← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining the Age of the Last Men
02:17:39
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A
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Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Red lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in. Hi everybody. Welcome to a new video of History 102, starring myself Rudyard lynch and our co host, Austin Padgett. And today's episode is going to be on the Age of the Last Men.
- [00:59]
B
Excellence. The last men. The ones that can supposedly cut through the age of the last men with just 100 brave soldiers. Yeah, like Leonidas.
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A
So this is going to be the last episode chronologically in the History 102 playlist, barring some insane black swan event happening in the next few years that would force me to reconsider sort of the structure of recent history, with the first video being Mesopotamia. And the reason this is going to be the last video chronologically is that this is an event that is currently in the process of ending. And it's a very strange event. It's a very strange era of history where Nietzsche invented the idea of the age of the last men at the end of the 19th century to predict what the world of the 21st century would be like. But you would not know that we had spent the last century living in the age of the last men until the last five years, because the last five years have totally changed the structure for how we perceive all of modern history, because we saw a tipping point in a variety of sort of different ways that changed our perspective. And I'm going to use three different examples to articulate the start and how to explain the age of the Last Men, the first of which is the world's population in the year 1500 was about 500 million people during the time of the ancient Greeks. It was even less at like 300 million people or even less. And the world today has 8 billion people, which is four times what it was even during World War II. We barely passed 2 billion people then. And you would think 8 billion people. And they're the best educated, fed, provisioned and connected of any era ever in human history. The assumption you'd be operating under would be that this society would be a utopia, a of every type of innovation and growth. But what do you see when you look around the world instead? You see a shocking conformity. Where one of my hobbies is I watch documentaries around the world. So I'll say, oh, what are the South Koreans watching? What are the Brazilians or the Singapore or the Chinese or the Europeans? And it's really remarkable how everywhere in the world has the exact same issues of houses that are too expensive, young people not being able to get gainful careers, not being able to start families. You have a loss of faith in social institutions, a meaning crisis with the death of God. And all of the world's populations, at least on an industrial base basis, are struggling with rapidly decreasing birth rates, social alienation. And their governments around the world are on the verge of collapse. And that's true of America, that's true of Germany, that's true of Braz, that's true of South Africa, China, South Korea, where Indonesia, where everywhere around the world you see the same tensions rippling. And it's really an interesting paradox that the end point of all of these blessings was an outcome like this one. Because you get the world today and technological innovation is predominantly driven by a handful of great men. Cultural innovation is practically dead around the world. And I see this even looking at culture in other continents. And it's deeply disappointing where as Americans, we are sort of the hegemon. Not sort of. We are the hegemons of the global system and we see all of our issues. But if you zoom out, America is ahead of the rest of the world in any of these metrics, whether wealth, whether technological advance, whether cultural innovation. And if you. And that's why people love still migrate to America by the million. But when you, if you're an American and you see all of these issues, everywhere else in the world has the same problems, but America has more of an edge in practically everything. And let that sink in. If you're a dissatisfied American, both for what it implies that the world and. No, I mean for what it implies that the world. Because we can know the American ecosystem. But when you zoom out across the entire world, it's even more dispiriting.
- [05:37]
B
Right? It's kind of ironic because some people that haven't had that psychological shift or frames shift in the last five years, they don't really realize what you could call the red pill or something. They don't really realize if they haven't had that shift, they don't realize how bad things are. At the same time, a lot of people don't realize how good things are. And that can seem contradicted, contradictory, but it's just. I don't know. That's just how things work.
- [06:02]
A
One of the things Nietzsche said when he was predicting the Age of the Last Men, and this is a theme we're going to tease out across the course of the video, and I don't want to have spoilers, but Nietzsche said that the Last men in the Ubermensch are both outcomes from the same world where the Last man is. And Nietzsche speaks that this in a fairly brief passage in his book Thus Spake Zarathustra. But it was so prophetic, it's become my intellectual obsession for the last year. I go through periodic intellectual obsessions like the Gateway Protocol or Mouse Utopia or Colonial America. And my one for the last year has been the Age of the Last Men, because Nietzsche just nailed it so hard. And the Last man are those who, due to the great wealth and interconnectivity, use it to be able to sort of stagnate and wallow in their own complacency. And we'll talk more about what Nietzsche's prophecy was in this regard, while the Ubermensch were those. And the Ubermensch, it's not a person, it's an archetype. And much like Mouse Utopia or the Last Men is an archetype where we can look at Western civilization here. And a lot of Westerners feel a personal sense of guilt for our failings in this. But these trends are. They're human trends. You can see them in Thailand or Brazil or China. And so they. The Ubermensch are those who look at this situation. And I remember as a child going to the airport and seeing all of these flights around the world, and I thought I could grab a flight to literally Timbuktu and arrive there within 12 hours. And that's unprecedented. I can go on the Internet and learn on any given topic. And the Ubermensch are those who see the same situation that lets the Last Men fall into complacency, and instead they choose to overcome it, to. To grow past the boundaries of what people thought was possible.
- [08:02]
B
Right? And those two, two choices reflect what I said about things being really bad and really good. What I mean by that is not that in reality, things are kind of in the middle. It's. No, things are actually really, really bad. And there is tremendous opportunity. And it's kind of like you said, if people from the past could see us today, they'd be shocked at the level of information connectivity and information available and capital. And they'd be shocked like that we didn't solve every problem. And not everybody knew how to do everything. Kind of like the joke about how you time traveled into the past and you wouldn't know how to do anything. Some of that is because of the technical nature of modernity, but some of that is also because we're just completely separated from the basically boomer economy. You could say there's not a lot of distributed available action.
- [08:51]
A
Yes. And what Nietzsche said is that the age of the last men would be the singular era of history that would most crush human agency and that the society would be built around what he calls resentment. And resentment is a French word for resentment, but it carries an extra strong flavor where Nietzsche used that particular word because he thought it carried sort of the extra degree of envy that a word words in German didn't have. And Nietzsche's comprehension of resentment was he's. And it's like extra envy. And he said that this was the great driver of modernity psychologically. And only when we had reached the tipping point where the age of the last men was as dangerous as possible would people unpack how much of their society was built on Resentimant. And I've spoken.
- [09:41]
B
Wait, so he had to use the French word for envy to get like a true. Yes, envy. Because the French are the best at that. So they have the strongest word, a big in because.
- [09:52]
A
Yeah, no, no, Nietzsche genuinely used the French word because he wanted to convey the sort of extra layer of the envy because he had no word in German could convey it. And a big inspiration for Nietzsche was he was there during the communist revolution in 1871 Paris. And so he saw these communist undercurrents because if you were Nietzsche was a genius that becomes more and more borne out as time passes. And I remember I was reading Will Durant's book on philosophy when I was a teenager and I was reading the entries on Plato and Nietzsche and I thought, like, these guys aren't that smart. Like they don't get it. And as an adult I'm just astounded by my teenage self's arrogance. But at the same time I came from a society which told me to say that. And so it's not really my fault as an individual. It's. I grew up in the last mental sort of environment where you're expected to say that about previous generations. It's just an inbuilt response. And it's really difficult to break past the last man framing and have the courage to do that, because most people stay inside that sort of reflexive response of the past was stupid. And we're better. Because as a teenager, I remember thinking, why are these people talking about abstract concepts? Because the things that are real are the things that are measurable and scientific. And I look at my teenage self, I'm like, oh, my God, that was such a stupid thing for me to believe. Because as I've grown older, I've come to realize that these earlier thinkers were based out of a higher logic that stemmed from the Greeks. And the Greek logical system was built on. It was built on understanding, sort of, if this is my finger, modern people can see the skin in the finger, but they can't see the underlying reasons it moves to the body it's attached to. And so the modern, positivist, pure materialist worldview, the entire world comes across as disjointed and atomistic and discordant because we refuse to deal with any invisibles. And invisibles are sort of. And I promise to get back to the main topic, but this is an important digression where. And this is a huge part of why the age of the last men became the way it is. Because invisibles are things you can't touch that clearly exist. So the laws of physics are invisibles that we can all agree exist. Darwinism is another invisible. The free market and market and how the market works when you set up these incentives are invisibles, but also abstract concepts like love or courage or justice or are also invisibles. And it doesn't really matter how a society sets up its social structure, as long as it achieves values like justice and courage and fairness and love that will help the society where we have these basic biological human needs to tap into these invisibles. And societies over history have used differing social structures to do that. And there's been this challenge over human history of how do we tap into these underlying sort of archetypal concepts that we can't touch. And modernity's attempt to erase the invisibles is actually a profound form of leadership abuse. Because modernity's idea that the blank slate. The blank slate means that humans do not have innate biological needs, thus we can ignore them and give you other stuff instead of. That's a violation of their responsibility as leadership. And this is a weird thing modernity does where we deplace all of the needs the society would have done in a previous society, in a previous culture onto the individual, and then we give the society power. It genuinely does not have. And so, as an example, in a previous culture, the society was responsible for maintaining the values, a moral structure, helping families develop, helping maintain the shared ethnic identity. And when the leadership class abdicates that responsibility, it puts it on the individual. But a lot of this stuff was genuinely not stuff that individuals should or can be expected to. And one of the cruelest things the age of the Last men does is they say, okay, we're not going to have a unified, coherent value system. So it's the job of the individual to develop their own moral code, but they're not allowed to enforce these moral standards onto the people around them, because fundamentally that would, in a normal society, that would be the patriarchal males and authorities job. And so if these sort of masculine authorities in places like business or in religious institutions or in politics are not allowed to enforce the moral code, and the system also invalidates any people who do try to generate moral codes that could be used to arbitrate society is what you've effectively done is institutionalize the tragedy of the commons and social failure, where you can't orchestrate things like starting families or having codes of politeness that make social interactions pleasant, or making sure there's strong relationships in employers and employees of trust. And this was done for several different reasons, but predominantly to give the managerial bureaucracy more power. And so you end up with this sleight of hands deception where the managerial bureaucracy takes responsibility for things that genuinely cannot change, like human nature or bringing utopia on earth, and then abdicates responsibility for the managing of a coherent social structure that allows individuals to cooperate, operate easily.
- [15:52]
B
That's a really interesting idea to apply the tragedies, the tragedy of the commons, to the modern deconstruction and moral relativity. Yeah, because if there's no good leadership and there's no rules, then it kind of creates a race to the bottom along a moral axis. And then how does this pair with the fact that they are kind of asserting a communist morality, which is, I mean, that's the classic hypocrisy. Right? But just because they're asserting a communist morality doesn't mean that they're not also deconstructing everything. With moral relativity, two things can happen at once.
- [16:32]
A
I'm going to answer that, but I'm going to say something else first. One of the things I didn't realize until I became sort of an employer and a leader is most people don't want to lead and don't want to have to make decisions on the highest level of stuff. Most people have a level of competency that they're comfortable with and they're willing to trade, they're willing to trade their authority to someone they trust. And this is something where, if you and I've been reading Erich Fromm, who talks a lot about this, when you look at the totalitarian movements of central and eastern Europe in the 20th century, these were serf societies that never developed freedom and autonomy as cultural traits. So when the pre industrial society fell apart due to industrialization, World War I, they defaulted onto the total state because no one had ever taught them those skills. So they tried to turn the state into a new type of serf. And that's a very toxic dynamic. But, but for most normies, they just want to work a job and support their family and they want a trusted authority to develop their moral code and enforce it and to protect their town and all that stuff. And social class is heavily genetic. This is something that all of the science stands behind now you can see it, you can look at practically any genetics work and it fits with history as well, where you had these pre established class social structures for all of history. And these class structures were often oppressive, that is true, but they were consistently superior to the Marxist total state, which is the other option, or degeneration back into sort of tribal barbarism without the ability to maintain complex social structures. And what the age of the last men does in effect is the type of people who would rise to leadership are disqualified because they tend to sort of be like alpha males who the system naturally dislikes. And then they force this level of responsibility for their entire social structure onto normal people. And this is a form of basically radical social degeneration because it means that only the bureaucracy can do social organization. And, and you look at all of these regulations to stop people from doing normal free association like working between neighbors or between trust between the society, which for all of pre modern European political philosophy was how do you decrease the power of the government and increase the power of the society? And that's why Aristotle talked about natural elites. And so the age of the last men does that. I'm sorry, can you repeat your question again please?
- [19:28]
B
Oh, the earlier question was about moral relativity, deconstructing of the tragedy of the comments. How does that relate to the fact that Marxism is actually pushing a value?
- [19:40]
A
Yes. So we're in a really weird situation that mouse Utopia is an archetype. And by archetype that I mean it exists sort of outside of any given historic time period. And when certain conditions are met, mouse utopia emerges. It's like how Aristotle's political system, monarchy, democracy, republic, those are the three political systems. Because in a game theory term, a society can either be governed by one person, a cabal of people, or by a voting public. And because of the game theory constraints, those three political systems, whenever they emerge over history, have comparable outcomes. Mouse Utopia, which I've spoken about in previous videos and I'll explain it in depth later in this video, but I want to touch on your point. Mouse utopia emerges when conditions exist that totally remove external competitors and constraints. You need an ideology to rationalize Mouse Utopia. And in a universal suffrage democracy, the governance is whatever most people want. So what Marxism did is that there was these highly structured Soviet disinformation and cultural sort of meddling that they did. And Soviet thinkers like Yuri Besmanov or other Marxists like Gramsci or Marcuse or many of the postmodernists, they were overt Marxists who said they were doing this to push Marxism. And they developed these complex systems to sort of weaken western culture. Gramsci wrote it this first in the 30s and Yuri Besmanov was later in the 80s. And this is stuff where it sounds like a conservative conspiracy theory, but you can read these Marxist authors themselves and they lay out each step and then when you compare the woke, it's people who openly call themselves Marxists who say the same lines as these Marxist propagandists. And so to not draw a connection here feels deeply foolish. And it's also very strange that humans are innately self serving and deceptive and greedy. But to imply that about a group, even though they have every interests to have those traits, is morally taboo is another sign of the age of the last men, because the age of the last men is explicitly or implicitly set up to reward low trust behavior. And what happened here is that in a normal society, Marxists would never have been able to permeate the total culture. But due to the removal of social authority, like we've mentioned already, on top of mouse utopia and the and sort of the mass politics nature of universal suffrage democracies is you ended up with a really weird incentive structure that creates results that look like this, where due to a series of structural variables, you ended up with a really weird outcome of democratically elected populations taking on the propaganda of a foreign power explicitly built to demoralize them and having it take over the society.
- [23:03]
B
Right, and not just any foreign power, sometimes just like Pakistan bought the farms. Yeah, not even that sophisticated, but so that kind of makes me picture it as like moral relativity is like the sword that's cutting apart the competitive moral fabric. As you're trying to advance the total state, you cut apart everything in its way with moral relativity and then you justify the state with the shield of Marxism, which is the value around that organization. So it's like a sword shield combo. And it's kind of funny that we always talk about the lens of, okay, you have the surf societies in Eastern Europe, so they didn't have the social fabric, so it was harder for them to resist the total state. And we always think about it in that direction. And what we're doing right now is we're basically destroying the social fabric, which is basically turning us into a serf population. And if you have a surf population, you're going to have a serf government, which gets into the story of exodus and why things are so bad because there's a lot we need to do before we can have a non surf government.
- [24:07]
A
Yes, that's a very good point. And I want to say this before we keep going, but if you're listening to this and you're hearing about our current society and it feels painful to deconstruct how the society you lived in has failed us in that manner, that's part of. That's part of the process. But also that pain is the place that allows new health to emerge where it feels momentarily pain.
- [24:37]
B
You will own nothing and be happy. You're supposed to be happy. Rudyard, eat the bugs. Didn't you get the message? I thought they already launched a marketing campaign around this. Did it not work?
- [24:49]
A
No, it didn't. I'm a reactionary schizo. I exist outside the terrarium. If you're listening to this and it's difficult to hear, I'm sorry, but this is something that. It's part of a process. There's pain that when you feel it, you're healing. And there's also pain that when you feel it, you know you're getting worse. So there's an intro, a very interesting sort of duality to the thing you're articulating that postmodernism emerged over the course of the 20th century and the roots of the age of the last men lie around World War I. And I want to get to the two other variables I would use to explain it before we get to the chronology. But postmodernism held that no value codes are better than others and you can't judge others. And this became popularized, not popularized, became articulated in philosophic form in the 1960s by a lot of French thinkers like Foucault or Sartre or Camus or. Or Simone de Beauvoir. And a lot of these thinkers were legitimate pedophiles or degenerates. Where Foucault was a. As a pedophile, most of them signed a waiver to legalize pedophilia. You can look this stuff up. It becomes significantly more plausible after the events of the last few months. But postmodernism is a sort of form of intellectual masturbation. You can't actually live as a person with those ideas, because postmodernism says that because we can change moral categories, nothing is real. And that is the intellectual version of a shit test. That's basically saying, I will make a ridiculous argument and I will hold this argument until you physically beat me.
- [26:41]
B
Me.
- [26:42]
A
And it's a useful form of sort of mental filibuster that you can't get past in a society with equality. Because in other eras of history, to say, this is the dumbest thing ever, what's wrong with you? Because once you have physical consequences for your actions, you cannot be a postmodernist. Because the idea that, let's say, men and women have definite traits, and you have to be aware of these traits to have functioning societies and relationships and families. If you just say we can ignore all of this, you have imposed a staggering tax on everyone. If you say that reality doesn't exist, then you have to also argue that a figure like Buddha or Christ is equivalent to, like, the most degenerate homeless criminal. And no one actually thinks this. This is at total odds with human processing. And so it's not actually a held opinion. It's a form of intellectual filibuster or masturbating. And a lot of these authors themselves said later, oh, I was never serious. That was just a joke. It was in.
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B
Joke is more shameless than prideful.
- [27:55]
A
Yes, exactly. And there's a weird thing to modernity where you do something that is objectively bad and you're like, oh, bro, it's just a joke. I'm not being serious. But that gets you out of the actual depth of the human condition. And first thing is you have the postmodern moral code. And this gained popularity during the baby boomer generation, although it had sort of dripples that stem back further. And what this was used for is because no value code is better than any other. This means that the moral assumption that no value code is better than any other is our operating axiomatic assumption. So we can base our morality out of that. But then this was used the Sleight of hands deception to just enforce a dogmatic Marxist worldview. And the WOKE are genuinely Marxist. They don't make sense through any other ideological operating systems logic, because I see each religion or ideology as a series of operating assumptions that are built upon certain underlying assumptions of how the world works. And wokeness only makes sense in a Marxist frame.
- [29:06]
B
But.
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A
But it's a degenerated version of Marxism that has lost any interest in logical consistency and has sold out to corporate America. So you have this deception of oh, every value code is just as good as any other. And this is. No, people didn't believe that there were the useful idiots as the Soviets called, who pushed these sort of values. And then you also have the Marxists who were always using this as a tactic. And the Marxists themselves say that they're willing to say whatever they can to get power because in Marxist moral philosophy, as long as you push the revolution, you are in the right. And so you have this disjoint between no value codes are okay except ours. You're not allowed to question this. And because there's no moral code, there's no way to build a logical internal structure of the world. So you're totally dependent on the ideological system to feed you views on everything. And that speaks to how you do relate to your ethnicity, how you do child rearing, how you mate, how you have friendships, how you play sports. And so they've made people totally dependent on them. But, and this is the thing I realized as a teenager, and I'm shocked, more people. It didn't click for more people. But the main caveat to all of this is that in a worldview where no moral code is as good as any other, I can just invalidate your claim that no moral code is better than any other. And I can say that my moral code is better than yours because you've just said that you're not making a claim to have be morally superior. So I am. So I can negate you that basically.
- [30:50]
B
Like yeah, because it's like calling someone a racist and then you're better because you're not racist and your moral code is non racism or something. Yes, even though your accusation is just a pure deconstruction. And then you can tell they're Marxist because it bleeds into the way people argue about things, even. Right. Filibuster was a good way to put it because you sidelined the debate onto some impossible definition when the reality of, for example, sex is staring you in the face to the point where like they won't change their position unless you make them or change the law. Like they're not going to stop filibustering. And the idea of being in the right if you're advancing the revolution is ironically kind of similar to third world scammer culture where you're in the right if you win, like if you don't get caught, if you succeed the scam, you're in the right. It's like you take that individual lands and our tribal lands and apply it to the ideology of Marxism.
- [32:01]
A
Yeah, there's this weird, there's this profound disjoint that the dominant Northwest European nations did not realize how much higher trust their culture was than anywhere else. And, and part of the high trust thing, part of their high trust operating system which stemmed from Christianity, is that in Christianity if someone appeals inside your moral code, you are morally. And this is not actually how Christianity works. This is how it was watered down and sanitized. And another thing is that with the shift from the right to the left hemisphere, from an idealist to a materialist worldview, Christianity switched from a religion about improving your soul towards God, where if you do certain behaviors you get into heaven. And it became an ethical moral code. But that warped basically all of Christianity's assumptions. And so modern Christianity, we've basically totally wiped out the mystic connection to God or sort of the living spirit. Except for a handful of churches. And I'm sure your church is wonderful. But what happened is that inside that moral code where you can appeal to say these people are part of their moral code, they're going to act virtuously. And Christianity sort of almost has game theory elements where it exists to allow cooperation very easily between Christians. And this is something Nietzsche also spoke about saying the age of the last men would have a degenerated moral code stemming from Christianity. And what this allowed was a co opting of the system where it became taboo to question how the system was co opted. But then you have these very low trust populations exploiting high trust populations. And the operating system these high trust populations developed did not allow questioning if people were cheating the system.
- [33:58]
B
Right. And the filibuster is a great way to deny the unseen because it kind of relates to, I feel like it relates to the source thing or the evidence thing which relates to the materialist frame, like the source meme, like source is kind of can be a filibuster in itself because your standard for proving the unseen is to see the unseen, which you're not going to do, which is because that's the whole Point of the unseen.
- [34:26]
A
Yeah. And equality was a huge issue here because you can't automatically trump people over obvious stuff where, for example, it's borne out in the statistical evidence that the upper classes generate more per capita than the lower classes do. And that's an obvious thing, if you're sort of looking at this intuitively because you're thinking in a free market. And of course there are always exceptions, but the idea that you have to play to the exception is a game that only the age of the last men cares about. There's always going to be obsessions and it's a combination of the hysterical feminine, the autistic masculine, which I've spoken about before in modernity. But if you're operating under the assumption that per capita the upper classes generate more than the lower classes, if you shoot all the upper classes, your society is going to lose. But then the left can operate in a frame that because we added these logical addendums, this thing, which should intuitively cause a decrease in the economy, will actually cause an increase because we manipulated definitions we operate under, or the idea, or for example, goes to reason that men would have a natural disposition to leadership over women because that has been the consistent historic record for all of human history. But the age of the last men set up a logical rule that you're not allowed to use historic evidence to study the world. And that's just a psychotic rule to have. Because if you're not looking at historic evidence, you're just making everything up because you're not looking at the track record.
- [36:07]
B
Right. It's like kids escaping on an island and being like, nobody's allowed to repeat what mom and dad said. Yeah. Don't try and hold each other accountable like by what mom and dad said. The rule of mom and dad is gone. We make the rules now. Because you don't have to be accountable to like the memory of a past standard.
- [36:27]
A
One of the things. Go ahead.
- [36:29]
B
I was just saying getting rid of the alpha, like preventing any alpha men from taking leadership roles, all that does is because there's different kinds of like, not alpha men. But what, what, what it leads to is it creates room for the like, manipulative psychopath.
- [36:48]
A
Yes.
- [36:48]
B
Because like, honest leadership from an Alpha perspective involves some bristle. But you can be a killer and be manipulative. You actually want the guy who's talking straight because then you know you can, you can trust him better.
- [37:06]
A
Yes.
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B
Versus if you prevent that, then you're still going to get a killer in there, but you're not going to know what he's doing.
- [37:12]
A
I'm really glad that the performative male became a meme. And the performative male is the concept that these guys who are feminists and very overtly pro female, they're doing it as a status game to get laid. And that's something that's sort of obvious if you zoom out because you're thinking, what incentive does someone realistically have to push against their own group's self interest? And the reason is because it's the same one that when the Persians attacked Babylon, the Babylonian priests opened up the gates because they thought that if they could get the Persians in charge, they would have a preferential deal. When the Chinese communists invaded, Tibetan local Tibetans let the Chinese in. And they didn't block off the passes because they thought they'd get a better deal in communist China, not realizing this would be the total crushing of their nation. And so that's what these performative males are. And you think of someone like Gavin Newsom, who's clearly a sociopath, clearly sort of a handler, and he is able to get this far because the system rewards people like that because the population has these unreasonable standards for the leadership class. And so what happens is that when you have these unreasonable standards of we want you to bring about utopia with no self aggrandizement. Because in a healthy, fair society, you can think our leadership class will likely be wealthy, they will likely engage in certain forms of degeneracy, and that's a structured reward for the work they've put into this. Because we would rather reward productive people for those behaviors rather than what our society does where we allow criminals and degenerates like rappers or drug addicts to engage in this degenerate behavior. But for the elite, sort of the elite men, they are morally policed more than any other demographic, which means there's less of a reward for actually being productive for the society. And then you end up with the people who do get into those elite positions are just the people who are good at deception and manipulating because that's the skill you've been selecting for the whole time. Because a reasonable person is not going to look at the optics of this and think it's a fair deal.
- [39:33]
B
Exactly. It's. It's an incentive thing. Like you're always going to get, quote, unquote, alphas at the top. But what are you filtering for accidentally by trying to prevent it? Yeah, you can't. I'm going to say can't stop gravity.
- [39:48]
A
I'm going to say two things the first of all that Nietzsche said that in the age of the Last Men, our perception of time would not stretch more than three generations. Because Nietzsche said that these social institutions like the nobility or the church were the people who established family dynasties, were the people who established societal long time horizons. And when you look at the last few centuries in Western civilization, Until World War I, educated people were reading the Bible and the Greeks and the Romans and they would have rural estates and relationships to the towns they were in. And so people's perception of time went back thousands of years. Where the core of Nietzsche's philosophy was, he was a big, his core speciality was ancient Greece. And he was looking in 19th century Europe at the spread of socialism and agnosticism and nihilism. And he was saying the ancient Greeks had a society that generated more great men and more excellence than the era that we are in. And this is clearly going to get worse over time because these sort of cultural trends are anti life and anti growth. So why don't we study what the ancient Greeks did correctly, culturally and apply it to our era. And that's what Nietzschean morality is. Nietzsche was trying to figure out what did the ancient Greek moral code had. And he extrapolated this further, saying that there was an underlying European pagan morality that we had forgotten about and that this applied to North Europe as well as South Europe. And his thinking was that by the time you get to the 21st century this, what he called slave morality is going to get bad enough that the only chance that we will have to survive is pulling on this earlier warrior moral code. And he said that the age of the last man would get so bad because when your perception of time is only three generations it means you can rationalize anything because you have no external standard besides the delusion of your given era of history. The other thing is that. I apologize. What was your point again?
- [41:59]
B
I don't remember the last thing I said, but the last thought I had about basically we, we need to like find some source. Source of strength to chimp out.
- [42:08]
A
Yeah, I thought your point was good. I'm sad I remembered. I'm sad I forgot it.
- [42:12]
B
But oh, was it about the. Oh no, no, never mind. That's an old one.
- [42:18]
A
So I'm going to jump to the second intro I would use for the Age of the Last Men, which is how do you get democratically elected populations to vote for their own suicide? Because that seems like a contradiction in terms. Because the benefit of democracy is that it allows reflexivity so the elites can't oppress the population. And if you look at the top 1% of most successful societies in history, a vast disproportion of them are democracies, between Athens, Britain, America, the Netherlands, Venice and Rome as well. And so it's clear that democracy has very good elements associated with it. But we have seen the very clear reality that in the Western world most overtly democracies are voting for their national suicides. And that's very obvious. And it really shocks me that few people in the Western world spot it. And that in itself has proved that we are in the age of the last men. Only in the age of the last men do you have this going on. And people don't say anything because that's also what Nietzsche said would happen where he said the west would commit suicide due to nihilism. And then no one would say anything until the final moment when you would see the ripping off of the old customs and the old sort of false taboos of the age of the last men, when they were put under survival. So the age of the last men gets worse until it just metastasizes into a clear moment where people snap. And that's the shift from the age of the camel to the age of the lion, which we'll have to get to later. But the idea that democracies can vote in their own suicide is a deeply concerning idea. And you can see it in the west mass importing immigrants. You can see it in us socially attacking the most productive members of our society, hating things like technological growth or artistic creativity or fertility that help grow the society. And Nietzsche said that the age of the last men's core unifying variable would be tearing down those who wanted to live and grow. Where he predicted that leftism would metastasize into an anti life force, it would stop being about helping poor people or blacks or women, and it would become anti growth. And Nietzsche said that the age of the last men would be the last time that we could sort of get away with this. And it would become a capstone example for the future. For what to avoid. Because when Nietzsche wrote at the death of God at the end of the 19th century, and he said it would take, he said it would take like it would be in the century after next that this would occur. Because at the end of the 19th century, Europe was still built around these underlying Christian moral codes. And so you look at most European societies were divine right monarchies with nobility. The population was something like 95 Christian. And so you could look at that and think that Christianity was still strong. But what Nietzsche said was that Christianity had de facto already died because God had stopped being a moral player in people's universe. And so when people did things that looked at the scientific results, they looked at theories like liberalism, and they were not using Christianity to mediate the elements of their life. It existed as an idea, but it wasn't the dominating animating principle of the society. And one of the things my friend Balaji has said is that the 19th century was a society where God was the dominating moral variable, where when you did a social behavior, it was arbitrated by God in the Bible. The 20th century was the bureaucracy, and the 21st century is going to be the network. And the shift from the age of the last men to the age of the Ubermensch is that from the bureaucracy managing social relationships to the Internet and indoor and sort of indirect methods managing social relationships with people's sense of self being a sort of node. And a node in their environment where people pull their strength from their positions inside broader cultural nodes they establish and webs they establish. And what Nietzsche said would occur with the age of the last men is there's a stultification of the society which hits the threshold where it's the most dangerous era in Western history, and it's the most dangerous era due to complacency, where the issues keep building up and up because no one wants to fix them.
- [47:18]
B
Right. Which relates to your American Beauty analogy. And there's a classic water tower analogy where there's a hole in a water tower, and so you put like a piece of tape on it or you block it up, and then you just keep putting more and more and more and more, and the problem gets worse and then explodes. Because you're building up water pressure that whole time that you're taping it off.
- [47:42]
A
Yes.
- [47:43]
B
So that's like a fragility dynamic that we're dealing with. And the American Beauty story is great, right, because it's about killing that alpha, which prevents him from cutting through the noise to say what no one's saying to avoid some unnecessary charade. And when you've. When you stop the alpha in society, then you prevent that from interaction from happening, rippling across. And I feel like this is Tony Robbins whole gig, right? He basically like teaching men to not have the Kevin Spacey reaction in American Beauty, teaching them how to overcome that. And that actually is very deep because it relates to all the other problems in society.
- [48:28]
A
I'm glad you brought up American Beauty, because I often think about it for the Age of the Last Men, where American Beauty fits for both the Corporate era America video and the Age of the Last Men. Because I've had to make a series of videos looking at the sort of different trajectories going on in the 20th century world, because you have a globalized order under America where trends ripple across the entire planet. And it's this weird situation where it's a combination of multiple players around the world in a single system, but multiple trends were going on at once. And with American Beauty, you see sort of phase A or B of Mouse Utopia, where you see all of people's relationships falling apart. Lack of meaning. And the thing that drove Mouse Utopia from Calhoun's many experiments was the lack of meaning. And that was the lack of meaning and agency. And what this causes is people engage in degenerate behaviors to make up for that lack of agency. And in American Beauty, people's lives are falling apart. But it's in a quiet, understated way that only a sort of poet's mind can look at it and see all the threads together. And you see.
- [49:44]
B
Because they're basically spiritually and psychologically falling apart.
- [49:48]
A
Yes. And you can see in American Beauty how this system falls apart due to all of these underlying trends people don't think about. And part of the thing that matters at the Age of the Last Men is it's probably the greatest point in history of a shadow catching up with a society. And the shadow is a Jungian concept. And Nietzsche and Jung shared a lot where Jung commented they were both pulling from the Hermetica as their core philosophy, so they share a lot of assumptions. And Jung was writing about Nietzsche at the time, same thing as Spengler, where there's. These German thinkers were aware Nietzsche was before Jung's time, but these German thinkers were thinking about each other. And the shadow is what happens when the trends which occur in the underbelly of a society come roaring out under pressure. And when Nietzsche wrote his book Beyond Good and Evil, what he was trying to convey is that Christian morality, and I want to state this clearly, Nietzsche said that the morality of the Age of the Last Men would not be Christian, but it would be a degenerated version of a Christian moral code where Christianity's core emotion is love and envy is the inverse of love. Love is when you accept people's failings, and envy is when you look for failings to tear others down. And so it can appear like Christianity, but it's actually its opposite and its inverse. And when you have a moral code built Off. When you have a moral code built off just good and evil, you end up with weird situations that do not understand the complexity of the world. Where when you invade Iraq, you try to install a democracy, although the first thing said democracy does is ally with your rival Iran and then use it for the Shias to sort of persecute the Sunnis. Because your concept of good and evil is not complicated enough, you think democracy equal good. When I was growing up, parents would helicopter their kids until they were age 18. They'd walk, they picked them up from school to walk a few blocks. They'd control their kids spending habits till they were 18. I knew parents who wanted to move to the States their children were going to college in so that they could keep track of them as adults. And that's because when you have a simplified good evil moral code, you can't view with these levels of complexity and abstraction. Especially so in a mass society that's not capable of large amounts of sort of complex thinking. Because in a mass society you have to get every single thing to be applicable and standardized. There's not the ability for certain elites of people to can do certain tasks and then other people can't. And in a society that allows a greater degree of depth and complexity, because Nietzsche said that the greatest taboo of the age of the last men would be depth. It would be a society built around conformity, where depth and struggle would be taboos in their own right. Where the greatest taboo would be enforcing depth or struggle onto others. And this would mean that no one would notice or deal with the underlying issues killing the society. And so you can't pull over these parents to say, hey, if you do this to your kid, they will be a completely dysfunctional adult. But that's an obvious outcome from the situation. When I went to school, kids would often do over 12 hours a day, seven days a week preparing for college. This means they've never had time to develop their own personalities, develop agency, figure out how to have relationships. So you've made it very difficult for them to pair bond. For them to have any faith in themselves as individuals, to have faith in their nation. And what happens when college turns out to be a scam and there aren't jobs, is you've wasted their entire life. And that's something where it requires a greater degree of moral clarity than just good or bad. When you look at the baby boomers, they see the world like Star Wars. There's the good guys and the bad guys, and there's not much more complexity than that. And What Nietzsche suggested was the creation of a new moral code that existed in parallel to Christian good or evil, where it's not that Nietzsche didn't believe in good and evil. He thought we needed to have an extra layer of complexity which was petty versus grand. And this feeds into. Because Nietzsche's this is something I'm surprised few others noticed because it's obvious if you look into Nietzsche, Nietzsche's underlying operating system was the Hermetica. And the Hermetica has a moral axis of grand versus petty. And so the Hermetica's goal is to increase power level and increase complexity. And Nietzsche said the age of the last man would be so bad it would force the rise of a new social class called the creators and a new moral code around increasing growth with its dominant moral axis as life affirmation. Because in the age of the last men that's spiraling towards mouse utopia. The dominant threat is can we develop a moral code that's more antifragile that it allows genuine growth? Because the age of the last men would be so stultified that this would be a life or death threat.
- [55:16]
B
What is the difference between the grand and the good?
- [55:21]
A
So a figure like Genghis Khan or Alexander are grand and it's unclear if they're good. Genghis Khan clearly wasn't good.
- [55:30]
B
Alexander, they're clearly grand.
- [55:32]
A
Yes. And so examples of the need to have grandness in your moral code is if you want to have growth and avoid stagnation, you have to give incentives to people who are not morally totally clean. Because the type of people who push for these great breakthroughs, like Christopher Columbus, who was not very good person in his personal life, but he got us to reach the new world. And in the grand scheme of things, Christopher Columbus's personal life is vastly less important them him reaching the new world for the course of world history. An example that we are in the age of the last men. When people look at Napoleon, they try to call him an incel for his relationship with Josephine, without realizing he was sleeping with like half a dozen other women at the same time. So calling Napoleon an incel is staggeringly insane. And if you want to focus on Napoleon's personal life to invalidate him being the conqueror of Europe, installing a new law system which is the dominant one in the world, being a cultured Renaissance man who could write in a variety of topics is you are using pettiness to invalidate a great man who caused an enormous historic breakthrough. And this is something that only makes sense in our society. In Every other era of history, they would just stare at us blankly for being so petty,
- [57:04]
B
right? They're like, he didn't leave her letters unread. He must be really emotionally dependent on him. Loser. On her. Loser.
- [57:12]
A
Napoleon wasn't an alpha, Chad Sigma. Well, he was, actually. I'm just mocking these people. It's very, really disappointing how we've simplified all discourse today into sex. And it's an example of sort of mouse utopia, because in mouse utopia, there's a breakdown of mating, and that's the most fundamental human thing. And so. And it speaks in the Last Men Ubermensch thesis that in mouse utopia, most people will be the last men who will be stuck in these very peripheral sexual signaling games. When you look at people online doing all of this sort of weird sexual signaling is these are not strategies that will work. Even if they did work, you're stuck in a society with a 50% divorce rate where people can't afford to have children. But then other people can pull away from this and realize the scope of it and not fall to their most base instincts. And this is a microcosm of the entire situation, because in mouse utopia, we're in the behavioral sync. And I need to actually explain mouse utopia for those who are new to this, my channel and my content. But the sink capture, the behavioral sync captures most people. If you can break outside of it, then you can totally dominate them because the sink is an environment which weakens everyone involved. And I'm going to back up and explain mouse utopia, where it was an experiment in the 60s to deal with population growth, where over the course of the 20th century, the world's population went up many times over. And there was real worries about overpopulation, because on the trajectories we had, we were going to get overpopulated. But a combination of GMOs allowed us to radically increase food production so that the world didn't starve, which it would have very quickly if we didn't have the Green Revolution. And also what happened was comparable to mouse utopia, that when you get this overpopulation, birth rates crash to zero. Where Calhoun ran this experiment over 30 times, and he put nine mice in a cage that could hold space for 6,000. And then their numbers hit 2,000 and they had a complete social breakdown where the mice stopped mating with each other. Male mice became effeminate. You saw these mice who would just groom themselves all day and do nothing else. Called the Beautiful Ones feminine mice became masculine and highly aggressive. They would misrase their young so that the next Few generations of mice couldn't function. You saw autistic mice who didn't follow social cues. You saw aggressive sociopathic mice who would attack others. And the last two mice that survived were the alpha male mice who died defending their harems, because mice mate in harems. And then the tunneler mice who had a hobby, because the mice hobby is they build out these complex tunnel networks that allow them to interface with their. That allow them, because they'll make these sort of balls of dirt and they'll make these complex tunnel networks that allow them to be distinct from the failing mouse society. And a complex point that I want to articulate is when you're looking at the age of the last men and these social norms, it's easy to forget that mouse utopia in these social norms are enforced by the entire society in a way you're not allowed to say no to. If you listen to most conversations today, people self deprecate and they take turns self deprecating as a game to relate to one another. And there's not the inverse of it, because if you self deprecate but you don't brag, it's sort of a psychological drain. And so we've banned bragging, and then we've made self loathing socially necessary, and then we've invalidated the use of these old social norms where when feminism formed, it was framed as a choice where a woman could choose to live in a traditional lifestyle or she could be a feminist boss girl. But what happened, in fact, was feminism was invalidating women who used to do the traditional strategy, which was the consistently effective mating strategy. And so when I was a teenager, I got so much crap for reading history and being a genuine learner, which is strange, because the purpose of school should be to help learning. And so when you look at the behavioral sink, you have to remember this is a living process that is enforced by the society's social code. And that's why Nietzsche said the age of the last men would be uniquely horrifying. And on top of that, because this cohesive social unit exists to weaken everyone down, wherein in mouse utopia, there's the first death or a spiritual inner death, when the mice lost any sense that they were alive or awake or sort of inner meaning. And then the mice turned on each other and murdered each other. Is that any mice who break out of this, the iron cage, or the terrarium as I call it, gain such a staggering advantage over the mice who are stuck inside the pit that they become the creators or the overman? Because you have these Two trends where when you have the groups that are selected by these self defeating mechanisms, they get worse. And the people who break out of this system and build social norms against it develop such a staggering advantage over them. Which is why Nietzsche said that the age of the last men would ultimately get crushed because it would make the people involved so weak that anyone who breaks out of it automatically wins the system.
- [63:05]
B
Nature self corrects itself.
- [63:08]
A
Yeah, basically, let's.
- [63:12]
B
Yeah, I was just wondering with the experiment, because with the analogy with us, we sometimes relate it to unlocking space, creating an extra outlet that enables us to escape the contained environment that contributes to mouse utopia. So I was thinking a way to test that would be to get. To make it possible for the tunnel mice to escape, like into a field, but really hard. Only after a certain amount of time that you would see the mouse utopia experiment start, start to take its form. So then you can see if they. What would happen if they broke out after the rest had already degenerated. Like that would be an interesting extra layer to the experiment.
- [63:56]
A
Oh, the mice. You can, you can't. Mouse utopia is triggered by overpopulation. Rural populations should not be as affected by mouse utopia as the urban ones by a significant margin. And I remember when I was growing up in rural Pennsylvania, we didn't have most of the mouse utopian norms. I didn't know socially left wing people until I was a teenager. If you were a Democrat where I grew up, you were a union guy. And so I didn't know most of this stuff was going on until I moved to Philly as a teenager. The thing we did have in rural PA was feminism, where the ide. Where we didn't talk about the other left wing stuff, but women gained significant social status. And a lot of that was the court system where we still had a 50% divorce rate. And when you're in a situation where you have to sort of mate to pass on your genes and you have a 50% divorce rate in a biased court system is you radically alter the sexual dichotomy between the two sexes, which creates a balance, sort of significantly more feminized society. And one of the things that Nietzsche talks about is, and it's interesting Nietzsche doesn't mention mouse utopia, but he does say that the age of the last men would be the most dangerous era in Western history where there'd be the threat of extinction and this would be caused by complacency and nihilism, and that the age of the last men would be so complacent it would be incapable of defending itself or procreating, and the west would be killing itself out of nihilism. So he talks. He knows something like mouse utopia is going to happen because he thinks it's an existential threat. But he doesn't frame it in those terms. He talks a lot about how mouse utopia is enforced by the society. And when you look at social media and these media outlets, as well as nationalized socialist governments, where by historic standards, every major country in the western world is socialist, because in America, the government makes up 40% of the economy. In France, the government's a bigger percentage of the economy than it was in the Soviet Union the year before it fell. The French economy is nearly 60% government driven. And what happens is that in a healthy, normal society, mouse utopia occurs in the cities. And the countrysides can maintain enough of their culture to resist it. What you do with mass media and social media and dating apps and socialist governments is that the majority urban societies vote in governments that use the regulatory state to enforce mouse utopia social norms across the entire population. So if you didn't have socialism or these giant. These giant governments is that you would have the cities. And then the countryside could operate as natural laboratories to develop these social norms. But the cities vote in these mate suppression, which enforce these norms across the entire industrial world. And that metastasizes into a far greater issue because you've turned the behavioral sink into a single international unit. Where I remember when I was in Phuket in the Indian Ocean, in Thailand, I thought, this looks exactly like Florida. I remember when I was in Shanghai and I could see all of the issues we had in America, but worse. And that's because we are all part of a singular system, and no one is responsible for managing if the system works. The Americans have given up on that, and other people are imitating the American operating system. And the reason that the age of the last men is so dangerous is not purely mouse utopia, but also the value code. You're dealing with it. Because if you were a medieval monarchy and you hit mouse utopia, you have a king and a nobility who could just tell the peasants, sorry, guys, you got. You can go to hell. We're going to enforce these social norms. And the big issue with mouse utopia, or one of the biggest ones, is the alpha male and the tunneler mice can maintain sanity. And that's sort of the. Because Nietzsche says the new social class which destroys the age of the last men are called the creators because he predicted that creativity was the way you get out of the behavioral sink. Which is also what Calhoun said. What socialist governments do is they penalize anyone who's against the mouse utopia systems. And this plays into the Unabomber's thesis on industrial over socialization. Because in a society like 18th century Europe, where you have a hundred independent countries with their own leadership classes is if Britain falls to mouse utopia, France can look to Britain as an example. But with the global international order is you've metastasized mouse utopia across the entire world and you've made it nigh impossible for individual players to rebel against it.
- [69:13]
B
That's funny, because we talk about space as an outlet, but maybe rural repopulation is more of an effective outlet connected to Starlink or something like that. Gives you the ability to spread out a little from the urban areas.
- [69:28]
A
It is.
- [69:29]
B
And that could help shift the power maybe, which would help that dynamic. And it gets back to like self preservation layer. Because Nietzsche is talking about how all these trends will culminate in self destruction. So like what are we going to draw on for self preservation? And maybe that's where you get the distinction between the good and the grand. Because Christianity provided the strength of the west through agency. When you reverse that, like the shadow catching up, you flip that, then you lose the agency. Then you need some sort of mechanism of like self preservation to fall back on as you're building this thing. And it's not like it's something new. You always need to consider both those dynamics together. Right. Even if you have a really healthy society, you still need to think about self preservation on another axis. There's always going to be a relevant situation for that.
- [70:19]
A
There were two, two German thinkers within a generation or two of Nietzsche that really got correct. Or they really analyzed Nietzsche's idea of the last man. And it speaks to what you just said, of whether space or the countryside is a more realistic escape for mouse utopia. And I definitely think the countryside on a statistical basis because it takes generations and new technology to get people into space, where space is a potential new frontier for humanity. But on a sort of demographic, millions of people basis, we already have the countryside nearby. And Spengler, a lot of his thought was based on Nietzsche because Nietzsche said that Socrates was a sort of dark figure in some ways because Socrates was against the organic Greek religion that powered their culture. So when Socrates criticized the culture and the religion, he allowed Greek rationality to emerge. But it was at the expense of the organic society that ultimately led to Greece's decadence. And the German thinkers of that era used Greece as their dominant society. They pulled from. And the first one of the sort of schools of anti Christian thought in this era was the German. We prefer the Greek and Roman manly European cultures to Christianity. And for the French and the Soviets and the Marxists, they had a criticism of Christianity for the opposite reasons. And what Spengler said is that around the year 2000, which is roughly when Nietzsche put his Age of the Last Men, where Nietzsche said that no one would truly understand his teachings until the year 2000 because it would only be after a century of the moral trends he talked about, that the Age of the Last man would get acute enough. It would be processed as a life or death threat. And Spengler said around the year 2000 would be the West's peak of nihilism. And Spengler was writing around World War I and he was. I like Spengler a lot. If people study my work, you'll heal me, you'll hear me reference him, although he's one of the worst writers I have ever read. And Spengler said that around the year 2000 that the west would experience a de urbanization because the cities would become so. So less and infertile. People would flee to the countryside, you'd see the rise of corrupt socialist governments, nihilism would be at its peak and the birth rate would be crashing. And Spengler said these things because he was looking to the precedent of earlier failed civilizations, especially the Greco Roman, where everything I said had already occurred to the Greeks and the Romans. So in Europe in the year 1900, that was when Europe was most powerful. But they could look to earlier civilizations to predict what a decline would look like. And Spengler was part of this same sort of school that existed among European philosophers, including Nietzsche, Carlyle, Henry Bergson, that were sort of like they were pulling from hermetic philosophy and Spengler's core theory of history, highly hermetic, where it's about sort of masculine and feminine charge and life force and sort of arcs of behavior that you pick a certain timeline that you follow through with the timeline. And he said that in the year 2000 that this would be the period where the west would be face the most danger from nihilism and Faustian civilization, in Spengler's definition is the west does what other civilizations do. But more the west is always extra and more so. Our era of nihilism, which each civilization goes through, would be the most pronounced of any era ever, but we would eventually puncture through it. And Spengler thought that the west would see a reintegration of Christianity that secular because Spengler said that socialism was the anti life philosophy of Western civilization. Socialism would be at peak power in the year 2000. But then Spengler's Faustian Knot, where Spengler said that Western civilization's dominant underlying story was Faust. And my mom was obsessed with Faust. She read it like four times. And it's the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil for infinite money and wealth on the deal that he's not satisfied with it. And then at the end of the story, Faust tells the devil, you did not satisfy me. I get to have my soul back. Where it's this whole drama of will because Faust becomes wealthy and famous and powerful. And so the idea is, will Faust lose his care for his soul? And at the end he pulls through. And that was what Spengler thought would happen, where he thought that, much like Nietzsche, the age of the Last man would be a period in Western civilization's history where we had the choice to totally throw away our soul and instead we'd pull through and Spenk her talks. He talks at a similar concept to Nietzsche where he says, Christianity is the bedrock of Western morality, and so it will have a re emergence alongside once socialism decays, the West's underlying fabric. But he also thinks that the foundational morality is of the west. And the sort of the hardware that we had on top of Christianity's software was sort of like Nordic hermeticism. And that's something that you read it in Spengler's work, where he talks about the West's core belief is the search for excellence in constant overcoming, the transmuting from lower to higher forms. And these are hermetic ideas. I can explain that if people are more interested. But what Spengler said is that around the 21st century, you would see this moment where the west chooses to sort of activate its soul and breaks out of this period of nihilism in the same way that the Greco Roman world did, as well as India and China, where each of these civilizations had periods of nihilism that they overcame in the west would be the most dramatic, but we would still be able to turn it around.
- [76:47]
B
So Niche is basically identifying this Faustian myth, and he's like, okay, what happens in this Faustian myth? How does the story go? And he sees the like, materialism and decadence. And he predicts that people are not satisfied with this bargain. They'll reject, they'll reclaim their soul. And this is obviously like a very consistent theme throughout culture where everybody famous is like, oh yeah, I didn't, I don't actually like it or I like my family or it's a burden or like you get used to it, right? Like all these, all this dissatisfaction with massive wealth is like a perennial theme. I wonder if that's common throughout the world or if that's like especially pronounced because of our. The Faustian myth. Is that related to that at all?
- [77:32]
A
It exists in different cultures. You can see it in the Bible, you can see it in Oriental traditions. It's exacerbated for the west because it's a, our dominant cultural trait. And when you look at the modern west, it's the society where the Faustian deal has become absolutely everything because socialism or modernity is the Faustian devil the west made the deal with. And so we have a society that has ev. That had everything except the west soul. In the west soul is a combination of our European heritage as well as the Christian religion. And those are the two things that we've most attacked as a society. I've been around the world and it's. I remember when I was in Asia, I thought to myself, is this all that this reality has to offer? Because you go to a far off country and it's, I mean, around the world it's Indian, Italian, sushi, American and Chinese food, even in Thailand, in Italy, in Peru. And I remember thinking to myself, I've been around the world, but I don't feel a sense of sort of transcendence or depth. And I remember going to Europe and I would talk to people and I had realized that the Europeans had watered down their history to fun facts for tourists. Or you go to China and it's a horrifying totalitarian state. And I thought, what's missing here? And it made me realize that the thing we're missing is different levels of perceptual depth to reality. And what I mean by that is that back in the ancient world, each society had their own coherent worldview. And as you invested time or effort into a certain place, you could attain depth or transcendence inside their internal logic system where they had sort of tight local communities, they had religions you could move up in, they had national coherent myths. But what happens when you compress all of this is you have a reality that is no place for depth. And what Nietzsche said that the. One of the most horrifying elements of the Age of the Last Men was the mass conformity and total loss of depth. So the society wouldn't be smart enough to even be able to Comprehend what its failures were until it snaps with the age of the lion.
- [79:58]
B
So this is where the network state comes in. Because if you picture like a vine, right, it's like things the global system expanded internationally, all these logistics connections expanded like the vines growing out. So you have Italian food now available in America and Japanese food all throughout Southeast Asia, but the leaves haven't like grown off of the vines yet. Give it the depth. And the network state is the mechanism from which depth can be generated within this new paradigm?
- [80:29]
A
Yes, because when the managerial class is your only social operating system, you have to play by their rules and the managerial classes rules, or if the system cannot perceive it, it's not real. Because according to the system all ethnicities are the same. Because from their perspective, that's the most efficient belief to have. Because they can exploit, they want to exploit each ethnicity equ or not really. But they like to you. They like you to believe that. And, but in a. And it's hard to overestimate how huge a jump it was from pre industrial societies where your social life and your daily lived experience was in a village with people with controlled social customs. Because that gave a much greater driver's seat for the individual. Because in our daily life the bureaucracy has a significant mediating variable where if you want to establish a town with your friends, the bureaucracy will stop you from doing that. If you want to establish a religious cult, that's taboo. If you want to make your sub region split off as an independent country, that's also taboo. Where what the age of the last men is as a deal is we will give you agency in things that don't matter, to remove your agency, agency in the things that do matter. And the way they do that is
- [82:01]
B
by stopping people like becoming the Duke of Saxony.
- [82:03]
A
Yes, the way they do that is by trying to stop people who exhibit agency, because that's toxic or masculine or upper class or whatever. And one of the. The great line that keeps coming up when Nietzsche talks at the age of the last men is the last men blink and call it happiness. Where Nietzsche said that the last men will be a society that has so stripped down ambition and depth and these higher virtues that the only thing left is comfort and conformity. And the last men will say they're happy because they've removed all the mental scaffolding for happiness to be a complex deep thing, rather than just a concept of comfort and not being challenged. And so you can tell the last man that they're not happy, but they're just going to blink at you and Nietzsche talks about how the Last men keep work as an institution because they need work to entertain themselves. But the work can't be too stressful or dynamic lest it push against their boundaries too much. And Nietzsche said that the last one would be obsessed with health because with the death of God and this is a multi step thing, the last thing that's left is human health. Because if you don't know if your soul is going to make it to heaven, your body becomes the dominant receptacle. And because Nietzsche said that after the death of God in the late 19th century, the 20th century would be one of tyranny and mass wars and horrors. Because the belief in the human soul is what stopped people from like Hitler or Stalin from emerging. And you can watch our Death of God video. In many ways this is the secret sequel to the Death of God video. And what happens after that time of great totalizing states and ambitious schemes from the death of God is what's left is comfort and complacency. Because without a framework established by religion, there's no place where you can say you ought to do this thing. The last thing that's left is the avoidance of suffering. And what Nietzsche said is that the last men would be the singularly most nihilistic society ever in history. And it would be used as a capstone example for thousands of years for why you need to avoid decadence because of the three great tyrannies of the 20th. The three great modern ideologies, Marxism and fascism, are ones you can point to and say they're very self evidently evil, at least to a reasonable person who's not been propagandized. You can see the Gulag or the Holocaust said this is a bad ideology. Liberalism is more complicated because liberalism is split between the French socialist version and the Anglo Saxon classical liberal version that share very little, but the term is used interchangeably. But what Nietzsche was trying to say was that when you have these waves of totalitarianism, the next option will be just using comfort and agreeability. But that in fact is more dangerous for the totalitarianism than the totalitarianism because it culminates in Naus utopia, where due to the wealth of the industrial revolution, Nietzsche said we had to sort of the world had to create. A capstone example of this is why decadence is not morally acceptable. Because I have a concept called passive evil. And passive evil is when you don't do something where your society is dying, you don't say anything when something moral needs to be done and it isn't and the great lesson of the Age of the Last Men is that passive evil is just as bad as active evil. And the age of the Last man was supposed to be the embodiment of raw decadence and raw sterility that future generations will look back on as an example to avoid, to motivate their populations to do cool stuff and continue the game of history.
- [86:15]
B
Right? I like to say if we're not careful, the only thing our era of history will contribute is to add cat ears onto the list of like signs of civilizational collapse along with inflation and whatever else normally goes with the the list. Watch. Like if cat ears start appearing, then doom is on the horizon. And that's kind of why we have to get our act together. Because. Because if we engage in the ultimate degenerate crash, then it's going to make our future ancestors go through a lot of pain because they're probably going to overreact to how horrible we are. So the better we manage it, the less PTSD people in the future will have to have about these very real threats. When you kind of split liberalism into the, the French and the English, right? And then it's kind of like it's the same thing. It's basically just exactly what we're talking about when we describe Christianity and then communism as its shadow. Like French and English liberalism are just Christianity and versus communism bleeding more or less into one or the other.
- [87:28]
A
And that's why nihilism is the dominant element of the Age of the Last Men. And the dominant trait of the Ubermensch is the overcoming of nihilism. Where in a nihilistic worldview you can point out that these two definitions of liberalism are not the same and should have different words. And in political discourse you should actually use structured words as a way to have reasonable discourse. Because if words don't have meaning, then you can't have discussions because the other side and Marxists are very guilty of this. Can just change the definition self servingly. So you can't sit them down and have an actual discussion. And that's the intellectual equivalent of sort of engaging in anti social behavior. And in a society consumed by nihilism, you can't do that because the dominant response is the last man shrug of oh, words don't matter, politics don't matter. Let's just blink at each other.
- [88:27]
B
Yeah. And I hate, I hate that I always forget the name of this Greek philosopher, but I know there was one Greek philosopher who was really lame. Like there's a Greek philosopher for everything, right? And he was the Greek philosopher for doing nothing basically minimize your. Which is. Which is like the giver, the philosophy behind the dystopian novel the Giver. And it's just such a lame era of history to be stuck in another.
- [88:55]
A
So there's two authors who make me think of this. Both science fiction novels, one of which is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which talked at the exact same themes where it set. It was. Huxley was one of the biggest mystics of the early 20th century and he was a perennialist. And he wrote Brave New World as a warning of 1984 is dangerous for overt reasons, like the totalitarianism we spoke about before. Brave New World is what happens when you have a society that's built around humans base biological needs, but none of their higher virtues are transcendence. Where in Brave New World they genetically engineer people to be complacent. It's a singular global system without barbarians to conquer it. They have these ritualistic orgies to keep people sexually satisfied. The idea of personal private life is seen as a moral taboo. They have these childlike nursery rhymes they repeat to keep people conformist. And we in a lot of ways do live in the world of Brave New World, where the age of the last men's great taboo is forcing others to care about their own society's death. Because the shared negotiation is we do not talk about how we will all enable the death of everything we love. And in Brave New World, in Brave New World, John the Savage, he's the main character. He goes to a Native American reservation and then realizes the Native Americans live significantly more vital lives than he does. And so he starts going on walks and having sort of ideas of transcendence that conflict with the society. And you see all the society's cultural control mechanisms against him. And the Giver was a science fiction novel from the same era because the 20th century there were enough people who lived through the horrors of the world wars and enough memories from the 19th century that they could write dystopian sci fi like this because they had a greater grounding in the humanism of Christianity or Western civilization, as well as the trauma of the world wars that gave them a frame for how dystopian their future could be. And the Giver is this society much like Brave New World, where everyone's numb and the main character gradually breaks out of the numbness and he starts feeling life more brightly. And he realizes that everything is socially controlled. And what's really dystopian is I have had the exact Same reaction. I left the terrarium, which I can explain that term if you want. And then my sensation of my environment became much more richer. My daily life became richer. I see the world in more vibrant terms. And that's dystopian. By providing the contrast of the system that people live in is designed to keep them numb and weak.
- [91:45]
B
It's because you know how people say, love what you do and you'll never work a day in your life. Yeah. You were able to kind of like enter into a space where you can do that. But it's funny, we sell that as a slogan and then prevent people from actually doing anything really meaningful. So you get shoved in a bureaucracy or a school. And when you're in that environment with low meaning. I remember specifically telling my teacher in sixth grade, and it really, like, surprised her and confused her because I wasn't like a bad student or something. I just didn't care at all. So I would much rather do a task that was menial and repetitive than something that required creative energy, because there wasn't the meaning to make the creative energy worth it. So it's like if you don't have. But you still want, like, busy work, which is what you described. Like, people will still work because they want to do something, but they don't want to make it too hard. Right. You want to, you know, I want to, like, weave a basket, you know, if. Rather than have to think hard, if I don't care about the thing, I'm thinking about.
- [92:44]
A
The Japanese musician Otto has a line in one of her songs that goes where she's talking to a social authority about how conform. It's a song, how conformist. Japanese society is called Ready Made. And she's talking to a social authority who says, you should go beyond the society to satisfy your needs. And her reply is, what the fuck does that mean? Fuck money and love. Where. Because going beyond the society is. You should, like, find ways as an individual, outside of the established structures of bureaucracy or social norms to reach your goals. And her reply was, okay, so you want me to live without the basic sustenance a biological human should have. And someone like me, like, I can do that to a great degree because I can read old books. I can get Secure an income off the Internet. But that's not a reasonable expectation for most people. And the society cannot void its responsibility to the individuals. Expect the individuals to. Expect the individuals to then figure out ways to operate outside the society and then penalize them for doing so.
- [93:52]
B
Right. It's the discouragement, like they're actually stopping you on top of not helping you.
- [93:57]
A
Yeah. I'm going to go through the chronology of the Age of the Last Men and then we can go through how Nietzsche thinks this will end, where the Age of the Last Men is sort of the spiritual, biological undercurrent of all of the videos we've made in the 20th century. Because corporate America is the economics and the politics and the demographics inside America. The neoliberalism and the Cold War are more the political geopolitical angle to this in the Age of the Last man is what happens to sort of the biological character of the society as all of these other videos are occurring. And I would put the start around World War I, but it's the metastasisation of a variety of things over the course of the 20th century. Where World War I, World War II, the Cold War, leftism and industrialization and also the managerial class, they all created different cultural traumas that the population had to sort of insulate because we didn't have a way to heal them, which is what religion provided in previous societies. And so more than any of the others. Oh, I didn't even mention the Cold War. Damn. So much stuff happened in the 20th century. We weren't able to assimilate. World War I is the one that I think is the biggest. Where our current era of history is an inversion of the societies that went to World War I. Where World War I was these heroic monarchies that were religious and nationalistic fighting each other in these horrifying trench wars that just killed the flower of European youth. And it's hard to overestimate how traumatizing World War I was for European history and world history. Because beforehand the west had this profound self confidence that they were building a beautiful world based on Christianity and liberalism and science. And the social authorities used those to rationalize to the people why they should die in these horrifying wars which were really cynical European balance of power conflicts that were put up in these moralistic guises. So when people left World War I and this was a nihilistic society after the death of God, there was no way to assimilate that. So we built our society around. We don't want the society that went into World War I to ever exist again, to re traumatize us us. World War II was the same thing yet again. And World War II gave the West a sense of profound sort of self loathing on top of this. And the Holocaust and the Nazis added an extra layer because that was an attempt to. The Nazis were An attempt to pull on the indigenous European tradition to fight against the Last man world. Because the Nazis were partly basing their philosophy on Nietzsche, where Nietzsche was a significant influence. And so their idea is, we want to reach the Ubermensch state now. But then the Nazis were evil and killed millions of people and deeply violated the West's moral code, which made it taboo to even consider trying that again. The Nazis made it socially taboo.
- [97:22]
B
They ruined challenging the last Men.
- [97:25]
A
Yes, exactly. And they made it taboo to pull on the European tradition, to pull on masculinity or nationalism. And the Cold War exacerbated this, where the Cold War created this huge threat of nuclear war that could end humanity at any time. And this made the baby boomers terrified of competition or any level of masculinity, because if the slightest thing went wrong, the entire world would end in an afternoon. And what happened is that feminism and leftism and the bureaucracy enforced and built the institutions around not solving these irrational traumas from the 20th century. So they just built up and up and up until the entire society has over a century of cultural shifts that did not assimilate. And I was thinking recently, after the Cold War video, about how no one ever talks about the Vietnam or the Korean War. A lot of people we know had relatives who fought in them. And in a healthy society, the society has discussions and points about the things that matter to it. The effects of the Vietnam and the Korean War should have been discussed as sort of a national conversation. And I don't mean that in the sense that the left does, where the left says we want a conversation, but they really want to control the narrative. But you look at the modern Western world, we don't even talk about recent history. We don't talk about how the. We don't talk about a litany of things between culture, between family, between religion, between our ethnic identities, between recent history, between how the rest of the world works, because any of them would re traumatize us to the early 20th century in a society which has built people's entire identity around avoiding depth so they could be more easily controlled.
- [99:18]
B
Right, which is why you can. You could literally plan this psy up 70 years ago. Because if the Nazis poison any attempt to take on the age of the last Men, then the obvious psyop is to make any. Any assault against the age of the Last man, label it as Nazi, or try to poison it and make it more Nazi so that it will either fail or fail to be even taken seriously.
- [99:43]
A
Yes, and it's disturbing that you look at Mouse utopia. And you look at all of the trends such as breakdown in sexual polarity between men and women, between the ideas of, of sort of hierarchy and social class or ethnic identity or religion, where these are all load bearing concepts that allow a functioning society. What we've done is spent decades making any of them, even indirectly socially taboo to question. And so if you want to get out of mouse utopia, you have to take on that entire wall of stuff. And this is why most people give up and clock out. Because the system is actively built and designed to make that the incentives, the people in charge can control it. And the people in charge know that in a natural, healthy society they would not be in charge. And they know on a subconscious basis that what they're doing is against biology. So they have a huge incentive to maintain their power. And they bring in people who in a meritocratic system would not be in power as a, or would not be in America, as an explicit strategy to create dependence of people who will not question their system them.
- [101:06]
B
Right, which is how we talk about the Left, how the left is very strategic and hiring an army of activists or an army of bureaucrats and like getting people on a payroll. And it's like they're operating on a totally different level of infrastructure.
- [101:23]
A
When I was reading Fire in the Minds of Men by Billington, which is a history of the 19th century left, 1 of the things that really struck out to me was that Marx, Marx was special because Marx was special, because beforehand you had leftist movements going back decades and they were at the CAFE level of development. And the issue with that was you couldn't organize because there was no structure. And what Marx did that no one else did was Marx made a comprehensive worldview in code that you can plug and play either for governments or for revolutionary movements. And this was a seismic shift because it suddenly made the left standardizable. And no one else got went to as much effort as of world building as Marx did, where even though Marxist theory was completely wrong, it had a structure that people could fit into. So the Marxists became the dominant player not just among the left, but among everyone culturally, because they had that structure. And it never occurred in right wing philosophy, it never occurred among the other leftists. And that's why I think Marx was uniquely important among leftist thinkers, including others like Rousseau or St. Simon, because those people were never systematizers. And I think that if you had changed a few variables, Romanticism would have made a coherent philosophy like that after World War I, because I saw a lot of trends leading up to that. And that would have been a, A worldview that combined Darwinism and religion and history. But World War I in the industrial Revolution and socialism so derailed the train that 19th century right wing philosophy was never able to make that substantial, was never able to sort of develop that coherent worldview that people could build social structures out of.
- [103:18]
B
Right, which is part of the problem with the, the fractures, the fractured nature of the right, which we talk about a lot as an advantage. But how do you, yeah, you actually do eventually need to have value that you're striving for in itself, rather than simply reacting in a, like, defensive coalition against the left. So what are the core elements you need for like a cohesive philosophy? You mentioned a few before.
- [103:47]
A
I think these are the things. And I asked Grok for what were the. What are the elements of the philosophy that Nietzsche says will develop to get out of the age of the last Men? And the number one is create new values. The Ubermensch would not adhere to traditional values imposed by society, but would instead create their own set of values. This involves rejection of dogmatic views and the establishment of personal laws that affirm life and self to overcome nihilism. In the face of nihilism, where traditional values are seen as meaningless, the Ubermensch finds a way to transcend this despair. The criterion for this new philosophy is creates new values, overcomes nihilism, self overcoming, embracing the universal recurrence, live dangerously, affirm life, influence culture and humanity and art and creativity. And. And so it's identical to a lot of hermetic philosophy, which is something you see Nietzsche pull from. And the ideal is that you have to overcome chaos to grow as a person. And if you're not overcoming chaos, you're stagnating. Because the age of the last Men is a society that tries to crush chaos. But the element of getting past good and evil is the ability to assess things objectively. And once you assess things objectively, you can zoom out and realize we need to have these things like Darwinism or struggle. And Nietzsche said that the core element of said philosophy would be agreeing that humans are innately Darwinistic and greedy and then helping humans reach that. Where Nietzsche said this would in effect develop a new religion. But the new religion would be accurate assessments of reality and how to survive the age of the last men that metastasizes into a new code. And it would not be otherworldly like Christianity, where the goal would be to reach the kingdom of heaven in the afterlife. It would be a philosophy built around this is how we practically survive the age of the last men with the core assumption of individuals are innately greedy and self serving. So let's assume that and then say how do they grow as much as possible as people and cooperate with one another? And the shared value would be the overcoming of suffering and sort of transmuting to higher forms.
- [106:20]
B
Well this is kind of picking up from where we left off culturally in the 1600s, where we were. That's pretty much what we were doing in the 1600s. Right. We were trying to figure out better interpretations of God's word as it related to natural law. I think we were in an episode maybe half a year ago and I forgot where I was going with I
- [106:43]
A
have a point to interject clarifying statement. So people tend to associate Nietzsche with the Nazis and that's not really fair because Nietzsche was an anti nationalist. He said Nietzsche's predominant goal was individualism. And so when he talks about things like aristocracy or sort of hierarchy, his ideal is pulling from the European tradition of when you have these sort these structures that allow leadership, said leadership will optimize for freedom better than structures that, that are purely equal, that equality paradoxically destroys equality destroys freedom. And so having fair structured hierarchies allowed the creation of freedom. And Nietzsche, Nietzsche called the worldview that would develop from this heroic individualism because his idea is enabling the individual. And you can see this as part of the trajectory of the founding fathers and classical liberals who were also pulling from the hermetica because their. And you look at the US dollar and the currency we have, it's covered in these hermetic symbols. And you have images like the triangle. And the triangle is the idea of pushing towards perfection or the polarity of having two political parties. A trinitarian government in executive legislative and executive legislative. And the third one, I know this is that they were structured, yes, judicial. And you look at capitalism and science, all of these structures were built upon the hermetic assumptions that the overcoming of suffering and chaos is what allows growth. And so these were intellectual trajectories that were existed in Europe for centuries that due to modernity became less popular. But Nietzsche thought they'd pop up again in the 21st century due to the nature of the external threat.
- [108:40]
B
Yeah. And it's funny to think of Nietzsche as a, well, not funny, but as an individualist like rejecting this kind of nation idea because it was a collective kind of thing. Right. And when Nietzsche's, Nietzsche's sister kind of changed his book to make it fit with the Nazi stuff, it's kind of like a very mid deconstruction of what Nietzsche was actually saying. It was basically like like taking what Nietzsche was saying and trying to shove it into a postmodern collectivist lens which is more accurately characterizes the Nazi movement. And it makes sense that Nietzsche the age of the last men around now because what he did, he basically detected a fragile dynamic and was like okay, so this fragile dynamic is going to mean people don't recognize it it until it gets bigger. Then they'll recognize it more as fragile dynamics go. And then the response is like a hermetic anti fragility. It's like really kind of simple.
- [109:43]
A
It is, yeah. And what Nietzsche saw was the 19th century was the period of the most unparalleled progress and growth ever. And he knew these principles of polarity. And so he knew that if the 19th century was this successful and these historic cycles take about 120 years to work out and 120 years after Nietzsche is the present, the polarity of that 19th century growth is we would have equivalent stagnation and decadence to the greatest growth period in history. So you'd have the greatest period of decadence and then you would have to pull from the ideas that worked in this first phase to get get out of this trap.
- [110:27]
B
Right. And you could guess 120 years because you could, you could see basically any dynamic like that. Like the Midas principle where you lose wealth within three generations is probably similar with degeneracy. Like the consequences of degeneres degeneracy stack up by three generations to the point where it's kind of visible keep.
- [110:45]
A
So Ibn Khaldun has the 120 year political cycle and he was an author that was known in the 19th century. Nietzsche was a smart guy. He may have known about it but Aristotle and Polybius were part of the Greco Roman tradition and Nietzsche was his speciality was the Greeks. And so he was reading these Greek authors who talked about these historic cycles. That's probably where he was getting this. And I want to mention Edward Bernays. And then we can close out on how Nietzsche says the age of the last men ends. Where I see Edward Bernays who lived about a century ago and he was the creator of the advertising and PR industry. I read his book and he thought that people were sort of malleable and stupid and you needed to have the manager psychologically manipulate the herd to create good outcomes. And so he invented, he called it first the propaganda industry and then the PR industry to use these psychological methods developed by his uncle Sigmund Freud to manipulate the population. And so as an example, he got women to smoke cigarettes by saying, by thinking this is a phallic symbol, women by smoking cigarettes, which was taboo before, they're sort of taking the masculine charge. And he also propounded feminism for a singular interest. He made eating bacon and eggs a popular breakfast item by telling doctors to make it healthy, by saying it was healthy. And he also popularized baking mix by the original recipe did not ask people to put an egg in it. And then when Edward Bernays told them to put an egg in the recipe, he thought it would sell much better because women unconsciously would want to share their egg with their husband. And it actually worked. And you can say that that's because it tastes better with an egg. But he was looking at these unconscious motivators and it's really impossible to look at the 20th century without seeing these unconscious motivators that we got fused to due to the world wars because the propaganda industry and the advertising industry were the same thing. It was the same experts who did the political propaganda as well as the, the advertising propaganda. And when you have a society that has banned its natural elites from forming, destroyed social norms and is unmoored from any sense of the divine or God, you make the population suddenly very susceptible to these types of psychological manipulations. And if you're a right winger, you can see this happening to the left and obviously spot when they get manipulated. But it also happens to us too.
- [113:31]
B
Yeah, on the right with like a reduction to kind of sloganeering. And it's like we're being turned into a mental slave in the same way as a physical slave like in Exodus because you have these non meritocratic elites replacing masculine leadership with manipulation that basically removes your agency. And a perfect contrast to this is, is the very manipulative like corrupt health advice versus rfk like cutting through the Age of the last Men and saying no, I'm going to say something. This doesn't make sense. That doesn't make sense. We're flipping the pyramid and he's changing behaviors and pat and patterns just like Bernays, but he's doing it through masculine leadership rather than propaganda.
- [114:24]
A
Yeah, and that's what Nietzsche called. I'm going to explain how Nietzsche says the end of the Age of the Last Men happens and Nietzsche calls it the great eternal. No, that the Ubermensch emerges and just says no. Because Nietzsche says that the creation of an Ubermensch is a three step variable and an Ubermensch is an archetype and Carl Jung at the time said it was identical to the Wodan switch, where the Wodan switch is a term Carl Jung used for. He was writing for World War I originally because he saw the Germans, who were known as one of the most civilized peoples in Europe on a dime, devolve back into these barbaric warrior sort of Viking behaviors. And he said that Wodan possessed Europe over the world wars. And it was very stark for him because he knew that this was the default wiring. And he said that Hitler was activating the Wodan spirit, which was. And societies have ethnic switches under pressure. The Semites have the prophet switch, the Japanese have the Amaterasu switch, the Russians have the mother. I'm inventing these terms, by the way. The Russians have the motherland switch, and the Anglo Saxons and the Celts, they're also under the Wodan switch. And then the Latin peoples have the Caesar switch. So, for example, when you put an Arab population under pressure, a prophet will emerge to get them out of it. For when you put a Latin people under pressure, pressure, a great man like Caesar or Bolivar or Napoleon emerges. And in the Germanic populations, it's like Luther, Martin Luther or the Nazis or World War I, where the pattern, when you put a North European population under pressure is this disagreeable guy shows up, says, why the entire moral code is fake and gay. And then the society ruptures and becomes significantly more aggressive and violent and to fight off the invasion. And because these switches get installed through a people's interaction with their environment. And so the archetypal North European myth is that Wodan hangs himself from the tree of life for nine days, and then he sees the nature of the spirit world and then brings it back to save his people. And so when you're looking at Martin Luther or Hitler or these are archetypally Nietzsche's Ubermensch, they are people who see outside the sort of fake gay lies of the society. And then they come back. And this was something that Nietzsche. Sorry, this was something that Jung commented out when he first invented his idea of the Wodan switch. And the idea of. Because archetypally, Wodan's idea is sort of like transmuting through suffering. And so the transmuting through suffering to higher levels, going up the tree of life. And what Nietzsche was saying was, we have this innate European tradition that stems back to our. What we evolved with, what our history is. The age of the last men will be such a rejection of the innate warrior character of European societies. They're going to snap. And once they realize how bad it is, get rid of it. And so the first phase of it is the age of the camel, when you take on the weight of the society's social structure and it piles up where Nietzsche said that it's like a camel's back getting overlaid and wait until the camel snaps and then it's the age of the lion. And what happens with the age of the lion was the society realizes that this is all bullshit. And because the age of the last men was so weak, Nietzsche said only a hundred men could defeat it. Because once you get out of outside of the terrarium or the system of control of modern consciousness, you can grow much faster than the mice who are trapped inside it. And then you can come back out. And once people realized how bad the age of the last Men, it's the eternal no of no. This is dumb, we're not going to do this. No. And then the Ubermensch destroys the morality of the age of the last men, because the entire moral code of the age of the last men is silly platitudes and conformity that isn't real. And when they have this existential threat, they finally snap and get rid of this morality. And this ushers in a new moral code by a social class called the creators. Because the West, Nietzsche said that there would be no nobility or leadership class where the age of the last men would be the peak of slave morality. And so you have to make a new leadership class, and it's based around creativity and self overcomin. And so it's people like founders or artists or adventurers who cooperate together, where we are all individuals and we're going to make social structures so that we as individuals can cooperate against the conformity of the last men. The age of the child is after the age of the lion shatters the last men, social structure is you have to allow space for the social structure to decompress, to allow growth, because the sort of rubedo or the explosion of the age of the lion does not allow the space for a society to develop healthily. Because part of the hermetica is the way growth works is you have to give people space and you have to give them sort of structure. You have to give people freedom to let them grow. And so the creators, after they win, have to establish freedom and peace so that the society can develop itself like a child, healthily. And this is the structure of how the Ubermensch first takes on the values of the society, grows too heavy, shatters it with the age of the lion, and then lets go so that the child can develop.
- [120:21]
B
Right. And the camel with the straw on its back is a great analogy because it brings me to this point where people tend to observe an unsustainable trend or inevitable trend and realize that it's going to end. And then they have a, like a time bias that brings that end closer to them. And this happened with China in the 90s, where everyone's predicting China in the 90s, like their system can't survive, they have this debt, etc, it's going to crash in this predictable trend. Or we were saying around after 2008, like every four years it was like, oh, the entire economy is going to collapse. But you're always kind of surprised to the degree to which you can add more straws. Which is like when you're doing that experiment where you're dropping water droplets into a glass and it just keeps getting higher and higher with the surface tension. And you're always surprised how high it gets before it breaks. It's this. And it's the same when you're stacking something like, how many of these can we put on? Wow, I can't believe it can bear that much of a load. It's always like more than you expected because you're anticipating this final result. And then like you said, you need to. For actually to have a basis to grow, you need to develop like a scaffolding and a structure like vines before leaves.
- [121:42]
A
Yeah, I'm gonna finish on this, this point because the funny thing at the Age of the Last Men is I think we're watching its end now. I think that this spring is going to be a turning point because Epstein, as well as the Iran war are political crises of legitimacy. And I think within the next few years where we can't continue the Last man operating system for very long. And so far this has been a pretty accurate diagnostic. And so within a few years we can reflect on what happened because we just won't know how this will, will culminate. But when Nietzsche calls it the Age of the Last Men, I think he's tapping into something interesting because this is the last era of history where we can assume just human players will be operating. And the thing with the Ubermensch is it's not a biological breakthrough. Nietzsche is explicit in saying this is humans who use these sort of mystical methods to overcome their weakness to grow as individuals. It's not genetic engineering. It can be done with our current human level of development. But we are entering a society with players like AI or genetic engineering or robots, where we can't assume that it's just human players. And we forget that over history, people did not perceive their world as just having human players. Players they thought there were gods and angels and demons. And so the age of the last men is uniquely interesting for assuming humans are the only players. But then it's such a radical shift because the jump from the age of the last men to the age of the Ubermensch is one of the most staggering jumps ever in human history. Because the last men repressed their entire shadow. So when the shadow comes out, it's insane. And so you go from a society where which stops individuals from even realizing that they can grow to a society where humans have the power of gods. And this speaks to the hermetic concept where the Hermetica is about evolving as a person. And it makes you think that if we're in a society where some people have to rise to a level of maturity that allows them to manage or take responsibility for these hyper advanced technologies, they're going to have to grow as human beings. So it's the Ubermensch ideal is sort of like how do we grow as individuals to a rate where we are mature enough to get our level of technological advance? Because Carol Quigley, one of my favorite authors, said the great crisis of modernity is the society is not mature enough for the levels. Is not socially mature enough for the levels of power that the government that people have now. And so Carol Quigley said that this would have to cause a philosophic or a spiritual breakthrough in the next century, where his book Tragedy and a history of the 20th century said that the tragedy of the world wars would cause the potential hope for this future breakthrough. And so when you look at the age of the last men, I think Nietzsche is somewhat prophetic that it's the age of the last men or the last era where you can take for granted that the highest agency player is a human. And what happens is that the age of the last men so repressed the uncomfortable elements of human nature like competition or sex or history or ethnicity, that when it comes out, the era that is out of this is a staggeringly insane era. And it's a really schizo time period, which we are currently in the schizo timeline. Just nothing makes sense. Everyone is mentally ill, every government is mentally ill. And you have to make new morality and you have to overcome your weakness to generate new moral codes for how insane the environment.
- [125:46]
B
What do you mean by the last age where a human will be the primary difference maker or whatever in conditions you Mean, like AI will eventually become more influential or something.
- [125:57]
A
We have to deal with AI as a different type of player than we would deal with a human because it's structurally different. If you have genetic engineering, someone will use this. And Nietzsche's ideal for transhumanism is ultra humanism. He said that as mankind grows as a species, we will have to exacerbate the traits that we see as humanity. And that includes moral complexity and depth and art and struggle. Because if humanity's power grows faster than our ability to be human, we will lack the depth to stop this technology from destroying our soul. And Nietzschean hermeticism is a philosophy that's. I think Nietzsche was a genius because he could make a moral code that allowed the rapid shifts with modernist technology. Because if your moral code is searching for the truth, stripping away broken conventions and growth is that. That's a moral code where you could develop social mores and rituals and that stuff to allow the society to shift as rapidly as technological advance requires. Because when your social code is built around shifting while maintaining your moral center is that. That is what's needed for when your civilization changes its structure every 30 years to every century. Because otherwise you're going to get stuck on the previous century's issue. Our educational system is based around a factory structure that no longer exists. Our political system is based on a military structure that no longer exists. And the weight of the 20th century is so heavy that it's strangling the 21st. And we can't afford to be this irresponsible going forward. And so Nietzsche said that this would be a staggering breakthrough where this social breakthrough that would stop the age of the last men from dying would cause centuries worth of innovation to occur in humanity, to keep growing as a species. Because this level of maturity and responsibility, if you get in at the right time, we will both avoid mouse utopia. But it also allows a scaffolding and a social structure for mankind to keep advancing, to reach the stars, to keep doing technological advance. Because. Because we are a capstone example where we have enough complex issues that future generations that are dealing with rapid change can look to us as a really bad example. And see, this is how they got out of it.
- [128:39]
B
Right? The technology can either be used by the camel or the lion to, like, extend the Jenga game or to do a more effective transition. And it's almost like you need a moral center or visualization or kind of like, like map away from AI. Otherwise it's like a gps. If you don't know where you're going. The GPS can just edit something and confuse you or trick you or control like your mind. But at the same time, AI also gives humans an ability to have an impact because there's competing AIs. And then even if you're not going for a particular agenda, going for like a true truth based approach is like a value in itself. Kind of like the opposite value of moral relativity. And then that would. I thought of the Iran thing with the camel and the straw because right now it's like we're at the end of a Jenga game where like there's one block everywhere and you're like, oh my God, it's gonna fall. It's gonna. Every turn you're like gonna fall. And then this guy's taking out the center block. It's like what, you're taking out a center block and then like it takes it out and the tower falls and stabilizes and everybody's like, what? It's like every, every, every big event now we're like, is that the water drop that's going to break the surface tension of the water? Yeah, but that's how those games are.
- [129:56]
A
I promise everything's gonna be okay. Just hold the metal stick and breathe.
- [130:01]
B
Yeah. And maybe get a straw and take out some of that water. Oh, yeah. And then transit and expressions of self preservation. Right. You're talking about the, the different switches across different cultures. And what that could basically be is just people are observing various trends and expressions of self preservation.
- [130:22]
A
Yes.
- [130:23]
B
Like, which is not, it's not. So it wouldn't, you wouldn't necessarily expect for every reaction under pressure of every area in the world to be the same. You'd expect some like, character.
- [130:34]
A
Yes.
- [130:34]
B
Differences to emerge. Because you react to things.
- [130:37]
A
Cultures naturally work differently due to the sort of conditions that birthed them. And they have logic that makes sense in their society. And Spengler talks about this where North Europe came from, an environment with very high military tension and fairly high ethnic homogeneity. If you look at China, it's the, it's high conformity required for the agricultural system, large centralized government, periodic existential threats that hurt the individual but not the collective. So they prioritize the collective because it's the most stable thing. And what's happening with mouse utopia is basically because societies do have. This is something that's not socially acceptable to say today. But it's true. Societies do have ethnic minds where different cultures operate on collective bases and they solve problems organically. And if you look over the history of a society, you'll see that the society is itself is trying to self modulate and heal. And so, for example, when France has. France multiple times has started civil wars because the king calls the nobility to court, the nobility protest, the king will levy taxes, and then they go to the tennis court to meet up. And in England and Anglo Americans, we have started civil wars over budget crises multiple times. Over wars multiple times. American revolution and the English civil war. And in China, Mao Zedong is very similar to Qishi Huangdi, where they were these atheist, autocratic dictators who tried to kill the old culture, where China has the emperor switch. And I just make a video at these ethnic switches on the main channel. But these clearly exist. And what mouse utopia has effectively done is, is that epigenetically, every population has realized that this is the most existential threat they will ever receive. Because the natural outcome to mouse utopia is total failure.
- [132:39]
B
Right. Which is why people kind of mock people's concern over the birth rate. But you're looking at an actual. That's a existential trend projected onto a few. If you project it onto a few generations and people get sensitive to that, like, saying there's a collective character to anything, but there's. There's an individual character to how people respond. People respond differently individually. So if people respond differently individually, that's going to, like, express itself in a collective. And it's kind of like a response to fear. Like, if you could visualize like, a Scooby Doo episode or something where they're walking in the dark and then a light and a scare comes on them.
- [133:21]
A
Yeah.
- [133:21]
B
And maybe, like, Shaggy's gonna act weird to turn people off. Fred might, like, put up his fists. Velma might pull her turtleneck over her head. Scooby Doo is gonna run away. You know, like, everybody reacts differently to stuff. Yeah, Those trends generalize into different averages.
- [133:36]
A
Yes. Well put. It's another. I'm gonna finish on this point where Nietzsche often talks about how what the last men do is because they strip people of things that give them social value is that the last men keep degenerating. And because in a society where if you're lower status than someone, you want to cooperate with them, you should be polite, you should be responsive, you should be respectful. Because there's a power asymmetry. And if you want them to cooperate with you, you should make yourself receptive for that. And that's the healthy feminine. And the healthy masculine is able to take leadership in a way that's like Nietzsche's master morality. It's not domineering it's loving, but it's still firm. And what the Last Men do is they keep degenerating until there's a point where they basically offer nothing to the society around them. Where if you've trained people to not acquire skills, not be polite, not have virtue, is you've made a shared bet that we will all be equivalently useless. And the Ubermensch creator culture does the exact opposite. And so you end up with a situation where I don't really care how the Last Men perceives this, because the Last Men society, they do not recognize the concept that there are ethnic differences at all, let alone that ethnicities respond to pressure in any given way. The Last Men will not acknowledge that the birthright is going down because it's all a shared project to avoid being held to standards.
- [135:26]
B
Well, and also, weirdly, it can be seen as like a preemptive solution to mouse utopia. In the similar way to, like, the elites solution wasn't to transcend, it was degrowth, which is kind of like a sad limiting vision. Like, if one of the problems with mass utopia is overpopulation, then their idea might be to, like, call the population to prevent that, but they might be mistaking their stre. They're actually. It's like mouse utopia is already here. The population is decreasing because of mass utopia. So leaning into that isn't going to prevent mass utopia. It's already happening. You're just fulfilling the. The dynamic.
- [136:07]
A
Yeah, well put. Do you have anything else?
- [136:12]
B
I think we tied up our loose ends pretty well on this one.
- [136:15]
A
Sounds good. Next video is the history of Protestantism.
- [136:19]
B
Oh, very fun. Cool.
- [136:21]
A
Yeah, we had too many modern episodes in a row, so Protestantism is next.
- [136:27]
B
Maybe we'll get back to the 1600s a little bit.
- [136:29]
A
Our favorite I was gonna do after Protestantism. 16th century Europe.
- [136:34]
B
Great. I love it. We can maybe go more into, like, the similarities from a geopolitical perspective. Like we said, like, countries under social pressure everywhere across the world. So they're more about working together to like, maintain control of their domestic fiefdoms rather than. And limited warfare rather than world war, maybe. So that could be like a. A useful analysis because I don't think anyone compares to that era of history. I mean, right. We mostly just do the 20th century, so. Yeah.
- [137:01]
A
Well, that sounds good. Catch you later. Peace.
- [137:04]
B
All right. Catch you later. Peace.
- [137:06]
A
History102 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.