Explaining the 1960s

Summary

History 102: Explaining the 1960s with Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett

Episode Release Date: March 3, 2025

In this compelling episode of History 102, hosts Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett delve into the transformative decade of the 1960s. They explore the profound political, cultural, and social shifts that not only defined the era but also laid the groundwork for contemporary societal structures. Through insightful analysis and referencing pivotal literature, Rudyard and Austin offer a nuanced understanding of how the 60s reshaped Western civilization.

---

1. Introduction to the 1960s as a Pivotal Decade

Rudyard Lynch opens the discussion by emphasizing the 1960s as the most culturally significant decade in Western history. Unlike World War I, which set the political tone for the century, the 60s initiated a cultural revolution comparable to the foundation of a new civilization.

Rudyard Lynch [06:16]: "The 60s are a cultural shift on the scale of the foundation of a new religion, a new civilization, or something along those lines."

---

2. The Rise of the Managerial Class and Bureaucratization

Drawing from Sam Francis's Leviathan and Its Enemies, Rudyard explains how the 60s marked the dominance of the managerial class over American society. This bureaucratic takeover infiltrated every aspect of life, from politics and economics to culture, effectively gaslighting the populace into accepting a Marxist, multicultural, and secular framework.

Rudyard Lynch [02:06]: "Our society is built off a sort of deception... it's a Marxist, multicultural, bureaucratic, atheist, secular society."

Austin complements this by discussing the consolidation of corporations and the rise of regulatory states, which stifled competition and innovation.

Austin Padgett [07:01]: "The rise of the bureaucratic state led to consolidation, making it easier for the government to interface with fewer corporate partners to centrally plan the economy."

---

3. Political Shifts from Classical Liberalism to Neoliberalism

Austin traces the decline of classical American liberalism, epitomized by figures like Grover Cleveland and Barry Goldwater, and its replacement by a neoliberal, neoconservative framework under leaders like William F. Buckley and institutions like the National Review. This transition entrenched a technocratic society, blurring the traditional left-right political dichotomy.

Austin Padgett [03:16]: "The last kind of gasp of classical liberalism wasn't a politically winning formula at the time... it settled into a neoliberal, neocon framework."

---

4. The Cultural Revolution: Hippie Movement and Social Liberalism

Rudyard and Austin explore the hippie movement as a response to the rigid, uniform society of the 50s and early 60s. They argue that hippie culture introduced hedonism and superficial spirituality, undermining traditional values and fostering a culture of self-expression devoid of genuine moral grounding.

Rudyard Lynch [16:07]: "Hippies had existed since the 50s... by the final years of the 60s, hippieism had become a dominant cultural form... they built up a false mystical sense to rationalize hedonism."

---

5. The Impact of the Great Society and Welfare State

Discussing Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society, Rudyard highlights how expansive welfare programs and regulatory measures initiated during this period inadvertently led to societal dependency, undermining personal responsibility and disrupting traditional community structures.

Rudyard Lynch [56:24]: "He established large welfare programs... part of that stems from the realization that people are not as good as we think."

Austin adds that these policies disproportionately benefited elite aspirants within minority groups through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, ultimately maintaining oligarchic control.

Austin Padgett [34:27]: "DEI was practically the system trying to quell minority populism... it created buy-in for the oligarchy."

---

6. Societal Consequences: Family Breakdown and Increased Crime

The hosts discuss the negative repercussions of the 60s cultural shifts, including the breakdown of family structures, increased crime rates, and economic stagnation post-1971—the year the U.S. left the gold standard. Rudyard cites Thomas Sowell's analysis on how welfare policies desensitized the black community, leading to unprecedented fatherlessness and economic decline.

Rudyard Lynch [43:06]: "Black people have not achieved a higher relative status in terms of income relative to whites since 1970... welfare has done tremendous damage to the black community."

---

7. The Decline of the American Empire and Economic Stagnation

1971 is identified as a watershed moment when the U.S. departed from the gold standard, triggering decades of wage stagnation, rising inequality, and deindustrialization in the Rust Belt. This economic downturn was exacerbated by excessive regulation and the rise of megacorporations, sidelining small businesses and fostering an environment where the average worker lost bargaining power.

Austin Padgett [53:00]: "Separating from the gold standard increased inflation and allowed the government to funnel created money into specific areas, exacerbating income inequality."

---

8. The Legacy of Psychedelics and Eastern Religions

Rudyard delves into the lasting influence of psychedelics and the superficial adoption of Eastern religions like Buddhism. He argues that these elements contributed to a shift towards materialism and moral subjectivism, undermining traditional Western values and fostering a society unable to engage with complex, abstract concepts like God and morality.

Rudyard Lynch [66:03]: "The 60s saw grappling with Eastern religions... creating a synthesis that ignored the hierarchical and patriarchal aspects of these traditions."

---

9. Modern Reflections and Call to Action

Concluding the episode, Rudyard and Austin reflect on the necessity of rebuilding societal structures grounded in strength, wisdom, and accountability to counteract the pervasive influence of bureaucratization and moral relativism established in the 60s. They emphasize the importance of guided cultural reintegration and the role of psychedelics in potentially aiding this transformation.

Rudyard Lynch [84:07]: "We have to psychologically break out of the short attention spans... we have to almost entirely rebuild our culture because its foundations are rotted to its core."

---

Notable Quotes

• Rudyard Lynch [03:16]: "Our society is built off a sort of deception... it's a Marxist, multicultural, bureaucratic, atheist, secular society."

• Austin Padgett [07:01]: "The rise of the bureaucratic state led to consolidation, making it easier for the government to interface with fewer corporate partners to centrally plan the economy."

• Rudyard Lynch [56:24]: "He established large welfare programs... part of that stems from the realization that people are not as good as we think."

• Austin Padgett [53:00]: "Separating from the gold standard increased inflation and allowed the government to funnel created money into specific areas, exacerbating income inequality."

---

Conclusion

Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett provide a thorough examination of the 1960s, presenting it as a decade of pivotal change that fundamentally altered the trajectory of Western society. By dissecting the rise of the managerial class, the cultural upheaval brought by the hippie movement, and the long-term socioeconomic impacts of welfare policies and deindustrialization, the hosts offer listeners a framework to understand current societal challenges. Their analysis underscores the importance of historical awareness in addressing and rectifying the systemic issues inherited from the 60s.

For those seeking a deeper exploration of pivotal historical moments and their lasting effects, this episode of History 102 serves as an essential resource, blending scholarly insights with engaging discourse.

---

Learn more about History 102 and other insightful episodes by visiting www.turpentine.co.

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 everybody, I'm Rudyard and this is Austin for History 102. And today's episode is the 60s. And for a handful of things I should just throw out before we get started. Firstly, I'm on vacation in Mexico for the next few weeks and so the audio quality will be terrible for these videos. However, I hope I have built up enough social trust with you using my expensive microphone back home that you can tolerate several terrible quality audio videos. I brought one of my travel microphones down to Mexico with me, but it just broke and I think, yeah, that's sad. So bear with bad audio quality. The lighting might get worse because this is dusk. Secondarily, Austin had a point. He wanted to say in the previous video on the 50s that he didn't. So go ahead.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh yeah, and just, I guess it's a good cap off for the last one and intro into this next one. Big theme of the last video is talking about how socialist the 50s were in the sense of it was, you know, an empowered government. And ever since then it's. It's only gotten kind of more ingrained in our lives. So the left wing narrative since World War II is basically to continue advancing communism while increasingly labeling everything as right wing. And that framing worked on a lot of us when we grew up in the last 20 years.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, that's a really brilliant point because it speaks to two different. It speaks to something I've thought a lot about, which is part of the structure of our moral code is the inability to look at our own moral code honestly. What that means is that what our society says we believe is not what we actually believe. And our society actually has this implicit moral code that's deeply horrifying that we live through but we're not allowed to talk about. Part of the implicit moral code is that if someone belongs to one of the oppressed categories, you're not allowed to hold them responsible for anything they do wrong. And that's something we live by, but it's not. If we actually talked through that in a reasonable manner, we would realize that it's just completely insane. And what he said is great because the reality is that our society itself is built off a sort of deception. The first step of the deception is that we pretend that we are a WASP patriarchal Christian Anglo Saxon society and Then the reality is that we're a Marxist, multicultural, bureaucratic, atheist, secular society, because our society's moral code is built around basically saying that the old society survived longer than it did and then saying those the people in charge, even when they're in charge. It's a real mind fuck that. Our society, if you look at the left, they're like, we're going to fight white male oppression and the patriarchy while they have complete institutional dominance.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And we talked about it before, but basically you have the different kind of American politics that existed before World War II and before 1900 that pretty much got snuffed out post World War II. And this was like the old American classical liberalism, Grover Cleveland, down to the founders, like 1776 stuff. And the last kind of gasp of that was Goldwater. And it wasn't a politically winning formula at the time, even if it was a good idea. There could have been different things, directions, maybe they went with their movement, but the tides of history were kind of pushing in the other direction. And this is when it kind of settled into Bill Buckley with the National Review, kind of took over the conservative movement and kept it nested fairly well inside of a neoliberal, neocon framework. And that kind of started this new debate between different versions of more. Different versions of more technocratic society and the current left right paradigm that we've experienced in the last 70 years, which we're just increasingly discovering in the last 10 years, that they're really more alike and than a classic American opposition is to either of them.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Agreed. I have multiple friends who were friends with Bill Buckley, and they say that he was an amazing guy. They just give him the best reviews. And yeah, I agree with that. And you did a wonderful transition. So thank you, Austin. And it leads me to two books which make me think about the 60s as a topic. And those two books aren't really about the 60s. They're about the social order that came from it. Because I believe the 60s are the most important decade culturally in the west, in the same way World War I in the 1910s was the most important decade of the 20th century in politics, because World War I set the precedent for the entire century politically. And then the 60s, and I can't overstate this, the 60s are a cultural shift on the scale of the foundation of a new religion, a new civilization, or something along those lines. And we've never honestly examined it. And we'll talk about that more so in this video. But the two books are Leviathan and Its Enemies by Sam Francis, and Revolt of the Elites by Lash. And I've spoken before about Leviathan and Its Enemies, where the thesis of the book is that it's about how the managerial class took over America. And the book goes through every single subset of American life, between politics, between economics, between culture, and it does a great job. And I like to say that Leviathan and Its Enemies is the equivalent of having a book in the Middle Ages about feudalism, where it shows that, let's say, if you were a medieval peasant, feudalism was just the way things were and you would never think about, wait, I give money to my lord, then my lord gives it to the king. And this is all a system to establish a military control based off heavy cavalry. It was just the water they swam in. And it's the same with the bureaucracy with us, where the bureaucracy gained such profound sociological dominance that we gaslit ourselves about it. And the 60s was really World War I was the point when the bureaucracy and the managerial class gained dominance over the. The political and military order. And then the 60s is when that took over the entire culture. And before I get onto the second book, do you have any comments about that?

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, I always have a comment on the bureaucracy because it frustrates me to no end trying to articulate its effect, because so much of its effect is incredibly complicated and unseen, because there's very few people who understand even one industry fully, let alone all of them. Nobody has that knowledge and you can't anticipate what would have happened. But a good way to frame it is most of the time when people think of government and the state, they're thinking of spending, they're thinking of the size of its operations. And in terms of. In the way central planning works. And actually more communist societies is they own the companies outright, and so that becomes part of their government budget. We don't have that as much. Our central planning is done through the regulatory state, where you get these cartels of corporations, where in the late 60s, on average, the top four corporations in any given industry would control 20% of the market share in the 60s, today it's 80%. And that's happened with the rise of that bureaucratic state. It's the same thing that happened in Sweden when they went socialist in the 70s. They have all the same corporations as they had in the 70s. And what happens is you get consolidation, you get fewer companies controlling the market, and that makes it easier for the government to interface with those fewer partners to effectively centrally plan the economy. And it works out on both sides. And it's Very pervasive, because usually when a company gets disrupted by a new technology, maybe they have a big infrastructure like all the companies before Standard Oil, they had a very specific infrastructure for producing gas. And Standard Oil reinvented the model. And so now they have all these sunk costs in their old machinery. So they were not only getting wrecked by Standard Oil, but they were losing to new capital formation that was utilizing Standard Oil's technology and creating new systems while they had these huge debts built into this infrastructure. So then they got the government to acquire Standard Oil for them, and then they got to take over that infrastructure so they could stay in the game. And what this shows is basically if companies are prevented from competition, as is the case now, then they don't have to reinvent their infrastructure. And if they're not under pressure from competition, they're not going to because there's too many sunken costs in the way they currently do things. So all they do is increase efficiency within static models. And that's why planes, cars, almost nothing's changed in the last engines haven't changed in their fundamental format. It's all, almost all increases in efficiency over the last 50 years, except for. And new sectors.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. My goal for this video is to shout out as many different conservative authors as possible. So far we have Sam Francis and Christopher Lash. The point you made speaks very well to something Thomas Sowell said where he looks at biggest companies by decade. Because there's this idea that the rich have a stranglehold over America. I think that's true as like a social class, but not as the individual rich. Because if you compare each decade, you find that the biggest top 10 companies in America, 1970 until 2020, every decade they're constantly changing. And the giants of 40 years ago, like Sears or US Steel or Chevy, those are barely companies now, even if they survived. And the great giants of today like Tesla or Google or these tech companies were formed in the 21st century. And so capitalism has this naturally generative force behind it that with if you do not allow monopolies, capitalism will create this normal flushing system of changing elites out. And you're also correct, Austin, that the biggest indirect effect of socialism is installing a caste system, which is something people don't think. Because what always happens is that someone has to have the power. And a great idea, or one of the worst ideas that killed the 1960s is the concept that you can build systems without hierarchy, incentives or power. And that's completely inaccurate. You fundamentally need these three things. And there's just this vague concept of oh, let's love each other and care. That doesn't work. And so socialism creates caste systems. And you see that in that 80% of European billionaires inherited their money and 80% of American billionaires are self made. Because what happens in Europe is that someone has to have power. And so because the state has power, the state picks its buddies or certain elite families which already have the ability to resist issues. So the elites maintain their power. Well, in a capitalist system, there's constant rife competition. And this is why Europe's faced enormous decline in the post World War II era. And people don't believe me, but just look at reality, man. The Europeans lost the colonial empires, they lost industrialization, they lost technological advancement, they lost cultural dominance, they lost their population growth, they became dependent on the us. Europe doesn't generate anything anymore. And it's all completely their fault because they said they put these socialist policies in charge of Europe.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, and basically all we have is the new sectors, tech, which we managed to not overly regulate. So we've had a lot of innovation there. You see prices going down drastically and TVs, et cetera. And the part of the economy that's more heavily regulated is the material sciences. We're not able to have advances in material sciences integrated on a deep societal basis with individuals being able to benefit from that technology and create and improve farming or medical services or whatever. We're not able to innovate in those key areas. And AI is either going to help us. We talked about this the other day. I think it'll either help us radically catch up if we can get rid of the bureaucracy and the material sciences because it can help us learn skills quickly, or it's going to radically accelerate that growing gap between tech and the material sciences. So the stakes just keep getting bigger for getting things right.

[Whatifalth]

We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. It's a bull market. It's a bear market. Rates will rise or fall. Can someone invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 41,000 businesses have future proofed their business with Netsuite by Oracle, the number one cloud erp. Bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. With real time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. When you're closing the books in days and not weeks. You're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. If I had needed this product, it's what I'd use. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and sees your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com Zen the guide is free to you at netsuite.com Zen netsuite.com Zen Foreign so it's a new year, 2025, and one of the recurring questions I've already been receiving is should I start my own business? Can I do it all on my own? Now more than ever, my answer is a resounding yes. With tools like today's sponsor, Shopify, it's never been easier to start pursuing your dreams. Shopify makes it simple to create your brand, open for business and get your first sale, no coding or design skills required. They also help with the details like shipping, taxes, payments, and have social media tools that connect all your channels and create shoppable posts, allowing you to focus on the important stuff like growing your business. What happens if you don't act now? Will you regret it? What if someone beats you to the idea? Don't kick yourself when you hear this again in a year because you didn't do anything. Now established in 2025 has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com momentofzen all lowercase go to shopify.com momentofzen to start selling with Shopify today. Shopify.com momentofzen.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I like to say that the Two Avenues young men have for social mobility are tech and content creating. And the thing is that tech for the longest time, and I hope we're breaking this, was a cartel controlled by leftists. And content creating is also heavily controlled where due to advertising blackballers due to an advertising blackball leftists make five as much money, five times as much money per view as conservatives do in calculations and conservative channels are heavily, myself included, are heavily Shadow banned on YouTube. So let me pause it to this mostly young male audience. There are some others, but my audience is mostly young men. The system is trying to cut you off from the last two avenues of social mobility and you're okay with that? This isn't cool, but the point I'm I was trying to make a point there. So. Oh yeah. When you look at the sociological side effects of bureaucratization, you find a lot and this is one of the things James Burnham, another conservative author I'll shout out, talks about really cogently in the 1940s, where he wrote the book the Managerial Revolution. And Burnham was mostly right, and he was wrong on a handful of things but what Burnham said. And it's interesting that a lot of the smartest conservative authors were originally Marxists. And so they're taking Marxist analyses. So Burnham was using a Marxist materialist analysis, class analysis, to say that once the bourgeoisie lost power over the west, you would see profound changes on every level of society due to bureaucratization. And this is what the 60s were as examples. The bureaucracy sees all people as interchangeable, and they're incentivized to do so. Thus they'll crush ethnic differences, which is a lot of the cult. The modern civil rights, race, culture we have now stems in the 60s. The bureaucracy sees women as more compliant for the large system. So it's pro female on top of that. The bureaucracy stands against culture and against the organic traditions and religion and art of the society. So the bureaucracy tries to standardize and destroy all culture and art and religion. The bureaucracy. The bureaucracy establishes school systems that pride, that prize conformity and not taking risks and that stuff. And then the system hates violence because that is the way violence makes life more difficult for the managers in charge. And so when we. I read a lot of history books as a kid that talk about the history of the world as all of human history. Then right after World War II, we attained enlightenment and realized that everything else we believed before in history was wrong. And it's funny to read people who have ostensibly read hundreds of books on history and then they just believe this stuff. Because I'm thinking, yes, 99.9% of the human condition is wrong. We are right. And that's the old narrative that the 60s were throwing off the shackles of the past into embracing this understanding of like, they always use vague war platitude words like self fulfillment or self expression or that stuff. And I think. Or like authenticity. And I think this narrative is worse than a lie for several reasons. The first is that we are not actually a culture that prices authenticity. Humans are authentically racist and sexist and hierarchical and jealous. And humans have lots of negative emotions. And that's the underlying driver of almost all of our behaviors. And we're a society that tries to plaster over all negative emotions with a smile and sec. So I think the authenticity thing is just a stupid lie that's hypocritical and secondarily a lot of the 1960s concepts of, like, self expression and, like, experiences, they're not actually what they're saying. Where I would respect it more if my son says, hey, Rudyard, when I'm an older guy, hey, Rudyard, I want to go backpacking in Ethiopia. I'd be like, you'll actually learn stuff about the world. I support you going to Ethiopia. If he's like, man, I just want to go to college and be a degenerate and go to the club, you're just rationalizing hedonism. Like, that's not an experience. And of course, I have partaken in some of those activities. I will not be a hypocrite. But what I'm trying to say here is that the 60s is a society that just rationalizes things that the rest of history would see as things that are, like, necess, things that aren't that good as moral. Yeah, this is. Yeah, go ahead.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, this is basically, it shows another parallel between the 60s and now, because everything we're dealing with now, the seeds were sown in the 60s. All the stuff the millennial says, Millennials say that came from boomers. We just don't quite understand how. And, you know, it's their fucking kids. Right? Right. Yeah. It should be more obvious than it is, but somehow there's this idea that there's a difference. And what it is is basically the complete abandonment of Chesterton's fence because we came into this, like, nobody wants to be told what to do anymore. They don't want to be hemmed in by tradition. They want to understand why they're doing something. It's like the whole population at the same time just went like, no, I'm not accepting anything on faith. I need to. I need to understand how everything works, or I'm just not doing it. And we're kind of going through this process. Like, the example I used is, you know, fancy British dinner mannerisms where you put your fork down after every bite, you sit up straight with your spine really straight. And that seems, like, silly and stuffy and stupid growing up. And then you start, like, listening to Andrew Huberman or something, and it's like, oh, you know, if you eat slowly, it has all these huge benefits. If you have good posture, it has huge health benefits and blah, blah. So there was a reason we were doing it. We didn't know why we abandoned it. Now we're figuring it out, and the Internet is helping us kind of figure everything out faster. But still it goes through the lens of, hey, it turns out that Tradition was right.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So that's a very good point. There's multiple ways I can break that down. The first is that the 60s were a culmination of a bunch of different variables that came together. One is that the trauma of the World wars meant that people lost faith in the old order because they were so obviously horrifying. And it showed because the old order prized science and reason and progress. And then the world wars happened and it was clear that the old order was a lie. And so what people thought is the old order was a lie. So let's remove all tradition and then remove Chesterton's fence, as you said. The second reason is the near infinite wealth, where I cannot overstate how wealthy this society is. Where in almost any conceivable metric the 1960s was. The 1960s in the Western world was the best time to ever be alive in human history as an individual, where it was vastly more prosperous than today. By any conceivable metric. The average person had the highest chance of being able to mate and pass on their genetics of any era in history. Don't discount that. The third is that it was the most politically the lowest crime ever in human history. Highest social networks. The country was doing absolutely incredible stuff like the Marshall Plan, building the federal highways, putting a man on the moon. Physical diseases were at the lowest level. Just anything you could think of was amazing. And that's what a lot of the 60s order, what a lot of the chaos of the 60s stems from. It's just plain decadence. When societies get wealthy, they get stupid. Third reason is that the pill, it's. Jordan Peterson likes to say that the discovery of birth control pills is an event on the scale of the atom bond. And we haven't realized it. And that's something you can't understate because as I like to say, humans are motivated by sex to a degree where we're basically powerless to it. On the population scale, if you can make men do pretty insane things with the expectation that they get laid, because that's how powerful the sex motivation is. And it's interesting to see what the side effect of the pill was, because firstly, it was the culture of free love. And I don't really blame people for that. Humans are basically toddlers. If you give them the ability to have sex with no consequences, of course they'll overdo it because we're fundamentally silly. And then you had the sexual revolution. And fourthly, you had egalitarian, feminized populations which didn't want to have standards enforced on them, which is another historic trend. And is there anything about that you want to take apart or talk?

[Austin Padgett]

Yes. This is essentially like the spirit we're trying to capture is, is two dimensional. Half of it is exactly like the French Revolution where there's just this complete societal moment where they just realize that they don't have to do something. And you can't really go back to, to the way it was like with the way they neglected the Catholic Church and neglected all their rules and all their tradition and just everything was a complete free for all from during the French Revolution. It was basically like that. But instead of not having bread, having way more bread than ever before, it's a weird. And then that part is kind of like, you know, if you jump off a cliff or something and a crazy gust of wind catches your robe and you float down and you then neglect all the rules of gravity and think you're, you're safe and you get splattered.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I don't fault the 60s for happening. I fault it for becoming the defining social code for an entire lifetime. And this is something I want to emphasize, that the social order of the 1960s is our current age of history, where my process as growing up as an adult has largely been unlearning the things I was told about the 60s and the things I was told of the 20th century. Because in the world I grew up in, and I'm 23, so when I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, everyone listened to classic rock, everyone loved the Beatles, and we had to read five books in the Vietnam War when I was in school, in only one book on any other war, that being the American Revolution. So what that shows is that the system was completely controlled by the boomers. And the boomers, boomerism is actually a relatively comprehensive worldview.

[Whatifalth]

We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

[Sponsor]

Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere from self driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it's coming and fast. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? Time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or oci. OCI is a blazing fast and secure platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, plus all of your AI and machine learning workloads. OCI costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for networking, so you're saving a pile of money. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to oci, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters and Suno AI. Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI for new US customers with minimum financial commitment. Offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for this Special [e-mail] cognitive that's oracle.com cognitive if.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You look at the nature of boomerism, it encompasses almost every element of life between economics, religion, politics, economics, child rearing and the nature of boomerism is I want it now and you can't. The worst thing in the boomer worldview is judging someone or saying that someone is better than someone else. The worst thing the boomers could be is not cool. And it reminds me of a book I read, the Lonely Crowd, by David Reisman, who's another author from the World War II era, who I find very prescient where it's the best book on modern American anthropology. And he wrote it in 1947 and he says modern America is a lonely crowd. Where. And he predicted again around 1947, he predicted a culture war between rural and urban America, he predicted trans, he predicted corporate culture, he predicted America turning into a high school society, he predicted political correctness, he predicted wokeness, and he predicted all of this. He said modern America is a lonely crowd where everyone is in the crowd because they're lonely and they want connection but they're not being authentic. And thus it's impossible to actually break out of it because the entire society is this platitude of comfortable sounding things. And that's really what happened in the 60s where we exchanged our entire society for comfortable sounding things. And so now the lonely crowd has consumed everything where I would say the struggle of our society is the struggle of a society which is a lonely crowd in which it's impossible to get anything done due to this just obsession with coolness and obsession with appearing as if you're just. Do you understand what I'm saying? I don't.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. Well, we talk about this more in the context of kind of the last 20 years where it's it's not cool. It's not seen as cool to strive for everything, for anything. It's not seen to cool as cool to believe in anything really. And unless it's complicated because it was revolutionary. And then the last 10 years, a lot of the left did do, did start believing in the institutions as they kind of signaled really strongly in their direction in 2015. But growing up before that is there was Not. And it made sense to a degree because you had this kind of soulless corporate structure like, you know, kind of Joe Rogan talks about nobody wants to really work there. And then you have, you know, you can work for or do public service. And that doesn't really have a good reputation because everyone's kind of realizes that, that, that's a. That's a big scam. So with all these systems captured, there's nothing to aspire to. If you, if you try and aspire to any of these things, you're probably not cool. But. And you know, in the last five, 10 years and more, if you wanted to, there is an opportunity to aspire to counter systems. And this attitude of being too cool to care about everything still lingers on and it affects every facet of society, even the left and the right. It's not cool to care or be serious. It's cool to like and be outraged or insult or joke.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, you know, guys, being part of the new right is cool. Okay, I'll stop the site. But yeah, great, great. Transition again to another angle on this. Which is one of the best books that explains modern America is the Revolt of the Elites by Lash, which was written in the 90s. And the thesis of the book, and it could have been written today because it's so timely, is that much of modern America's culture is. The culture has shifted to a system where the elites have no responsibility for the people. And the entire system is the removal of moral structures that would force the elites to have any responsibility to the population. And this is one of the interesting angles where, for example, the death of family values, it leads to what Rob Henderson calls luxury belief where everything in the modern left is. Everything in the modern left is something that hurts the collective society for the benefit of largely the upper classes who have the resources that these things don't hurt them as much. For example, broken families, collapsed of religion, collapse of communities, the collapse of traditional values, financial crashes.

[Austin Padgett]

Covid.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. The collapse of mating, the collapse of the ability to compete economically by making a small company due to regulations. The importing of immigrants who lower wages, deindustrialization, demanding the managerial class through excessive regulations and oh yeah, automating AI These are all things which work worsen the general population for the benefit of the elite. And they tell, they say that they're empowering as a way to basically get people to buy into the delusion. But the fundamental reality is that everything in the 60s is about giving up responsibility. And when you look at the people who are Pushing it. It was college educated people who are at elite universities. So you're thinking, wait, these elite college educated people who are from backgrounds and in cultural settings where they have the self regulation and the resources to push these luxury beliefs is that they're hurting literally everyone else except their demographic.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. I mean, it makes sense too in the context of history. Right. There's so many things we're so stressed about. We've had so much pain over for thousands of years, like just getting enough food, just getting many opportunities, worrying about our lives that we, when we get to this place, it's easy to think that we can stop worrying about all that stuff and never think about it and we're past this point in history and we can stop doing all this stuff. And I guess it's also we, we talk about the boomers a lot, but a lot of this is also the silent generation. I kind of lump them together sometimes because the boomers were kind of kids in the 70s. So just some additional context because my mom got mad at me.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The 60s as we understand them were only like four to five years. So if you look at anything from 1962, it's going to look like 1955, where the first half of the 60s were just basically the 50s culture. And another thing to keep in mind is that most people in the 60s were not part of the culture that we see as the 60s, where for rural or for rural or religious or large parts of the country, the social shifts of the 60s just didn't exist at all. If you went to Cincinnati in 1969, you could totally think that it was still in the 50s. And however, the cultural shifts of the 60s were very pronounced among the college educated because this was an era of history in which we filtered for the elite through the college system. And the college system was taken over by radical leftists. And this is how the left gained control of society. Where the 60s, and as you said before Austin, they were our cultural French Revolution where the left gained total control of society. And even though the cultural shifts associated with the 60s occurred in relatively small groups of upper class Americans, it was spread through the university system and then through corporate America. So that the left was able to gain complete control of all the, all of the institutions as it has today, whether media, whether the government, whether the imperial bureaucracy, the school system, Hollywood, the tech industry, parts of the military, etc.

[Austin Padgett]

Yep. And all these trends were kind of happening for the last hundred years and really accelerated after World War II. And that, that makes me think of an interesting thought Right. Because we opened talking about how things get increasingly left wing while being painted as increasingly right wing. And the more that this northeast media, government bureaucracy, power is projecting this idea set through licensed broadband or not broadband tv, then, then the dichotomy between those rural areas you were talking about that were not affected by this, or maybe urban areas in different states, it grew and grew and grew. So it's easier relative to the monolith culture to point at the people outside of it as defining America as being more right wing as it continually gets more aggressive.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's a good point, because the reason this worked is that the technology, it's the reason that the blue pill era gained such dominance. And the blue pill era is what I call the era of platitudes that we're leaving now, which believed a series of ridiculous things like equality, the sexes don't exist, race doesn't exist, history doesn't matter, there's no God, there's nothing spiritual. There's like a dozen of these and we hold them with complete certainty and you're not allowed to question them. And so I've always looked back to figure out how did this start and when did it start. And the 60s was the takeover of the blue pill era over the world. And I think the reason for that is that this was the era of the greatest scale decentralization ever, where most of the world's important matters were controlled by two superpowers, the Soviets and the Americans. And then inside those countries. I like to think that a lot of the modernist worldview stems from the nuclear rooms that the great powers had. America and Russia had these global maps where everyone sit around looking at knockout. This city, knockout City. These are our allies. These are their allies because it creates this global, dehumanized, clinical understanding of politics. And that's how our elites view it. And our elites have a huge issue because they can't see people as humans who have souls and desires. So they end up treating their own populations more like cattle or animals or robots. And that makes sense because that's how nuclear war works. It's all systems, because our. We can only see in systems. And it's all depersonalized. And that's important because the, the way a society wages war will have profound effects on literally every part of the society.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Because it's kind of the central organizing principle a lot of times. Interesting. And then I can go back to another thought, unless you're on a trend there, your mention of caste systems and how it reinforces the caste system. This is A perfect example because you can look at India, you can look at how their caste system was really broken up by markets in the 70s when they expanded them. And you can look at how their caste system got a second life after Gandhi took over. Because when everything's reduced to the bureaucracy, then your only differentiating mechanism is nepotism. So it drastically. And nepotism will uphold caste systems. And you saw the same thing in the US with the black population because a lot of these regulations and a lot of these minimum wage things, they were, they originated out of keeping black people out of the white economy and putting a barrier preventing them from, from competing. And there were, in the 50s and 60s there were black cities where, you know, everybody was wearing suits, there were a lot of great businesses. The black family formation rate was slightly higher than white people at the time. I mean there were levels of achievement that many people only consider theoretical today. And the one of my more viral posts got over a million views was I shared this graph of black income relative to white since the Civil War, since 1870, every decade on average it increased 5% relative to whites all the way up to 1970. It continued to go up a little bit to the 90s and then slower and then crashed back down to the 70s level. So black people have not achieved a higher relative status in terms of income relative to white's. It's not grown since 1970 and it grew every year before that for almost 100 years. And one of the big reasons for that is people point to a lot of things. They point to redlining and all the abuses during the civil rights era and before that. But black people were much more successful under racial discrimination than an expanded progressive government. And that's because the majority of black owned businesses were small or medium sized. So when you have this enormous consolidation of corporations like that, going from 20% to 80% of the market share controlled by the top four, you effectively wipe out the majority of black owned businesses, basically everyone and all banks, hospitals, because those are also monopoly zoned. And so you just completely destroy these communities. And then you have the obvious welfare part of it. And, and you see those trends also impacting white people about 15 years delayed. And it, it's not really a consolation to white people that the few remaining corporations are run by other white people because we're also losing out on opportunities and independent wealth creation and all that stuff. And I forgot the last part of that point I was going to cover, but I'm sure it'll come back to me.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That reminds me of Two very important points. The first is the story of the black community and how it related to the end of segregation in the civil rights era. And secondarily how 1971 was the start of the decline of the first American empire. And so this is one of the things Thomas Sowell talks about that I thought was too spicy when I first read it as a teenager. Teenager. And I've kept looking into it, and it's accurate. Where there was a massive series of sociological shifts that occurred in the 1960s, largely as the state intervened to try to help the black community. However, the effects of these were overwhelmingly negative. As an example, in 1960, black people, they had families that were 50% more intact than white people. So the black family community was very. The black family was very strong. Blacks had intact communities. And you had very low crime rates, very low drug usage rates. And in the late 60s and early 70s, crime rates skyrocketed. And this is true for both white and black Americans. We don't really know why. And also drug usage rates, family formation rates collapsed. And now black America has the greatest fatherless fatherlessness rates in human history, around 80%. And it's also a community with just a lot of different issues where a third of adult black men, I think, are. It's either felons or the level beneath that. And there's two reasons for this. The first is that welfare has done a tremendous amount of damage to the black community. And Thomas Sowell writes about it because it basically doesn't provide incentives for cooperation because you. And this is something that always happens with welfare. Welfare creates dependent classes, whether the Romans or a lot of the black community today. And interestingly, anthropologists talk about how certain negative cultural traits started with the black community in the 60s and then spread across to white Americans and other ethnicities. And they call it anomie. And anomie is the breakdown of like shared culture. What started with black America in the 60s, then it spread to other races where you see breakdown of religion, community, family formation, etc. And the other thing is that I. The civil rights movement was laudable and got rid of the Jim Crow stranglehold on the South. And it's remarkable that Jim Crow survived as long as it did because immediately after it, racism became completely intolerable. And MLK got rid of the Jim Crow by using a similar strategy to Gandhi where he tried to basically tear jerk upon the consciousness of the Western world. And that worked really well. And there have been recent stuff that's come out about MLK with him throwing Crazy parties and cheating and that stuff. And I don't really care. I still like him. Like all leaders. Like, if you look at the life of any great man, there's gonna be a lot of weird partying and sex and certain scandals. Every historic figure you'll get has a few bolts loose in his head. Right.

[Austin Padgett]

I mean, it's multi dimensional. I don't like him because he was a communist, but I like him for other stuff. And I realized he had a value and his role in. He played a role and it was taken advantage of in some ways, but it had a legitimate role in other ways. So just. It is what it is. There's a reason why people reacted to him. And the dream speech is very nice. So, you know, like. But this brought me. I remember the thing I was going to say. Oh, okay. Going back to the caste system point with Jim Crow and the segregation, right. You had legally upheld segregation and you had a lot of pressure from businesses to change that because basically just shows how the rules enforce the caste system. And the end point of the earlier rant I was on with the black income relative to white and losing all of the, all of their small businesses and getting replaced with this large corporate. These corporate monoliths is the. And I don't know if I've ever heard anybody else say this, but the real functional purpose of DEI within that context, because everything is fundamentally about, you know, like laws are about power games fundamentally. Even though they have all these excuses. What DEI was practically was the, the system trying to quell minority populism and get them on their side by putting them into these corporate structures in massive numbers using D I and then making a bunch of TV shows and movies showing happy middle class black families working marketing jobs in corporation. Because you get them and then you get them the degree and then you get them in these companies and that creates buy in for the oligarchy. And because they knew they realized they were starting to lose the rest of the population. Yeah. So that's like the functional purpose of DEI from the perspective of the oligarchy trying to maintain its power.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's a great point. And it speaks to a very important thing that I try to tell conservatives that when you look at the Democrats control over certain ethnic minorities as voters, you're looking at what was basically a buyout of those minorities, upper classes at the expense of the population. Because if you're an enterprising black person and you play ball with dei, your career is going to go so far. And the left is very good at Buying out elite aspirants of their demographics. And then the elite aspirants speak to the population and then they get them to follow along. So if you're a black person with initiative, you could follow the DEI plan. But then also let's look at what happened partly through the removal of their natural elite. You saw the breakdown of black communities. And then also look at my home city of Philadelphia. The rise in crime and all these other issues made the rust. Made the downtowns of the Rust Belt uninhabitable cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati. And this resulted in the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt, which a lot of you would know. That's one of the most important things of my life because I'm from Pennsylvania, where deindustrialization is my biggest political issue. And those factories first moved to the south and then they moved to Mexico or China or the Philippines. And the reasoning for that is partly the increases in crime and secondarily the rise of socialist governments across the Rust Belt, which were often quite criminal and corrupt. And so they disincentivized people make for making businesses in the Rust Belt felt because. Because just it wasn't a good place to make business. And so what happened is that in exchange for their top elite aspirants getting so many goodies from the left is that the average black person, average woman, average working class American, lived vastly worse lives as women's mental health and women's mental health crashed their children crashed, crashed their child, the birth rate crashed. Black people saw all the issues mentioned above, and then the working classes saw their decrease in income. And I'm going to keep emphasizing the stuff like community and family and religion because for most people, those are the most important things of you in your life. If that's not the case, it's because you're a certain tier of elite or you're. Or you're like a hermit who just has specific interests. And 1971 is such an important year. And I see it that way partly because it's right after the moon landing, where the moon landing is the final extension of the Faustian spirit. The European man finally saw the moon. And then at that point we had attained the furthest level we could by just discovering stuff around the Earth. And then we turned in on ourselves. And isn't it. I want to focus on this for a second. Isn't it incredible? The moon landing is so epic that people a generation later said it couldn't have happened because our technology and society degraded that quickly.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, well, There's a lot of angles to go on on that one. I feel like every other insta reel I see about it, I changed my mind on the moon landing, but I think it happened.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I mean, the reason.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, go ahead.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Is that the Soviets, if it didn't happen, the Soviets would have figured it out and then they would have just pulled the rug and told us the American was faking it. The nature of the Soviet and the American plans working at the same time means it's difficult to fake. And on top of that, filming on the moon with the reels of the moon landing, it would be. You would be incapable of simulating some of the stuff we saw on the moon with the filming technology of that era. But the thing with the moon landing is that after it, you see the decline of a lot lot of American society where there's this website, what the fuck happened in 1971? Which is 1971 is the year we left the gold standard. And then what happened is that American wages have radically have stagnated since 1971. Quality of life has stagnated, inequality has skyrocketed, the birth rate has collapsed. Every major variable of American life collapsed. Weight increased. If you look at any given variable, it starts at 1971. And do you want to go on a rant about gold about this?

[Austin Padgett]

Sure. And this is the typical libertarian point of we separated from the gold standard in 1971, so it increased the rate of inflation. And the government is able to funnel that created money into specific areas, which further exacerbates income inequality and the. The leverage of the top banks and top corporations who get preferential access to stock buybacks, etc. And there's a graph that you see where it shows wages separating from productivity. And the Fed is a huge part of it here and it kind of an easier to understand part. But I honestly focus more on the growth of the regulatory structure which happened along the same exact time period. It exploded through the late 60s, 70s and 80s. So it's the same. The regulatory growth and the Fed, it all happened at the same time and accelerated at the same time. So you can put different weight to each of them. But yeah, so that created. So the graph shows wages separating from productivity. Part of that is because benefits increased largely as a percent of pay, especially after the government created created rules that tied health insurance to corporations. So a chunk of that is not actually accurate. Income is higher than the graph shows, but the separation is real and large. And it's largely because, like we said, it relates to this gap between innovation and the material sciences. It relates to the growing megalith corporations because humans are more increasingly cogs in this machine and we're not able to participate in the ownership part of it. We're cut out of that. And when we are cut out of ownership, then you're going to be increasingly separated from productivity. We don't have bargaining power. We don't have ownership. We're not able to forge ahead with an independent company or health association is just illegal.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The cultural changes implicit to the 60s involved removing control over things that do matter and giving it to the bureaucracy and then giving you control over things that largely don't matter. So the social order that came out of the 60s, it prized real religion. It was against war. It was against basically being financially independent. It was against traditional regional cultures. It removed all the things that for the rest of history, people drew their identity from and made them taboo. Oh, yeah. It made family undesirable and it made just being happy undesirable. Then it gave you autonomy in things that don't really matter, like whatever form of hedonism you choose. It's the start of Brave New world. Do you have thoughts on Johnson's Great Society Society?

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, I guess everything we've been talking about. I kind of consider Johnson's Great Society because he kicked off the welfare. He kicked off a lot of the regulatory stuff. Acceleration. He probably helped kill jfk. I mean, he did a bunch of stuff.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So for those that don't know, LBJ was a Scots Irish politician from San Marcos, actually south of Austin in. He's from these parts and he is a hard guy. And he is very. He was. He cared a lot at the political craft, if you're interested. Everyone keeps telling me that John Caro's like several thousand page autobiography of lbj. It's one of the best histories ever written. I have no interest in reading 4,000 pages in the 60s. So he established a large welfare program partly because he grew up poor. And the welfare program. Program basically had all of the large effects that we are describing culturally, indirectly. And a lot of that stems from the realization that people are not as good as we think. So if you give people incentives to not work, you will and cooperate. You'll see the breakdown of all of these cultural formations that we've spoken about before that exist to make life more tolerable. And so it makes the public dependent on the government and intercedes the government into all independent relationships. And a lot of this was genuinely done by communists. And we haven't been honest about the cultural importance communism has had in recent history. And I like to say the ideology of our current society is stupid communism because it has to combine two negative traits, envy and greed. And the only way to combine envy with greed is an ideology that treats everyone as equal and says you can't judge anyone. Well, it also says that you can take whatever you want whenever you want. And it's basically the two worst traits of feminine nature combined. And so stupid leftism is like, whoa, man, let's have an image of Castro and then sell Starbucks. Whoa, man, what if we all loved each other? And by loving each other, I mean having five side chicks at once. Where it's the. It's conflation of hedonism with Christian love. Where you look at the 1960s culture and it's all you need is love. And I don't think they mean like agape, like the platonic concept of love. They basically mean sex. And again, I don't fault the 60s for being obsessed with sex. You did just invent the pill, so. So no human could resist that. But the order, the thing about hippies and hippies were the dominant cultural force of the 60s. Hippies had existed since the 50s and they gradually bubbled up. And so by the last final years of the 60s, hippieism had become a dominant cultural form. And hippieism is like this rough constellation where it contains some mystic elements, but they weren't really serious about that. And it's like, whoa, man, let's just chill and vibe. And it's a culture. Do you have a better explanation of hippie culture than I do?

[Austin Padgett]

I was kind of listening to yours.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Oh, an example of hippie culture, I'll give, is that my grandpa grew up in a pretty wealthy family in Nebraska, and then he chose to be a hippie and then stopped working a regular job, then stopped giving up the family business. And then my mom grew up in poverty as a side effect of him being a hippie. And the point I'm trying to convey here is that hippieism takes a lot of moral assumptions about the world, about basically treating weakness as a form of moral weakness and irresponsibility as a form of moral goodness, while at the same time actually allowing the abdication of serious responsibility. And I respect genuine religious and monastic orders where if you're a Dominican or a Franciscan, you go out in a monastery and you honor God and you meditate and you pray and you're genuinely trying to escape worldly things. And then hippies do the opposite, where they Build up a false mystical sense to rationalize hedonism.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, I think the hippies in that time were really fascinating and maybe we can talk about the shadow side of it that maybe was an appropriate response like because a lot of hippie stuff was revolting against this kind of soulless cog in the machine society. It's just that the hippie story of the 60s, the way that they evolved, their hero's journey, was basically reconciling the fact that they would be the man. And wondering. I saw this video of a bunch of kids in the 60s in a bar talking about like how society was crazy, but like, are we going to be the man? And then what are we going to do when we're the man? And they, I think they, most of them grew out of that and became really, really kind of neurotic, blue pilled administrators of the thing that they were rebelling against. Yeah, but in the current counter political switch, there's a role for hippie, you see the like rfk free speech liberals that like the good parts of that hippie culture are manifesting in separate groups. Like the two parts of the hippie personality in the 60s is split and there's something valuable there. And I've, you know, it's like combining businessman with hippie is kind of like the new, what do you call it? Super uberman.

[Rudyard Lynch]

One of the things I find indefensible is the boomers in their youth were for irresponsibility and degeneracy. In their middle age they were for making money. And in their, in their old age they were totalitarians. And the thing that's indefensible about it is they just rationalize whatever their, whatever is in their self interest.

[Austin Padgett]

That's funny.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I find it disgusting that like the boomers were for free speech and rebelliousness and that stuff in their youth. And now those very same people are actively cracking the people who are for those things today. Because if you're part of the new right, that's the new counterculture, the new punk. And the very same people who when they were younger were actively supposedly for those things turned on them. And I feel deep resentment that there were like when I'm a young guy, when I was growing up, the entire society, society said authenticity, individuality, fight against authority, be live your true self. And then the second it became inconvenienced, they threw all those moral codes out the door. And now the New York Times is literally saying, don't think for yourself. The Atlantic, like all of the content now from the Mainstream media has just shut up Wagey. And I think the hypocrisy is just disgusting.

[Austin Padgett]

They code switched in 2015 where it suddenly became like. It became like pretending they're not in power to all right, let's consolidate our power and kill everybody.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

This is our moment and it failed. And JD Vance is kind of a good example of that integration on in a different way than rfk just by the fact that he has a beard and he's a little bit out, you know.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Outside of polite normal society or woke society in the way he addresses things or talks to people. And you know, seven 60s beards, 50s, not beards.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, you are right. Where the order that the 60s came out of was fundamentally an order that was way too constrictive and it was boring and soulless and all that stuff. Because keep in mind, this was a time period where people were proud to eat processed food. And this was a society where people genuinely like thought corporate brands were there. I was going to say people genuinely thought that corporate brands were their identity. Then I realized people still do that today, but this was a very sterile, uniform society. And the irony is that the 60s picked up on it and they made it worse. And you have a very good point where Carol Quigley, one of my favorite historians, in his book Tragedy and Hope, which he wrote in the 19, like 1961. Interestingly, he was able to predict the rise of hippie culture and he called it the middle class crisis, where he said that the west had grown so wealthy that the bourgeois values that resulted in the West's material prosperity, like time sensitivity, like hard work, sexual propriety and the other values of the bourgeois class of which dominated America, he said that these had died. And the ut sud saw the rise of cultural traits that you see in very primitive societies, which are the hippies, like not caring about things, lack of sensitivity to time, lack of time, lack of trying, etc. Because once you get to a very wealthy society, you can allow the sorts of traits that more primitive societies have because it's so wealthy. But the point I was trying to make with Quigley is that he wrote the book Tragedy and Hope because he thought the tragedy of the world wars, which were deeply traumatic to Western civilization, in turn allowed the hope of a new spiritual breakthrough in the 21st century. And he said that he saw in the hippies the striving for some type of spiritual depth. Because Quigley said that the greatest thing killing Western civilization is the lack of any real religion. And I agree with him. Where I I do actually think the 60s set in motion cultural shifts that in the 21st century will have enormous impacts, but it hasn't occurred yet.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes. And then basically they had three options or two options really that were obviously in front of them, which was shut up and do what you're told. Become, you know, just conform to this kind of relatively restrictive society or look in all the right, wrong places for change. Because there was no movement kind of incorporating the best of our history into forging new values for the future. And there was just basically conform or bad ideas. And so those were the options. And now it's like, now we're in a better position to define positive change because we can't just sit within the castle walls and wait for them to degrade. Which maybe was an attitude that emerged out of the success in the 50s, where it's like, hey, everything was great back then. If you just act like this, it'll work. It's like, okay, that vision is dead and frozen. The left vision is destructive and we need to forge new values.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. And one of my friends makes historic cycles where he says, he says the 1960s was an attempt to have a mystical revolution at peak materialism. And I mean that in both ways. First of all, this was a heavily materialist society where like people would genuinely. People cared what celebrities thought and they would genuinely like, think about, if you watch 20th century stuff, it's all about like getting a new car, getting a nicer house. Some people call the early 1960s the Joneses era. Keeping up with the Joneses. So it was physically materialist, but it was also psychologically materialist. And this leads to two different ways where, where I think cultural, I think spiritual shifts which occurred in the city 60s will end up having long term historic effects that are bigger than we understand. And I think that material, if your study gets too philosophically materialist and materialist, as you think all of reality is contained within physical things, is that you lose an understanding of abstract concepts. So the 60s didn't believe in concepts like God or moral goodness or these highly complex things we built up over Western history. So they could only think in like, let's make more money and let's like spread peace. And it's this very silly facile understanding where I this was the algorithm, God's blessing me. But I saw this video today about, it's these people singing together in 1971, I want to like build the world a house and I want to love the world so that there's Peace. Was this in your algorithm? We have the same algorithm, those about.

[Austin Padgett]

Loving the world in peace. I don't. I think I missed that one.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It was a song from 1971 where they get all these like, young people from around the world to sing on a hill in Italy with a Coke.

[Austin Padgett]

Okay, I've seen that. I've seen that before. I saw other interviews of 60s kids recently, which relates to. But go ahead.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I saw these comments from boomers. Like, this was amazing for me, and this was the most important moment of my life. It was like a religious experience. And I watched it and I thought, this does nothing for me because I had to live with the consequences of what this entailed.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. The consequences of the message.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. Because I finished a book today, King of the Mountain. It's a pretty good book. And at the end of the book, like, he's a fair author. I'm not going to criticize him. But at the end, he uses the normal managerial class answer that we have. The way to stop war is to create a global anticulture, humor, homogenous culture that pushes against war at all costs. And I thought, wait, we did that. And it was more despotic than the previous society that was pro war. And this is the law of unintended consequences. As our mutual friend Andrew Heaton has a thing on Reason tv. Like Unintended Consequences, right?

[Austin Padgett]

Yes. Like a series.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah. But two psychological, two spiritual revolutions in the 60s. The first is the CIA's research into the spirit world, which was really big in the 60s. And this is one of those things I made a video about. But I'm so shocked the public hasn't touched on, because you guys realize that the CIA and the Soviets and the Czechs and Europeans. So these three countries, or Europe, Russia and America, they all have hundreds of hours of research into the spirit war world, where they were able to get people to replicably and hundreds of people to replicably go to the spirit world, talk to different gods and demons, and make a map of the spirit world. And then they also have hundreds of records of psychics deriving information that would otherwise be impossible to find. So the Americans used psychics to find Russian military bases, and they used it to read statistically significant numbers and rooms either side of the country. And so this is stuff again, multiple superpowers have agreed on this, and it's made no impact on the public consciousness. And you can say this is wrong, and I'm open to being wrong. Science is a difficult process, but it's remarkable that this stuff was declassified like 10 years ago. This has had zero impact in the public consciousness.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Well, it relates to the science video where we get really uncomfortable with things. Things that are hard to prove even when we can prove their replicability and a thing that everyone can relate to. With regard to this, I think maybe most people have chalked it up as your brain recognizing coincidences, like when you recognize time on the clock. I don't think that's it. Everybody has experiences with ESP where you're thinking something, someone else is thinking something that happens way more than you actually confirm to each other that you're doing it. So something is going on. There's.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I know that going on this discussion tangent will turn off a lot of people in the audience, but if you don't want to believe it, don't believe it. And I don't know how much of this stuff is true, but we should definitely research it. There is something important here. And I will say that literally every other society in history believed in this stuff. The most educated people in the west till World War I did, as well as literally every society in history. So we want to just categorically denounce it. That's silly at best and suicidally delusional at worst.

[Austin Padgett]

If you can be impacted by energy in a room, it's not that absurd to think that there's some sort of quote unquote wavelength that stretches longer distances than that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. The other thing is I think the psychedelics breakthrough of the 60s will have long term historic impact. And the reason I say that is that first of all, and people don't. Didn't think. I'm surprised people didn't figure this out. But cartoons and a lot of our modern art, like the Allegria, you know, the crappy corporate art with like block.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh yeah, Allegria.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, that's what LSD looks like. And so psychedelics have already affected modern art in an enormous way. And because when you look at the, the blocky colors and this is a style that came out of the 60s, that's what certain drugs look like, geometric shapes.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And also the 60s had this sort of grappling with Eastern religions where Buddhism was popular and there was no genuine acknowledgment of what those Eastern religions entail. You actually go to a Buddhist country, it's hierarchical, sexist, misogynistic. The Buddhist monasteries practice slavery. There are Buddhist nationalists sides, but so Western Buddhism, and I'm sure there are many honest Buddhists listening, is in most cases anti Christianity. And Anti whiteism. But beyond that, there was this attempt to create synthesis of religion and this understanding of how different religions relate to each other. And who's the, the British thinker who lived in California who wrote a lot about Eastern religions. You know who I'm talking about? Alan Watts. Yeah, Alan Watts was another thinker in that ecosystem. And the 60s was the breakthrough onto level six of spiral dynamics. Level six is that the world is innately very complex. And due to that we default onto. Any moral code is as good as any other. And this is the normal moral code that societies hit when they have decadence. It's comparable to the cynics in ancient Greece. And the 60s was moral subjectivism taking over everything. And because there was this degree of ideological, of diversity of beliefs around the world, the 60s saw the complexity of the world and they said, wait, we don't want to have to deal with the thinking. Let's just say everyone's equal. And this turned out to be a terrible decision long term because it allowed, it removed any ability to understand the world. And I'm going to point this out because this assumption that all cultures are equal and fundamentally we don't believe culture matters because everyone's the same. It was based off complete lying in the social sciences. So. And a lot of these people were CIA assets. Margaret Mead, who wrote Coming of Age in Samoa, which was the most important anthropologist book of the 20th century. It, she talks to the Samoans practicing sexual looseness. But the reality is you look at Samoan society, and we knew this for over a century beforehand, is that if a woman loses her virginity before marriage in Samoa, she and her lover will be clubbed to death in front of the tribe. They publicly check women's vulvas to see on their wedding day in Samoa to see their virgins and show hope they.

[Austin Padgett]

Didn'T ride a bike on a hill.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And she. And so she was being tricked by the Samoans. But I think she knew that because if she had to, I mean, I have anthropology books from 1930 that talk about this stuff. If she read a single book on Samoa, she would have realized, but she was lying. And she was a CIA asset as well as there was complete lying in anthropology, in history and politics, in philosophy. And, and it was just this blackballing of all of human history beforehand, where the science of history, of which I have taken so many influences, was almost all based around World War II. And then the science of history became taboo in the 60s, which meant we stopped the development of this potential field that could have Done a tremendous amount of good for the world. And so it was just complete pseudoscience. And I talk about this in the video the Greatest Lie Ever Told and. And you wonder when you look at this time period, was anything authentic? Because we know from stuff the CIA and the FBI release. And this makes me like a conspiracy theorist, but this is stuff they publicly say. The CIA was controlling the three news stations. The CIA was involved in the National Review. Bill Buckley, National Review the biggest feminist writer was the biggest feminist writer. She was Jewish, she was from New York. What's her name again?

[Austin Padgett]

So not Ayn Rand?

[Rudyard Lynch]

No, no. Biggest feminist thinker. Feminist, right her 60s. So there was another feminist thinker who Simone de Beauvoir, where her book the Second Sex, the argument implicit in it, and this is the most important feminist book of the 20th century, is that because I don't want to have children when other women have children, children, it makes me feel bad for not having children. So let's create these enormous state sponsored things to remove the concept of motherhood so that I don't have to feel guilt about not having kids.

[Austin Padgett]

That's brutal.

[Rudyard Lynch]

This is the biggest feminist book of the 20th century and no one actually fucking read it. It's the Second Sex and there's infinite amount of this stuff like Foucault, like we know a lot of these people were terrible people like Foucault. Fucking diddle ch. Children. And all of the big postmodernist thinkers who emerged in France in this time period, they all signed a petition to remove the age of consent. Right. And these were all people who were publicly communist. And I find it beyond infuriating. In the 1960s, the left established a series of strategic calculations which which they made out of purely acumen where we're going to deal. He emphasized the working classes and focus on women and ethnic minorities. And now modern leftists view these strategic decisions as basically the gospel, where they obsess over these groups. And secondarily leftist thinkers at the time, like Yuri Besmanov, Savolinsky, Adorno, Gramsci, literally outlined the exact plan that they were going to use communist infiltration of the. The institutions to destroy the coherent society. And that the one thing that could prevent this was Christianity. And we fell for it. They said it to us, and yet we fell for it. We are.

[Austin Padgett]

It's wild that, yeah, that. That proves. I mean, it's impressive, you know, when you can say something right out loud and then manifest it, you can definitely see the seeds of the terrible psychological motivations of the movement. Through the degeneracy of its founders. I mean, you can even do that with Marx. And the subjective framing is really, really annoying because you see it. It's really ingrained in people today as well. Another, like people all across the political spectrum who don't realize that the way they think is impacted by these same things where they say, I'm not going to make a judgment over this system or that system. Maybe this system is better for these people, or this system's better for these people. Or either system will work. You just have to choose one. I don't have an opinion. Capitalism and socialism are both good, both bad, whatever. Just if you do one, it'll work. You have to. This whole way of thinking is so. It's like you're not thinking.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

It's a way to not think.

[Rudyard Lynch]

In spiral dynamics, level 6 is the level where you get advanced enough, you circle back to being stupid.

[Austin Padgett]

Ultimate horseshoe.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Part of why I think, oh, it was Gloria Steinem. Gloria steinem was the 1960s feminist thinker I was thinking of who was a CIA asset. A reason that I to jump back to an earlier point and finish. I think psychedelics will have a historic influence impact is that people in societies wire certain neurological connections for what they want to perceive in the world. This is why previous cultures in history would see demons and goblins in the real world and we wouldn't. Because the conditions that they wired their minds with basically meant that they actually saw like goblins and demons.

[Austin Padgett]

Right, because most of what you're seeing, you're not seeing. You're filling in the colors, you're filling in different shapes. So if you have an expectation, you can see. Yes, you can see it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And then the west established a very strong neurological left hemisphere connection over the course of this time period. And so the left hemisphere, in the guilt crisis, the master and his emissary can only see the world through money, through power, through logical flowcharts. It can't see personal things or subtleties. It can't see change over time. It. And it can't see holistic processes. If you ask each hemisphere to draw a part of a human body, the left hemisphere can literally only draw half of it. The right hemisphere is more subjective, and it also can draw the entire body and it can get the correct answer. But the right hemisphere is humble, and the left hemisphere believes itself to be completely correct. And we wired our brains to be incredibly left hemisphere. So much so that anything that's not even remotely left hemisphere doesn't seem as exist in our society. Like the innate duality of the masculine and the feminine which powers everything. We can't imagine that because it's not an autistic, logical category we established.

[Austin Padgett]

The spirit world fits into that as well, actually.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Or culture or history or human nature. And so what psychedelics do is they're basically bombing the left hemisphere fears monopoly. And so what I think will happen is that over the course of the 21st century, you can see this with figures like Joe Rogan or Rupert Sheldrake or whatever, where questioning the modernist mechanist narrative, which is a narrative people. It was a narrative that had less thought put into it than you would think. That's become normalized. And I blame that mostly on psychedelics where a lot of these people will just openly say that they took psychedelics and. And it made them realize these ancient principles that people took for granted, like everything is connected or everything stems from God, or that human life isn't really about just money and status. And so I think a lot of the social shifts in the 60s will have long term effects, but for great irony, I think the right will do it, not the left, where a lot of the hippie traits that the left set into motion will actually be used by the right and left instead. Because you've seen the migration of the honest hippies like Russell Brand or Joe Rogan or that type of person from the left to the right. And the right has lots of different sub factions, but like the schizo right. And there's this like weird schizo faction of the right which is open to this sort of thing.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, that's exact. That ties really well back to what we were saying earlier about the split and the hippies and how, you know, J.D. vance is a beard, RFK, etc.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Like these things are being integrated and I think they're. I think your whole picture is accurate. But there should be a word of caution about reintegrating our right hemisphere because they're atrophied.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And we maybe don't know how to use them.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's a great point. And when something is atrophied, you have to be careful and you have to establish social institutions to do it. And if we do, I like to say that the sociological changes that our society is about that have. Will feel like emotion, like, like opiate withdrawal for a lot of people. Because modernity is a form of opiate where we have all these stimuli and we have all of these constant distractions and those sorts of things. And so for our society to survive, we have to psychologically break out of the short attention spans in the left hemisphere that modernity has. At the same time, though, we don't have the tools to. To do that yet, where you have to develop social institutions to do so. And our brains aren't designed for it. So it has to be a gradual process done with caution. And the other thing is that once you get outside of the understanding of the world that your society has, and our society's understanding is just broken and insane, so we have to leave just to survive is that the world gets very chaotic, chaotic and dark. And there's an infinite amount of ways to be insane and only a handful to be insane. To be saying right. In this process of cultural change, we have to stick together and stay accountable to each other to make sure that we don't go crazy.

[Austin Padgett]

That's why it has to be guided by values. Because science can tell you a thousand ways to walk through a field, but give you no kind of value judgment on which one to choose.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And it requires strength. We will have to have a lot of strength to get through. We as we have to almost entirely rebuild our culture because it's foundations are rotted to its core. And that requires a tremendous amount of strength and wisdom and determination. But I think we have it because the other choice is losing. And Americans don't want to lose.

[Austin Padgett]

Yep. It's the adventure of our life.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Facts. So I think we gave the 60s justice. We could have covered Europe or Africa more, but we didn't. So.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. America is the who's who's of the 60. You know, before the developing world really kind of started to take off, Europe was still licking their wounds.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

So it's all about us. Let's be real. I mean we will.

[Rudyard Lynch]

We might make a post. I mean Europe might get its own video. And also I want to make a Colonial Africa video. So we'll cover recent African history in the colonial Africa video.

[Austin Padgett]

Cool. And then one more point I wanted to make was. And it kind of related to your social isolationism. Like cogs in a machine, everybody in a crowd. But alone is even the concept of the nuclear family is a weird atomization of culture. The nuclear family idea we get from the 50s that was a product of people being able to have the wealth to kind of isolate themselves and not deal with other. Other people maybe. But there's a. And I mean relative to us, they were much more community oriented just because of the way things have gone in that direction since then. But yeah, the nuclear family is kind of an unnatural concept and it ties into the difficulties with people raising kids today and two incomes and the workforce and lack of support structure. And you kind of isolate things and do everything yourself. Everybody gets their own babysitter. Everybody does this or that. There's no, like, cooking in the town you live in. There's no person making bread. And there's. You can't get it on Facebook, Marketplace. There's no. Everything is atomized. And that's also connected to the bureaucracy, even though it gets attributed to individualism.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So the nuclear family has been around for a millennia, at least, where the nuclear family goes back to the early medieval period. And we have records that medieval people lived in the nuclear family. What I think you're talking about is the nuclear family being the sole center of all social life.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That is an outgrowth of urbanization, where humans did not evolve for cities. And the first time any country became majority urban ever was Britain in 1850. So it's no surprise that we don't have the social traditions necessary for urbanization. But what happened with that, partly bureaucracy, partly urbanization, is the gradual breakdown of all social connections. And I know some of you think, some of you who watch my videos know that I believe this to be mouse utopia, where you saw the breakdown of traditional communities, religious religion, families. You saw the breakdown of almost every organic form of society, because that was all founded upon stable communities. People knew each other for their whole lives. And so the constant jostling of cities meant that. That these sorts of organic traits that just formed in previous societies without even thinking about them, that they vanished, and they're vanishing without any kind of counterveaning force now. And I know to end on this, I am sad to say that I believe the 1960s would be the first step of mouse utopia.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. So hopefully we can expand those horizons and free ourselves from the mouse trap.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. I refuse. Squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, Squeakers.

[Whatifalth]

In the Future, you, 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.