxists like huckstering Bitcoin, but, like, because crypto is a term for someone who's pretending to not be what they are. Like crypto Marxist. It was crypto Marxists in the government who enforced civil rights law as much as possible so that companies had to follow DEI quotas to keep up where because communists are the ones enforcing the laws, the laws were used in the most ridiculous antisocial way possible. And I think that is a wonderful segue to the 1960s where we'll talk about the civil rights movement and LBJ's welfare state and that stuff. So thank you so much, Austin, and it's been a pleasure.

[Austin Padgett]

Absolutely. A lot of good stuff to get into there. See you guys next time.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Catch you next week. Bye.

[Whatifalth]

History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ 102. 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.