Explaining the Age of Romanticism

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Explaining the Age of Romanticism"

History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Host: Turpentine
Date: November 11, 2025

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Overview: The Age of Romanticism – Defining an Era Beyond Simple Labels

In this thought-provoking episode, Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett delve into the Age of Romanticism, unpacking its intellectual, political, and cultural ruptures in 19th-century Europe. Rather than offering a simple textbook definition, Lynch and Padgett grapple with the complexities and contradictions of Romanticism, exploring its enduring impact from the French Revolution to World War I. The conversation integrates philosophical insights, economic trends, literary movements, and the evolution of political systems, drawing revealing parallels with modern society.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is Romanticism, and Why Is the 19th Century So Hard to Pin Down?

• Romanticism as a Period and a Vibe:
  • Lynch cautions about boxing the entire 19th century into Romanticism, noting its oscillation with utilitarianism.
  • “The 19th century is so complicated that I don’t feel comfortable putting it into a single box…Romanticism is a sort of blue fire in the 19th century.” (04:32–05:16)
  • The term ‘Romanticism’ encompasses art, philosophy, politics, and even spiritual yearnings—a generative, yet chaotic, energy opposed to cold rationalism.
• Romanticism vs. Utilitarianism:
  • Two opposing fires—subjective, martial, biological (Romanticism) vs. mechanical, egalitarian, rationalistic (Utilitarianism); the 20th century saw Utilitarianism “crush the Romantic nearly completely.” (03:10–05:00)

2. Impact of the French Revolution and Conservative Reaction

• Aftermath of Revolution:
  • The French Revolution didn’t simply “fail to win” but produced a conservative backlash (Congress of Vienna), installing “the most socially conservative ruling class they could.” (06:35–09:25)
  • Gaslighting of Social Change: Despite restoration of monarchy, France’s social structures, bureaucracy, and property distribution had irrevocably shifted.

3. Shifts in Political and Economic Power Structures

• France’s Post-Revolution Crises:
  • Lynch likens France’s repeated governmental shifts to the cyclical instability in modern Thailand—military juntas, bureaucratic inertia, failure to revert to old aristocratic models.
  • “France hummed along as a wealthy great nation, but also vaguely a failed state…” (12:30–13:15)
• Rise of Socialism Pre-WWI:
  • In France and Germany, socialism was already entrenched before the Anglo-Saxon world noticed.

4. Britain: Dark Realities, Free Market Bets, and Corn Laws

• Industrial Revolution’s Human Toll:
  • Early 1800s Britain: likely “the worst era to be lower class in any time in European history.”
  • "20 people in a single room, never bathing, living in utter grinding poverty..." (34:00–35:20)
• The Bet on Free Markets—The Corn Laws:
  • Abolishing protectionist agriculture was “a radical decision” that doomed the old landed gentry and fueled urbanization—eventually raising living standards.
  • “That was the correct bet. It’s also the bet the Scandinavians, Dutch, Belgians, and partly the French made.” (37:25–38:05)

5. Romanticism’s Philosophical Roots and Branches

• Romanticism as Reaction to the Enlightenment:
  • Rousseau is highlighted as a pivotal figure, shifting focus from rationalism to deep emotional authenticity:
    • “Rousseau...believed we should get in touch with our true inner emotional state. The deeper your life is, the more emotional your life is.” (44:17–45:32)
  • The fragmentation: right-wing Romanticism (Carlyle, Nietzsche) vs. left-wing (Rousseau, Marx).
• German Influence, Cross-European Movements:
  • Goethe, Kant, Hegel—operating with philosophical depth lost on moderns.
• Incoherence and Open Source Thinking:
  • Romanticism and the Enlightenment as “open source toolkits” lacking “quality control,” susceptible to utopian excess or subjective delusions.

6. The Decline: Modernity and the Suppression of the Inner Life

• Impact of World Wars:
  • The 19th century’s confidence gave way to postwar neuroses, suppression of inner life, and an "anti-Romantic" modernity; the trauma of war shaped several generations.
  • “We are the direct inverse of Romanticism… If you dropped Romantic figures in modern America, they would just be so abjectly horrified…” (59:46–60:20)

7. Cultural, Sexual, and Social Undercurrents

• Romanticism as Subconscious Outlet:
  • Discussed as a channel for repressed sexuality, yearning, rejected social norms—linked to the rise of simping, courtly love, and the ideal of “the soulmate.”
  • “The idea that everyone should get married to a person who completes them, that’s really a 19th century idea.” (91:31–92:13)
• Romance, Agency, and the Decline of Aristocracy:
  • Romantic culture is tied to aristocratic virtues—artful living, emotional intensity—antithetical to today’s managerial, bureaucratic age.

8. Political Chronology: Europe’s Transitions from Vienna to WWI

• Relative Stability—Unifying Germany, Italy, Dismantling the Ottoman Empire:
  • Congress of Vienna leads to decades of peace, with Eastern Europe most stable, newly centralized states forming (Germany—Bismarck’s chessboard; Italy through Garibaldi).
  • Revolutions of 1848: Liberal revolts across Europe brutally crushed, followed by partial reforms and co-option of classical liberals into the conservative establishment.
• Military Culture and Modernization:
  • East/West divides in Germany, Austria, and Russia; introduction of mass conscription, meritocratic reforms, undercurrents of reactionary militarism.
  • Logistics and War: Changes in technology (e.g., vaccinations) played outsized roles in military outcomes. (113:07–113:35)

9. Parallels to the Present & Lasting Legacies

• Agency and Responsibility as Keys to Well-Being:
  • “The role of society should be to increase as many people's agency and responsibility as possible. In every scenario where you remove agency, things get bad. In every situation you increase agency, things get better.” (125:23–126:12)
• Cultural Amnesia and Cycles of High-Trust Societies:
  • The “boomer” trust in systems, the erosion of inner life, and inability to heal from past trauma are recurring themes—and warnings for the future.
• Lessons for Modern Conflicts:
  • Balkan instability and alliance entanglements leading to World War I hold messages for modern geopolitics and America’s own centrifugal tensions.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the limitations of historical categorization:
  • “I don’t even like the connotations I was using there because I don’t want to say that Nazi Germany is the end point of Romanticism…Romanticism was a sort of blue fire in the 19th century.” (Rudyard Lynch, 05:00)
• On the incoherence at the heart of Romanticism:
  • “It was sort of a vibe…When I’m trying to figure out where Romanticism starts, part of me wants to say Rousseau, another part wants to say German Enlightenment…the process of living itself is turned into an art.” (Lynch, 51:56–53:00)
• On modernity’s relationship to the Romantic past:
  • “We are the same civilization as the 19th century. We’re just the degenerated version. All of the core components exist—it’s just we are the idiocracy version.” (Lynch, 71:14)
• On the trauma of 20th-century warfare:
  • “We are in the inverse of the world wars world where we hate all of the cultural energy that produced the world wars…we will kill society to avoid the world wars.” (Lynch, 60:29)
• On the enduring need for creativity and agency:
  • “Creativity stems from small sort of laboratories, not a massive scale thing.” (Lynch, 134:03)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:10–09:25: Defining the Age of Romanticism, its duality with utilitarianism, and impact of the French Revolution
• 12:30–13:15: France’s political instability post-1815 and enduring social change
• 34:00–38:05: Industrial Britain’s “dark age,” the Corn Laws, and evolution of working-class conditions
• 44:17–51:00: Rousseau’s proto-romantic philosophy, right vs. left Romanticism
• 59:46–64:45: The suppression of inner life after WWI; comparisons to “The Giver” and contemporary neuroses
• 71:14–74:19: The decline and degeneracy of modern Western culture
• 113:07–118:05: Bismarck’s unification of Germany, military innovation, and shifting European power
• 125:23–126:12: The primacy of agency and the consequences of its loss

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Tone & Style

Throughout, Lynch and Padgett adopt a conversational yet erudite style: blending rigorous historical analysis, literary references, wry humor, and candid social commentary. Their discourse is intellectually dense but marked by accessible analogies and personal anecdotes, inviting listeners to grapple with big-picture questions regarding modernity, memory, and the perennial swings between reason and passion.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a sweeping, critical tour of Romanticism’s legacies—not simply as an artistic or moral movement but as a crucible of European modernity, whose unresolved dilemmas still haunt us today. Lynch and Padgett challenge the audience to consider how Romantic and Utilitarian impulses continue to inform both societal collapse and renewal, and what it might take to recover a sense of agency and meaning in a fractured age.

Transcript

[Austin Padgett]

At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner.

[Rudyard Lynch]

However you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way.

[Austin Padgett]

And that's what running is all about.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Run your [e-mail] Running welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator what if Fault hissed. Redyard 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. How are you? Austin, have you been empowering Wamixen of color?

[Austin Padgett]

Empowering? What mix?

[Rudyard Lynch]

What mix in of color?

[Austin Padgett]

I don't even know what that is. So probably not.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Mixing is women without men. And so you make rather than E, you have an X.

[Austin Padgett]

Ah, I'll pretend I understood.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So woman. There is a sub thing. Man. So you're removing the men contraction from women.

[Austin Padgett]

Okay, all right.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Make it womixen.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, that's less patriarchal.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It is. Because you've put in the X chromosome instead of the E for men.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, is that why Latin. Latin X has an X in it? Because they're trying to.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So the reason it's Latin X is because they're trying to avoid gendered language, which you normally see in Latin. Latin. Its languages, English, sorry, French, Spanish and Italian all have male and female conjugations. So when it's Latinx you don't have to gender the final. The final sort of letter of Latino. And in Latin speaking countries, an ethnic group will always be male conjugation. And so that removes structural sexism, even.

[Austin Padgett]

Though doors are obviously women because they open. It's like there's a lot of analogies for the. I guess they're all kind of sexual analogies.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, no, that was the first thought I had said when you said women are doors, like kids, waves and goblets. But. So this video is a Romantic era Europe, where the Romantic period is a rough heuristic for the 19th century. And I was sort of torn about how to title this video because when you compare the 19th century to earlier centuries, there's a sort of meme of Western history that if you read enough modern Western histories, they always have the chapters on these. And the meme is Renaissance, Reformation, development of science, Enlightenment. Then you have the 19th and the 20th centuries. And as the time goes on, the histories vary more so in their take on what things matter. Because as more time passes, you can see that the 16th century had this clear direction and we write out the things in earlier Eras that don't fit those general heuristics. But the 19th century is called the era of Romanticism. But it's also not where I think the 19th century is a very complicated era of history. And I like the idea of having a Victorian Britain video. And this is a video for all of Europe, but it's predominantly the continent. We're going to glance at Britain periodically because they're reflecting a broader European trend. But the Europeans, they were doing their own thing. And the division inside the 19th century was between Romanticism and utilitarianism. And this culminated partly in the World wars, where all of the great German thinkers of the 19th century said that they stood for Nietzschean, Greek, martial, subjectivist, biological values, and then the English stood for utilitarian, mechanical, equal, rationalistic values. And then with the World wars, the British utilitarian, egalitarian tradition won, thus sort of crushing this more subjective romantic 19th century view. But these are both trajectories from 19th century culture that spilled into the 20th century. But the 19th century is so complicated that I don't feel really comfortable putting it into a single box. And I don't even like the connotations I was using there because I don't want to say that Nazi Germany is the end point of Romanticism in an Overton window. It's the worst possible option, the same thing as Marxism. But Romanticism was a sort of, it's a sort of blue fire in the 19th century. It's like a generative soul that the 19th century used that informs a lot of its behaviors, but they also had the hyper rationalist utilitarian sense. And they oscillated between both of them and These sort of two fires generating inside the mind of the 19th century until the utilitarian crushed the Romantic nearly completely in the 20th century. And you can look at a wide variety of trajectories from everything between Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to Marxism and Nazism, and as the descendants of 19th century romanticism.

[Austin Padgett]

And you can put labels on them, but like you said, the Romanticism had Marxism, the utilitarian rational had equality. So like, they can both be various political expressions. But it's a bit like getting too attached to a psychological profile for its association to politics. Right. If you're more open or something, you're more likely to be left. It doesn't mean that psychological profile is bad or that we should only be right brained or left brain, because one's more associated with one politics than another. It's like a separate layer of analysis, almost like that relates, but gets tied up in confusing ways.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, you can never let your tools control you. And once you start to let that happen, you should throw away the tools. Because once you let sort of your own mental tools control your analysis, you're going to lose, because reality is so complicated. You have to sort of be able to change up your settings. Even the best settings over long enough without change will corrupt. And I actually think the best place to start talking about Romantic era Europe is from the political side to see how it informed the cultural and philosophic and artistic side, where at the time the French Revolution was seen as a trajectory that was meant to happen, but didn't. Where for the liberals and the admirers of the French Revolution, they had a general attitude that this was the way of the future. And even conservatives agreed with them, even if they wouldn't say it. By the time of the 19th century, the left had already won at writing the mythology of the society, that they were the future. But what happened was that the French Revolution brutally lost. And it lost to sort of hardcore reactionaries, where when you look at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, you saw every major country in Europe team up to establish the most socially conservative social ruling class that they could. And they were smarter about it than the Versailles Treaty a century later at the end of World War I, because they were all aristocrats who had been part of over a century of European balance of power politics. So they knew how to maintain the balance of power. And they knew that even though France had been humiliated and defeated at the end of the Napoleonic wars, that France was a stakeholder in the European system. So if they pissed off France too much, France would go dark and turned toxic against the European order. A century later, with the Versailles Treaty, once mass democracy had showed up, you had to appeal to populations which had seen their brothers and their sons die in the trenches of World War I. And so they really wanted to tear at the defeated Central Powers to get revenge for the personal loss. But for the monarchs who were making these decisions, they didn't have those sorts of qualms. And so France was brought into the European system. It was a respected country. They were allowed to keep their military. They didn't lose any physical territory outside the old country of France. And a group called the Holy League that consists of Russia, Prussia and Austria, or the great powers of Eastern Europe, they teamed up to build the new order. And they were the ultra reactionary alliance against the liberalism of the French Revolution, where all three of those countries had until very recently practiced serfdom. They were all theocracies that had turned on the Enlightenment. And it's interesting to see the tilt from Romanticism was earlier, philosophically around the time of the French Revolution. And then it went into political effect after the end of the Napoleonic wars. And so they had earlier had this sort of inoculation of enlightened despotism. And they turned against it and returned to sort of reactionary mysticism and hyper religiosity. And they tried to inform and control the European order. And so the big disturbance of the new European order was Republican France. So they put the Bourbon monarchy back in charge of France, but that covered up that you could not change the underlying social structure that had already shifted in the French Revolution. The new Berman monarchy was based on off the French Revolution's political structure. It was based off its bureaucratic structure, economic system. You couldn't put the nobility and give back all of their lands the way they were before. So the French society had changed. And there was this really weird feeling in 1815 that we reinstalled this hyper conservative system that did not adjust for all of the huge changes that we had seen as a society. And I think there's a degree of, as the kids say, gaslighting, that everyone knew that the French Revolution and these liberal ideas were the ideals of the future. But the conservative reactionaries won politically and then they installed the old order and then the old lancial regime tried to hold on as tightly as possible to maintain its power. But there was no new narrative of the world that was being written.

[Austin Padgett]

It's similar to my points about the monarch in Thailand, where the king can't control the bureaucracy. There's too much going on, there's too many departments around various industries. There's a mesh of interests and complicated information. The king can maybe get rid of bureaucracy, but that's more of a system change. So it sounds like they put a king on top of a system that was almost running itself.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, that's true. And the issue with the return of the Bourbon monarchy was people knew that and they knew they didn't need the king. And so France suffered a series of internecine political crises from 1815 until 1871. And I don't keep track of all of them. I frankly don't think I even have a reason to because a lot of them were like Les Miserables, which is one of my favorite books ever, where there's multiple revolutions in Les Miserables. And Victor Hugo, who in many ways was a genius, he covers a lot of these dynamics where there was the Revolution of 1831 as an example, where he talks about how the bourgeoisie or France's capitalist economy stopped there from ever being the true revolution because the property holding moneyed interests did not want the true revolution. Victor Hugo, writing in 1850s probably did not realize what the true revolution entailed. And although Victor Hugo was like a super capitalist, you can see that in the books. But France was stuck in this sort of state of indeterminacy where the king would come into power sometimes, then they revert back to a democracy, the democracy would not actually able to get stuck stuff done. Then you revert to a military dictator. And France had so many of these crises over the course of the 19th century. And it's just a sort of wash to look at where like as an example you had, I believe there was a king Louis Philippe. There was a time when there was a time when the Bourbon monarchy came in. There's time when they appointed someone else monarch who was like a banker, but then he wasn't able to like develop a lordly bearing, so they took him out. Then they threw in a few parliaments in there. And this was. France was an economically and socially stable enough country that you'd have these political shifts, but they didn't actually entrench in the underlying social order that kept going over the course of this tumultuous 19th century. People still had jobs, they were still. France was still the beating heart of Europe technologically and socially. France was a great nation, it was widely respected while it had these political crises. But at the same time it did mask that with the end of the Napoleonic wars. The new era was the Pax Britannica. France did not rebuild the colonial empire over this time period, except conquering Algeria in 1830, while Britain ruled the entire world's oceans. They had colonies everywhere. And so France hummed along as a. As like a wealthy great nation, but also vaguely a failed state. And it, it also masked the growth of the socialist bureaucracy which had already happened in France over the course of the 19th century where a lot of people and I fell into this fallacy, thought the rise of social socialism was a World War I phenomena that was just in the Anglo Saxon world. In France and in Germany, it was the 19th century phenomena. So that even when Gustav Le Bon was writing in the 1880s, he said France's economy was mostly socialist. There's a lot of interesting threads to tug at there.

[Austin Padgett]

It goes back to the Thailand example as well, because they constantly would have military juntas over and over again. Throughout the 80s and the 90s, like every few years. And it would be basically the military would take over and then throw it back to the king once things calm down as because the military being in power, I don't know, it doesn't work sustainably because unless there's a crisis, it shows the brutal naked power of the government. So then they throw it back to the king and then it would destabilize and they bring back the genta. So it's like. And the whole time, you know, the bureaucracy grows. So it sounds kind of similar to France.

[Rudyard Lynch]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

There'S also the weird duality here of the gradual degradation of Europe's social institutions the exact same time as the technological progress occurred, where this was an era when people genuinely did believe in progress. The 19th century believed in progress significantly more than we do. Which is funny because we've personally seen the benefits of progress more than they have.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, it's also the type of progress is funny because like you said, they had this attitude that this was the ascendant future, which is very similar to how even conservatives throughout the 90s and 2000s would adopt the progressive frame of the continual progressive growth. You know, even if they weren't happy about it, they would all think that would be what the future looked like. Which is the more unnecessary demoralization, because as we see in the 19th century, those trends were reversed or they were the losing trends.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, and this is why I say the 19th century is complicated. And I say that in the Victorian period too, where this is an era of history significantly more intellectually and culturally and emotionally advanced than us. So they have a lot more complexity than we do. And it's very difficult to understand someone who's more complex than you. And so when you look at the 19th century, you partly see a huge conservative victory. And I will get my psyop out early that the 19th century was the century that the conservatives won and they maintained power across Europe between the French Revolution and World War I. And that time period was also known as one of the greatest economic, cultural and technological golden ages in history. And then when the conservatives lost power In World War I, Europe went into decline. The policies are not sexy, however the outcome may be. You have to draw the connection between policies that sound boring and good outcomes.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, it's like Andrew Jackson killing the bank is what gave us the golden age in the late 1800s. And if we didn't have a period of growth like that in a time that was at least relatable to modernity, then it would be really hard to have a historical period to point to, to even show that these ideas work. At all.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I have a degree of vertigo about that argument because my mom, when I was 10 years old, was talking how the Fed was destroying America and Andrew Jackson destroying. Destroying the Fed was amazing. And that was a decade before those arguments got mainstreamed. So I had a sort of childhood inoculation. And since then I've seen the argument become sort of mainstream across the entire country.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, I remember the argument when I was just out of college or something with the millennial generation to show how unserious we were was, should Harriet Tubman replace Andrew Jackson on the twenty dollar bill? It's like they only put Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill as a joke and an insult and to co op his fan base into supporting the central bank.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Wait, is that true?

[Austin Padgett]

I mean, that's just logical. Why would the central bank want to put Andrew Jackson on their dollars? The only reason is to co op his image and as kind of like a sick joke, because, you know, Andrew Jackson fans can't argue against the Fed if he's honored as one of the most important bills.

[Rudyard Lynch]

This is one of the things I've noticed. We often incorrectly model the minds of the 20th century because the 20th century was a so much higher trust society than the 21st century that we sort of like incorrectly read their motivations. Because in 1950 or 1910 or whatever, people were genuinely, like, so sincere and so earnest about things that they'd make decisions that would come across to us as utter madness. Just they didn't even think about them because they're like, oh la da da, things are going to work out, everyone's nice. It's just, it happens so many times. It's just staggering. And there have been several points where I've read 20th century authors and I thought he must be saying this as a sort of cynical power game to enforce something. And I then I realized, wait, no, he actually believes this.

[Austin Padgett]

No, because they hadn't seen how wrongly it would go yet. So is that kind of the origin of a lot of the boomer quote unquote, trust in the system that's broken down recently? Kind of a blind trust that this will work out? Oh, the. We're on the same team. The Fed is just to tax the rich or something?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, and you can see it too. Like when I've periodically done business with older people, they'll just make certain decisions. And I'll just think, you must be so staggeringly naive to have done that. And I'm like, wait, they've been dealing with, dealing with high trust institutions their entire lives. Because if you're like a certain age, let's say you're 60, you accumulated capital in high trust institutions and then when you had enough, you could mutate over to sort of like upper class institutions. So upper class boomers have sort of no feedback loop to how low trust the rest of the society is, because it's a creeping thing. It was a creeping thing in the edges of society until the entire society became low trust.

[Austin Padgett]

And it reminds me of my point about how if you actually look at a lot of boomer values there, or the values over the last 50 years, 60 years, they're not actually that bad. It's just that the system doesn't represent them at all. Kind of like the Orwell War is peace flip of everything kind of confuses people to, to the, the point where they're actually saying some good values like individual rights or. But they're not. It's not reflected in the political system, which is a giant socialist mess. It's kind of like the Reagan rhetoric is very good, but the policies didn't actually really change anything. And so, I don't know, part of that is tied to the blind faith in the system. But then that creates a risk of like rejecting all the ideas instead of just actually implementing them, I think.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So the boomers do have some good values, like high trust or like working hard or discipline, but they're carried out in such a coherent, incoherent manner, I can't actually take them seriously. Where a lot of boomers treat being cucked as a moral virtue, where they're like, oh, I let myself get cucked because I think other people deserve chances. Or they'll say the real courage requires losing. And I'll just think, what, like how losing a moral virtue. Or they come. I hate that our society combines decadence with philistinism, because if we're decadent, can we at least do it with class? I mean, I'd like to have decadence with good culture. I'd like to spend the death days.

[Austin Padgett]

That's such a good point.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I'd like to spend the death days of my empire sipping wine in like a nice, like Spanish style garden. Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Can we at least develop a cheese culture instead of killing ourselves with Velveeta? And Velveeta's good.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So if you're philistine and philistine means you don't know culture and art, that's good. If you're barbarian and you're growing. But then if you're philistine in your decadent phase, you're just getting the worst of both worlds. And boomers have this sort of mindset and mentality where I'll see a lot of boomer corporations, they will constantly be obsessed with making marginal efficiency gains and then they'll make staggering strategic errors. They're just so much bigger. Where they'll just be like, oh, we can't pay young people because of marginal strategic gain. And then they have a huge DEI program that's just blowing them enormous sums where they're investing in terrible stocks or they are hiring people who don't even speak English, who can't perform the job. Or where the boomers would be like, we worked hard when we were young, but then. And you kids are lazy. But then Gen Z works significantly, significantly more hours than boomers do. That's just statistically or did. It's just statistically completely true for less, less gain. And so their values are so incoherent, I cannot see them with respect.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, you can't take risk to maybe hire someone in this situation because there's no dynamism in the corporation. And this ties back to my point about ever how ever since these business models have been captured in regulatory bureaucracies, they can't disrupt their whole system, which normally only comes from a competitor. So all they're left with is these legacy processes. And the only way they can improve them is to increase efficiency. And so it's like very slow marginal increases in efficiency has been the only technological development we've had in the last 50 years, unless it's a totally new industry.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And then they're unaware of the implicit costs and a lot of the marginal gains they're making. As an example, I see this in media. It's why boomer legacy corporations cannot do digital media. They always fail. Is their utter unwillingness to take risks itself becomes a death spiral. Because if you. The way you make a brand is you cross two distinct elements in a way that only works with your personality and then you play off the different interplays of the elements to make a sort of discordance that's beautiful. And boomer cons. Boomer. Boomer corporations cannot do that because that requires too much courage and taking a stand in investing in something because something to keep in realize as well is that the. Our LC regime, the one that's currently in charge, they utterly lack discernment. That is one of their greatest flaws.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, I guess that contributes to the Orwellian flipping of war and peace and all that kind of stuff because it's a discernment issue. If you can't see beyond the semantic framework into the reality, then it's not going to match.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's too many 2D thinkers. But back to 19th century Europe. So it's funny that with the Congress of Vienna in 1815 in the Napoleonic wars, the British were the guardians of Europe's right wing and the French were Europe's left wing because the French pushed socialism and liberalism. And the British had their own version of classical liberalism. Like 3% of the population could vote. They were hyper capitalist. Then with the Congress of Vienna, the British became the far left of European politics in the Overton window, moved to the Russians, where at the Congress of Vienna, which was masterminded by Metternich, the Austrian diplomat who was a genius. He was a figure on the scale of Bismarck or Richelieu, who was the architect of the 19th century European order that lasted for a century. And Lord Castlereagh, the British minister at Vienna, he was horrified by the sort of reactionariness and the classism and that stuff of the continental Europeans. But then Britain was also a country that was mass exporting its own convicts to Australia, had horrible prisons and they would hang a poor man for stealing bread to feed his family in Britain. And so in the post Napoleonic war periods there was this huge fear among Europe's elite of another French Revolution. And so there was a tightening of the screws against the general population, which, it's complicated. I think it was both justified and not justified, but it bred this sort of very disturbing air. And Bernard Cornwell has a book, it's something like Gallo. It's at the gallows of 1821 and it's at this British detective. And it's crazy to look at 1821 Britain because the end of the Napoleonic wars did not bring an era of prosperity like the, like the end of World War II did. It was a European recession. Europe's governments had to pay off their debts. Europe was deeply overpopulated and there was this huge social turmoil where even in Britain, the most stable country in Europe, you still had revolutionary sentiment in a lot of cases caused by the start of the Industrial revolution where the Luddites or the anti technology people who were craftsmen, whose jobs were displaced by the new factories, who tried to destroy the technologies or the Chartists or people who wanted to expand the voting franchise. And across Europe was this air of revolution that people wanted the rev. A lot of Europe wanted the revolution. But then the Lieu regime had won and so they were tightening the screws to maintain power. And the thing is that it actually worked.

[Austin Padgett]

I'm going to go back to Sharp again here too because they showed this term.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Sorry, the same author.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, no way.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Wrote Sharp is the guy who wrote the book I just mentioned.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, that's amazing. That's perfect. Because in the show they go back to England and the pause between Napoleon's exiles and there's all sorts of social disruption and it's basically like a labor organization and Sharp has to enforce and protect the factories against the labor guys who are the poor people he grew up with. And then they realized that the other companies or rich guys, they were the ones destroying the machinery of their rivals, not the anti technologists in order to get like a monopoly on the industry. And then Sharpe eventually busted that scheme up. So it was a nice like libertarian solution where you're eliminating corruption to improve the market rather than going communist under prop. Again associated with oligarchical control.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, and that happened. There was a sort of overton window across Europe of are we oppressing the lower classes for market reasons or for serf reasons or for state reasons?

[Austin Padgett]

In England the people who had the money to invest were often already nobles. Right. Or they had the property to host the factory. And so you started at a pretty big disadvantage.

[Rudyard Lynch]

England was the country that did this the best, where they experienced the Pax Britannica and the Industrial Revolution in a huge sort of cultural and technological revolution. And in England they made a sort of rationalistic decision. And I think Britain's ruling class made a good choice here. Where Britain, much like the rest of Europe, was deeply overpopulated, there was a huge underlying bubbling resentment. And the English made the decision we're going to stick by property rights totally. And that did periodically cause horrifying results like the famine that killed one third of Ireland and caused another third of Ireland to immigrate. Where the English did not send aid to help Ireland because their idea is we must respect a rules based, market based system to have a functioning society. And in Britain only the upper classes could vote. It was a parliamentary democracy. And they made a system where complete respective property rights, lots of personal freedom, but at the same time no protections against the poor. They had, they had the workhouses where if you couldn't afford to live to support your family, they would force you to work in these sort of prisons. In Britain you see a combination of sort of the utilitarian and the romantic sentiments. But it was a horrible period. In Britain, the early 19th century was potentially the worst era to be lower class of any time in European history because Partly you had these huge sort of social disturbances, mental health issues, family breakdowns from the rapid move to the cities. People living in these horrible conditions. 20 people in a single room, multiple families in the same room, never bathing, living in utter grinding poverty, working 14 hour days at the factory. And the story of A Christmas Carol by Dickens where Scrooge is making his employees work on Christmas. Stuff like that happened where it was just a brutal culture. I think a lot of the 20th century was a sort of pent up resentment by the lower classes against the start of the 19th century. So there was that going on. But when you're looking at Britain, this system did work. Where 19th century Britain experienced this huge revolution, where by the time of the 1850s, when Elizabeth Gaskell was writing north and south, she was saying the factory workers only work 10 hours, they eat meat daily, they have nice furniture in their houses, they're all literate and well fed. Well, in 1830 it would have been way worse. And by the time you get to World War I, Britain was a very prosperous country. Lower class people still often lived hard lives, but there was a sizable middle class. And so Britain didn't have the threat of revolution in the same way the rest of Europe did. Because the British aristocracy made a series of good decisions. One is they intermarried and mixed with the merchant classes to make a coherent sort of parliamentary ruling class. Then they gradually increased the franchise. And the Corn Laws stand as a turning point in British history where in 1831 or 1833, Britain had a dispute between do we have a trade and economic system that prioritizes our own agriculture or not? If they had a system that prioritized their own agriculture that would artificially inflate the land as gentry, that controls Britain forever at the expense of the industrial, the industrial cities, because the interesting. The cities with the Corn Laws, they needed food imports from America or Argentina or Europe to sustain them. And so the British government passing the Corn Laws was seen as this really radical decision because it killed off the old landed gentry in rural England and then sped forth with an urban industrialized England which allowed the radical importing of food from abroad. And so that lowered the price of food. So the British poor were less rebellious and it also allowed the growth of the cities. And so the British made a bet that if they relied on free market, they would see exponential growth that would fix their revolution worries. And that was the correct bet. It's also the bet that the Scandinavians and the Dutch and the Belgians and partly the French made.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, so I mean, I saw this firsthand because I spent so much time in developing countries working between the cities and the agricultural areas. And there's non optimal conditions when you're first rushing into like a newly developed city. And there can be supply constraints that put pressure on services or space and things like that, but there's little, small things that are also important to pay attention to. Like you mentioned meat. Like people wanted to move to the city. That was the goal. The countryside was very poor. I mean there's, it's nice, you keep your family together and you have your community and there's intangibles like that. But generally the path is people are looking to be a part of this process and there's certain luxuries like little bits of meat or clothes, things that we wouldn't think of as maybe super interesting today. That would have been revolutionary back then. And also associated with status and moving up and growth. And the conditions change very rapidly, like you said, in terms of that development and the wealth that it creates. So no, like no one's happy, no one's sad when a factory comes in to near a farm town. In China, the suicide rate is twice as high on the farmland. And I guess we, we still have all these other problems of dearth, famine or having your village raided or something or killed in a war that you don't have much control over.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's totally true. And in countries where they're industrializing and they create legal barriers to migrating to the cities, people will still break the law and move to the cities. That's what happens in China. It wouldn't surprise me if in other Asian countries there were a similar thing because in the industrialization process, living a crappy life in the city is better than living a crappy life in the countryside because at least there's hope for growth.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And you can have this like. Oh, you can have the, these people where it didn't work out better for them, especially in transitory phases or phases in particular oversupply. But the mass overwhelming trend was people migrated voluntarily for a reason.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And there's a TV show called Manor House Set. It's a. The BBC trying to recreate a 1905 British manor house. And what the. The servants work like seven days a week, 16 hours a day. And what they would say is that people would try to get those jobs because you're in a warm building and.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, exactly. Or knowledge, access to knowledge. Like even being near a book or a newspaper, it's like, wow. Yeah, it's like Internet Connectivity today.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And so when you're looking at early 19th century Europe, it was a very dark time. And in, in northwest Europe used, they, they, they dealt with that, with the rise of capitalism through the free market. And that worked. The further east you get into Europe, it's serfdom, where Prussia got rid of serfdom due to the French Revolution. And they had sort of stagnated between the time of Frederick II and the Napoleonic wars, the defeat at Jena, they went through an innovation period, recreating their political bureaucratic system, getting rid of serfdom, introducing a more free market economy. And they also made the military fully meritocratic, although the Junker nobility still dominated Prussia, but they were still ostensibly a sort of like barbarian total state. Where in Prussia it was still a nation with. It was a military with a nation attached. And then in Russia you had genuine serfdom where the government kept on trying to throttle the population, where Russia nearly had a revolution at the same time as France. But Eastern Europe went through a counter Enlightenment due to the Napoleonic wars that radically changed their perspective. So Russia was on the verge of revolution a little bit after the American Revolution. But then they had a patriotic way of, due to Napoleon, where they rejected Enlightenment French philosophy and tried to return to traditional Russian mystic Orthodoxy. And the Germans did something similar where you saw this nationalist wave ripple across Eastern Europe and that was the core of the Holy League. And the further west you got in Europe, the more the tendencies of the Enlightenment survived.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting, the Holy League. So which countries was that? Central Europe and a lot of Eastern European ones.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Holy League was Prussia, Austria and Russia. It was all of Eastern Europe, barring the Ottoman Empire east of Germany.

[Austin Padgett]

Is it kind of like the Holy Roman Empire? Is there any connection to that in terms of the name?

[Rudyard Lynch]

So they just liked calling things holy. Although Austria was a member of the Holy League and they were the founding dynasty of the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon got rid of the Holy Roman Empire and then after that they replaced it with the German Union, which was sort of like the lame new Holy Roman Empire that Prussia then disrupted.

[Austin Padgett]

So how does this connect to the rejection of the Enlightenment ideology and like continental philosophy?

[Rudyard Lynch]

When you're looking at the philosophic trajectory from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, it's a continental bing bong or ping pong. Where you start out with Rousseau in France, who is the first, I'm sure there were thinkers before him, but he is the first quintessentially romantic philosopher where Rousseau is often written as part of the Enlightenment. But I can't see him in any lens except Romanticism because he believed that we should get in touch with our true inner emotional state. And the more time you spend living with your true inner emotional state, the deeper your life is. It doesn't have to rationally make sense, just have to feel true. He said that tribal peoples are the noble savages and humans are naturally good and social institutions are what makes us bad. So if you got rid of social institutions, social responsibility, then humans would be innately good. And he also was really into spirituality and he was ravenously sexist and he let's super leftist. Oh, he's like, he is, he is the origin of the Western left and that.

[Austin Padgett]

That informed the continental romantic shift more than the English Enlightenment.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. So you have right wing and left wing Romanticism where Romanticism impacted all three of the great humanist ideologies of liberalism, leftism and Nazism or fascism, where Carlyle or Nietzsche are very clearly romantic figures on the right. And then Marx in some ways is a descendant of Romantic thought. He's sort of anti romantic, though. I can explain, but. And then you have Rousseau was like the pallbearer of left wing Romanticism. And so when you're looking at the outcome of right wing Romanticism, you see these manly Aryan noblemen slaying a dragon, taking the princess, founding a new nation like Conan. And then left wing Romanticism is, oh, if like we just get in touch with our true authentic feelings and destroy social structures, we'll get a utopia.

[Austin Padgett]

And Romanticism itself is not necessarily good or bad. Would you connect it to like integrating the hemispheres to connect Romanticism and the other side?

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I actually am sympathetic to Romanticism. I think I am more of a Romantic than I am an Enlightenment thinker. I mean if, if your parents. Rudyard Kipling was one of the big Romantic writers. He was a late 19th century writer who talked a lot about nobility in heroism and glory. And I see Romanticism as a reasonable reaction to the Enlightenment. And it had the same issue as the Enlightenment of no quality control. Where the Enlightenment was an open source toolkit to allow rationalizing. Romantics were the same thing. Where on one end of the Enlightenment is the Founding Fathers and on the other end is the French Revolution. With Romanticism on one end is Rudyard Kipling and on the other end is the Nazis. And then on the other side of this is Rousseau. And so you're looking at an open source toolkit that emerged as a reaction to seeing the failings of the Enlightenment. And this was a gradual tilt. We're almost like a biological process. As the Enlightenment festered into the general population, you saw sort of biological reaction against it that evolved into Romanticism. And you can see it in the lives of singular figures like Kant, where Kant is seen as sort of the capstone of the Enlightenment. But I also see Kant as in some cases more of a Romantic, a proto Romantic thinker than a, than an Enlightenment thinker. Or with Napoleon. Napoleon's both. The French Revolution is both the capstone of the Enlightenment and Romanticism at the same time. Because inside the French Revolution you have the sort of Reddit rationality that was the Enlightenment in its worst form. But also they just gave up on, they were incoherent. They would talk about the cult of reason, but they were the most staggeringly irrational people ever. And part of the reason that the Romantic movement developed was looking at the complete inconsistency between the actions of the French Revolution and the values they espoused. Because the French Revolution, much like the world wars later and wokeness now, showed that the mask of progress was a lie. It showed that behind the words was staggering animalistic barbarism. And with the French Revolution it's just this efflorescence of energy that sparked across Europe and people thought if this staggeringly irrational thing took over the entire continent, that means staggeringly irrational things are very important. Or Napoleon. When you look at Carlyle's Great man theory as a direct reaction to the life of a great man who dominated an entire continent, that being Napoleon.

[Austin Padgett]

Romance is almost like poetry where it can be beautiful or tragic.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And it's probably often especially tragic when it's a reaction to something pent up. But could you say also the to kind of blur the lines on the schools of thought that the Founding Fathers were romantic themselves and that a lot of Enlightenment people were romantic. Romantic about the future, like romantic about their efforts, romantic about the journey and that like amazing out of reach goals and going for them anyways, like there's not you, there's to do the American Revolution. You can't be just completely rational.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So this is one of those topics where if I read a single good book on the topic, I'd change my opinion. But I would say the American Revolution is not romantic. I think the American Revolution is actually pulling from the 17th century more than the 19th century. Because if you look at the books the Founding Fathers read, they were reading the classics, pulling from the Greco Roman tradition. And I don't see a lot of appeals to Romantic philosophy in the works they read. Thomas Jefferson liked Rousseau, but he was one of the very few. And Thomas Jefferson was seen as like one of the more erratically emotional Founding Fathers in his worldview. And when I see the sort of the will that got the American Revolution, I see the descendants of the English Civil War and the Parliamentarians and not so much romance.

[Austin Padgett]

I guess maybe I'm blurring the lines between the intellectual categorization and the feeling or the idea that the word Romanticism makes people evoke. Or maybe I'm just reading things totally into their mentality. But like, to me, romance is being down, not caring about the odds, taking a bet, having it pay off with a lot of hard work. And you all went through this journey together, and it's like a beautiful. Yeah, but that's. Maybe that's just a reduction of Romanticism where to. Where it's not philosophically useful.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So this is one of the most, like, annoying things, that Romanticism, that they are largely inconsistent. Where I could not give you a good definition of Romanticism, it was sort of a vibe where. When I'm trying to figure out where Romanticism starts, part of me wants to say Rousseau, another part wants to say the German Enlightenment. Another wants to say that it was an 1820s Second Great Awakening spiritual thing. And there's not really a good answer, because Romanticism was sort of an inchoate biological reaction against the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Because keep in mind, this was a society with a highly cultivated, educated class who had studied the Bible and the classics and knew a lot of history. And when they were seeing the early stages of the dehumanization that ultimately culminated in our society, they were abjectly horrified and they had enough power that they started to clamp down on it. Because there was a social reaction to the dehumanization of industrialization, the disconnect between Enlightenment ideals and the actual implications of the Enlightenment, that there was an attempt to reach for another polarity. They couldn't really find what that was and categorize it. If Nietzsche had been the founder of a new religion, he invented a master morality, they possibly could have, but I don't think that would have worked. And so they weren't able to codify what Romanticism actually meant. So that as Europe industrialized, the sort of utilitarian, mechanical logic won. And so we're in a timeline where the utilitarian, mechanical, soulless system, not even Enlightenment rationality, we don't care about reason at all anymore, won so hard that we lost the older group of sort of educated, cultured people who could even Say what went wrong? We don't understand Romanticism because it was a reaction to a. That has since been won. And it has been won so completely we don't even understand their original motivations.

[Austin Padgett]

Okay, so you have pure rationality. Reason obviously breaks down because it leads to paralysis. So people realize we need this way of thinking in which we can just do things without having a perfect rational explanation. But then the materialist world has wiped out their orientation or value structure that could point them towards maybe what things to do or why they're even acting how they are. And so unbound non rational action is insane. Which is probably why it's hard to categorize. Which gets back to Christianity and the mystic elements versus the value and then versus like the, the rational side.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, that, that's true. And you see it with the, the Romantic thinkers with an inability to sort of maintain a consistent worldview. Where De Maestra who was an Italian French thinker who was the founder of the counter Enlightenment, he was a hyper reactionary, he would argue for hierarchy and mysticism and the these things and he pulled on a more oriental mystic tradition rather than a Christian one. His worldview cannot actually be implemented into a society and it's not actually something that people believe. And a lot of the Romantic attempts to build a worldview were highly utopian and silly. Where Nietzsche is another example. Nietzschean morality, as he articulates it, does not exist. Nietzsche does not make an internally consistent system. It doesn't have a real metaphysics. And to be fair, I think that's an unreasonable expectation to put on him like bro, why don't build an entire religious structure and then implement it? That's, that's an unreasonable.

[Austin Padgett]

It's because people are already worshiping him as a God. So they're like, why don't you give me everything I need? Yeah, well maybe you shouldn't have been treating me like a God.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Or these, you have a lot of these utopian schemes. Or Marx is another example where Marx actually did succeed at founding a religion. It just was built on the wrong principles. Where when you look at thinkers like Marx or St. Simon, who was the founder in France 200 years ago of the modern sort of wef ideas where he wanted to make a universal man that destroyed berets and men and women. You have, he talked about using migration from the third world to launch a revolution in the first world priesthood of worshiping the science with secular rituals. So when you're looking at Marx or St Simon or these thinkers, they occurred after the breakdown of The Enlightenment belief, where you look at a thinker like that French pervert Guy De Sade is using Enlightenment rational arguments to justify the most demonically insane and degenerate ideas ever. Do not look up beliefs. What you saw there was the logic of the Enlightenment had no quality control. And so you can use it to argue for the worst things by these sadistic edge lords. And that was sort of the French Revolution symbolically which all of Europe agreed. Read the French Revolution was beyond the pale besides its acolytes, where they didn't get how bad the 20th century would be. But then you have the reaction by all these thinkers trying to get their bearings on the situation, but they couldn't enforce quality control either. So you have an overton window of different thinkers that the society can't agree on or can't sort of form a cultural classification. And you have Nietzsche on a distinct arc who stood for hyper individualistic Greco Roman master morality. And Nietzsche is very much an Enlightenment thinker who was explicitly against. Sorry, he was very much a romantic figure who was explicitly against the utilitarian industrial British worldview. You have De Maistra who is a similar thinker, but he was sort of more weird. You have more, but you'll have. Lord Byron was a huge Romantic figure. We should get to him. And then you have people like Hegel who was trying to make a logical system to articulate unconscious irrational variables. And you have a bunch of other thinkers. Goethe was very much a man of that transition. But on the other side you have people who are using the sort of romantic aspirational delusion to push anti Romantic goals. So that's St. Simon and Marx where they're part of this cultural current, but in rejecting it they're also embracing it because Marxism doesn't logically make sense. It's taking the Romantic desire of harnessing the will of the people that Rousseau talks about and using these irrational like belief in the aesthetic of revolution. God, I want to kill myself saying that. And then they're harnessing it for the exact opposite of Romanticism's goals of emotional expression and depth and subjectivity and that.

[Austin Padgett]

Stuff, which is how you get to the really like cynical marketing of Zoran's campaign or something versus the totalitarian take over.

[Rudyard Lynch]

We are an anti romantic society in like the polarity of history. If 1850 was one jump. We are the direct inverse of Romanticism where if you dropped Romantic figures in modern America, they would just be so abjectly horrified between the complete artificiality of the culture, the artificiality of the Food, the lack of any artistic depth, the fact that society is dying, the just. They would dislike all of this.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, so Marx is like romantic but not towards anything that doesn't exist.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Or not towards anything that exists.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, exactly. That's a great way of putting it. And so we're in the inverse of romanticism because romanticism eventually ended in World War War 1, where it was these great European nations fighting a titanic middle earth like war that utterly destroyed Europe in the most epic ancient saga ever. And so we are in the inverse of the world wars world where we hate all of the cultural energy that produced the world wars because the Europe of that era cranked their sort of register up to 10 and then slammed into each other. And our society said because the world wars are the worst outcome, we will kill society to avoid the world wars.

[Austin Padgett]

Brilliant. It makes way to rectify your mistake. That doesn't make it worse at all.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. One of the things that I had to figure out is all of the boomers motivations are based around variables that occurred either before they were born or before or when they were very young.

[Austin Padgett]

That explains. Oh yeah, go ahead.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The boomers are heavily motivated by World War II, period, right after with the post war boom or even the Great Depression. The boomers, apparently the boomers think a lot about the Great Depression. And so it's weird that political events that occurred a century ago are still being used as the guiding principles for society today.

[Austin Padgett]

Because I was wondering, how are the boomers so neurotic if we were talking earlier about the period of abundance that they lived in? And I guess it's just part that that can add to the neuroticism because we've avoided quote unquote, Great Depression so long, at least in their minds, because they can stay away from it, that we can't go back to that place. We have to get past history. We have to get to the end of history.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And this gets into themes like the Giver. The giver is very much synonymous with that blue pill worldview because it's about tamping down every emotion, every feeling completely. Like categorizing and controlling things to the point where you're prevent, you're creating, trying to reach out for some sort of stability. Everything in the society is designed around minimizing pain, which is like that Greek philosopher. I forget which one is more of the vague one. But yeah, so it's. How do we move past that?

[Rudyard Lynch]

I've. So I read the Giver as a child and when you said it, I didn't think of the book for a while, what I realized I have actually gone through the experience that the main character in that book talks about. Because after I rejected modernity and rejected the old world, I went through a sort of process of transformation where the world seems so much brighter and deeper and more meaningful. And it's been a shift to how I process my life on a daily basis where I feel a greater degree of pain, but also a greater degree of awareness and sensitivity. And I was just thinking about how dystopian it is. That would be an evolution. Someone would go through that. In having to reject the society's social structure, you realized it had boxed you out of the genuine experience of life. And I think that's just a sad thing. And I think people are just deeply numb and asleep now where they've turned off their ability to actually interface with their environment. They're not. They're not processing the things they're seeing anymore.

[Austin Padgett]

People were born with such positive energy and it's just been kind of. They been kind of tamped down their whole life because if they try and care about something, you have all these feelings and it gets crushed. Like when I tried to write about free market healthcare in health class and I got a B minus for being off topic. It's like every time you aspire, it's like you get crushed back down to the point where you withdraw to avoid pain without ever having experienced or fully understanding or remembering what life can be.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's totally true and it's very sad. When you look at the romantic world, they were whatever the opposite of that was, where the sort of romantic ideal was Lord Byron, who in the English speaking world is seen as an artist, but he was a very important philosopher in the continental world. And Byron was a philosopher in a very Vibesian sense. Where Byron, he was a Scottish nobleman. And Scotland was really important at the time. You can see with thinkers like Carlisle or they had this poet I read about who was super influential at the time, he was a local farmer. But Lord Byron, he was an adventurer. He died fighting for Greece's independence. He would wander around Europe, he would compose poetry, he would hang out in classical ruins, he would have love affairs, he would hang out with Mary Shelley, where Byron was just a sort of Renaissance man. And this was an ideal of Romantic era culture of just the wandering aristocratic adventurer who would just live a life like a work of art. And this was an ideal of the Romantic period to craft the human life into a work of art. And so an interesting thing is that in 19th century culture, if you see a beautiful woman and then you immediately propose your love to her, that was seen as innately noble. In Les Miserables there's a lengthy segment where Marius Pontmercy, he falls in love with Cosette, Valjean's adopted daughter. And then he stalks her for weeks and then he throws himself into his room and confesses his love out of his deep passion. And this is seen as deeply noble. And then she loves him for it and then they get married. And today that would get you a restraining order and you would not be able to get hired again, hashtag cringe. Because in the 19th century, him putting that much emotional investment into something was for its own sake moral. Because they put a huge emphasis on the emotional lived experience of life.

[Austin Padgett]

That's so funny, because it's rational in a sense, because we have the opposite problem today where everyone's like, I want to marry the imaginary person from my head and nothing is good enough and I can't get a reason unless these all this whole checklist is fixed. Which everybody's checklists don't actually match up to the market, which leaves us like inoperable versus that ability to pull in that romantic lens and just make a crazy decision, so to speak, for the hell of it actually has a utility. So yeah, maybe a middle ground there.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I grew up with the attitude that sort of irrational decisions that you put deep subjective value on are justified. So that was something that grew up that I had in the sort of cultural sort of framework I had as a child. So it's still a sort of attitude today. Hollywood put a lot of emphasis on it in I would think, a wrong way. Because this system only works if you have a very significant amount of self control and rationality already. Because if you have those things, you can sort of privilege your own individual whims because you have enough self control to pull back from your own delusions. Where this romantic culture stems from aristocratic societies, it's originally a development from the 12th century Romantic courtly love culture, which is. I have a sort of like dissertation that I probably won't make into a video, but I've considered that simping is a long standing part of Western civilization that stems back to courtly love culture. And even a lot of Roman authors would write variously vaguely simpy things. But because in this aristocratic society the process of living itself is. Is turned into an art. Because aristocrats have lots of free time and extra time and effort to cultivate things. And so after the aristocrats won with the Napoleonic wars, There was a return to this aristocratic culture, which is why medieval Gothic aesthetics were so popular in the 19th century. Same thing as horror stories like Frankenstein or Dracula, ghost stories. Spirituality was huge in the 19th century, as well as love of the Greeks and the Romans and the Bible and always this was a very historically literate society. But in these aristocratic cultures, love affairs were seen as a work of art. And so if you read about 18th century, the 18th century seducer Casanova was a romantic figure in the late 18th century. He just seduces girls as his project and he does it as a work of art where he'll put certain constraining variables on his seductions, saying, she has to be within a certain range. She has to be. I have to do it without like talking to her mother. So he's. He's developed this enough. It's his hobby. And then one of his old flames hit him up and said, hey, I have a teenage friend who's known for her moral purity, who just got back from a nunnery. Can you seduce her? And he's like, this is difficult, but I need a hobby. So sure. And so when you're looking at romantic culture, it's developing from these sort of aristocratic societies where an aristocratic culture operating with gracefulness and artfulness and mastery was seen as a moral virtue.

[Austin Padgett]

It's interesting because today it seems like you have a bit of that. Like there's an aspiration for elite culture, but also. Or to be in elite culture, like celebrities, etc, but also to make it ugly. So they take that aristocratic what?

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's both philistine and decadent.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Like you said earlier, it's like. So they take that. You hear that line today about back then, maybe it would be like, I would sail across the world and back or blah, blah. And today it's like, oh, I would crawl across five miles of broken glass and eat gross stuff to do something debaucherous to this person that I find attractive. It's like a ugly fight. It's like derelict from Zoolander or something.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, we are the same civilization as the 19th century. We're just the degenerated version where all of the core components we have in our society today exist in the 19th century. It's just we are the idiocracy version.

[Austin Padgett]

And.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So to go through a series of romantic thinkers because it's potentially the greatest philosophic explosion in history, people treat the 18th century as the great philosophic era of Western history. You could make the argument the 19th century was equivalent, where at the start you have A lot of thinkers like Carlyle, who's the inventor of great man history, Carlyle was very, very wise. People don't. He was operating on very deep levels that I don't think people understand. If you just glance at his work, same thing as Nietzsche. A lot of these think. Actually most of these thinkers were operating on a very deep level where I can assess when I read a thinker how sort of deep their vision is. And a lot of these 19th century thinkers are just operating in a depth that is so much vastly greater than any thinkers we have today that the comparison comes across as insulting. And my attitude towards Carlisle, I wanted to give out this rant at some point, but I guess this is the spot for it. Carlisle writes things that I think are sort of inspirational, but if you actually follow, the implications are kind of somewhat horrifying. But I can't tell if he's playing a sort of psychological game where he's overstating his case so that you try to reach it and then fail or if he just genuinely does not understand human nature. And it's one of those things where he's operating in sort of philosophic schools that have. Nietzsche did this too, where there were lots of sort of literary conventions in 19th century philosophy that come from underlying sort of mystic traditions. Where Nietzsche was trying to, through a lot of his writing conveying concepts that cannot be said in normal prose to indicate a state of heightened psychology in which the concepts he was stating would be comprehensible or Goethe would operate under similar principles. And this was one of my mom's long standing rants. She loved Goethe, that he was sort of the German Shakespeare where he created a lot of German linguistic conventions in the same way that she Shakespeare did for the English language. But he also was operating under a higher system of logic where that was incredibly influential to all of the German thinkers of that era. Where Goethe had a long standing greater philosophy that all of his ideas were integrated into. And so when you're dealing with a lot of these thinkers, you can sort of read their peripheral work, but they were playing significantly deeper games that you would not pick up if you didn't know the context they're operating in.

[Austin Padgett]

It's when you're talking to people and you're trying to get across an argument, it's always, you're always trying to figure out how you relate, how you're supposed to relate it to the crowd and you think too rationally or autistically or something. And then you, you need kind of these narratives, but you're not sure exactly what part of it sets up what or what can be understood, what you have to explain. And like, I just do it through trying to feel it naturally. And this whole system of logical attachments or categorizations of all those different aspects always kind of escapes me. It seems really complicated.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So, yeah, this is how you and I write. And that's an American literary convention. Americans anthropologically argue through evidence. First. Give me a breakdown from this, from the evidence, how the situation works. Give it to me as a cohesive whole. Write it directly. Europeans don't like that. Europeans want you to go through the logical formulae first, explain the system you're measuring this with, and then go through the evidence. Where Europeans find the American system distasteful. The Americans find the European system obtuse and silly. And of course, I agree with the Americans. I do not think continental philosophy has been good because a lot of these different thinkers, where you look at Hegel or Marx and even Spengler, these are all thinkers I've read in their original. And they're utterly incomprehensible. And I can see what they're doing because they're trying to capture you in their definitional games so they can shuttle you from one definition to another so that they can get a natural endpoint, which is in fact not true. Like Hegel saying that the Prussian state was. Hegel said that freedom is slavery, that the ultimate freedom is to support the state. The state is the manifestation of the nation's ability to act. And so by growing the state's power, you grow freedom. And I can see the argument he's making, but he's also lying. You have Marx as well. You have shuttling these definitions back and forth until you reach the end point that we should take the richest property and then we'll live in a utopia. Well, in fact, if you kill the rich, your society will collapse. And so you. Part of the European tradition is, you have to remember for a lot of these thinkers, they were in a population where everyone was familiar with the classics in the Bible. They will frequently have just passages in Latin or French they don't translate because the horror of an educated person not speaking Latin and French and often Greek. And so a lot of these thinkers, for example, Nietzsche or Schilling or whatever, they're assuming you have a knowledge of the. The classics. And if you read 19th century documents, they'll make casual jokes about these references to classical mythology as part of their humor. And so that was the audience that was identifiable. But at the Same time you saw this gradual transition, which I think was a tragedy, away from the classics to rationalistic philosophy. But the rationalistic philosophy tended to not actually correlate with reality very well. And the end point of Romantic philosophy was to always rationalize power. Where once you removed these Enlightenment rules and the Enlightenment was also used to rationalize power, you ended up with the inchoate Nietzschean will to power being the dominant social currency. And you move from a 19th century order where liberalism, Christianity and democracy or these vaguely Enlightenment rationalistic notions were seen as the end point of civilization in the future to in World War I. These romantic notions blowing up the continent and being replaced by the inchoate desire for power which had been rationalized by many Romantic era philosophers.

[Austin Padgett]

This sounds like the fall of Greek democracy to rhetoric.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, same thing.

[Austin Padgett]

And so do they have specific formulas? Do they take like courses on this where they're like, you need an emotional appeal? Oh, of course, with a definitional point and then an explanatory framework or something. You have to do them in this order. Or if you set up this feeling before you do that, do they talk amongst themselves and strategize on how to manipulate crowd psychology?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, that's Aristotle's rhetoric that Cicero wrote a book on rhetoric to. Those were classic training material. Francis Bacon wrote the different logical fallacies. That's like the opposite side of this. And you had a lot of understanding of the tools of psychological manipulation. And that came in some cases from mystic traditions where Hegel talking about batting the thesis, synthesis and antithesis together, that's from Hermeticism. And so they were using that to psychologically control the population. And this was something that was taught and there were courses about this, but it was among small, isolated educated groups of people. And these sort of psychological tools mutated into the mass manipulation of the mass state in the 20th century. So when you get to Edward Bernays and the develop so in the 20th century, and this is one of those things that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but we have a lot of evidence for it. You saw the development of these transnational manipulative systems, social engineering or advertising or totalitarian states and these manifested intellectual ideas that were developed during the Romantic era, but in a way completely stripped of the subjective, emotional, artistic depth of Romanticism.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting how Romanticism, the discoveries and it got used as like a soulless materialist tool to manipulate. And then it's kind of like you're all this, this intellectual tradition is almost categorizing things people already do naturally to do them in a more targeted, pointed or manipulative way.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And that's the Nietzschean higher man. The higher man is one that's capable of seeing beyond trajectories to manipulate it themselves. And an element with Romanticism is that this current, which in the early 19th century could maintain power, was not built for the macro social trends in Europe over this time period, where as Europe modernized, industrialized, got wealthier and more literate. The conservative order that held up Romanticism, where Europe's luscial regime and nobility were pulling back to the earlier aristocratic eras of Western history to sort of balance, is that when World War I hit, you had a century of peace. But it's really a wonder the peace lasted so long, because When World War I happened, these trends had already built up for decades. So once you had a sort of industrially modernized Europe, you ended up developing a modernist worldview. And it's as if all of these cultural trends that occurred over the 19th century to balance it, it's sort of like their water supply dried up.

[Austin Padgett]

Did you say Romanticism died with the French cavalry charge on German machine guns?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Basically, yeah. Rudyard Kipling, he would write all these things about how dying in battle was heroic, was heroic, or the glory of empire and all of these things. And then his son died in World War I and he felt profound guilt about that. And I think that's a great symbolic example of it.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And it doesn't mean that you shouldn't care about things or believe in things or find beauty in things. It's just you also have to point that in a direction. So it's again, it's again, it's synthesizing the false dichotomy of romanticism and rationality.

[Rudyard Lynch]

19Th century Europe was Europe. 19th century European politics was about ideas. In 20th century European politics was about stuff where in the 19th century you upheld ideas like property rights or Christianity or your nation's identity as the core defining features of your nation. And in 20th century Europe, the government's role was to get the population as much stuff as possible, whether goods or safety or, I don't know, spiritual solace, which is what the 20th century Totalitarian regimes are really offering. And then you will justify whatever tyranny allows you to get that stuff, stuff based outcome. And so you saw the Generation from the 19th to the 20th century of the sort of intellectual and cultural complexity of the society.

[Austin Padgett]

And then you have, even within that frame, you can have rational arguments that are pointing towards the correct things to get you more material prosperity or something. But the Even within the rational framework, the rational arguments not being chosen.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

There's better ways to get more goods, I could tell you.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And it's because people are short sighted and foolish. They don't. A lot of people can't pass the marshmallow test. And there's a weird dichotomy here where a lot of romantic culture was looking for something deeply primal and savage. And that was a reaction against a lot of the urbanization and sterilization that occurred at the time. And what was when you tried to reach for the primal and the savage and the natural and the animal, those tools just became used by the modernists, where once you say all of these social rules and stuff, like parliament, like property rights, when you get to arguments that Rousseau or Nietzsche is making that the animal savagery of a people or their shared will or their espirit de corps outperforms their property rights or their rule of law or their political system, you get very easy totalitarian rationalizations because you'll just say, well, we can pick sort of romantic intangible variables to count. And if you can do that, you can make stuff up.

[Austin Padgett]

This reminds me of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. It's a very young person attitude where they think they can just like sprint to the end of the top of the mountain.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And then they get tired and broken down and demoralized and they hate hiking and they cry instead of like. And that you can just get rid of all these heuristics. Right. But no, you actually can't get rid of all the.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And you look at the world wars, part of the reason we're so nihilistic as a society is every military that banked off intangible variables in the world wars lost France at the start of World War I. They were all part of this espirit de caur idea that the will of a military will defeat an enemy military that has less will. And then the Germans, who banked on discipline and organization and military structure, they thrashed the French in that war. The French had to get bailed out by a bunch of other countries to survive. Although the French did fight quite heroically. And you look at World War II, a big thread is that World War II was the victory of scientism against the descendants of Romanticism because America was liberal scientism, the Soviet Union was leftist scientism, and Nazi Germany and the Axis banked on things like biology or intangible factors, heroism, mystic intuition. And you just saw the utter thrashing of these sort of Degenerated descendants of romanticism. Because Hitler was very much a romantic figure. It was the core part of his worldview. And so when you're looking at the 20th century afterwards, we associated a lot of romantic culture with the Nazis and then used it to sort of brush it under the rug.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. People always ask, why did Hitler invade Russia? Because he's a romantic. Like, that's basically all you need to know. And I realized this is basically exactly the attitude that I would have in sports. And I'm realizing kind of like the flaws in that connection, because in rugby, I would just be like, I don't understand. How can you not tackle that person? If you wanted to stop them more, you would have. We can't let anybody pass. What is. What are people doing? We can't. It's like the will. I thought it was the will thing, but, like, turns out we didn't have subs and our props were smaller. So maybe it wasn't just a will problem for them.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. What happened is that. So the Enlightenment tried to be rationalistic, but it failed. Where the Enlightenment rationality was not adapted to the real world or human nature, because the Enlightenment original hadn't really adjusted to the real world. Its romantic polarity or counterpart couldn't either. And so both of them got progressively more delusional and removed from the general baseline. And in most societies of history, you don't have these issues because you just have a social code that's adapted enough to human nature that you don't either think about adding a rationalistic analysis on top of it or. Or a primal emotional analysis on top of it. Because the idea of sort of caring about feelings can only exist in a highly rationalistic society. Because in the other cultures in history, you wouldn't think about it. Because it's just. Everything is either feelings or behavior or people just are what they are. Where to think about feelings as a distinct thing, you have to have had a society which has been shifted by rationalization a significant amount already.

[Austin Padgett]

Because in the past, things were not that changing. They were pretty rigid social structures which had to actually be at least in some way connected to natural law for their function. And then with the modernity, there's this huge volatility. So you don't have that societal stability check while operating outside of natural law. So you really have to pay attention to natural law more actively to make sure that the changing conditions aren't bringing you away from heuristics that are going to build up fragility and kill you.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. Another thing is I think there's a sort of profound sexual undercurrent to romanticism that people don't really talk about. Because romanticism is how you talk about sex without saying the word sex. When you think of heroic barbarians or slaying monsters or like primal tribal cultures that don't have inhibitions or returning to mother Nature, you're talking about very primal, earthy things that are like second or third order connections to sexual. And this is one of the most sexually repressed societies in history where people did not talk about sex at all in polite company and it was pretty puritan. And so part of me thinks in a sort of psychological sense that a lot of romanticism is a psychological balance.

[Austin Padgett]

To that, which explains the. What's the word for it? The S word. Simping.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

Because it's connected to repressed sexuality. So a repressed sexuality increases like the demand for unbound romanticism in the same way that when a woman doesn't have a kid, her mother bear instinct can be turned on the society. But for men, it's like the romanticism expression.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's very true. And that was going on in the 19th century. And a lot of our sort of delusional attitudes come from then. The idea that. So earlier eras of history had sort of, especially in Europe, had romantic love stories and. But the idea that everyone should get married to a person who is their soulmate and they love deeply and completes them, that's really a 19th century idea. Maybe the 18th century had it. I would doubt it. And the rest of the world in history, there's a girl in your town, she's the same social class as you. It's nice and along, but she's going to listen to your orders, so it doesn't matter. And so you saw this 19th century transition that we're still living in the after effects of.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, it brings me back to a sports analogy because I was a fan of Chelsea growing up and I was into the soccer and stuff back then. And they won the Champions League with a not very good team that was not rated very highly at all. But their coach, Jose Mourinho, he made so many teams win games just by maxing out pure romanticism. He could motivate people from a romantic lens. So he turned the dial up. So like with the rugby analogy, it's not everything, but it's like a dial you can use to maximize the juice in the orange. Of course, if you get delusional or you're in an unbound environment, that can create problems. But it was an interesting. Like, if you can manipulate that 3% layer in an environment that's relatively marginal and its quality differences, then you can make big impact.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That. That's a great point. Especially given Europe had pretty good political institutions in the 19th century. Every major government in Europe was sort of operating at their maximum capacity in the 19th century, which you compare to the 20th century, when Europe had a lot more people and a lot more money, and it did vastly less than 19th century. That meant that sort of the political social organization of the 19th century was superior to the 20th century. So if Europe's operating with fairly productive political institutions, it makes sense that the romantic desire to lean on culture would have become the deciding variable.

[Austin Padgett]

Yep. It's funny how it can be deciding variable. Romanticism is, funnily enough, a trait of the U.S. soccer team. It's the only reason we ever do as well as we do in international competitions. We have a motivation or a chip on our shoulder. There's scrappy games that barely get one without the tactics or necessarily the quality that should have resulted in it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And the 19th century saw a religious awakening, especially concentrated among the upper classes who noticed how, how bad the. The French Revolution was. So in France, for example, the upper classes were atheist in the 18th century and they became quite religious in the 19th century. And this spawned a cultural current that went through the entire population. So The Frenchman of 1850 was significantly more socially conservative than the Frenchman of 1780. And this was a wide scale European trajectory. And you can see it with figures like coleridge in early 19th century Britain who were really into mysticism and altered levels of consciousness. You can see it with the American Great Awakening in the mid 19th century. So there was a religious wave across Europe in the 19th century. And most of Europe was religious in the 19th century, where French Revolution was one wave that got suppressed, another wave with the 19th century. And there was a trend to introduce religion into the cities to sort of maintain religiosity among the new industrial urban classes, which, which worked for decades. And when you get to the end of the 19th century, you saw that this was a society across Europe which had largely succeeded on both an economic and a cultural. An economic, political and cultural level. Where Europe in 1914 had incredible economic growth. It had maintained political stability in almost all of Europe's major countries with unity. It had maintained radical technological progress, scientific progress, and it had a socially cohesive high trust society with very low crime rates. Europe had lower crime rates in the 19th century than the 20th century. And so when you're Looking at the world wars, you're seeing utter horror that Europeans who had grown so comfortable with the 19th century order, where the British minister at the start of the war said the lights are going out across Europe, they will not get turned on the rest of our lives. They were utterly terrified by what the world wars showed them about their themselves and their own world because they didn't think it was possible.

[Austin Padgett]

So what kind of. I guess that led to a lot of the neuroticism. Right. The self doubt, this can never happen again kind of thing. To the point where you no longer are comfortable riding your bike because you fell off of it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. Modernity has an issue of psychologically splitting things up. And so we'll have, we exist with this psychological balance of nuclear war could destroy, destroy us today. A lot of people living incredibly safe, comfortable suburban lives. And we reconcile these two things psychologically. Well, in most societies in history you have constant internecine warfare between the different feudal lords that doesn't actually destroy the entire society.

[Austin Padgett]

And ironically our inability to deal with them is leading to massive buildups in fragility along the most complicated systems humanity has ever seen.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. Life is quite strange.

[Austin Padgett]

Great job guys.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So we're going to talk about Europe's politics because we covered everything else and it's, it's always weird about the political chronology at the end and we go for the sort of cultural context first. But after the Congress of Vienna, Europe maintained 99 years of peace. I mean that's another reason to not talk about the politics because peace is boring. History is a negativity bias. But. So Europe stabilized and interestingly, Eastern Europe was the most politically stable place of anywhere in Europe where Austria, Prussia and Russia maintained the same borders between the Congress of Vienna and World War I. And the three real border changes in Europe were Italy and Germany's unification as well as the independence of the Balkans. Where Germany's unification was an evolution over time of the growth of the Prussian state where Prussia held. They had their old territories in the east, but one of the big border shifts of the end of the Napoleonic wars was giving a significant region of the Rhineland to the Prussians, which then became their center. But this sort of embroiled them in the European continental issues where Europe was on a low level verge of revolution for the entire early 19th century. So people were terrified at revolution for decades. And Prussia by entering into the West European system through these Rhinelands territories got sucked into West Germany's Western European orbit. And Germany had a wide scale issue of balancing East Germany's more conservative East European savage serf, statist energy with West Europeans, more British American capitalist, liberal, egalitarian society.

[Austin Padgett]

And did that match the divisions of Germany after World War II with Russia and the U.S. it does.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's fascinating authors have spoken about. And so you had the rebellion of 1848 which was the culmination of this 19th century sort of revolutionary era. And it was again a historic event that lots of people assumed needed to happen but didn't, where an entire generation of German thinkers and Germany was the world's center of philosophy. They were the people who really mastered the tipping point from Enlightenment to Romanticism with thinkers like Kant or Goethe or whatever. And they built up this whole culture of German liberalism with a unified Germany. So when they were rebelling, they wanted to make a German United States of America and then unify the independent German states into a liberal capitalist democracy. And the liberals of this era were classical liberals. But with the wave of revolutions across Europe in 1848 which occurred in Germany, in Paris, in Italy, Austria, I believe Poland and Western Russia, they were all brutally crushed by the governments where the governments did a good job of stopping the liberal revolts. And it was a real anti climax. And this was caused by the mass famine and poverty across Europe which had a cresting population wave. Where West Europe and Britain experienced their population spikes in the early 19th century century. That happened with the spread of the British diaspora, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. France's population decayed over the 19th century as they became atheist first. Then Central Europe experienced its population boom around 1848 which culminated in the failed revolutions. And then Russia and Eastern Europe did at the end of the century which resulted in the world wars. And so the western part of Germany had its population boom in the mid 19th century. The Eastern part of Germany did in the late 19th century. So that's also another element in the intra regional German division. But the major European governments gave significant concessions to their own countries as a reaction to the 1848 revolts to stop it. It's part of the principle that if you launch a revolution you'll even if you lose, you will often get the concessions you fought for.

[Austin Padgett]

Right?

[Rudyard Lynch]

The classical liberals were bought out by the establishment conservative governments which created the conservative ruling regime of old stock conservatives and capitalist classical liberals. They got integrated into the growing parliamentary systems across Europe where by the end of the century every major country in Europe had a parliament. And that was just a rippling change. And they had to gradually increase the franchise as the population got better armed with the Universal drafts by the end of the century. And a point McNeil makes as well is part of the culture of these huge militaries with the universal drafts was cultural reaction against the social shifts of the Industrial revolution and the nobility and the old peasants. And this is especially true in Germany and Eastern Europe, where the officers maintained a highly hierarchical, disciplined, authoritarian structure of the military was. This was a model of the old serf society. And it was a sort of haven of people who did not like the new social changes of the Industrial Revolution. And so because the military were these conservative rejects from the society, they were able to crush the Revolutions of 1848.

[Austin Padgett]

It's a. That's an interesting alliance. I was wondering. It almost feels like the early Kantian, early fusion of utilitarian and romantic thinking was the best it got because or not Kantian himself, but that early period of English or German liberalism combined with the military making a relatively free environment, they built up most of their manufacturing base and cultural capital that they expended in the 20th century. In the late 1800s and early 1800s, people don't think about it that way a lot, but like, that's why Hitler was able to get loans for manufacturing and why he's able to produce stuff just like the US they already had manufacturing infrastructure just for cars and planes and stuff that they could convert to wartime or just production. And it's like the fusion, early fusion was the best it got because the Kantian romantic knowledge was deconstructive and subjective. So right when introduced, you had kind of like a nice combination, but it just degenerated, which is kind of interesting because it's like a reverse synthesis rather than finding a way on the other end to maintain heuristics, natural law, utilitarian value, while incorporating a romantic element that enables you to act.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I have a theory that in the early 20th century we should have seen a sort of Aristotelian synthesis of the Western tradition with Darwinism and biology. I think a lot of the currents were going in that direction. And I really like 1900s, like the decade 1900, because I think it was producing a lot of cultural forms that could have ended up being something. But didn't you see it especially so in France? And you look at the Belle Epoque culture or Nietzsche and the Darwinist thinkers of that era, like Gustave Le Bon or Symbolist art, where by the time of World War I, you would developed sort of complex ideas stemming from earlier Western philosophic traditions that integrated Darwin, one of the most important thinkers of this era. Darwin changed. Darwin was the big thinker that killed Protestantism of any great philosopher because Catholicism could latch onto the French Revolution. But the Protestants, the Protestants needed Darwinism disentangle from Christianity and the. So we nearly incorporated Darwinism and science and philosophy slash religion into a single holistic worldview. And that was the trajectory leading up to World War I. What World War I did was throw a brick at a highly subtle glass house. And then the world afterwards was built by very unsubtle, very unserious modernists.

[Austin Padgett]

So the consequences of World War I are just get deeper and deeper and deeper. Because first we come to terms in the future with the human cost, the brutality of the trench warfare. Then we realize all of so much of Europe was destroyed, the buildings. And then we realized that there's negative political impacts. And now we realize it's just destroyed our entire cultural and philosophical ascent.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, the inability to heal from the world's wars has been a huge cataclysm for the world because we can talk a lot of the physical toll of the world's wars, but the sort of psychological and spiritual toll on the self confidence of civilization. Staggering.

[Austin Padgett]

And if we don't heal, we're just going to do it again. You try and use romanticism to ignore reality to the point where we have this flip where we think like that's what it is. And then we do it again because.

[Rudyard Lynch]

We'Ve utterly blot out the inner life. Partly for to not deal with the trauma of the world wars, but for a series of other complex reasons. We can't process the psychological consequences of the world's wars on especially western civilization. So we keep on doing the exact wrong things. And it's a chicken and egg thing where I find boomers in a lot of cases deny the existence of the inner life. A lot of boomers don't act like people have internal monologues or their own motivations or they're driven by the choices of their life, which is a really weird thing to believe. And I think that's partly a reaction to not having to think through the implications and of the world wars.

[Austin Padgett]

But one implication on, on women I was thinking about in Germany, right? Like Germany had a brief good period after the war where their government was destroyed in their free market. But they went pretty quick back in to leftism and this feminism and equality. I'm thinking, well all. Imagine all the old women who were around during World War II and they saw all the men do this crazy romantic thing where they got ahead of themselves, got themselves all killed. And then got a huge percentage of the pot of the women raped and ravaged by Russian soldiers. Like the rape of that much of the population combined with the failure of this other path probably made the women really resentful. Which then. And that made the men really lose confidence to the point where you get this like berating quality culture that creates its own disaster.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I agree with that. I think the World War is kind of enabled a form of castrating feminine culture because it showed how much the male traditional martial authorities had failed. Because World War I was blamed on sort of Europe's old ruling class who were permanently kicked out of power after that. But the old European tradition was the only thing that had the tools to sort of get Europe out of its new situation. Europe did the things societies often do that they double down on their worst trait under pressure. And Europe had already cut itself off from reality through modernizing and they just doubled down on that path even more.

[Austin Padgett]

Ouch.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. So to finish off several other political things, I feel bad for like shoving Europe's 19th century political history into a segment this short because I've seen 19th century authors drop hundreds of pages on the topic. But I largely do not care about most of the things they talk about. Like Norway and Sweden split up. Cool Britain. All of these distinct countries are gradually increasing parliament and then socialism emerges. That's a cross continental trend. They'd be quite disappointed I'm doing this also. They're not alive. And so Germany unified in imperial Germany should be its own video. And that was under Bismarck, who was one of the greatest political geniuses where Germany was a chessboard beforehand of a bunch of distinct independent states going back to the 13th century. And Bismarck was able to pull at the threads of the European balance of power to basically disable the switches to let Germany unify, which created the most powerful country in Europe that then rocked the entire continent in the World wars where first of all he drove the Danes out of the borderland in North Germany. They held, he fought the Austrians, beat them very quickly, disabled the Austrian governance of the German Union and put the rest of the German states under Prussian protection. And then he started a war with France. Or he quite cleverly manipulated the King of France into attacking South Germany, unifying the German states as part of a defensive treaty. And then he wiped out the French military at the Battle of Sedan and seized Paris. And this was a huge upset where the Franco Prussian War, besides Crimea was the only real decisive war of 19th century Europe in the long peace. And it showed that Germany was a greater nation than France, because everyone had assumed the opposite, because France had been a great power for centuries and Germany was largely an upstart, but the Germans had relied more so on technology and discipline. And a big element was the Germans vaccinated their military and the French didn't. And so the Germans could. The Germans kept more of their men from vaccinating their military than from deaths and war, because deaths from disease in war were significantly higher than deaths from actual bullets.

[Austin Padgett]

Right.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And so into the Germans seized Paris, and then France or Paris became a commune, a communist society, briefly, after the defeat for the Prussians destroyed them. And then the Prussians unified Germany from the Franco Prussian War and took the Alsace region from France, which made the French deeply resentful. And they just sort of kept a grudge about that for decades until World War I. Right.

[Austin Padgett]

This is part two of the problems of the fall of Burgundia.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I've loved that point of yours. And that real division between Prussia and France was the starting point of the formation of these entangling alliances that ultimately resulted in World War I. You have the unification of Italy, which was Piedmont in the northwest. They gradually conquered the rest of Italy. And there was some issues where the French were trying to conquer Rome. So the French held Rome as a city state. They had to negotiate with the Vatican, which held the middle of Italy until it didn't. And the Italians used an adventurer named Garibaldi who attacked south Italy to unify Italy into a centralized country. And there were some hopes for Italy. Some people thought it might be a new Roman Empire. But they were corrupt, corrupt enough they couldn't really industrialize, or north Italy could. Mediterranean Europe in general fell behind in the 19th century. It didn't generate a lot. And so you saw that the formation of these two new European states, Italy and Germany, out of divided territory, which radically changed the map of Europe from the middle of the continent was a battleground between the estates on the corner in the corner, allying against the stronger middle. And the final shift was the gradual defeat of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, its replacement by these small Balkan states that ultimately caused World War I, where the Ottoman Turks were called the sick men of Europe. They were the poorest, least developed, least functional country. And the Russians kept on trying to take Constantinople to partly liberate the Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire and also just to seize the land and connection to the Mediterranean. And the British and the French consistently supported the Ottoman Turks against both their rebels in Egypt, who nearly took Istanbul, or the Russians in the Crimean War. The Crimean War might have killed more people and been bigger than the Franco Prussian War, I'd have to check. But the Russians and the French fought in Crimea, a place that is now known for Putin against the Russians because the Russians were trying to take the Turks. And the Crimean War is really interesting because the French and the Russians, operating at the end of their own supply chains, were able to consistently beat Russian armies fighting inside their own country because the Industrial Revolution had given the British and the French and up where they could actually supply their own armies by water better than the Russians, who didn't have a road system could overland. So the French, the British armies in Crimea were better fed than the Russian armies in Crimea.

[Austin Padgett]

Logistics are technology. It's. That's why technology is the most. And development is the most important factor in war, because it basically changes. Think about satellites in space. You control space. That's a big technical advantage. It's like ships back in the day. And then the centralization of the European countries. The Burgundian point made me think about. It leaves all these other countries in this really interesting place like Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, all previous huge powerhouses when competing as relatively large kingdoms, but now reduced to where they're either wiped off the map like Burgundia, or they're the remnants of it or remnants of other places. Like Denmark was the traditional spawn point of the Germanic people. It was really powerful. It always punched way above its weight. It was like a top player. So I wonder if Germany taking out the spawn point was kind of like symbolic of the centralization. And then you think of Switzerland. Belgium is not very consequential countries, but they are. They're wealthy, developed, but they lost their unique kind of power play.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's a very good point. You look at the Dutch, who were one of the great European countries beforehand. Even in the 18th century, the Dutch sort of just became that country that holds Indonesia.

[Austin Padgett]

The Dutch is kind of right in the middle ground of all this.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. So. And then they got conquered by the Germans with practically no effort. By World War II, the British and the French felt insecure to the Germans and the Germans felt insecure to the Russians, where one of the big trends that led up to World War I was everyone else could see everyone else developing. And there was this triggering sense of worry of if we let this trajectory continue, we will lose. The British and the French wanted to have a war in 1914 because they knew if they gave the Germans more years, the Germans would move faster than them and be able to defeat them. The Germans had the same logic with the Russians. The German High Command said they wouldn't be able to defeat the Russians after the year 1960. And that wasn't true. But they didn't know that it didn't.

[Austin Padgett]

Even have to be an arms race. They're just looking at the technological development because the implications are so directly obvious. For example, the AI race, Right. That has applications in all sorts of logistic and military functions. But of course it's primarily exists relative to the regular economy.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And an interesting fact is the first developer of arms anti arms proliferation treaties was Russia in the 19th century. Because Russia wanted to stop arms proliferation, military technological development because they were at a military disadvantage to the West European countries. So they, they made the Hague Convention and sort of trick the West Europeans into not developing new military technologies that would give them a military advantage against the Russian hordes.

[Austin Padgett]

Weapons reductions. It's such a troll because it doesn't mean anything because like we said, it's connected to the economic development. If you get, you can have a weapons deal, but these other guys are doing fusion, energy and space stuff. Okay. They're going to be able to easily put a gun on, on their ship or whatever.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And you saw this, this culture of sort of radical militarization. And militarization was popular. The Europeans did a really good job of integrating their early mass societies into the country, which is harder than it sounds. The mass society is a term for the 20th century where everyone in the country is hooked up to the same TV stations, they eat similar food. You have national economies of scale, you have large multi continental corporations. And for the first lifetime of mass society, there was this attempt to integrate the different social classes in regions of the country into a nation that everyone felt a shared investment of. So people would burst, young men would burst into tears when they couldn't serve in the military. And it was seen as a really cool thing to be part of the regional militia or young men were happy to go to war. At the start of World War I, women would shame men by putting white feathers in their clothes if they didn't serve. And what you saw afterwards was that because the first lifetime of mass society was so high trust, the elites realized they could just screw the public over. And the public wouldn't realize it because the public didn't know how good the earlier elite were.

[Austin Padgett]

And the generational cycles kind of contribute to this. Right? Because during the Vietnam generation nobody really glorified serving. The illusion was kind of broken. People even treated veterans badly, even if they were drafted and Then when I was in high school, after 9, 11, the guys we would talk about how yeah, if China attacked we would go fight or we would do this and we would fight. And now that kind of illusion about the Middle east wars has bubbled up again. But there's always like the generation after Gen Z. And so the, the generational, what do you call it when you can't remember things? Ironic amnesia contributes to their ability to like extend this one long ago held high trust dynamic, the ripples of it further and further, but the ripples get weaker.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. That's, that's very well put. The. So I wasn't with the Crimean War where it was an anticlimactic war. No one took any new terrain. The Turks didn't fall and the, the Russians went through a sort of process of self transfer transformation where they realized if the French and the British could defeat us, we're not doing something right. And Russia was on the verge of revolution in the 1848 period. And the Russian elite took a step back, ended serfdom, did land reforms, introduced capitalism to a greater degree in the free market. They subsidized sort of migration to Siberia and I think they made the military more meritocratic. And so Russia didn't have a revolution. Russia did not have a revolution in 1780 when they could have, they didn't in 1850. And so they had one in the 1910s. And Russia was doing really well in the 19th century. I mean underneath it was horrible poverty and inequality and serfdom and czarism. But they were an economic, military, political, technological, cultural juggernaut. And if you look after the Soviet period they could maintain a sort of arithmetic growth. But under the czars they had exponential growth because in the Soviet Union there was no incentive for the increases in productivity that were under the czars. So if you look at the computer models, if you had followed the trajectory under the czars, Russia would be a first world country. Now it's a second world country.

[Austin Padgett]

It's just like Argentina in the 1800s. And what was the other country we were talking about? Germany. Right. They built up their industrial capacity in the previous generations. And so yeah, people credit a lot of the development to the Soviet Union which was based off like the cultural capital of a previous age and not as fast as it could have been. Similar to the US where we're still like growing 2% and seeing like big technological changes to the point where the landscape changes totally. It's unrecognizable in modernity and we Think we've developed so much, but you can't see the unseen. And the factors are complicated.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And it's almost like if you want to be. You can't be prideful if you're helpless. So Russia could have more pride about itself under the czarist period when they were able to compete more effectively. So it basically points to the fact that if you want to be able to be proud in your nation, you have to go capitalist nationalist. Just like the Chinese were forced to even do a little bit through pragmatic copying. Because if you're just. So if you're technologically helpless and powerless, like how can you be proud? You're a beaten people.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. I've come more and more so to think that the dominant variable in society is agency and responsibility. That the role of society should be to increase as much people's age, as many people's agency and responsibility as possible. Because I've consistently found that's the variable that correlates with just holistic success and well being. Where in any scenario where you remove agency, things get bad. Between collapse into slavery, communism, serfdom, the nanny state, and all of them end poorly. And in every situation you increase agency, things get better. Between a strong yeoman, nobility, a proud warrior nobility, rich capitalist economy, democracy. And this sort of leads me to the two transitions to end this topic where you look at the road that leads to World War I was a road that goes both through the Balkans and the sort of modern mass state where one of the points Sam Francis speaks of is that the capitalist wealth of the 19th century created these enormous industrial structures that caused its replacement by the managerial class. Because the 19th century sort of social order was you have a small town and the business owner of the local factory, he's the social leader of the town, he knows the mayor, he has a sense of noblesse oblige. The factory workers, everyone sees everyone else on a daily basis and you work your way up to the factory. And in the 20th century that local power structure is removed. The factory is owned by a multinational corporation which cycles managerial leadership in and out. And the workers have significantly better qualities of life. But it's a significantly more dehumanizing system that is causing social decay on a more rapid speed. And so you're seeing this trend spread across Europe. And it's the anti romanticism that when Nietzsche, writing in the 1880s, where Nietzsche is one of the ultimate romantics, he could see that romanticism was going to lose in the next century with the rise of the age of the last men that prized mediocrity and conformity and docility and envy. Because he saw that this was the trajectory that was going to happen and there was no countervining for force. And you can see it with the rise of socialism or these huge conscription based militaries across Europe, the big cities, the growth of scientistic ideology over the entire society. So this was a current that occurred over the 19th century that eventually hit a tipping point in the 20th. And this also hit up with the political instability of the Balkans, which was probably the most boring region of 19th century Europe, which also became the most consequential at a certain point. Because with the fall of the Ottoman Turkish Empire you saw the rise of all of these ethnicities that had not had self governance for a very long time between the Bulgars, the Albanians, the Greeks, Romanians. And there was all of this instability, especially in places like Serbia, where the ethnic lines are not very clearly drawn. And one of the things Bismarck said is that when the next war happens, it will be started due to some damn fool thing in the Balkans. And lo and behold, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand is shot.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh. Because things were so chaotic there and in Western Europe they had investment in the outcomes. So it's basically triggered a larger consequence inevitably. And he knew that it would because there was always going to be things switching hands there.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, because Europe had been tied together by these entangling alliances where I think World War I would have happened anyway. There were lots once it nearly happened earlier, but the more you forestalled it, the more it became this titanic industrial structure where earlier these different European countries were independent, where the British had had this, this thing called glorious isolationism of we don't entangling alliances because we don't want to compromise the British Isles or the British people. They got rid of that due to the German threat and the Russian threat. And the Germans got wedded to Austria, which Bismarck was vociferously against. Bismarck always believed that having strategic fluidity in the European system. So if there's going to be a war, you can jump sides. Once you got these highly rigid alliances with these huge militaries, you were going to have a war. And the Balkans created all of these sort of plausible deniability conflicts that could escalate. And it's very surreal to combine this warrior honor culture among the elites that started World War I. Of the ethic that got Europe into World War I was it would be an insult to their honor to back down. Where Serbia insulted Austria's honor, Austria insulted Russia's. Honor. Russia insulted Germany's honor. France insulted Germany insulted France's honor. But then beneath this was the mass industrial state that created the trenches and poison gas and the command economies of World War I.

[Austin Padgett]

So most of the alliances were actually really stable and locked in. It would have been hard for Austria to flip sides or something, but the Eastern European countries weren't because they were all in flux. And so you combine like the unmovable alliance in which Otto or Germany can't just like switch sides to cancel the war because it's overwhelming. So you can't do that because it's immovable. But now you've got this movable element that is forcing a conflict.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. So you look at the Balkans, where as an example, when you. So when I. When I've spoken of the potential for a new U.S. civil War, I talk about things like this where it's a real worrying sign that Trump is putting troops in every major American city because you've radically increased the velocity of social sort of friction. And for every element of social friction which exists within a range of legal plausible deniability, you radically increase the potential for a war. And what I mean by that is the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he was murdered by a Bosnian radical separatist group called the Black Hand. Serbia could have chosen to disavow the Black Hand. They actually supported them.

[Austin Padgett]

Them.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And so you're seeing this wild card group which will not have to pay for the consequences of their actions, feeding fire into the dynamite of this interconnected European system.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, this makes me wonder. I had a conversation with Tim Pool about this the other week on the culture war that was kind of interesting because we were talking about that social conflict. And if we, for example, Roe v. Wade or something. Right. Which is the idea behind Roe v. Wade is it's supposed to reduce conflict because we're no longer fighting about this on the federal level. And states can do their own thing.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Tim was making the point that's going to do their increased conflict because states can do their own thing and they'll do different things that people don't like. But ultimately. So maybe, yes, it could increase conflict, but ultimately it seems like the release valve on not being in a shared orthodoxy where only one of us can win, because that literally, definitionally force forces a fight. I mean, what are national elections? It's a war.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I support states rights on a definitional basis. Even if it were to create more conflict. I think it's good because I would prefer to have regional conflict rather than titanic continental conflict. Because we don't want to have a system where the individual American states become slaves to the centralized government because they're going to lose all of their individuality or character and become and just submit to the central authority. You've completely changed the dynamic.

[Austin Padgett]

And eventually that Babel Tower will fall.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, exactly. One of the things I thought about is that growing up, everyone in Pennsylvania is super complacent, which is. And they're just like, interesting things don't happen here. You should give up. And it's crazy that Pennsylvania, I think, has an economy more than Greece, Finland and Peru combined. So that's. It's 13 million people. That's enough for like a regional social revolution. You could make a variety of things with 13 million people. I mean, that's Italy, it's medieval Italy's population, or more than that. And it's really interesting that the shift from the 19th to the 20th century, that 19th century England, I think had like start of the 19th century, like 10 million people, 15 million. They accomplished so much more than the 60 million English people of today. And it's counterintuitive that the world in the year 1800 had 1/8 its current population. But that world produced so much more creativity because creativity stems from small sort of laboratories, not a massive scale thing.

[Austin Padgett]

It reminds me of your point about agency responsibility and how we talked about the exponential change, because it's literally, it literally makes an exponential difference to operate in these alternate ways. And having independence is important because a small area like Pennsylvania or Ohio could have world changing consequences.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, those are all very good points. Thank you for this episode. And next podcast will be Modern British History from the Tudors until Now.

[Austin Padgett]

Very cool. All right, let's find out our roots.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Bye bye. Belief in Yourself, Peace Believe 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.