← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining the Age of Neo-Liberalism
02:16:29
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- [00:00]
Austin Padgett
We heard you.
- [00:01]
Rudyard Lynch
Nine years of bring back the snack wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the Hot Honey Snack Wrap. Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist, Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in. Hi everybody. Welcome to another Episode of History 102 with me, Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett. And today's episode is on the rise and fall of the age of neoliberalism.
- [00:44]
Austin Padgett
Yes, and great shirt you have there for it. 2008 global financial crisis. I was going to leave Wall Street.
- [00:52]
Rudyard Lynch
I was going to leave it silent to see who noticed, but it fundamentally doesn't matter. I like this shirt. I saw a rapper wear it and I thought, that is pure ironic gold. So I ordered it myself.
- [01:04]
Austin Padgett
Nice. Well, rappers are the coolest people in Society since the 2008 global financial crisis, so maybe they played it best.
- [01:15]
Rudyard Lynch
Insert disgust noises.
- [01:18]
Austin Padgett
I don't listen to hip hop.
- [01:22]
Rudyard Lynch
And so this is the most recent video we have so far. And that's something that I am careful about. Where most histories kind of give up in the previous lifetime before their authorship, where histories that right now give up around the world wars. There's a especially. I found this with the history of California and it's generally true, where when you read histories of California, the author stops being able to be critical about the ruling regime past the start of the 20th century. So the robber barons of the 19th century were bad and the robber barons of the 20th century were okay because they were leftists. And if you read books from the early 20th century, the world wars era, they do that for the 19th century. I have a history by this Scottish author from the Napoleonic era called Titler, which stops at the start of the 18th century or a century before he was writing. And a reason for that is that we don't really know what direction historic events are going to take until a significant amount of time afterwards. And if I had made this video even a decade ago, I mean, I would have been friggin 14 years old.
- [02:41]
Austin Padgett
You may have made this.
- [02:42]
Rudyard Lynch
No, I think I probably. I could probably could have. I'm just curious what I would have said because I was. I started the channel when I was 13. I think I made a. What if the great financial crash happened? What if the great financial crash never happened? When I was 17. And so when you divide up these eras of history, you have to think, how do we deal with recent history in a way that's realistic and respectable, respectful of the historic distance? And the reason that I'm so harsh on presentism or people like bringing up sort of very momentary stuff is that whenever I look at when I tried to be presentist years ago, it never ages well. Where I remember in 2013, you had movies like, I don't know, like Jurassic park, level 12 demon slaughter. I'm making sound way cooler than it was. It was Jurassic park, big dinosaur fights, big King Kong. And this was a big thing at the time, and culture revolved around it. But then you look back and you thought, I don't remember anything about that movie. And so that's the really the issue you have when you deal with current or recent history. And I'll read these authors from the classical world or from the a century ago, and they'll make references to this actor said blank, this socialite said blank. And it just doesn't age well. And so when you're looking at the sort of the very recent history, it's difficult because, first of all, you are enchanted by that era's ideology. And one of the things. I wrote a book of alternate histories when I was a teenager. And for the introduction, I said, when you read these alternate histories, most of them will appear worse than our current timeline. The reason for that is that your moral code was designed for the timeline you live in. So when you're perceiving these alternate timelines, they might appear bad, but people in these timelines would look back at you and think, our timeline is bad.
- [04:39]
Austin Padgett
Right? And you might be right, but still, people would come up for a justification and a story for why what worked out the way it did was the best thing in an alternate timeline.
- [04:49]
Rudyard Lynch
I was watching this alternate history YouTube channel when I was a teenager. Alternate history was, of course, my obsession for seven years. It's funny that people who are new from the channel, new to my channel, they just don't know that that was my backstory. I did it from ages 13 to 18 or 18 or 19, whatever. And I watched this alternate history YouTube channel saying, a timeline where America conquers Canada and The War of 1812 is deeply implausible. And we have to sort of take it face value how implausible America conquering Canada would be. And I thought to myself, we currently have 10 times Canada's population. We did 200 years ago as well. They've been constant where for all of our history. America has had 10 times Canada's population, and we totally could have. But this sort of mindset of whatever happens in history needs to happen. This is sort of like the weak dialectic that it's all part of the progress. It really shuts off any understanding of human agency in either the past or the present.
- [06:04]
Austin Padgett
Right. Because it feels kind of deterministic. I. I think a logic to it that kind of makes sense is that people are sensitive to catastrophic risk. So, like, the ultimate goal is survival. And so if you say, hey, if we tinker in this timeline, we could have made it better in this way or this way. And they're like, what are you talking about? We're alive. We, we survived. We're alive. Listen, don't mess with it. You know, there's. It's kind of like an element of that also. We can't change the timeline, so it doesn't matter. It's like a hypothetical to explain things. Don't worry, we're not going to back to the future. Your birth.
- [06:39]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, that's a good segue to the sort of era of neoliberal dominance. And as I divide up recent history, this is my mental categorization system. So the age of neoliberal dominance, this is going to be the political situation around the world from the end of the Cold War until Trump and Covid, where this was an era of the highest degree of global uniformity ever. But it was done so in a really weird, disconnected way. And you have to sort of pull. Peel away the edges of the illusion to figure out how this is the era of the end of history and how that myth dominated the entire world. And so I'm also going to subdivide this era into a different. A series of different topics. So the age of neoliberalism was the post Cold War increase in capitalism and democracy around the world, which was the greatest breakthrough in, in wealth and quality of life and freedom ever in human history. And within a single generation, like 30 years then, for the social trends that ended up in mouse utopia and the societal decay, we're going to make a video in the future at the age of the last men. I don't want to make that video now because I want to have sort of have it ferment in my mind more until it feels sort of complete. And I want to read John Lewis Gaddis's book on the Cold War before I make a video on that. And I want our next video, our next two videos to be about the Pax Americana in corporate Era America and the Pax Americana is the American empire that dominated from the World wars onwards. And corporate era America is a term I've invented for the cultural and economic and political state of America from the end of the 19th century until the present, where corporate era America was the time period in which large corporations that had deals with the government dominated American life. And Houston Smith once said that in 1920, 90% of Americans worked in small businesses, and in 1990, 80% of Americans worked at large companies. And so how do you have that huge social shift? And so for the next video, do you want to cover the Pax Americana or corporate era America?
- [09:16]
Austin Padgett
I think corporate America ties into it pretty well. I was almost going to start talking about it now. Yeah, because you have the two conceptions of neoliberalism, right. You have the Thatcher Reagan kind of period. You have. It's associated a lot with deregulation or privatization. And then you have the kind of general picture since World War II where you get this consistent and then accelerating increase in the actual state bureaucracy, which is kind of contradictory to that idea. And they're both true in narrow ways. And we can, like, dig into that and parse the difference. It's kind of funny. We kind of got liberal. Neoliberalism was kind of like liberalism for the developing world and communism for the home front.
- [10:01]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, that's a very good point. You really nailed that. And it speaks to a handful of threads, one of which is that neoliberalism was the attempt to reconcile both sides of liberalism which were fundamentally different. That being French liberalism and Anglo Saxon liberalism.
- [10:19]
Austin Padgett
Exactly.
- [10:20]
Rudyard Lynch
These have been different since the foundation of liberalism during, during or around the Enlightenment. And Anglo Saxon liberalism is what caused the American Revolution and parliamentary democracy. And French liberalism is what led to the French Revolution and the Latin American juntas. And the Western left in general, which is the dominant sort of philosophic substructure of the Democratic Party and Marxism and the hardcore socialists are descendants of French liberalism. And the definition of neoliberal is sort of a watery term. I want to get to the definition first, and then we can see how the dynamic you're describing has played out. Where neoliberalism emerged around a generation after World War II. And Strauss and Howe have this interesting. These sort of interesting historic cycles where the Western world built out these significant bureaucracies to fight the world wars that were larger than anything else in human history, where Britain had a 95% tax rate, America had a 90% tax rate. And even by the time of the 1970s, which was sort of the first period of stress testing that the Western world had. After World War II people could start to see how constrictive these bureaucracies were. And so neoliberalism was the attempt to take liberal ideology, which had not been popular since World War I, and then rehabilitate liberalism so that it could become a global ideology. And something that Yuval Noah Harari made that I think is a good point that everyone forgets is that in 1970 there were less than 10 capitalist democracies on earth. And most of them were not really capitalist. Where most capitalist democracies on earth were concentrated in Northwest Europe. And then you had a handful in their diasporas as well as Japan. And that era was very stifling and corporatist in a way that we've sort of forgotten and was whitewashed by the society where you had only three TV stations. The government would give out these monopolistic contracts to these industrial firms to build these large infrastructure projects or stuff like agriculture was standardized under the auspices of safety. And neoliberalism was the attempt to figure out how do we market these classical liberal ideas to these modern welfare liking publics. And the compromise they came to was to fuse a technocratic capitalist agenda to these basically psychological manipulations that played into what the public wanted. And this is most evident in Latin America where in Latin America the spread of capitalism that happened with the end of the Cold War occurred because technocratic regimes would get voted into power. They would then give concessions to their buddies in order to stay elected while maintaining this technocratic agenda. These countries would experience economic growth. But then the underlying ideological and political power behind this sort of enforced top down technocratic capitalism was not there. Which is why Latin America cannot maintain consistent economic growth over the last few decades. Argentina is a great example where Argentina has this pattern. They've done it so many times, probably more than I even know where they will face financial insolvency. They will be profoundly irresponsible with their spending. They fail, they create a capitalist government. Said capitalist government gets wealthy and then they have to give away their goodies, which promotes envy and then the cycle restarts. And so I think there's some ludicrous data how much the Argentine economy failed. I think it might be like 10 times within the last century where their currencies just lost value.
- [14:49]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, they've been in an accelerating, accelerating inflation cycle. I'm not sure if they've, I mean, I don't think they've even had a free market period quite as much as Chile. But they're constantly shuffling through like their investment credit and to try and get more corporate investment. And now they might have a better shot. But it's, it's really funny. You describe neoliberalism as the way to like sell liberalism to the socialist population. Yeah, because I describe it as a way to sell socialism to the liberal population. And it's kind of both because it's the fusing of these like political pressures at the time because the socialism was popular, it got a better, but it got a bad rep after World War II. So it's like how do we keep socialism going when it's unpopular and associated with the Nazis and the communism? Oh, we'll do this market based, we'll allow markets, don't worry. But we have welfare and we're going to regulate them, etc. And that's where it gets into the Argentina problem is the regulation. And we focused a lot of times on big corporations and their kind of regulatory capture and rent syncing, which is a huge part of it. But it's also kind of like the responsibility is a little bit lower also because for example, you've got all the doctor associations right where they want to collude. They have strong ideas about the way they do medicine. They don't want someone doing medicine a different way to become more popular. They don't want competition from doctors bringing their wages down. And so it like solidifies into this respectability bureaucracy that has, you know, as far reaching of an impact as a lot of the corporate monopolies. So it's like it's, it's all of our faults, not all of our faults, but like the responsibility for this is more distributed than people realize. Yeah, it's not just like corporations regulation and people welfare. It's kind of like they bleed into each other where corporations get welfare and people get regulatory protections.
- [16:59]
Rudyard Lynch
That's a good point. I have a, I have an extra tangent there about how the only way to understand this era of history is you have to realize that in a coherent system like a global democracy, a global market system, global media is, you end up with a sort of projector screen. And the projector screen is designed by the people who are projecting it to be as easy as possible for people around the world to look at it and then put themselves in that their shoes. However, they'll say words that often mean very different things to different people. And so they use these words like liberalism or freedom, which will have wildly different meanings to people, different areas of the world, different areas of the country or for Hollywood, they have bland characters and bland stories so that people in project their own lives and stories onto it and then not realize they're doing it. And so, as I've gone back to study this era of history, I've come to realize that lots of different populations around the world were basically playing different games under this shared illusion of the one global system. And the lie of the system was that you were not allowed to overtly say you were playing these games because that was the sort of the end of history, where the shared illusion was the end of history and people would psychologically project themselves into this. But playing this game required a staggering amount of denial. And when you look at the shared projection of the ideological left or global capitalism or Hollywood or whatever, you have to remember that this was a sub coalition of a variety of groups who were doing this for their own interests. The big catch is that the shared deal in this was you were not allowed to talk about it. Does that make sense or do I.
- [18:55]
Austin Padgett
Have to articulate that a little more specific? Talk about what? Basically you're saying like they made, they reduced liberalism to like the concept of the good, which in itself is vague unless you tie it to a specific set of principles where people like claim to represent the good and liberalism is seen as good.
- [19:16]
Rudyard Lynch
So I'm going to explain this in two ways. First of all is that the terms liberal and freedom have radically different meanings depending on who you ask. The Anglo Saxon definition of liberal is freedom from the government and individual freedom from external authorities. And this is the objectively correct definition if you go back to the original. And the French definition of liberal is that the state protects you from the consequences of your own actions. So you have things like welfare or abortion or the huge bureaucratic structures or the abdication of singular responsible leadership for these bloated corporations and bureaucracies and committees, is that you are being free from the suffering of the world. And you can say the word. And so the word freedom in the Anglo Saxon connotation is, is freedom from sort of external forces forcing you to make decisions. And then in the French connotation, or the left wing versus the right wing, liberalism. The French have a highly confused term for liberalism where they. For freedom or liberalism, where they use these words interchangeably depending what subgroup of French you are. But it's freedom from the suffering of the world, which is not, again, not the correct definition.
- [20:37]
Austin Padgett
Objectively freedom from bad cheese. Yes. Like clearly taking this concept and applying it to a very loose way, as in, I'm not, I don't have to be to do this.
- [20:48]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, and the second thing is I am trying. I was thinking of who maintained the leftist illusion, or as I call it, the terrarium. Who is maintaining sort of the terrarium of modern consciousness, this hot house plant that can only survive with this total insulation because in modern life you have all of these hothouse plants like the woke or like Gandhi or these just Mandela, feminism, Mandela. All of these people could have just been shot or disciplined by society. I would not recommend those things. But that is how all of human history would have perceived this. And people chose to maintain this removal of Darwinism from their, from the world of overt Darwinism to replace it with COVID competition and calling out female. I'm not done calling out. Yes it is. Calling out the rules of the game is how you get invalidated. So if you look at the global order, the system attacks people who play the game overtly, like Iran or, or South Africa or the American conservatives because they will openly state we support our own self interests rather than the rules of the game. If you look who maintains the game, it's a shared illusion of a variety of groups who have a self interest in doing so. For example, the bureaucracy has an interest in maintaining the game because they're the ones in charge. Older women and younger women have different motivations. Older women often have a deeper comprehension of these sort of sexual dynamics and all of these Darwinistic games. And so when these conservatives, conservative authors look at toxic femininity, you have to subdivide toxic femininity between the wise older women who know all the mechanisms involved and are consciously manipulating this versus the younger women who lack the experience and they're following along through the female social codes generated by more intelligent women who are aware of these dynamics. And that might sound schizo to some people and I don't have evidence for that. I just think it is fundamentally true.
- [23:02]
Austin Padgett
So women become more self aware about COVID strategies as they get older because.
- [23:10]
Rudyard Lynch
They'Re learned through experience. Young women will engage in low, low trust covert strategies, but they're repeating their group's motivations. The people who are designing these systems are older women who have attained wisdom through experience and they're the ones who are setting up these complex social systems and then it ripples through the population through things like media or social media or social norms.
- [23:35]
Austin Padgett
So the young ones don't even know they're doing mate suppression. But some of the old ones are like more self aware of the game, which is, I mean, you could relate that in the international Foreign policy sense of. Of maybe Europe, maybe Europe's becoming more conscious of the advantages they get from the neoliberal system as they resist its dismantling.
- [24:01]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, I hope they will. I'm not sure they will, though. It's because there's this desire to maintain the shared belief structure which is not logically consistent. It merely operates through basically conformity signaling. And we utilize the conformity signaling in a variety of contexts to make people not question it. First of all, people who work in large bureaucratic organizations tend to converge on the view structures of everyone else in their organization, which is why the left is a profound ideological standardization, because they work in these. And this is true on a statistical basis. Leftists work in low agency positions with lots of people, because subconsciously, if they're an environment where they're powerless in these large organizations, they have to ideologically agree with people to cooperate because the singular individual who says no is slowing down these huge bureaucratic organizations which need to operate according to consensus. And so that's one. The schools are another mechanism that teaches this. The media is another one. And so what you're seeing is sort of a psychological system of control that operates through covert signaling, through conformity. And then through these sort of COVID signaling are all of these implicit unconscious assumptions that go along with this. Which is why we've seen social change over the last few decades that's so rapid. Because what the left did is they strategically picked cultural points they could seize power over, which carried enormous unconscious weight. So when the left seized control of the schools and the media and sexual and mating, they could use each of those systems for their benefit. And so as an example for to do the 1619 project. In order to have the 1619 project in your Overton window, you have to completely invalidate the experiences of white America. To say the real story of America was the arrival of the first African slaves. So merely creating that as the frame jumps over 10 different very important cultural, historic arguments. So what the left did is they picked these spots inside the collective unconscious that they could see strategically. And then they used those spots to drag the population over cultural issues that they did not think about. So it was a sort of sleight of hand deception where they forced your eye on one thing so they could steal you in other things. Because once, once they had control of the economy, through the bureaucracy, through mating, through the school system, and then the media, they had seized control of all the triage points of collective social interaction. And this is why I say that the system was designed by a handful of coalitions because it requires the bureaucratic skills to maintain it. But it also requires the implicit social wisdom that older women have. Men don't think this way.
- [27:11]
Austin Padgett
I think you picked a perfect timeline by going from World War II to 2020. TRUMP Covid, because I think that's the moment kind of the illusion of the bureaucracy fell. Because like we said, you play with these different terms. You can both call them liberals. You have positive versus negative rights. And the idea is we're. We've always said, hey, they're not liberals, they're progressives. They're totalitarian because they're doing all these things. And people are like, that's not totalitarian. That's just how society works. And it wasn't until Covid where you could really obviously see how totalitarian and manipulative all these bureaucracies were. And it's like, oh, that's not just like neutral liberal institutions. That's like a science cult and corporatism.
- [28:01]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [28:02]
Austin Padgett
And all those. Yeah. Bad incentives. And it's like, how did they have. How did the left have such awareness to so effectively take over these institutions? Like, I just saw something that Curtis Yarvin was talking about where there's a ngo, or I don't know what the term for it is, but basically they're the leading scholarship fund for humanities. They, like, dominate the humanities scholarships. And it's only like $500 million. And the left was able to kind of control the entire direction of humanities. I know there's other factors than just that ngo, but there seems like there's a lot of ways to make a huge impact with a very limited insertion, if you know where to go. And they seem to know.
- [28:45]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. I'll say two things. First of all, that I'm considering making a video talking about the different subgroups that maintain the modernist illusion. I'm not sure that I will, but the groups I've said are, you have the useful, you have the useful. You have the useful idiots who are the people who are basically delusional leftists who get played by the cesarean handlers. The cesarean handlers, the political bosses and the people in power who understand the mechanisms to control the population. And they often know that these are bad because they've studied political theory, especially the ones who set up the system a century ago, but they're just willing to accept the loss for power. The third group is older women who manipulate the system and set sort of social rules for mate suppression. The fourth group is young women and impressionable young people who go along with it because it's the social norm. The fifth group is the managerial bureaucracy. And then the sixth group are basically mercenary dependent groups like immigrants or minorities who are paid to go along with the system. And so these, and there's probably several more I'm forgetting, but these are the groups that spring to mind, the people who have convergent self interests in maintaining the illusion. The second thing is they were very good at maintaining it, except for Trump, slash Brexit and Covid, where when Trump happened, I had moved from Philadelphia to rural, from rural Pennsylvania to Philly. And I saw how much of a shift it was because I thought, wait, I assumed you people were somewhat similar to me in values wise, because we're both Americans, we both sort of live in, we eat the same food, we live in similar houses, we apparently are the same ethnicity. And then what happened is they started treating Republicans as if they were basically either second class citizens or political radicals that had to be sort of gotten rid of. And I thought to myself, so you want to kill off my entire hometown? Because if you're from a region of the country that's predominantly Republican, you're like, wait, do you want to wipe out everything I know? And like, not even everything I know everything within thousands of miles of that? Because if you, if you live in a place like that, you're thinking, oh, people in Virginia are Republicans too. People in West Virginia are Ohio, upstate New York. And that was sort of a bolt where I thought, these people are going crazy. And then the next thing was Covid. And Covid really clamps down because it was such an overt shift in people's biological rhythms because people tend to only conceive of the world in a realistic way if it gives them a biological reaction that they have to integrate into their life. And what Covid did is it, is it disturbed everyone's way of life. So it forced us to realize that something was wrong. And I was writing about COVID and I thought to myself, this was a really weird period of our lives that we did not reconcile. And all of our time since COVID has largely been spent in denial to avoid thinking that Covid ever happened.
- [32:04]
Austin Padgett
Right? And we still haven't totally processed the lessons of COVID and applied them to our own history because we saw how, for example, the, the recommendations from the bureaucracies were driven in ways that benefited corporations. And that actually wasn't true from a data perspective in terms of the safety benefits they were talking about. And we kind of just like write that off as a one Time thing. But that's. That's exactly the same way that it started. As we talked about the F. Scott Sinclair example with the Jungle, we've mentioned it in other episodes, but basically it was like a fake media story that was hyped up to pass certain rules that had been planned 20 years before. Just like the COVID Response emergency disease center stuff was all written up 20 years ago. And so it's like, we've always had the yellow journalism. We didn't fix it or get rid of it. And there's this concept, the neoliberal concept is. Or the way that it's been played in culture is that it's, you know, these. The. The right for these big corporations against the little guy. And then you're like, wait, why did every Fortune 500 employee donate to Michelle Obama? I mean, not Michelle Obama, Kamala. Like, how does that square? And. And what they would say forever. Like, when I was coming up in politics as a millennial 2010, all these liberals would say, how would they explain that the poor people voted Republican in a lot of these rural states? And they said they were basically idiots, right, who thought they were going to be able to be a millionaire. But in reality, they understood very well that the progressive bureaucracy was killing their businesses, killing their livelihoods, killing their towns. And they didn't maybe exactly understand how. Exactly how the progressive bureaucracy was doing that, but they knew that this wasn't benefiting him. Despite the left trying to gaslight people into thinking that they were good for the poor.
- [34:03]
Rudyard Lynch
Obama said that people in central Pennsylvania were holding onto guns and religion because they feared progress. And that was a big talking point where I grew up, because people resented it very deeply, and they took it as a statement of, oh, these people literally don't care if we die. And so you saw stuff like that seep in. And it's why I thought Trump might win Pennsylvania in 2016. I looked at the rest belt, and I found I'm surprised this doesn't have a political ramification, because it's so evident. If you grew up in the Rust Belt, I thought, wait, no one's talking about this. This hasn't impacted politics yet. That's very weird because no one knows.
- [34:40]
Austin Padgett
What to do about it, right? Because they're like, they're. They're told that they lost business because of greedy corporations, or maybe they think it's because of competition from overseas, undermining wages or something. So they know, like. And that's when it gets into the Trump going after the trade agreement. So people Know something is wrong. Yeah, not exactly what, but now that they're fighting the system, it's working out because the system wasn't doing it right.
- [35:13]
Rudyard Lynch
One thing is that this era of history is really weird because firstly you have centralized mass communication you can't talk back from, which changes to interactive group communication, where with the TV they can say these really weird things and that are just not true, but you can't talk back to the tv. And also you don't compare notes with the tv. Who are you to say no to the tv? And then the combination of Marxist disorientation campaigns, which gain significant cultural power, as well as the bureaucracy weakening free association and the Internet and tv, is that people became progressively more atomized. And so you saw the breakdown of organic social communication. And so people listened to the TV and the public authorities more, which further atomized them. And then it became a cycle where it became difficult to reintegrate because people had lost the habits, the habits and the social traditions that allowed organic social cooperation. And so you see a progressive atomization as the narrative makes less sense over time. And there's sort of no mechanism to organize. And it's really remarkable how far the illusion got. And it worked in practically every Western country except a former a handful in the former Iron Curtain. In its potent in America, it had more fight more. More ability to fight back. But the reason that it fought back harder in America was due to two historic great men, that being Elon and Trump. And you compare every other Western trajectory and they are having the same issues as America, where our GOP is not willing to deal with these underlying issues as a party. There are GOP politicians who are what the Boomer Khan establishment by and large is not. And Trump reset the gop and then Elon bought Twitter and tried to help the 2024 election. And those were the two events that gave America enough breathing room to develop counter elites. But this did not occur in Canada, Australia or Western Europe. And the reason America could generate two great men is that we had unleashed enough capitalism with the Reagan period and the neoliberalism afterwards that there was enough chaotic innovation to generate natural elites. Natural elites are an Aristotelian concept of people who do great tasks in the society and then are given status because they are respected. The bureaucracy tries to shut off the generation of natural natural elites because natural elites are formed through dealing with chaos, that being capitalism or foreign barbarians or discovering new things. And so in the neoliberal era, the only places that generated natural elites were the ones that were not regulated because they did not touch material reality. So that was either tech and finance. Because one of the things I found with conservative world is that the tech right is aware of, of a lot of the current issues. A lot of the GOP is not. And I found that deeply concerning. But it's also interesting that the tech right is more awake to these things. But I was driving across the Great Plains with my dad a few months ago when I was going through Kansas and Missouri, and I thought, these people are smart, they're hard working, they're pro social. There should be more going on here. Because you're going through the Great Plains and you're thinking these people could invent technologies, they could farm, they could do agriculture because it has enough of the active components for a successful society. And so I thought, wait, this area must have been screwed over by the regulatory structures. And the reason there aren't large conservative corporations is that the bureaucratic structures and the feminization destroyed the ability to have leadership structures which make manly decisions. And so the tech right is capable of doing that because they have enough new. Because the reason we had the tech revolution was the government wasn't able to regulate it because the government did not understand it. And so you could have these huge amounts of tech money that you form around singular individuals. And you could not do that in the normal economy like manufacturing or agriculture or pharma, because the regulations shut that off. Do you see the threads I'm making?
- [39:55]
Austin Padgett
Totally. A perfect example of that is where are the natural elites in medicine and like the medical field. Right. The celebrities and the people with the best connections and the most money were asking Joe Rogan what to do about COVID And they asked him a lot of other general health stuff too. I mean, they were texting him, being like, what do I do? What do I take? And he's sourcing from other doctors and things like that. But like the, there's, there's no natural elite. We're so starved of natural elites to that point where Joe Rogan is better than most respectable doctors in terms of his advice on that, which is kind of comical.
- [40:37]
Rudyard Lynch
It is. And I see it in my chosen fields. Or the humanities, where like I'm a 24 year old college dropout. I built my brand around rejecting the society and reading like 19th century thinkers instead of. And it's crazy that the older humanities have failed. When I was growing up in declining Philadelphia, I told myself, at least we get new history books. We don't have like new quality tv, we don't have new quality culture. At least when I go to Barnes and Noble there will be a new book on the Ottoman Empire that's fairly good. And now that's no longer the case because academia and the publishing agencies have been so taken over by leftists that it used to be history was a field where you could write about the Ottoman Empire and historians generally have understandings of certain things they won't tell the public. If you're deep enough into history, you'll sort of realize, oh, social conservatism is just culturally better because if you read out the Middle Ages or the Ottoman Empire you'll be like, wait, everyone involved here is having culturally conservative societies. And they're hit thresholds of societal sort of advancement in things like art or culture or whatever in social organization that we can't today. But then it used to be that you could write that and you could sort of read between the lines and now they've shut off everything that's not direct left wing ideological propaganda. And so the iron cage of the terrarium has gotten tighter. Where I. So I grew, I'm Gen Z and I grew up without TV in a rural area. And so I had enough space to have to develop an internal monologue and sense of self. But I think of Gen Alpha kids, you're always stuck in front of a screen, parents constantly monitor you. And when I was going to high school, I knew girls who would basically work over 12 hours a day every single day of the week for college stuff. How do you develop a sense of self like that? And so it's sort of the constrictive machine. It's been getting worse over time. So when you look over culture you think, oh, was this sort of, this thing escaped the machine within the last few years when you could.
- [42:57]
Austin Padgett
Right. They're using the conscientious and high agreeable filters to trap people with their own character traits.
- [43:04]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [43:05]
Austin Padgett
This miserable process and the accreditation for industry applies ties into the schools and the ideologies. Right. Because if you're going through the 10 years of school necessary for the practice medicine, there's like a 90% chance you're going to be a Marxist.
- [43:23]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [43:23]
Austin Padgett
You're either like grandfathered in or you're a Marxist or you're a foreigner who was allowed to be a doctor through that track.
- [43:32]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And also they do all this extra schooling and now they only hire foreigners and you have AI and automating.
- [43:41]
Austin Padgett
So it's 95% of what they learn in school never applies to their career.
- [43:44]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. It is a staggering Generational betrayal that no one will mention. And the reason no one mentions it is because we have centralized systems of control built off a false ideology that people do not check the notes for.
- [44:01]
Austin Padgett
And this is something like a perfect example of something the mainstream GOP will never have the creativity or vision to trust. Yeah, it's it. People should not keep expecting different results as long as Congress has the makeup it has. You need to focus on your local GOP establishments which have not been disrupted by a Trump being figure like he did nationally. So it's a, it's a totally different. This is like they're like a decade behind at least and institutionally ingrained. So you need to change that if you want to have hope of paying attention to Congress in the news cycle in a way that's not futile. Otherwise, just ignore what Congress is doing.
- [44:41]
Rudyard Lynch
It's important to see neoliberalism as the ideological equivalent of a marketed product where it does not require logical consistency, it does not require functionality, it requires the ability to see it on TV and think it is plausible enough and get as many people as possible behind it. And I don't think it's an accident that the advertising industry has been working with government propaganda. The two are formed at the same time with the advertising industry forming around World War I with the same people like Edward Bernays. And so when you look at an advertised product, and this was something that my parents and people around me told me growing up, they said when you hear the TV and you hear the sort of political, when you hear politicians, you have to remember that these people are selling you something of equivalent level of realism as a TV advertisement. They said if you buy toothpaste and the advertisement says it will make you happy, and you actually use the toothpaste and then think it will make you happy, you are a fool. And so that was the frame that I grew up with. And it shocked me that people actually believed the things they said. Because my assumption was always like, that people were just, they just did not trust faraway authorities.
- [46:01]
Austin Padgett
And people keep doing it. Like, yeah, there was an example of someone who felt they're like, oh, sorry, I got this wrong. I felt there's this headline about Trump and I believed it. And it turns out that wasn't true. It's like you still taking headlines at face value. You've been on, you haven't been on that side in like 10 years and you're still. Because I don't know if it's a biological thing where you just read something and because you read it you think it's true. And unless you make the effort to put up a filter, like, it's the automatic thing that happens unless you put extra effort.
- [46:36]
Rudyard Lynch
I see that for both blue and green, blue and red bubble people, blue bubble people, ideologically detached in ways we understand and we've seen it take over the world. I'll meet people who are from conservative religious bubbles in the south, and they'll often say these sort of like, norm, you live opinions from 30 years ago. And I'll have to pull them over and be like, hey, you do not understand. If you practice the thing you just said, everything you grew up with will collapse.
- [47:05]
Austin Padgett
Where you don't even agree with that.
- [47:07]
Rudyard Lynch
You were afforded the luxury to believe these foolish ideas because you grew up in a society where everyone was like a Christian fundamentalist. But if you actually carry out these ideas, you will see, like the little bubble of cultural safety you grew up in go away. And they don't have a comprehension of it because they don't know what they don't know.
- [47:26]
Austin Padgett
That's why censorship is so important for maintaining this illusion. And we've kind of slipped back into a complacency around that because for 2010 to 2020 or whatever we were saying, hey, the left wants to censor. They want to shut down speech. They don't believe in free speech. And it felt like you were a crazy person talking to a wall. They're like, what do you mean? We're just against, like, not nice things. Oh, no one's going to jail. Oh, it's a private company, bro. What are you talking about? You know, gaslighting into pretending they're not trying to control speech. And then they go full in it from a policy perspective, it's realized that they're manipulating the social media companies. Elon, great man, right? Saves the Twitter. And then Trump makes an impact in the office, prevents that Kamala from doubling down on a censorship regime similar to the UK and Europe, where we're watching this alternate negative timeline happen right now. And somehow back in the U.S. we're kind of like back to the point where we're forgetting this is a threat. It's like we've got these, like false equivalences emerging again between the right and the left, even though the most of the GOP is in that camp. And it's like this complacency is setting back in around this threat that not only we proved was true, but we can watch happening across the sea right now in Europe.
- [48:44]
Rudyard Lynch
Firstly, if you can't talk about anything, you can't think about it. So when we were in a social frame where the left controlled what we were allowed to talk about, we had to operate inside their frame because we were not allowed to talk through our own internal logical systems to build our own social structures. So that's why in places like Kansas or rural Pennsylvania, where most people are conservative, they'll still be operating within the woke frame because they don't have their own institutions to build their own internal cultural logic. Another example of this is that with all of these sexual dichotomies we see in modern America and these sexual issues, these emerged because Victorian, the Victorian Anglo Saxon world was uniquely weird for not talking about sex in private life. Where in most societies in history, and most at least developed societies, public life is for state affairs or business or maintaining your clan's face. And then private life, you talk about things like your own personal needs as a person, sex, meaning where you have this stark private, public distinction. And we, with the Industrial Revolution, we erased that. And so the inability to talk about sex in the society meant that you could say that men and women were the same because there was a pre established taboo on talking about sex, about sex itself. And so you could not say these sorts of things, which is why our current sort of sexual division between men and women is a metastasization of the Victorians not being able to talk about sex.
- [50:27]
Austin Padgett
Right. And so it's basically the taboo descending from public life into your, into your private life, where the taboo is all encompassing and then it's kind of like a so be it Soviet vibe, where, yeah, you're being thought police.
- [50:42]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, it's like that, like, oh, you.
- [50:44]
Austin Padgett
Violated the social order. You can't do that. Because even if you say that in private, that means you might say it in public or it's like a threat, proximity.
- [50:53]
Rudyard Lynch
If you cannot assess people for responsive levels of responsibility, it's hard to trust them. Where, for example, I have friends who I like as people, but I will not do certain things because I do not trust that they have the will to hold it. And so if you lose the ability to say that person is clearly superior to someone else, you have to make social rules that appeal to the lowest common denominator. And so that totally cuts out depth or meaning or beauty or any of those things.
- [51:25]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, if you don't have gum for everybody, then spit out your gum.
- [51:30]
Rudyard Lynch
That was how school was when I was growing up. I was once with the Boy Scouts and they developed a committee where the kids chose what to eat because one of Them was a vegetarian. They said, we're all gonna eat vegetarian stuff like peanut butter. And then the dad stepped in and said that was super gay and we'd eat meat.
- [51:45]
Austin Padgett
We had. We had anarcho tyranny basically. In my school in Spain, I was there for a year and it was super communist. And I got the lollipop thing happen to me where I brought one in. I couldn't have it because I didn't have enough for everybody else. And then the kid who was always acting up, always disrupting class, half the class was about him. He was laying, he would yell blah, blah. He behaved well one day and he got a lollipop. And I was like, what about everybody else? That not only is here, you're violating your communist principle, but we also didn't do anything wrong. Like this guy didn't mess up one time. So it was like the robber was getting rewarded and the individual couldn't succeed even.
- [52:29]
Rudyard Lynch
Whoa, man. They're energetically attracted to chaos. No matter the context where they like. They like things that cause chaos. The thing as well, when you deal with these people is you have to remember that they're not rational individuals. They're going through the psychological equivalent of opiate withdrawal. Where I will compare the neoliberal age to a warm sort of opium haze. So I'd like to say that the industrial world is line go up, line go down. And Covid was the switch from line go up to line go down. So it's a single sort of continuum of a mountain. And both sides of line go up and line go down are very different, but they're connected. And you can imagine that we as the individuals stuck at the top of this mountain, where you're going up it, and you think, oh my God, the mountain's getting higher. I can see more stuff. This is awesome. Then you see the top of the mountain and you see the way down. And this will ultimately last less than a lifetime. I will live till the point words no longer line go down. But this turn is very scary. And you have to remember this is just an individual moment of history. And if you want to zoom out from this moment and not have to, if you want, do not take this moment seriously. Because I'd like the start of opiate withdrawal. And so when I look back on the time period that created, I'll say this too. When someone's in the early stages of opiate withdrawal, their last thought processes are why they're not. They will think up every single rationalization about why they're not about to go through withdrawal. And Pennsylvania is the state in the country with the highest opiate overdoses numerically. This was just part of the culture where I grew up.
- [54:14]
Austin Padgett
I was going to say we replaced psychological opiate withdrawal with actual opiate addiction.
- [54:19]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [54:21]
Austin Padgett
And solution.
- [54:23]
Rudyard Lynch
And so when you look at the world that formed the Cold War, the neoliberal age, everyone was sort of high off this ideological opium where their decisions do not make sense in a rational way or a rationally self interested way. When you look at the sort of. The breakdown of. Let's look. It was a complete cultural shift between the fall of the Soviet Union and then the fall of South Africa and then the tilting of the third world regimes to capitalist democracies. And this was presaged earlier by the collapse of the European colonial empires, which were the same pattern. I need to make a decolonization video, but I want to read like an extra book on the topic. And Europe gave up its colonial empires in ways that are very historically rare by doing so peacefully because they didn't want to have to maintain the costs. And it was partly an Oedipal leadership class which wanted to domesticate the population and they were easier to do so without the empires. It was partly that the US which was bankrolling and protecting Europe, did not approve of the empires. It was partly ideological. Europe was also very wealthy and the west was a utopian society in the period after World War II. It's easy to forget that if you're young now, but the reason old people are so attached to the old society was it was apparently very nice. And so they have this very strong emotional attachment to it because it was genuinely a utopia. And when people thought they had already reached utopia, you ended up with weird psychological incentives because with the west reaching this supposed utopia, the rest of the world thought, let's imitate the Western methods and we can all live in utopia together. And so with the Soviet Union, Gorbachev emerged as part of a generation of Soviet leadership that had lost faith in Marxism. And Marxism as a materialist ideology has to deliver tangible results to stay in power. And Marxism was not able to do that. And so for the final decade leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, it was this weird hyperreality which Adam Curtis talks about. And we have a comparable situation where there was the stated public reality everyone agreed to, and then there was the underlying lived reality that everyone had to deal with on a daily basis. And people would code switch between these. And this is what happens in America today. And at the time Everyone thought the Soviet Union would last until the 21st century, but once it fell, people were shocked it took so long. Where the Soviets artificially inflated their bloated economy through selling oil to the rest of the world during the Carter era malaise. And they were just declining. Where they had a growth spurt with their baby boom after World War II, albeit less than the West. But by every conceivable metric, the Soviet Union was decaying. Their manufacturing was not competitive, their science had decayed, their birth rate went beneath replacement in the 70s, which is very early, they were dead culturally in every single way. Where people talk about the Marxists industrializing the economy, and the czars were industrializing it beforehand to a greater degree, but they don't talk about how Marxism is soul death for every other variable in the society. And so Gorbachev looked at this, and he was a student in Europe, so he went to all of these Western European countries and he thought, wait, why don't we just become a liberal democracy? And there's a story of, I believe, Yeltsin visiting America. And he did not believe that poor Americans could live in a house, have a car, have a tv. He thought it was American propaganda, but that's insane.
- [58:23]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [58:24]
Rudyard Lynch
He saw this stuff dribble in. And they see, they'd listen to Western music, they'd watch Western tv, and it would dribble into the Soviet Union that they were a far inferior society to the West. And what Gorbachev thought was, okay, let's dismantle the Soviet Union and make it a liberal democracy, like a Western country.
- [58:44]
Austin Padgett
Right. I like how, first of all, just the fact that he didn't actually know what grocery stores were like in the US As a world leader shows you the totally different nature of the information environment before the Internet. And it also is hilarious that Tucker Carlson basically tried to recreate that Yeltsin grocery store moment, but in Russia with like, oh, look how cheap this bread is, or something, which. There's a lot of factors going on there, but it's like, it's a funny reversal of that dynamic. And like, it ties into nationalism versus globalism. Maybe that's a way that you could give Russia some credit. But yeah, it's. It's funny. And it's kind of like the semantics of it made us complacent because the Soviet Union is communist, the US Is capitalist, so the US won, so capitalism's better. And whatever we do is capitalism. We don't have to be careful about what we're actually doing because we represent Capitalism. So whatever we do is capitalism, but it's not. We, you know, we got complacent and messed it up.
- [59:48]
Rudyard Lynch
Whoa, man. Reality is a gradient in which you can be a mix of capitalist and state planning economy.
- [59:54]
Austin Padgett
There is no. That wasn't real communism. Which is. That's why I don't like this framing liberalism as market or whatever, because it lets the communists get away with saying that's not real communism. Because if you look at Covid, right, and you look at the schools, their main book, they main author they prescribe is Marx Covid, you have this like clearly totalitarian response. And we've adopted like 6 out of 10 of the planks of the Communist Manifesto and that's chalked up as liberalism. And the communists also will be like, yeah, those stupid liberals like Hillary Clinton or Kamala or whoever, the Marxists will call them liberals because they're saying that's not real communism. And they don't want to have to take responsibility for the negative results of that system. Of course, real communism never results in a utopia. It always looks technocratic and oligarchical. So that is. And then by the same token, the moderate liberals are kind of let get off the hook because they can be like, well, I'm not a, I'm not a radical. But no, actually you are purporting the same thing as these guys are. That's why you're on the same team.
- [61:09]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, it's the same sort of opium high point where when Gorbachev opened up the Soviet Union, he thought it would become a liberal capitalist democracy or like a social democracy, like a West European country. And what happened was that the Russian empire was held together by the brute force, starting under the czars and later through the Soviets. So if you let the people vote, they're going to vote to end the Soviet Union. And the cultural demoralization of Russia was so great that Gorbachev just let it happen. And Xi Jinping, the Chinese premier, has said, I. Every day I think of how the Soviets gave up power and that was the worst decision for Russia. And I, of course, am happy that the Soviet Union fell. But Putin has said that it was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, which is, I'm sure what that's. I'm sure that's what you'd think he'd say. And you saw a over several year period where East Europe was decolonialized in the manner that the former European colonies were after World War II. And this is one of those strange historic moments where the Marxists were basing their power off the will of the people in a Rousseauian sense. And then the will of the people demonstrated. They didn't want the Marxists and no one believed in Marxism. So the system fell apart. And as an example, in the Baltic countries, which were taken by force, by force during World War II and were independent beforehand, the populations made these sort of like armbands around the borders of the Baltic countries so Russian tanks wouldn't move in and the Russian tanks didn't fire on them. In Romania, their brutal dictator, Ceausesco, he was going to take power again. And he stood before the crowd and then a single person started booing and then the entire crowd booed. And in East Germany there was a process where they decided to integrate with the West. And the Berlin Wall came down. And then the Russian forces did not shoot the people dealing with the Berlin Wall. And this was seen as the great moment. And so Russia had this sort of, you know, when people are in toxic romantic relationships and they'll be like, oh, we'll still be friends with benefits even though we're not technically dating. And then that, then that falls apart and like, oh, we can still be friends. And then it's the gradual de escalation as you don't talk to each other anymore, right? That was Russia with its former empire in East Europe where they said, okay, you guys will be part of a democratic Soviet aligned block. Oh, you guys are talking to NATO. Oh, we'll have a sort of cultural relationship. Oh, you guys don't talk to us anymore and you hate us. You remember World War II until you hit a point where Russia lost, even Belarus, Kazakhstan. And there's two sides of this. There's the countries that went with America and the countries that didn't. And the ones that went with America included Germany, which unified. And there was a huge cultural project to reintegrate the poorer east into the wealthier West. Poland joined NATO, the Baltics did Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Croatia. So America scooped up a lot of the rest as a lot of Eastern Europe as allies. And so the edge of the American imperium moved from the Elba out to the edges of Russia. And these countries became liberal capitalist democracies. And East Europe was in a place where they could grow very rapidly because the Soviet period had homogenized their populations, removed any class structures or resentment, where I think either Latvia or Estonia, they have a flat tax rate and a poll tax as their sole taxation. Because the idea is we all started out equally poor under the communists. A generation ago. So if you get rich, that's fair.
- [65:17]
Austin Padgett
And see the connection.
- [65:18]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. And so East Europe's already had an experience with Marxism and the destruction of their culture and economy. So that's why they're immune to wokeness and why they're also more free market. This is a book, I'll reference it a few times. It's Crashed by Adam Tooze. It's a history of the 2008 financial crisis, which is sort of the. It's the main axis of this video, the 2008 financial crisis. And he goes through how each area of the world was operating before that happened. And so East Europe got a lot of help from West Europe to modernize their economy. After the fall of the Soviet Union they over indexed. So when 2008 happened, they went on financial austerity. So part of the reason Greece is such a huge issue in European politics is they were not the only people who over indexed the pigs countries or Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, or sorry, pigs is normally a Mediterranean term where it's Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. People sometimes throw Ireland in as an honorary pig because the pigs, they were countries that besides Ireland flipped over to be democracies in the final bit of the Cold War, where we forget that Greece, Spain and Portugal were all military dictatorships in 1970 and they were brought into the EU sphere. And a lot of Spain only industrialized Post World War II, as well as a lot of Mediterranean Europe, a place Fukuyama calls the modernized but not industrialized area, which includes the Mediterranean, Latin America, the Middle East. And in the modernized but not industrialized societies, they got electricity and modern medicine to their populations boomed, but they never had the factories or the jobs which creates dissent in political radicalism like Islamic terrorism or socialism or military dictatorships. So the pigs were part of this credit binge that predominantly German banks were making across Europe because Germany and France were in an alliance where after World War II, Germany could not wield power directly. So as Germany and France were the core members of the new European Union, France did the public facing stuff. And then Germany's greater economy could sort of dominate. And so they worked together to hold the European Union together. And these German banks were heavily investing across Europe. And so the issue they ran into with Greece was because they had connected much of the European continent into a single currency. That meant that the outliers like Greece, which did not share a similar history to the rest of Europe, where Greece is in many ways more. I'm going to say that just to piss them off, Greece is In many ways more similar to a Middle Eastern country than a European country. And so when they got this credit binge they used it for financial insolvency to go through a decade long debt crisis where the Europeans should have just cut them off. And then it resulted in weird, these weird finaglings. I used to know this and then I've forgotten it but it ended up with the radical Marxists in charge because they had. God, I don't even remember how Greece happened. The Germans pushed for austerity, then the rest of Europe thought the Germans were mean. Then Greece kept free floating. Then Greece had a political crisis because one of the factions gonna maintain austerity but not another one. And austerity for those that don't know is when the government does not spend money. And it was treated as this horrible thing for the neoliberal era. Oh my God, a government's on austerity. They're gonna like they won't be able to give out their depend, their welfare dependent stuff. But a lot of the resentment for Greece was that Eastern Europe went on its credit binge. And then they did countries like Poland, Czechia, Hungary, they went on austerity, fixed their economies and then the Mediterranean economies didn't and they stayed being corrupt. And so the rest of Europe looked at Greece and thought why are you rewarding the bad player here?
- [69:28]
Austin Padgett
I think it's like a too big to fail or like a reverse hostage situation where Germany stupidly extended a lot of credit to Greece and then Greece's plan was like hey, if you take away our benefits we're going to shoot ourselves with communism. Just totally tank this European project by being as difficult as possible, not paying it back, etc defaulting. So now Germany's kind of like stuck managing the debt and Greece's whole politics revolves around being unable to negotiate with that just maybe. Yeah.
- [70:03]
Rudyard Lynch
I've heard like four stories from my personal life of guys who dated girls who threatened to kill themselves. They're all Gen Z. It's like a not uncommon Gen Z girl thing.
- [70:13]
Austin Padgett
It's a terrible threat to make.
- [70:14]
Rudyard Lynch
It is, yeah. And it means they call it out. Means they have basically no other boundaries in their life. And so they're going to that as sort of like I want to exert the ultimate boundary to see if someone does something. And yeah, because Adam Tooze talks about this, this author is really funny because he's like a hyper Keynesian and it bleeds into his work in weird ways where he once said Germany had the best economy of any country on Earth during this time period after the 2008 financial crisis. But this was somehow done without enormous Keynesianism. And if the Germans had done enormous Keynesianism, they would have had good economic growth, but they were somehow the best. Or he would say, America had this huge Keynesian push that ended up creating mass inequality and social discontent, but if they had quadrupled the scale of this Keynesian push, they would have finally fixed it. And he does this all over the book. It's like a weird detail where he'll like, say, you know, this Keynesian policy failed, but if we did it five times as much, it would have gotten the stated goal. And then somehow, inexplicably, the countries that are not Keynesian are winning.
- [71:24]
Austin Padgett
Right. And he's like, I don't know how that's happening, but anyways, moving on to why we need more money on public education. Yeah, classic example where you see the money going up and the results going down.
- [71:36]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And the thing with, with Greece was that the Europeans had made a single currency and then they had made highly risky bets. And so if Greece's economy toppled, Italy's economy would topple, which would topple Germany and France. And so you saw that the European elite choose to bail out their banking class because they had made this risky bet they had attached the rest of the economy to, and they were not willing to let their populations feel pain. What this caused is an artificialization of the European economy where because it was this artificial bubble, there was no incentive to actually do real work to grow or fix the economy. And so they were insulating the baby boomers from suffering at the expense of future generations.
- [72:27]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. And it's funny that this whole period, or whatever the 80s or even 90s and 2000s are referred to as pro market neoliberalism. Right. I said the narrative a lot is regulation deregulation. The narrative is that it means austerity, it means privatization. Yeah. At the same point, this time is the time where we've been like more dominated by Keynesian economic economic economists than ever. Like, almost every economist is a Keynesian. And it's. I saw a really funny projection because I watched a left wing video just to get refreshed on their talking points. And he was saying that is a perfect projection where he was saying that there's like this priest class of economists and whatever the problem is, whatever supply problem is, oh, they just find a way to say it's a mark, we need a market solution, or here's a market solution to fix that. I'm like, what world are you living in where like clearly the priest class of economists that comes out of, come out of the Ivy leagues are all Keynesians. So it's just like a. They're so consistent in their projection, it's unbelievable.
- [73:32]
Rudyard Lynch
This is why I say you need to see the neoliberal era as a projection that different people can look at and see their own motivations in it. Because a leftist could see the last few decades and see this as a period of corporate control by the wealthy. And then we can look at the exact same event and say that this is the state using capitalism to control the population. And from both of our perspectives we are accurate. It's just our perspective is significantly higher predictive value than theirs does.
- [74:03]
Austin Padgett
And say their perspective again.
- [74:05]
Rudyard Lynch
So if you are a leftist socialist and you want to see the neoliberal era as large corporations seizing control of the entire world and society manipulating the world for the rich, they can see that and have the variables line up to them. We can look at the situation and see that it's the government and regulation controlling it. Both of our perspectives are valid from the frame we're operating in. Our frame has a vastly better predictive value for the world. So our frame overrides theirs.
- [74:39]
Austin Padgett
And the, the way to kind of address their frame is you go back to the origin of this stuff and it doesn't like. We warned specifically that creating central monopoly would enable on how you're allowed to do business would enable large special interests to take control. And that's exactly what happened. And then they point and call it corporatism, which is gets back to why I don't like to let the libs and the commies get away from separating each other from themselves, because that's their idea.
- [75:18]
Rudyard Lynch
Whoa, man. This is deeply psychologically complicated with multiple layers of mind. Fucking crazy.
- [75:24]
Austin Padgett
And.
- [75:27]
Rudyard Lynch
It'S really hard to overestimate how important Greece was to European politics in the 2000 and tens. It was a consistent issue for the decade. It started early in the 2010s with 2008 and it was never resolved. And it showed a lot of tensions inside Europe. And it showed how the European Union was a highly fragile organization where no one had the stake to maintain it. And it was also bureaucratic because the European Union started as a trade federation about coal between the Germans and the French in the 1960s and then it metastasized into this global empire which would enforce these regulations or immigration or cultural views across all of its members. And that was not the deal that the people involved thought they were making when they joined. And East Europe thought they were joining to have a buffer for economic growth and against the Russians. West Europe thought this was a trade federation when they joined, they didn't think it was sort of a new empire. And Mediterranean Europe in some cases wanted oversight against their own corrupt elites and they wanted to have the money. But because you made it a specific interest, the European Union metastasized and it used these cultural issues as a way to destroy the national governments and the organic culture. So when you're looking at the mass immigration and the wokeness and that stuff, that's because the bureaucratic interests inside these individual countries have shared interests with the European Union in Brussels. And so the two of these are working together, trying to shut down the arisal of natural elites that would appeal to the populations.
- [77:09]
Austin Padgett
Oh my God, it's like Louis Court. Yeah, Louis Court, where they take all the natural elites and put them in this social hierarchy game in Brussels.
- [77:18]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. The other main tension in the 2010s for the European Union was Brexit. And Brexit was comparable to Trump, where both of them were populist rebellions against the managerial system. And what Brexit found, and Brexit was on my birthday, by the way, same day.
- [77:39]
Austin Padgett
Oh, cool.
- [77:40]
Rudyard Lynch
And Boris Johnson once said, we want to make Brexit Day our Independence Day. And I thought, yes, you are going to put a holiday on my birthday.
- [77:48]
Austin Padgett
Good rhetoric, bad follow through from Boris.
- [77:50]
Rudyard Lynch
And so what we found with Brexit, and I assume you guys know what Brexit is, it was Britain's attempt to vote to leave Europe and a majority won. But what the British people found was that their own ruling class was not willing to carry out the orders. And Britain became worse off due to Brexit. I would have voted for it. But Britain did become worse off because they were not able to make the jump where if they had a leadership class that had not betrayed them and kept pushing all these neoliberal policies, they would have had to make the jump to be part of the Anglo American world. And that would have involved operating on sort of the Anglo American evolutionary strategy of mass deregulation or having more open trade systems. And I have, I have a few stories about this, just how complacent England's gotten because the English economy that renovated under Thatcher, where Europe became more bureaucratized and they didn't experience the same sort of Thatcher Reaganite revolution in the 80s and Thatcher was able to lessen the sort of managerial throttle on the economy for finance and tech. In other industries, it was impossible to make new businesses because they were so deeply regulated. But this caused a lopsided equation where the City of London or the financial hub in London became the most important driver of the society, while the rest of Britain, including the former industrialized areas in the north or Scotland, they were left behind in a process very similar to the Rust belt in America. And Britain became a highly bifurcated society between this financial international elite based in London, that had a sort of somewhat cooperative relationship with the managerial class, and then the population who were sliding into poverty and degradation. And England is significantly more nihilistic than America. And so even basic societal stuff like trust or politeness or honor or whatever, that has eroded in England to a significantly greater degree than America, which is why they're so suicidal and nihilistic. But Brexit was the population's attempt to sort of break out of this trajectory. The managerial classes has short circuited it and tried to seize total power. And the managerial class is scaring away the City of London or the financial international type, who were the sole generator of growth and income they had. And now these people move to America or Dubai or Singapore. And so England has, through this process of these three groups interacting, destroyed itself.
- [80:36]
Austin Padgett
Right. It's like recess was banned. And then with Thatcher is like, oh, well, we'll allow you to play hopscotch and kickball. Yeah, like finance and tech. And then everything, the whole society starts revolving around hopscotch and kickball. And you're like, what the hell, I hate hopscotch and kickball. It's like, well, maybe the problem is you should allow other stuff too, instead of going back to when like hopscotch and kickball were banned.
- [81:04]
Rudyard Lynch
That's a good metaphor.
- [81:06]
Austin Padgett
And, and with the England and Brexit, it's like leaving the cartel doesn't work if you don't differentiate yourself. Right. What leading the European Union did is it provided the opportunity to differentiate on various regulations which would have sent England on a totally different path than Europe. But of course, labor got into power and Tories didn't do anything. And they very aggressively were like, you don't need to be in a contract, you don't need to be in an explicit agreement to just copy the standards of Europe. And it's the same thing in the US where DC disseminates a lot of regulations. Right. Building codes are like determined by an international ngo. And DC picks up the codes and standardizes them and then passes those along to the States. So if you have Trump making A deregulatory effort where he says, okay, the states can make their own decision on this. We're not going to use federal funding to bully you towards a particular direction. Well, then the states still need to differentiate on it. The states need to do something. You need DeSantis to eliminate occupational licensing now that we know the Fed isn't going to put the hammer down on Florida for trying that. But you're not getting enough transformative leadership at the state level. Just like England didn't separate themselves enough from Europe. Now, we're not that bad. We have some better states than England. But that's a sim. It's a similar situation. It's why kind of local politics are so important.
- [82:29]
Rudyard Lynch
It is. And what you sort of see with the age of neoliberalism is the removal of local incubation centers. And if you were to go back to 500 B.C. at the time of Herodotus, the Persians, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Elamites all had their own distinct cultures around their own mythology and land, which were thinking in their own right and trying to develop their relationship to reality. What happened with the age of Neoliberalism was the unification into a single system. And the people in charge of the system had utterly given up any responsibility for it or any seriousness of what they were managing. The American coastal ruling class, either in Balaji's paper belt from D.C. to Boston, or in California with the tech industry and Hollywood and such things, they propounded an utterly nihilistic philosophy of the world where they stopped caring about maintaining the system at all. And that resulted in them becoming utterly exploitive, but at the same time using self abnegation pointed actually at others to justify their utter ruthless, ruthless self interest. Where if you imagine this is the wizard of Oz of like a central projection, and then you find you enter the sort of place where the wizard is doing this sort of orchestration for this, and it's just an annoying millennial woman going on a rant. There's no planning, there's no structure. And so it's this shared illusion that once you peel it back, you're like, wait, you guys. This was all a justification for you to exploit the global system as much as possible. And you would destroy any moral standard that would tell you that this is bad. And so what you saw was the collapse of the narrator class in functioning societies. You have people who are like priests, journalists, authors, intellectuals, who narrate the lived reality of the people around them. What happened was that our narrator class went insane and betrayed us. So the Question was either do you go along with it or do you try to find a new system, or do you build your own system?
- [84:45]
Austin Padgett
Right? And then it's like what we get back to the problem with the universities, right? It's like, how long does it take to restructure all this stuff when 90% of the professionals are leftist? Or how long does it take to restructure it when you have all these doctors relying on the cartels? You have new skills, there's tons of new ideas in medicine. So then it'll be like chaotic to see how you make a transition from these systems. But I forgot where I was going with that off of your point. But it's a mess.
- [85:22]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, I'm going to finish up with Europe because we have to touch sort of the historic narrative of what was going on beyond the sea behind the scenes, then see how it applies around the world. Europe appeared to be adjacent enough to America until 2008, where there were authors in the 90s, the 2000s, so that Europe would outpace America. And what happened in 2008 was that Europe doubled down on entropy and socialism. And they European countries have practically experienced no economic growth since then. Same thing as Japan. Yeah, it is crazy. Especially so in South Europe where it's just huge unemployment, nothing happening. And as of COVID the gap has just grown because in 1960, Europe was 40% of the world's economy. In 2015 it was 24%. Now it's beneath 19%. America has been a quarter since the 70s. So America is not decreasing in global importance. The third world in Asia is rising. America is holding steady. Europe, Russia, Japan are decreasing.
- [86:37]
Austin Padgett
You want to hear something hilarious?
- [86:38]
Rudyard Lynch
Sure.
- [86:39]
Austin Padgett
I mean, one of the reasons why they formed the EU or strengthened the eu, because it was formed over multiple decades, is they did the math and they're like, the US is bigger than all our individual countries and so they're able to like bully us around. But if we combine all of our gdp, our GDP is bigger than the us. So let's combine like which is stupid math thing. It's not. It's like an abstraction that doesn't relate to reality because you're still not the US if you add your GDPs together. And so what they did is they added their GDPs together inside of a shared bureaucracy and that killed all of their GDP is to the point where like the entire GDP of Europe is two thirds of the US. Like this is over the last five years, 10 years, 15 years. This is weird for, for me because you picture Countries sizes, country economy sizes. It's kind of like not something that should move that fast. Like, Europe is on track to be half of the US when it was supposed to be. It was like, bigger together not that long ago.
- [87:41]
Rudyard Lynch
My latest project is. I've been writing a sort of history of the last 10 years of how the Internet has changed how we live our lives in the world. And one of the threads I've found is we have experienced a staggering amount of change since COVID but the nothing ever happens school shuts down discussing about it. So we largely isolate and atomize our change, or say it in our groups of friends. And then none of it gets out into the public. So the public maintains the facade. And. And then the cultural change is operating in the shadow. And to go to the other side of the Iron Curtain, besides the areas that joined the NATO coalition, you have the Orthodox countries where Russia experienced a horrible period of chaos after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was mass poverty and social anarchy where the lives of the average Russians got markedly worse with drug addiction and alcoholism and no jobs, because the Soviet Union had been able to maintain the illusion long enough that when it fell, they realized how much the Soviet Union had degraded their underlying fundamentals. And what happened across Belarus and Russia, as well as Ukraine, is that these kleptocrats bought out the old industries from the Soviet period, and then they allied with the government. What happened in Russia was that you had Gorbachev and then you had Yeltsin, who was Russia's one of basically their only democratically elected leader. But Yeltsin was a drunk and he was weak. And then Putin emerged, and Putin was a former secret police guy. And then Putin, as he is called in Russia now sometimes the new czar, he made Russia a dictatorship. And they are postmodernist nihilists under a facade of social conservatism. Every book I've read about Russia says that it's this weird sort of like, panopticon of all the issues you think about in the west, where they have. I mean, they. They have all of the maladies and degeneracies that we do.
- [89:46]
Austin Padgett
They have by far the highest abortion rates in the world and are the number one exporter of prostitutes. Like, that's your panacea of social conservatism.
- [89:55]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. Their average male mortality rate is like 54, which is the same thing as Papua New guinea, where tribes literally are in the Stone Age. And that's because their male mortality is really high due to alcoholism. Because in the removal of all of these sort of societal structures men could enter into to attain responsibility. The men just drank. And so Russia has a series of issues, but they. They went on an imperialist binge pretty soon after Putin took power. Where Putin's first phase was working with the West. And everyone forgets this, but there was a phase when, like, Tony Blair and Putin had a bromance where Tony Blair would fly to Russia and these Columbia law professors would go to Russia to rebuild it. So until 2008, Putin was sort of working inside the Western frame. And there were conversations at Russia joining NATO, although I doubt that could have happened. And once 2008 hit, Putin realized that the west was not the economic perfection that its people pretended. And so Putin firstly invaded Georgia due to a border dispute. And he cowed Georgia because Georgia, Ukraine. Georgia and Ukraine were considering joining NATO. So Putin neutralized Georgia so they wouldn't join NATO. And Ukraine. Ukraine was a converse to Russia because in Russia, Putin was able to make the oligarchs submit. And so Putin was on top, and he built an oligarch coalition in Ukraine. The oligarchs won, and they kept a weak democratic government to maintain power. And so Ukraine, by most metrics, is more corrupt than Russia. And they would use the democratic government to sort of oscillate between these different oligarchic power bases. And I believe Zelensky's turned himself into a de facto dictator due to the war. I still support Ukraine, by the way. I support them because they're an American ally. They're not our enemies. And so you see this sort of tension. And Russia invaded Ukraine in 2012 because they were having these riots to become more of a Western country that neutralized them. He invaded them again over Crimea. And so Ukraine has been stuck between east and west, which has made them significantly poorer than Syria, as you've said before, because they haven't been able to integrate into the Western trade bloc, but also they're not part of the Russian bloc. So they're stuck between these two different worlds.
- [92:29]
Austin Padgett
Right. And they have this legacy of socialism that they didn't shake quite as well as the rest of Eastern Europe. Their. Their. Ukraine's doctor program is almost identical to Cuba's in its nature, where they're paid almost nothing, and then they send them abroad as, like, cheap doctors, and it's considered a win because they have a lot of doctors. Yeah, that's insane.
- [92:50]
Rudyard Lynch
Something to keep in mind is that Russia is one of the lowest birth rates on Earth, and also it has a total economy smaller than Texas or Canada, so.
- [92:58]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. And Italy.
- [92:59]
Rudyard Lynch
When the left tries to use Russia as a bogeyman, you should see China as our real potential threat because China has 10 times the population they are China, I would say in some ways not all is more aggressive than Russia. And I see Russia under Putin as sort of making desperate grabs. I don't think they can, I don't think they can actually sustain being a great power anymore.
- [93:22]
Austin Padgett
It's like bravado. More where China is like the quiet threat because if there's any, there's only two people competing over who's going to create like the infrastructure of the future that acts as a pulling force for how everyone else operates, like the software layer and everything. And that's China and the US like there's no one else.
- [93:43]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. The left picked Russia as a, as their bad guy, I think partly because they didn't want to pick a non white bad guy. And secondarily because they could hit the boomer Cold War buttons because people in power are the boomers and the boomers have the Russian buttons seared in due to the Cold War.
- [94:01]
Austin Padgett
Right. And now this whole, this whole Ukraine thing has really elevated that. But. Right, and where they're talking about Putin as a threat to invading all of Europe, it's like Hitler or whatever, but in reality, like he's kind of limited, it's physical, so it's more in your face. Right?
- [94:15]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [94:16]
Austin Padgett
But what's happening in China is a much bigger threat to whether we have control over our own lives or not. And the Russia situation is interesting because the, yeah, sure, they pivoted from Soviet Union Communism or whatever, but all they did was sell off the state assets to the oligarchs, which is kind of like an Ireland under England situation. Right. Where the English landowners control 97 of it. So it's like, okay, what's the point? And they didn't, they clearly didn't have it in them to make the market economy work. So maybe the like, if you're trying to take Putin's perspective generously that it was a tragedy, maybe the better thing for them to do would have been to take a Singaporean direction instead of like giving up the control, just take a Singaporean direction and force the economy in a better direction while having control rather than like trying to get that through the oligarchs.
- [95:10]
Rudyard Lynch
They could have technically done that. It would have required a great historic figure and that kind of man would have been ground down by the Soviet Union. It would have required a figure who was like very magnanimous and wise who was willing to hold power, grab it and then go a Singapore free market direction because Russia does not have a capitalist economy, because property rights or the free courts are not enforced, where if you make a good company, it's just going to be stolen by a social superior, much like Latin America. And so there's no incentive for the free market. And the oligarchs can maintain power when they're in Putin's good graces because they are part of his apparatus of power. You have to see these second world countries like Russia or China, motivated firstly to a vast margin by power, not by economic gain.
- [96:01]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. And that's the problem with why they can't join like an anti globalist free market coalition where they're stuck in the middle, kind of causing trouble because they can't commit to either side because they don't want to have their national sovereignty controlled by some international structure. But they also don't want the international structure to disappear and put them under all sorts of competitive pressure. So weird. They should have just made Metallica their leader when they had that concert. It was like a million people. That wasn't. That's enough manpower to storm the Capitol.
- [96:36]
Rudyard Lynch
So to go through the rest of the world, Asia was the place where the most people were brought out of poverty during this time period. And the neoliberal age is the singular era of history where the most people were taken out of poverty, most increase in wealth and freedom. And there are just incredible stats about this if you want to look at Pew Research. Most people on Earth no longer live in grinding poverty. And the singular biggest variable there is China and the rest of Asia, because a majority of the world's population lives in Asia. So that's where the real numbers for ending poverty and human sort of turmoil are. And this was part of the destruction of a sort of shared bluff because the end of the Cold War caused a breakthrough towards democracy and capitalism because the Soviet model failed. And a lot of these countries had also gone through a few generational period of using socialism as a counteraction to European colonialism. And that occurred across the developing world, where China, as an example, when Mao died in 1976, Deng Xiaoping took power and he said, it is glorious to be rich and it doesn't matter what color a cat that hunts the mouse is. What matters is that it kills the mouse. And that was a Chinese way of saying we're going to become capitalist now. And so the Communist Party became a mechanism of power rather than an actual ideological organization where Deng Xiaoping and his successors, they were highly aware to never let go of real power. So they let Western corporations and these ideas come in to the threshold where they actually have to surrender power. And it was treated as a truism and sort of educated Western circles that the rest of the world, as they developed, would follow the European trajectory of becoming more liberal and wealthy and free. And that was staggeringly naive because in fact, in a lot of countries they went through a transitory period of becoming more free in the beginning. But then as they got wealthier, that enabled their autocracy and cultural collectivism because the sort of traditional society started to kick in after a generation of modernity. And so China experienced one of the most staggering growths of any society ever due to the offshoring of Western manufacturing to China. And this has been a disastrous decision for a lot of the west, killing a lot of our manufacturing, because you have to actually make stuff to have a functioning economy. Having an intelligence economy is a late stage decadence thing societies do. Europe had an intelligence economy before it collapsed. Greece did Babylon.
- [99:23]
Austin Padgett
I, I hate the stupid conception that services or intelligence economy is about moving up the chain of hierarchy of production because it's not okay. Like a computer is higher in the chain of production than your stupid service that can be replaced by an AI.
- [99:39]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly it.
- [99:41]
Austin Padgett
And I don't, it's like I always try to avoid getting sucked into a materials materialist lens when I talk about this because, like, it's easy to underestimate the benefits of reduction in world poverty. Like when you go to these areas and you see the generational change and you hear the stories from the old guy, like, we didn't have any scooters and we had three scooters and now we have like four cars. We're drinking soda, we don't have to die, we can like eat. We don't have to starve as much.
- [100:08]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [100:08]
Austin Padgett
And that has like a big negative impact on people. Like you go to Eastern Europe and people are just hard, you know, like in the Depression, people are hard. Like this has an impact on people's lives and it, it goes into like slavery and destroying your creative impulse and meaning, which gets into evil pretty quickly. Like, it's evil stuff. Like if we consider torturing, torturing someone evil, why don't we consider subjecting someone to these brutal, brutal surgical procedures where they're given steroids that make them blind and then they have a third of their intestines cut off and get a bag grafted to their stomach, like the human centipede when they could have just fixed their diet.
- [100:51]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [100:51]
Austin Padgett
Or had a stem cell injection. Like that's evil. That's not just materialist.
- [100:56]
Rudyard Lynch
It's. It's. The world's complicated. I mean, the two populations that have had industrial societies for long enough that can sort of seep into their character are the Japanese and the Northwest Europeans. The Russians do, but they're sort of adjunct to the Northwest Europeans in doing so. And so those are the two populations where the maladies of modernity seeped in more. And what's going to happen in the developing world is they're going to face the early stages of this and then they're going to have the plug pulled before they were even able to recognize. When you think of a place like, I mean, China, when I went to Shanghai, I looked across the river and our tour guide said everything you see in front of you, skyscrapers in every direction was built since 1990. And that's true across China, where we would drive for like three hours straight and every single direction is the tallest skyscrapers for hours along the highway as far as you can see. I thought this is how you fit over a billion people in a country. And so when you look at a place like China or you go to Dubai or Southeast Asia or Latin America, these were places that were built up since 1990. So they don't have any cultural experience with this. They are new to it. And that creates comparable cultural issues to Europe during the industrial revolution. But the Europeans were significantly more sensitive and smart than people are today. And so no one involved this thinking of how to deal with these cultural changes. And you go to China, they are having a totalitarian crackdown where for a few years they were very sort of friendly to the West. That was the liberal part of the Communist party until Covid and I went to China one of the last few years. Westerners could go to a pseudo free China, which was 2019. After Covid, they became significantly more radicalized anti Western. They stopped letting their people sort of. They cut off a lot of their traffic. They had wolf warrior diplomacy, which was being openly hostile to other countries. I've spoken about China before. They're pretty bad where they have. They have control over the Internet. They openly propagandize people in the school system. They've openly called for war against America or Taiwan many times. And people are so complacent. They do not hear these things China is saying, even though China is saying them and China is preparing to do them. And so we got conned by China because We were far too naive where we thought, oh, we're going to help them develop. But in reality, a generation is not fast enough to change an underlying character. And you think of our friend Dan, who used to be an anthropologist in Southeast Asia. He talks about how Southeast Asians have horrible issues with screen addiction. Because Southeast Asia is the same process writ large. And if you go to Bangkok or Phuket or I've never been to Vietnam, I'd like to go, I like to go to Malaysia. But these huge eight story malls that are just hold everything, these are in the Philippines as well because it's so hot. Bangkok was entirely built up within the last generation where Thailand got their big impetus from hosting the Americans for the Vietnam War in the same way that Korea did for our front against the North Koreans. And Japan got an economic impetus due to the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Making stuff for the Americans or hosting American troops. And I'm going to use, oh, I'm going to use a few examples. First of all, Southeast Asia has horrible screen addiction issues because they don't have a cultural thing for delayed gratification. So if you're giving a Vietnamese child a smartphone, they don't have the sort of degree of interior, they have not cultivated interiority to a point to say, to avoid having the sort of screen addiction, to have the cultural skills to offset screen addiction.
- [105:04]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. The perfect example is soda, right? Where we're like, oh, soda is bad. We're kind of like having a cultural awareness about the, about it. But when I was in like the poorest single hut homes, maybe one scooter, maybe no scooters, they would serve soda and be like really excited about it. And it was like, it was just like the most amazing thing ever. And there was no kind of conception that like this is the percentage of sugar or that's gonna mess with you. Same with like screen addiction. I don't think they have John Height, like sharing studies about how bad this is. And this comes down to the basic excess, right? Like, it's not surprising that if you get a calorie surplus for the first time in history, you're gonna get fat. Right. It's like you overcorrect and then you correct it the other way where you're like, oh, it's not just about calories, it's about nutrition. And the US has been getting smarter about that for decades. Like, like the industries held back what consumers want, but consumers have been on top of wanting healthier food for a while. And these trends are accelerating, putting pressure on the industry, both legally and, and market wise. So like that's kind of. Those are. And we don't talk about that normally because we normally talk about how modernity just kind of destroys you in these ways. But we've, we never talk about how like countries that have been dealing with modernity for longer are starting to adapt to these situations where you realize pretty quickly like Mexico would be, is going to be way fatter than the US they already are. They already are probably right. Yeah.
- [106:33]
Rudyard Lynch
No, they statistically are.
- [106:35]
Austin Padgett
They passed us. Yeah, there you go. See, I was right.
- [106:37]
Rudyard Lynch
India. Mexico drinks the most Coca Cola of any country on earth per capita. And look at Korea and Japan. Korea is interesting because it's such a perfect example where the Koreans are ethnically very homogenous. No one thought of Korea having a North or south before it was divided within communists and capital list. North Korea has stayed being one of the very few pure Stalinist nations on earth until today. It's, it's remarkable. South Korea. Yeah. South Korea became capitalist because they were run by Methodist conservatives, Methodist conservative landowners. It's funny, you'll have a conservative regime like Franco or the Nazis or Syngman Rhee and then they will establish the incentives that make the society hyper modernize because the conservatives establish good incentives. Capitalism emerges. Five generations later you get cape. Sorry, one generation, one lifespan later you get K pop. And so Korea's a really interesting look at sort of modernity issues. Where North Korean defectors going to South Korea often say that life in the south is unbearable because in the north they had more structure and community and meaning where in South Korea they work all the time, hyper competitive, materialistic, conformist culture. And they have the worst stats because they sacrificed for the this enormous burst in innovation where South Korea is genuinely impressive in a single lifetime, but it was at the expense of the human character. Where they have the worst mental health of any country, Lowest birth rate, lowest sleep times, huge gender divides. They invented the 4B movement or like women should not interact with men in any way. And they've nearly had a. They've nearly had a civil war lately. They have as much political polarization as America. And when I look at Japan, Japan had an earlier burst where their big wave of innovation stopped in 1990. And they've been decaying ever since. They're part of the older generation of industrialized societies like the American Russian Belt or Europe who have been decaying over most of this time period where the Third World or the Sun Belt develops. And in Japan they have this highly constrictive culture because they industrialized where they had a land owning system where every sort of landowner was part of seven families and he would monitor this or like seven or ten whatever families. He would monitor every element of their life to see if they were following the standards issued by the government. So that's why the Japanese can maintain such strong degrees of social control, because they had democratized the land owning leadership structure so that the landowner would check in on everyone in his group to see if they were following the standard. They use this model to industrialize, which is why they have the salaryman culture, because they ported this village family structure into their industrial revolution. So this is why if you watch anime or engage in Japanese culture, you'll hear stuff of like, I can't quit my, I can't quit my job because it would disappoint my boss.
- [109:51]
Austin Padgett
Or this loyalty to a feudal lord.
- [109:54]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. Or it's why they've referred to older, like, older like work people as like auntie or uncle or they'll buy them gifts. And so you're seeing again, you have the innovation, but it's part of this implicit underlying social cost. And I look a lot of global media. And so the issues American youth face are the problem everywhere. I've seen documentaries in Singapore, in Korea, in Japan, in South Africa, in Europe, in Latin America, where if you throw a dart at any grievance American youth have, these exist around the world because we removed the local individual thinking processes. Everyone was dependent on the American operating system, but the American operating system totally lost confidence and then tried to betray the American people.
- [110:50]
Austin Padgett
Right. And I don't mean to be nitpicky here about like the term modernity or characterizing what it means, because I, like, I make this point all the time, but it's kind of, it's important to clarify because a lot of the problems that they're suffering are through the bureaucracy inherent in modernity. And I was going to make that point with South Korea and Japan, where their companies like Toyota, you know, and the way they treat like the leadership at Samsung, it's, it's like a hyper cultural deference or adherence to a, a corporation. Like, it's not, it's not viewed as, as like a competitive market where it's viewed as like, this is the leading corporation, this is the pride of the nation, this is what we must protect.
- [111:40]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [111:41]
Austin Padgett
And Americans get into that mindset too. It's a very boomer mindset where they're like, Cargill is the best, Ford is American company, Boeing, you know, Dominating for America across the globe. And it's like, no, it's not the company, it's the market, it's the technology, it's the knowledge, it's the infrastructure, it's the processes. So you get attached to the, the symptom rather than the process and then you lose the process.
- [112:04]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. I'm going to clear out the rest of the world. India, partially industrialized. It was highly class oriented where they never had the manufacturing phase. But they would do stuff like intelligence economy or call centers where certain castes in India have done better. But the average Indian is stuck in the same secular cycle issues as the rest of the world. I know you used to live in India, is that correct?
- [112:28]
Austin Padgett
I didn't live there, but I've spent like five months there. I've been to every state in the country by far, except for the Northeast.
- [112:36]
Rudyard Lynch
Okay, I'm glad that I've never been to India. I'm glad I hit the dart correctly there.
- [112:40]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [112:41]
Rudyard Lynch
So the antipodes are Australia and New Zealand as well as Canada. Their economies were dependent on trading resources to China as China developed because China used the amount of concrete as the city of Rome every single year in the 2010s. And in a decade of the 2010s, the Chinese used more concrete than all of American history combined. And so this created an artificial inflation of resource prices where you should have seen a deflation of resource prices with 2008, which is normally what happens. But part of the reason the recovery for 2008 was lackluster was that as resource prices were artificially high due to China's growth, it meant you couldn't have an organic relapse in the west because China decided to respond 2008 by having a huge credit binge for infrastructure projects. And because China was developing, they could sort of pull off the bluff of we're going through our industrial short burst. And this gave Australia and New Zealand and Canada unfounded egos, which is part of the reason why they're so woke. Because Australia especially did not experience the economic hardship of 2008 in the same way the rest of the Western world did. So they haven't had the reality check.
- [113:59]
Austin Padgett
Even the the Asian tigers, like the Southeast Asian economies that got hit really hard by the 97 crash, that's like built up as a story. But that crash actually didn't impact them that hard because they still had a strong culture of savings. So when you have a culture of savings, you have the extra capital to recover quickly from a crash where our whole economic model has been pushed towards, like, boosting consumer spending to the point where you're like, threadbare on credit. So that when something happens, like in Age of Empires, if your town center gets destroyed and you don't have like 400 food and, you know, some stone or wood or whatever, then you can't. It like takes a whole another 10 times faster to get it started again because you need that capital saved to have an injection to get to the next cycle of investment. So that's kind of like a tangent, interesting economic point. That was. That was big at the time. But the speed at which these Asian economies transformed is important. It should be illustrative of something. Yeah, it's kind of the lens that I use to try and explain how fast we can turn things around in the US because you have all these siloed industry knowledge hubs and monopolies and bureaucracies. Right? Like normally in history, if you had this guild that dominated everything, it would take forever to disseminate that information throughout the rest of the economy once that guild collapsed. So you could like, start to get a broader adoption or it would take longer. Right. But now all the information is at our fingertips. There's millions of boomers who are industry experts. Like, like, Elon has a lot of knowledge. Right. But he's not allowed to teach in any state in the U.S. like, if you just created alternate channels for learning, both through industry experts, real people, and also technology and AI and all these ways of information transfer, we can, we can like, rewrite the landscape of distributed knowledge so fast.
- [116:03]
Rudyard Lynch
Of course.
- [116:04]
Austin Padgett
So it's kind of a unique historical opportunity to, like, fix mistakes quickly.
- [116:09]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, agree. You have to flick the switch. Growing up, adults would list a series of historic events in the 90s, and I grew to resent them. And I purposely don't talk about them because adults would constantly mention them. I thought, why do I care? So, I mean, the Vietnam War was the big one. We read six books at the Vietnam War in school, at these boomers saying, oh my God, when we did drugs and we didn't fight, that was so awesome. And it changed history. The six books we wrote out Vietnam in school, they weren't even at the war. They were just like people doing drugs and not fighting culture. Yeah, exactly. And I thought as a kid, like, why do I care? This has no bearing on me. But I mean, they talk about Yugoslavia, Slavia and Kosovo. They talk about the fall of the Soviet Union, the Gulf War, and then the dot com bubble and the Asian financial crisis. So these were the Events adults would just mention around me. I wonder what that says about the background I grew up in. But there was this ideal of this sort of international order that followed these rules that were not stated. So they would use these 90s events to sort of be hysterical, to say, oh my God, we had to send peacekeepers to Somalia to maintain the global order, which you did, really didn't have to do. Or there was a whole thing of, oh, the Serbs are genociding their neighbors, America should bomb them. And it's easy to forget how much the global policeman thing was genuinely believed because the losses in the war on terror have caused a failure of national confidence. But beforehand people thought, oh, this is jolly. And the war on terror, there were a few inklings of it beforehand, like the Gulf War, we had to crush Saddam because he invaded our ally Kuwait, or the civil war in Lebanon. And people beforehand would talk about, oh, the Middle east is a complicated area. How do you solve the Middle East? And I mean, you can't solve that many clan disputes and that much history and that stuff. It's just not tenable and reasonable. But 2001 was a real capstone event where people. 2001 was a capstone event due to 9, 11. And that made America invested in the war on terror for decades. And there was a lot of hysteria. I remember people were still worried about terrorist tech a decade later, even though it's statistically not going to happen to you. And it was used to repress freedoms. And America invaded Iraq, we conquered it, but we weren't able to hold it. And we invaded Iraq under similar auspices as Afghanistan because it sort of emotionally reminded us of Afghanistan. You can go through all the motivations why George Bush did this. I do not find those particularly interesting. He just made the decision. And we kicked out Saddam's government. And they were the people who knew how to govern Iraq. So Saddam's regime, who were Sunnis, worked for isis. And when we tried to install a democracy in Iraq, the tribal structure did not allow that. So the Shia immediately voted in a party that would persecute the Sunnis. And we were so naive, we didn't predict this. So the Sunnis got resentful and our Shia elected government became an Iranian puppet because Iran was another Shia country right next door. So we basically built a puppet for Iran who was our rival, who called us the Great Satan. And then the Sunnis rebelled under ISIS and they nearly made it out to Baghdad. And this created a quagmire much like Syria, that we didn't know how to solve. So we were just staring at a problem we weren't going to solve or we weren't going to take responsibility for.
- [120:02]
Austin Padgett
For. This is the problem with erasing your own history. Because we could have understood exactly how Iraq worked, not even by studying Iraq, but by looking at our own history. Because that's what the Civil War was. Right. It was two kind of different cultural spheres, and they're competing over control. One group's going to control the other, and then that creates resentment. That's like why we thought the EU wouldn't work, because you have these different countries that have different preferences. They're being controlled by Germany or whatever, and that's going to create resentment. And so obviously, like, when you have these three different tribes in Iraq and you try to center them on a democracy, one's going to dominate the other, or you're going to need a secular strongman, which is like the guy that we got rid of.
- [120:48]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [120:48]
Austin Padgett
And it kind of illuminated these problems in the U.S. just as we were kind of also starting to rediscover our own values post Cronkite. It's like, oh, we have the same problems as Iraq with, like, different political preferences regionally and one region dominating. And a lot of that goes down to the way the British drew the lines, which is like creating a tribal mess in the Middle East. So that was like a big thing that the Iraq War opened up in our own consciousness about ourselves. And this is the problem with, like, having a false moral authority, because it's almost like we got a moral authority off of the legacy of our past, which we no longer stewarded. And so we have all the stuff, we have the reasons to think well of ourselves, but we don't know why we were successful. And so when we give advice, we're giving all this backwards advice. Just like when we tell Bangladesh or India to make child labor illegal, because that's what we did, even though that's not what we did. So. Or that's not the reason it went away. So. And that applies to other policies, too. So it's like that, that this gets back into how everybody believed. Like the empire building or our foreign policy interventions were just like, obviously humanitarian. Right. Like Kosovo or. Yes. How we should have intervened in Rwanda or something. When in reality, the metric for deciding where we intervene has nothing to do with the scale of tragedy around the world. Right. Otherwise we would invade China for what they're doing to the Muslim population or something.
- [122:24]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [122:24]
Austin Padgett
Or Nigeria or whatever. You know, pick your example. So that's Just not the, the driver from a geopolitical standpoint. And we don't even have the ability to tell people the right way to govern themselves. If even if we understood our own, if we understood our own success, then we maybe could, but we don't.
- [122:44]
Rudyard Lynch
So that's valid. This video is a connecting video. And so I'm going to touch on a variety of areas of the world where I cannot explain the full complexities of each of these continents. But this is sort of the capstone video for the modern history. You can reference this as this is what the post Cold War equilibrium was and hopefully we'll make more videos at different sub regions. And. Afghanistan was similar to Iraq, except we weren't able to conquer it. We took Kabul and we made an alliance of the northern ethnicities that were minorities against the Pashtun Taliban. We allied with the Tajiks and the Hazaras and we were at the seize a few areas, but we weren't able to conquer Afghanistan. Practically no one conquers Afghanistan. The British didn't, the Soviets didn't. And I had two funny stories. I mean, one of them was a Taliban soldier when America was invading who said, when we beat the British Empire, the British Empire fell. When we beat the Soviets, the Soviet Empire fell. You Americans are here. When we beat you, you will fall.
- [123:56]
Austin Padgett
Right. Which is kind of Bin Laden's plan. The worst part, it was like our idea with the, with the Soviets. We, we very recently had the, our own idea that we just did the opposite of. Yeah, exactly like living memory of the people making the decisions.
- [124:18]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, I forget the second story. I promise it was funny. Hopefully it comes up. But in the Middle east, we spent the net worth of Taiwan on the war of terror without conclusive results. The Middle east itself was a mixed bag. Some places were modernizing, like the UAE experienced economic growth equivalent to what we talk about in East Asia. Iran quietly industrialized under the, under the Shahs, where they were original. Iran was the incubator for global, international sort of schizo leftism. Wahhabism isn't as schizo as Shia Islamism. And if you look at a country like Turkey, they were western oriented, but as they moved from a military dictatorship to a democr, they became more Islamist. And so ironic. Yeah, no, it's not ironic. It happens a lot.
- [125:07]
Austin Padgett
They moved away from the secular strongman into like a more democratic. And then democratic result was, hey, we're Muslims.
- [125:15]
Rudyard Lynch
That, that's why I say you have to see a lot of this development in the third World as Technocratic. The educated elites will often have power and they'll try to Westernize. And when you bring in democracy, it doesn't work. Where the Arab Spring started in Tunisia and it rippled across the Arab world, causing these state collapses. But it didn't actually work. Where very few of the regime shifts with the Arab Spring actually brought change. And you look at a place like Egypt where they move from a military dictatorship to a democratically elected government. The democratically elected government elected the Muslim Brotherhood in, and then the military kicked out the Muslim Brotherhood, right?
- [125:55]
Austin Padgett
And this is a big part of Western power projection, right, is the elites want to be integrated with the U.S. they want their kids to be able to like, move to London or move to Europe. And they're like, they go to these universities to train, and then they go back and they rule their own countries. So it's. I forgot the conclusion of, of that.
- [126:26]
Rudyard Lynch
But I can, I can give you one.
- [126:28]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, it gives a lot of leverage.
- [126:30]
Rudyard Lynch
It works very well because that's. I'm going to clean out the rest of the third World and then return to America where Africa. And in South America, Africa was fitful. It experienced radical population growth, where Africa now is five times the population as 1950. And that's due to health advances and fertilizer and agricultural advances. The problem, though, is that Africa has no ability to sustain that themselves. Where they have not industrialized, they remain the poorest place on Earth. So if there's a supply chain issue, they have no recourse to that because they've been dependent on the rest of the world to artificially sustain their own population. And Africa is the most one of. Is it in the Middle east are the two most foreign food dependent places on Earth. So if there's any supply chain issues, the Middle east and Africa will experience mass starvation at the worst level of any society ever in history. And in Africa, the shared thing is that the leaders will try to exploit the countries, use the mechanisms created by European colonialism to get their money abroad as fast as possible. And then when the regime flips, they'll move to London or Paris. And in a lot of African countries, the flights go to London and Paris, not to each other. So if you want to fly from, let's say the Congo to Burkina Faso, you will fly through Paris and at best, Addis Aba, right?
- [128:04]
Austin Padgett
And then they kind of like loot the population and then escape to Europe. But they also push, like, the technocratic ideology of Europe, which is like a great mechanism for expanding the levers of global control, right? This is how they built, this is how they got so many countries on board. Connection to the investments, connection to the relocation, connection to the. Yeah.
- [128:30]
Rudyard Lynch
And Latin America was a society where they kept a constant position as a percentage of the world's economy since the last century. So Latin America has seen a lot of development. You can go to Latin American societies like Mexico or Brazil or Peru and see mass sort of factory, not factories, but highways, modern cities that you could mistake for a developed country where there are parts of Mexico City that look like they could be in America.
- [129:01]
Austin Padgett
I was surprised about that actually, because I expected it to look more like Asia. I was like, I feel like I'm in la.
- [129:06]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, exactly. And this was a fitful growth where Latin America alternated between periods of technocratic capitalism and socialism. And often it was muddled. And a lot of this innovation was very recent where Colombia was in a civil war till very recently. But the end of the Cold War genuinely lessened the ideological dissent inside the Cold War, inside the Third World because the Marxists stopped backing alternate factions. And so as the Soviets stopped funding, these western aligned factions could win, but they would face issues from the local population not liking capitalism and change and these things. And so in a place like Venezuela, they were one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America. Then they picked socialism and became very poor. In Chile, they nearly had a communist government in 1979. They then made a capitalist government then that's faced lots of riots and issues from socialists lately. Brazil was a military dictatorship, it became a democracy, but it was a highly socialist, corrupt capitalist democracy that now was one of the highest rates of polarization. And they've become sort of a leftist controlled society where they threw away their, they threw their Trump Bolsonaro into jail.
- [130:25]
Austin Padgett
We're in crazy.
- [130:26]
Rudyard Lynch
Each of these Latin American countries, it's this own story, but it's the shared thread of balancing between local socialists and more global facing technocrats.
- [130:39]
Austin Padgett
Right? Which is one of the negative impacts of this global power projection is it actually turns people against our own values when done in a certain way. And it's funny how there's kind of two sides of it, right? There's like, like soft power which is like the globalist communist. And then there's hard power which is like the neocons and they worked kind of together forever towards their shared goals. But sometimes they have conflict because maybe the like hard power guys, like your soft power is not doing anything there or the soft power guys, like your hard power is messing up all of our relationships and our plans to Try and get them on board with X, Y and Z. Yeah. And so there's like this artificial conflict between hard power and soft power, but. But they're really like both empire focuses. And that's the only reason someone like Jeffrey Sachs is mad at the neocons because they're too belligerent.
- [131:32]
Rudyard Lynch
It should not have taken me this much work to disentangle the illusion. I should not have had to study friggin alchemy to figure this out. It should not have been. I should not have had to cross reference multiple eras of history and alchemy and human behavioral science and all of this to figure out what's going on. They did a very good job.
- [131:53]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [131:53]
Rudyard Lynch
And in Latin America you saw most of Latin America were dictatorships in the 70s and with Reagan and Thatcher you saw the sort of revolution of capitalist democracies spreading across the region. But as of now, they're all facing political issues for the same reasons the rest of the world is. It's independent. Each country. When I was in Peru there was a lot of development, but I would go to restaurants and I'd get a five course meal for $11. And what a local Peruvian said to me is we like the big portions because the people here remember starving. And so that's how fast the innovation was. And when I was leaving Peru was having these Marxist riots in the street and they were electing a Marxist government and.
- [132:38]
Austin Padgett
Right, you're like whiplashed.
- [132:40]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, exactly. No, wherever I go in the world it's more Marxists. There's Marxists.
- [132:43]
Austin Padgett
You're like, literally you just got food and you're already doing this Marxist thing again.
- [132:47]
Rudyard Lynch
Exact. And so that's the nature of Latin America. And this video ends in a cliffhanger because I write these videos before whatever historic event is going to happen in the next few years that and I hope to write these videos in a manner so that we can look back and sort of see this is what it looks like in the moment of anticipation. Because it's clear that the neoliberal order is weakening and it's probably going to fall apart in a cataclysmic event. I don't know exactly what it's going to be, but there's too much tension in the air. And for the final place at the center of it is America. And I'm going to keep this brief because the next video is in America. But America ended up in this sort of distinction between its first empire and its second empire, because the Reds versus the Blue states or the Red States are symbolic for the cultural society of America that started with the European migrants in the east coast and populated the continent in the 19th century century. The left speaks for the international American empire which was formed in the 20th century through these social, these progressive bureaucratic organizations. And these two have fought each other. And because America's culture and its government were explicitly built to stop tyranny, the proponents of the second American progressive empire, they use every other mechanism, like psychological manipulation, control over sex or culture, or the bureaucracy where you've seen the second American empire trying to throttle America's politically libertarian institutions and the culture of the American people to enforce this global neoliberal empire. And they do so indirectly. And the battle inside America's soul between these two is a sort of microcosm of the entire world's battle against it, which is.
- [134:44]
Austin Padgett
Goes down to like nationalism versus globalism. Yeah, like Yankee imperialism versus Americana or something.
- [134:52]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, man, I'm tired. It's. I don't have the heart to go through the last 20 years of American politics of Trump and Covid. I. I assume you've been alive through it.
- [135:02]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, we kind of covered it indirectly a little bit. And like you said, we can mention it in the next video, so. But basically the illusion has been lifted. But now the challenge is like not going crazy in the mess.
- [135:17]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. That's well put.
- [135:19]
Austin Padgett
Hold on to your iron rod.
- [135:21]
Rudyard Lynch
I didn't bring my. Oh, my iron. I'm sitting up. Hold. Yeah, hold on to the iron rod. Stay calm. Okay.
- [135:28]
Austin Padgett
Do not sit on your iron rod.
- [135:29]
Rudyard Lynch
Hey, I'm the guy who made the friggin system. I get to make. Okay, I will see you guys next week for Corporate Era America.
- [135:38]
Austin Padgett
All right.
- [135:40]
Rudyard Lynch
Time, Peace 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. New Year, New Me. Cute, but how about New Year, new money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers giving you time to power through those New Year's goals you know you're gonna crush. Start the year off right. Download the Experian app based on FICO scoring model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details. Experian.