← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining the Rise + Fall of Modern Britain
02:09:54
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- [00:03]
A
Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in. Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of History 102. I am Rudyard lynch with Austin Padgett and today's episode is on the rise of modern Britain.
- [00:29]
B
Hello. And by the rise of modern Britain, we're starting pretty far back, right?
- [00:34]
A
Yeah. This is going to be the Tudors to the modern era. So this is the entirety of modern British history.
- [00:42]
B
Even including Shakespeare.
- [00:45]
A
Yeah, it's going to start at Bosworth in 1488. This is one of the the advantages of having your speciality in the Middle Ages, because modern historians will have like 10 episodes on the 20th century and then not actually say anything. They'll talk about the parliamentary cabinets in the 1920s, but then you won't actually get a comprehensive direction of British history in that era. Where if you look at 20th century histories of Britain, they portray the trajectory in Britain as the direct opposite of the reality. Where most 20th century histories of Britain treat it as Britain in the year 2000 is this enlightened, stronger society than Britain in the year 1900. And that's a big thing I saw as a huge shift over the course of my life because I was born in the 21st century, but I was still sort of somewhat politically cognizant before age 10 because my parents were. And I would like see what newspapers they had lying around and they tell, they, they talk to each other at the news. And it's interesting how in the early 21st century, the west had such an incredibly arrogant and sort of facile understanding of its identity. It's like we built this beautiful society that doesn't really stand for anything and we've thrown and we've built this modern society unironically. And so when you look at these 20th century British histories, they portray the loss of the empire, the loss of the manufacturing, Britain's intermeshing under an American defense system, under a broader European system, and even quality of life going down for the average British person, they're going to mask it as good, which is kind of nuts. That's an extra level of psyoping, as historic regimes go. And secondly, people often frame this era of history as boring, where when you look at history books, they'll say they write out the English history in the most boring, dry way possible, because that's partly a derivation of Whig history. But you'll say, oh, it's the Magna Carta. Oh, it's the English Civil War. Then you have the Glorious Restoration. And they, they make it like the worst chapter in the history book. Which I don't think is fair because the reality is that England is potentially the most successful government in history. And what they did was innately very heavy metal. That England basically broke the laws of their reality, where England created a completely new game that broke the rules of the old game and got us to transcend several steps over the course of justice.
- [03:40]
B
And a few centuries they basically altered global game theory. Yeah, that was such a fundamental impact. It's not even comparable to regimes that lasted for thousands of, of years and just solidified a caste system or something. But the, the degrowth is a crazy excuse. Is it interesting because. Or justifying degrowth. Right. Is you think how could somebody do that? But it started with thinking that the Soviet system was better throughout the 70s where they talk about how they industrialized so fast, even though like you said, that they were growing faster before the takeover, etc. And there was a lot of death and slavery involved in that. But when there was still Soviets versus us and there was an information curtain, basically they could keep up the illusion that the Soviets were more innovative, you know, with the early space race and then that crashed. And they couldn't argue that socialism led to more growth. So then they had to argue then that growth was bad. And so degrowth developed kind of partially organically as a defensive narrative response to the failures of socialism, but it also worked. Was pushed by the technocracy to advance their global control of the economy.
- [04:57]
A
That makes sense. One of the things boomers would say, boomers have like the same. A lot of boomers have the same 10 stories they repeat. And I don't know how they all have how they have the same stories there, but one of them has been we were growing up, we thought communists were so bad. And then we grew up and then we realized the communists weren't so bad and they're just like us and like everyone just loves their children. And I thought what timeline are you in? We're looking at the data. The friggin Soljanitsyn's book came out. We saw that their own files after the Iron Curtain fell that said that the reality was worse than anyone's nightmare, where even the most far right, only the very most far right of politics got correctly how bad the Soviet Union was. And also this is a distinct point. And then I promise we'll get to actual history is I actually believed enough of the neoliberal propaganda as a child and I feel resentful that they just threw away the mask so quickly because you had this whole. And this is one of the things where I think it depends a lot on class and region and that stuff because I'll talk to different people my age who are Americans, like, oh yeah, we never heard that neoliberal propaganda. But the idea that the west are these pluralist, capitalist, secular, developed, humane societies, it's like the worldview that the Economist has that that the sort of mental framework of the world I had. And it's so disappointing that the neoliberal mask just dropped so quickly and then no one even references that it's what we believe for decades.
- [06:40]
B
Well, the Economist forever was considered a centrist paper and it still will be rated that way by AP News or something. But it's the most obvious left biased slant of all time. I mean they're consistently advocating for global government and all, you know, the corporate and democrat politicians narratives, the NGO train and it's the. So much has changed in that last 20 years. The reputation of the UK has crashed so hard from, you know, being one of the pinnacles of the world, considered that way in the 90s, to basically playing out V for Vendetta and being completely swamped with Islamic immigration.
- [07:21]
A
Yeah, my parents read the Economist and so I'd see the magazines lying around because they have images and, and it was sort of a meme where my childhood self saw the Economist would say any given third world country would succeed. They haven't. They'd have an issue. Brazil. Brazil is Brazil's. Brazil's the power of the future. China's the power, South Africa is Russia, the European Union, Nigeria, all of those bets unilaterally failed with maybe one or two exceptions. And so it's just sort of seared into my mind this 2010s attitude. The entire world is going to rise and the west and decline. And that's good. That was a genuine attitude. Or like free trade is good under every single context.
- [08:06]
B
And you even what free trade was because the free trade was defined as free trade agreements, which were the explicit international organizations standardizing regulations and taxes across countries for single economic blocks, which is global communism sold as free trade. Talk about Orwell.
- [08:25]
A
Yeah, exactly. And that myth collapsed very quickly because you saw that neoliberalism wasn't actually a political or ideological position. It was a mask for a litany of other positions.
- [08:40]
B
Yeah, exactly. Well, that's kind of going back to the point that A lot of the boomer values aren't actually that bad. Like a lot of the Reagan talking points were pretty good. It just didn't translate into policy. And they had no. They didn't understand enough about policy to understand that those values clashed with actions. And so it's kind of tricky because you end up rejecting a lot of the positive lingo because of the failure to actually carry it out in a way that's reflective of what it means. Yeah.
- [09:11]
A
I've been thinking a lot over the last month about how our culture's obsession with pettiness is a cover for the state's total. The state. The state's total removal of agency. Because I constantly have to look at how petty the Internet is and I really don't like it. It's just people are fighting each other over the stupidest things and they're mentally ill and they're constantly cruel. And I'm thinking, why are people like this? And the, and the reason is because the culture told them to be petty was a virtue.
- [09:45]
B
We.
- [09:45]
A
Which is something I saw. The culture did treat being petty and hedonistic as a virtue. And the reason it did that is that the state had removed all of the ways to gain agency. Being capitalist is evil. Adventuring in third world countries is evil. Being a patriarchal clan father is evil. And so what happened is that the culture of the last century has been very much the attempt to avoid having how much the state lessens normal human agency.
- [10:16]
B
That's so funny you mentioned. Yeah, it's so funny you mentioned agency. Because I was just dwelling on this responsibility thing because I was trying to figure out why is all social media so anti solution oriented. And it's because there's a broad lack of responsibility throughout society. Not many business owners will be usually more like less black pilled. And because they have a responsibility, they have to continue carrying on. They have to make the system work. And people have this idea that they're just mad about everything and they have some simple, easy ideas about what should change, including like maybe tearing a couple structures down or something. But no one's really put themselves in the room and considered like what it would actually take to, to do that even to operate the machinery. You would need to talk to some boomers to be like, what's the password? Like how do I, how do I get into this account? Like how do I operate this FBI system or the fda? Like you need, you're going to need to work with some people at some level. And they're also running a system and you have to. You have to be able to run the system to be able to change it. And people aren't even close to that.
- [11:32]
A
They.
- [11:32]
B
They haven't really thought out the second, third, fourth, fifth order of any anything.
- [11:38]
A
Nietzsche, writing in the 19th century, said that the early 21st century would be a society called the Age of the Last Men. And I've spoken of this many times before. And he basically said it would be a society where envy and socialism and equality would be destroying the west, and the west would be in the process of sort of suicide from nihilism or lack of belief in anything. And he said the core issue would be that the Age of the Last Men would be the society with the least agency of any ever in human history. And he said socialism through envy would destroy the ability for people to use their own will to power or agency. Then that would mean no one would be capable of rising to defeat the civilizational crises that would build up. So the Age of the Last Men is a structural situation where the system doesn't allow you to fit fix the big problems. So the big problems build up and up and up. And so people wallow in the absence of agency because the problems keep wallowing up. The cost of fixing it constantly increases. And so that's what would end the Age of the Last Men. And he said the end of the Age of the Last One would be the most dangerous era ever in Western history.
- [12:55]
B
And basically people, I've never done the mental switch where they try and put themselves into the shoes of someone in a position of responsibility and then suddenly, because if you were actually thrust in that position, you would go from talking crap to being like, holy crap, what do I. What am I going to do now? I hope I don't. And if you didn't think like that, then that would be even a worse problem. But people are more awfully unprepared. And I think, like you said, they don't have the instinct because they don't. They're not even imagining themselves within a remotely possible position of responsibility. Yeah, so how do you flip that?
- [13:30]
A
One of Uberboy's best points is a lot of the current ideological issues are that leftists have the part of their brain that operates on threat detection has been turned off because society's gotten so safe, they don't need the threat detection brain. And so when you've removed threat detection, it radically alters your incentive structure because you suddenly stop thinking you need people or you need things. So the calculus suddenly becomes, how do I live in comfort and never have to get out of comfort.
- [14:07]
B
Right? And you're you and it relates to responsibility because you don't think about the actual people you would need to help you, even in the most absurd, like highest level of responsibility because you're not at all thinking it and that way.
- [14:22]
A
So for the audience, do you like conversations like this in the beginning or do you want me to go into. Do you want us to go into history faster? We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.
- [14:35]
C
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- [16:31]
A
So when you look at British history in this time period, there's the sort of integration of the different sub regions of the British Isles together and the process that integrated the British Isles together was also the process that created the British Empire. And one of my favorite historians, Norman Davies, likes to say that the British Isles were a microcosm of the British Empire, where the same mechanisms the English used to keep the Celts down were the mechanisms they used for the Colonial empire. And so once Britain gained Ireland, the empire was on, and once Britain lost Ireland, the empire was down as well, because Ireland was the part of the British Isles that openly resisted the English for the longest. And if you compare Britain to Japan or the British Isles to Japan, you have a very stark difference that in Japan, it's practically 100% Yamato Japanese. They had to conquer some previous peoples. But as of now, you would not divide up Japan if you're a sane person, because the northern island, Hokkaido, doesn't actually have that distinct identity from the rest of the Japanese nation. That's not true in the British Isles, where you have four different nations that all have their own histories that go back thousands of years, and you have a bunch of lesser subdivisions that also have distinct identities. And those four are England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. And so when we're going to start in the year 1488, England has taken Wales. And they did so earlier during the medieval period. And England holds the little bit around Dublin in Ireland, while the rest of Ireland is free. And Ireland never coalesced into a unified country at this time period. It was a bunch of tribes living in the forest who lived under various clans and tribal chieftains. And then in Scotland, you have a distinct country that's in fact older than England, that has its own identity, that's fought against England for centuries. And so you see the British Isles divided between a series of different kingdoms. And so one of the important steps here is how do you unify the British Isles? Because that was the sort of shared variable that thrust the British Empire forward. Because until the British could hold Ireland, that would be a backdoor for the French and the continent to take England. And that was something that they consistently tried. The Spanish would land forces in Ireland. The French landed an army in Ireland in the late 17th century to take out England. And the French also launched an invasion of Scotland with Bonnie Prince Charlie. And so the English were operating under a lot of game theory for how do we stop the European continent from taking us? Because England did not have a military that could compete with the top rate militaries in Europe. If a foreign power like the Spanish or the French or later the Germans could land an army in Britain, they would win. So the British had to figure out, how do we unify our position on our shore and then also build the best navy on earth to protect the home islands. And those two things became the two founding variables of the British Empire.
- [20:16]
B
It's so funny how similar it is today with when Scotland talks about leaving the uk, it's in the context of joining the EU because they're more liberal and. And so it's still kind of like, tied to this dynamic. Where are you kind of a stooge for the continent or are you controlled by England? Yeah, it's hard to escape it because if they want to get away from England while ignoring the continent, there's the inconvenient fact that England is like the buffer for the continent.
- [20:49]
A
Yeah. The Scots normally got around that by working with the French. And actually, one of the oldest alliances we have, and one of the longest lasting ones in European history after the fall of Rome, is the alliance between Scotland and France, because they used England as a shared enemy, which was wedged between them, and both of them fought England for centuries. And there were multiple points where the French basically saved Scotland's independence, either by sending the Scots aid or. Or by waging war with the English to pull English forces away. And for a frame of reference, England in the year 1400 had a little over 2 million people. That was around half of what it was a century earlier. But the Black Death had halved Europe's population. Ireland had a little bit more than half a million people, and Scotland had a little less than a million. So you're dealing with very small population numbers. And I'm inventing a term called Britain. And Britain is the ethnic identity of white English speakers in former British colonies. I want to make a shared identity that Canadians, Americans, Australians and New Zealanders or South Africans too, can say in the same manner that the Latin identity formed from the Roman Empire or the Arab identity formed from the Arab Caliphate. We need a word for this new ethnicity that's formed. But so when you're looking at the Britain ethnic diaspora, it's one of the most rapid ever in human history. And there's a book called the Cousins War by Ken Phillips or Kevin Phillips, about how the English Civil War, the American Civil War and the American Revolution were all wars that established meritocratic incentive structures that kept on allowing the British people, which is the term I don't like, but I'm using the British people doesn't work in the context of the home islands. It does work in the diaspora, but it resulted in the British people sort of rapidly ballooning their numbers because they kept on hitting situations where they had an exponential rate of development. And this is one of the things the English did really well, that they kept on establishing incentive structures where they could transcend the rules of the game at the time and then break their enemies with a new set of rules. And this is one of. This is England's strategy. And it's. They're the only people who have pulled this off well. And it's what created the modern world because England was vastly disproportionate in the invention of science. England was the home of the Industrial Revolution and practically all the cultural trends. Freedom, the British Empire, whatever. And so it was a strategy that consistently worked. And although we frame the English political and cultural tradition as boring, it's actually sort of insanely heavy metal in science fiction. Once you zoom out at what the timeline would have looked like without England.
- [24:02]
B
Yeah, it's very Jules Verne. And yeah, it's funny that the relationship between France and Scotland really parallels the relationship between the US and France in the early stages of the revolution, which also makes sense because of the large Scottish contingent in the American colonies. And then I was thinking that if you. Basically the problem with the French Scottish alliances, if England didn't exist, I doubt that Scotland and France would be very friendly because. Right. They would just be trying to invade. So it's kind of a cheap shot from Scotland to throw it all at England while they're being the buffer against France.
- [24:45]
A
I don't think cheap shots. How this works. I think it's geopolitics is just making sure your nation survives. There's not like I'm going to ally with this country for the memes or for the irony.
- [24:55]
B
Well, I don't know, I. I guess they're just not acknowledging the service that England was providing to the water patrol or something. Yeah. And this is coming from a very pro Scotland person. I just had that thought. I was like, wait a minute. That seems like a little bit free riding.
- [25:11]
A
So in the year 1488 you have England and they had just gone through a multi decade period called the wars of the Roses, which is one of those time periods that is so absurdly complicated. But you'll probably not get that much benefit out of studying it. It's the House of York and Lancaster fighting over the English throne for 50 years. But the guy who finally won, Tudor. I think it's Edward Tudor. I could be getting that wrong. But. But Tudor won and he was a French faction where he was a mixing of both the House of York and the House of Lancaster's bloodline. So he was sort of the Hegelian synthesis of the War of the Roses. And people didn't think at the time that he would be the final bit of the War of the Roses. But the House of Tudor came out of France, seized control of the English throne and established the Tudor monarchy which ruled England from, I believe, 1488 to like 1603 with the death of Queen Elizabeth II. And the Tudors, when they first showed up in England, did not have a single drop of English blood. They were Welsh and French, but they still kept Wales down. They didn't liberate it because they had lost the Welsh consciousness. Where Owen Glendower was a Welsh leader who nearly got Welsh independence in the middle of the 15th century before his revolt was crushed. And so the Tudor monarchy, it was largely peaceful and boring. And I always mentally assort them with the Valois monarchy in France. At the same time, where we don't remember good eras of history because history does have a negativity bias. And when you look at early 16th century Europe, yes, you do have the Protestant Reformation, which was a titanic event. But most Europeans lived fairly peaceful, prosperous, stable lives, where the 16th century was not a terrible period to live in. Although there's. Every era of history always has their, like three things that are really unpleasant about their era. And before the Protestant Reformation tightened things up, it was a period of sort of moral laxity and it was fairly laid back. It was, it was a golden age of Renaissance art and humanism and all those sorts of trends. And England was also recovering from the Black Death, so wages were pretty high. And then Scotland, they were under their own monarchy, which I believe were the descendants of Robert the Bruce or the Stuarts, kicked in, they kicked in later. But Scotland was largely poor at the time. It was split between the Highlands, which were under Scottish clans and tribal chieftains that the central government in Edinburgh didn't fully control. And the King of Scotland never went out to the Highlands because it was too dangerous and it was savage. He just stayed in the Lowlands, which created this intractable ethnic divide between north and south Scotland. And then in Ireland, it was even less advanced. Ireland did not have major cities. Most Irish lived in a state of. Lived in a state of semi cattle herding, semi farming. It was a nomadic barbarian society. And the English kept on trying to conquer Ireland in the centuries beforehand. They kept on losing because the Irish would just drag them into the forest and murder them. Where English field army after English field army kept on getting wiped out in Ireland. And Queen Elizabeth II was ultimately able to conquer Ireland by the end of her reign. And that was through black powder, where the Highland Celtic charge with guys with their broadswords and claymores and that stuff that could consistently beat the English in a pre Gunpowder world. But once you had ranks of gunpowder, it gradually removed the Celtic military advantage. So during the reign of Elizabeth ii, Ireland became nominally under English control. But Ireland was still de facto ruled by these native confederacies that could tell the English no. And so the life of the average Irishman remained fairly similar. And it wasn't until more than a generation later that the English really tightened up, tightened up on the conquest of Ireland.
- [29:51]
B
It's amazing how long the Celtic broadsword charge worked as, or at least was manageable as a strategy, literally from Egypt, until gunpowder they were running around with.
- [30:03]
A
It was even longer too. We're at the Battle of Culloden in the mid 18th century. Up by Inverness, the Bonnie Prince Charlie's Highlanders charged up against Redcoats. And the Highland charge In the mid 18th century was still a viable military strategy. It was on its way out, but there was still a chance they could have won because Bonnie Prince Charlie's army made it halfway down England.
- [30:31]
B
Right. And they didn't get stuck at a swamp or something in Falkirk or whatever that battle was. It would have been as bad. So.
- [30:41]
A
The first big event in. The first big event in early modern English history was the Protestant Reformation, and that ripples across North Europe. And there were lots of people in England who were interested in Protestantism because England's biggest trade partner was the Netherlands or Flanders, who are Protestant. And so the first people who were interested in Protestantism were the English, who were connected to the. Just the Germanic peoples on the other side of the pond, the. That also had similar religions, which was in the south and the east, mercantile classes, the future Puritans. And then the area that consistently was anti Protestant was North England. And they had several different rebellions against the formation of a Protestant England until the reign of. Through the reign of Queen Elizabeth, where she had to put down several of these earlier in her reign. But the decision to convert the Protestantism was largely a political decision by Henry viii. And I would guess that even without Henry viii, England would have converted to Protestantism, because practically all of the Germanic countries in Europe, except for the Habsburgs, who had a very established political reason for not converting to Protestantism, because their title was given by the Pope, did eventually convert to Protestantism, Although you can see in a country like Sweden, it was significantly later, like 50 years, like 40 years after England, and it was after a civil war. But I also don't think a Catholic England is unlikely either. I could definitely see a Catholic England because at the start of his reign, Henry VIII was names defender of the faith by the Pope. And he was widely considered to be a paragon of Catholic leadership. And he was a devout Catholic. And the story goes that Henry VIII really wanted to have an heir, but none of his wives could bring him an heir. And so he went through five wives to try to find an heir. And his first one was Catherine of Aragon, who was part of the Spanish ruling family. And after she couldn't have an heir, he tried to discard her, but because the Pope was in an Italy that was dominated by the Spanish, the Pope could not annul his marriage. And so Henry VIII just created the Church of England, making England Protestant so he could remarry how many, how however many times he wanted.
- [33:19]
B
Right. One of the most iconic, legendary, absurd moves of history. Yeah, the funny, like, my small reason for, like, a large institutional theological change.
- [33:34]
A
I also find that for a lot of deep social things, you'll use the plausible deniability answer, because it's easier than explaining the 10 other answers you have. You could be like, oh, this. Like, we have. We're allies with a lot of Protestant countries already. This fits our national culture and ideals. Well, I can seize the church lands. And you say it's about your wife. You don't say it's seizing the church lands.
- [34:02]
B
Oh, you're right. Maybe the wife is actually the excuse. Kind of like how with foreign policy, we say, oh, we want to protect our allies, but really it's about extending hegemony. But then people get more mad about the fake excuse, and if you just told them for real. So with Henry, he's saying it's about the wife, but it's actually a very clever geopolitical move to kind of keep them in a structure where they have control over the Church, but they're more in line with Protestantism. Like, they're navigating the Catholic Protestant divide in a way that kind of works for both sides. Of course, I'm sure the wife was also a factor, but, yeah, it can be both.
- [34:41]
A
But. So one of the points Norman Davies makes is that the English nobility getting the Catholic Church's lands after Henry VIII converted the nation to Protestantism ended up becoming one of the most important variables in English history writing, because through the 20th century, the English nobility had to justify why the Catholic Church was bad to justify taking their lands, where this has been a consistent theme in sort of English, English society and English history writing for a very long time, because England built itself as Protestant, and it was the same fundamental elites who were still dependent on the same lands. And it's. It's. Being anti Catholic has been a pivotal part of England's identity for nearly the entire modern period. And you see it very overtly in certain periods of English history, like the Popish plot in the late 17th century. And you see it less overtly through the 20th century, where the Troubles in Northern Ireland are the easiest example of a Protestant Catholic dispute that occurred through the 1990s. And keep in mind, the IRA in the Troubles, they are the bloodiest terrorist group ever in human history. It's not the Taliban, it's not Al Qaeda, it's the ira.
- [36:11]
B
Really, Irish don't play. So they actually killed that many people?
- [36:18]
A
They did, yeah.
- [36:19]
B
Interesting.
- [36:20]
A
They were operating on, like, an industrialized scale for decades, and they were highly.
- [36:26]
B
Organized and used a lot of bombs. Yes, dynamite.
- [36:32]
A
So with the establishment of a Protestant English state, you opened up, first of all, Scotland's conversion to Protestantism, as well as an enormous religious can of worms. Because when the entire British Isles were Catholic, it was easy to cover for all of these ethnic differences, because at least we're the same religion. But what the rise of Protestantism did was exacerbate these differences inside the British Isles and create centuries of wars over them. Until you saw the unification of the British Isles under Anglican hegemony. And Scotland went through a weirder Protestant Reformation than England's did. In England's case, they converted to the Church of England, and the Church of England went through a very serious theological shift. Where originally they were more so Calvinist, but then over time they evolved more so towards Catholic doctrines and ceremonies. But in the process of doing so, they alienated the Calvinists and the Presbyterians that were their original allies, who became a distinct group. And they created a huge amount of dissenting Protestants. But the Church of England was fairly reasonable. It was a church that existed for the English aristocracy to have a church. Well, in Scotland, they got fairly crazy, where the old king of Scotland was fairly corrupt. Scotland's royalty were connected to the continent a lot. They were married into the Burgundian family, but they weren't really representative of the interests of the Scottish people. And so Scotland had a coup d' etat under the Presbyterians, where presbyter is an old term for sort of elder councilmen. And this is a modern connection, but among the Calvinists or the Puritans, because the Puritans and the Scottish Presbyterians, they're theologically almost exactly the same. They were run by committees of these religious elders. They're the origin of Western Committee culture as well. As totalitarianism. Because in the Calvinist societies like Puritan New England or John Calvin's Scotland, sorry, John Calvin's Geneva, and then with. With Scotland, with Knox, John Knox, they're totalitarian societies where the state can fine you for arguing with your wife too loudly. The state can find you for not working on Christmas. You. You're not allowed to swear at all. And so it's this highly Karen up your face society. And for decades, it was as if Scotland was run by the Taliban.
- [39:23]
B
They'd regulate clothes. You could reg. Only wear a few colors. They were pretty muted. It was like Bernie Sanders. You only. You don't need 20 types of deodorant kind of stuff.
- [39:33]
A
Yeah. And that was all of Scotland. And James the first, who later became the King of England, or he was James II of Scotland and James I of England, he grew up under this Presbyterian tyranny where all. Where the. The Presbyterian council had taken the king hostage and raised him as one of their. Basically under their prison. And I think he needed the English to bail out the king of Scotland from one point from his own people. And they would do all these things to basically humble him. To say that just because you're king doesn't mean you're not a servant of God. But the Protestant Reformation really rocked across Scotland. And the only area of the British Isles that didn't convert to Protestantism was Ireland. Ireland stayed Catholic. And that's partly because the Protestant Reformation almost always occurred through monarchs. And then the populations followed. At the start of Queen Elizabeth's reign, Protestants were less than 20% of England. And by the end, they were like 80%. And that was because the monarch made the decision that. And then the populations generally followed. In Ireland, there was no central King of Ireland, or if he was, it was a myth. And so there was no decision that was being made. And also you ended up in these oppositional relationships between the English Protestants and the Irish Catholics. And the Jesuits and the Pope put a lot of effort into retaining Ireland. And Ireland got a tremendous amount of hurt for staying Catholic vis a vis a vis the other repressed Protestants, where the Welsh converted to Protestantism. And the Welsh are the only Celtic people in the British Isles who kept their language. And that was because they wrote their religious documents in Welsh due to the Protestant Reformation. And the Welsh and the Scottish could exist as sort of pretend partners in the British Empire, although the English still did maintain total dominance. And for the Irish, it was just total subjugation once the English did conquer them.
- [41:48]
B
So for the Irish to have converted away from Catholicism. It probably would have had to happen pretty early after England did, because after a while, it just becomes entrenched as a partisan thing. Right. Where you don't want to be Protestant because England's Protestant and vice versa. And they couldn't transition that fast because it was decentralized. You had the European Catholics talking to them, like you said.
- [42:14]
A
Yeah. In Ireland, the Protestant Catholic division has become very much ethnic. You have terms like Protestants are right footers and Catholics are left footers. So Protestants, when they dig with a shovel, use their right foot and Catholics their left feet.
- [42:29]
B
Right.
- [42:30]
A
There's all these pity indicators in Ireland if someone's Protestant or Catholic because they're people who physically look the same but have these wildly different ethnic differences. And for spoilers, the Protestant Irish are settlers from Scotland, so they're distinct ethnic groups, although they're genetically very close.
- [42:52]
B
The Irish had a proud history with the Catholic Church, too. Right. As innovators of a lot of theology. They had saints and stuff. They were pretty advanced theologians.
- [43:01]
A
Yes. That's all true. So Henry VIII was also just a real character. He was morbidly obese when he was younger. He was one of the great jousting champions. He. I believe he had mercury poisoning. I believe he had gout. He had all of the royal illnesses. And he's very much a sort of Brian Blessed character. Brian Blessed was this English actor from the 20th century who was always the jolly feasting king.
- [43:33]
B
Right. We should have Robert Baratheon kind of.
- [43:37]
A
The jolly feasting king is an archetype we don't have enough of in society.
- [43:41]
B
It's a great one. It's very classic. Turkey or ham leg.
- [43:44]
A
Yeah, exactly. And. But England was largely a madhouse, and Tudor politics were really weird and really incestuous. Where England had a parliament, it was one of the more powerful ones in Europe. But England's parliament hadn't taken the edge as the leadership engine. So the king of England still had a significant amount of power, and he'd call the parliament periodically for stuff like taxes. But you had. Monopolies were a big thing in England at the time, where the king would give away certain businesses to his buddies who had monopolistic control over that. And the English people became progressively more resentful of them, with monopolies being possibly the biggest cause of the English Civil War. And Tudor politics was just constantly. It was very Renaissance court, where you are in the king's good graces, the king rewards you, you're no longer popular with the king. He kicks you out of court, or the king doesn't like you, he murders you. And so Tudor politics had this constant backstabbing, underhanded, very Renaissance nature to them.
- [45:03]
B
Where you got into the groupie or yes man problem pretty easily. Did any kings from the dynasty deal with that better than others? And were there any particular strategies they used to avoid the yes man dynamic?
- [45:18]
A
So Queen Elizabeth was kind of a g. Queen Elizabeth was genuinely the best monarch England had in that time period. And I'm careful not to do diversity higher, naturally inflating her because she's a woman, but she is genuinely one of the best leaders England has ever had.
- [45:37]
B
Maybe people were willing to disagree with her because it was a woman or something, that there were fewer yes men because of their sexism.
- [45:44]
A
Yeah, it was a fairly bad social taboo to take an order from a woman. And so that's something you'll see if you read the primary sources from that era, where her speech at the Spanish Armada, she would say, although I have the body of a feeble woman, I have the soul and the mind of the greatest of Europe's princes. And she played into it really well. She's probably the best historic example of leading in a feminine way, where her first position when she became queen, and she had a horrible childhood, she was very likely molested as a child by one of the king's retainers, which is partly why she remained a virgin for her entire life. But she also knew that if she married, she'd hand away power. And so there's weird, sort of like Oedipal, certain kinds of sexual elements to English politics of that era, where Queen Elizabeth would flirt with certain suitors from other nations to get an advantage of them and then ultimately reject them. Or she became dependent on Mary Queen of Scots child to become her successor. But she also murdered Mary Queen of Scots, because Mary Queen of Scots was the potential queen of Scotland. And she was kicked in and out of Scotland a few times due to the Presbyterian Protestant rebels. And so she stayed in England, but she also had a potential claim on the English throne. So that meant Queen Elizabeth kept her in prison, but then she was colluded with people outside the court to either put her in power or to get her back to Scotland. And Queen Elizabeth heard about that and murdered her. But there is a sort of strange Oedipal nature to this, that Mary Queen of Scots son inherited England from Queen Elizabeth. Queen Elizabeth did not have her own children in order to preserve her own power, but she had to give away. She had to do that. Knowing she traded the power over the course of her life to have her rival bloodline take over England after she died.
- [48:02]
B
Really interesting balance, because instead of having a bunch of heirs and doing diplomacy by arranging marriages, she's just fake selling off her own marriage over and over again and then pulling the rug.
- [48:14]
A
Yeah, it's.
- [48:15]
B
And it's a weird. Be able to negotiate with your own courtship.
- [48:19]
A
Yeah, yeah. So Queen Elizabeth was a good example of feminine leadership, because in her first time as first thing she did as queen, she went out to the English people and actually, like, talked to them and showed an interest in them. I think she might have wept at sorrow of their suffering. And this was completely strange to Europeans at the time, because the king should just have a natural noble bearing and a natural lordly manner, so that he just dominates the peasants. So the idea of a monarch even pretending how the peasants felt, that was seen as strange. And she also was very good at manipulating the European balance of power, where England avoided having continental wars over this era, which was largely a good decision. England hadn't modernized their military, so they were still dependent on the yeoman longbowmen from the medieval period, and they had never gotten the pike and shot armies until the English Civil War. But the English held Calais, or a single port across the strait from England, through the late 16th century of where the Spanish took it, and they lost that during Henry VIII's reign. But Queen Elizabeth was constantly manipulating this complex and subtle system of diplomacy that Europe was entangled in during the Protestant Reformation, trying to get England's advantage through the Dutch rebels who were fighting against the Spanish, who were fellow Protestants, as well as keeping England out of Continental wars, but also managing the Spanish threat, because England's dominant rival was Spain. And England and France were actually allies at this point against Spain because Spain was the great power. And the English were terrified of Spain, which shows a real power reversal, because a few centuries later, it would be the exact opposite. And so the Spanish hated England because England kept stopping them from taking back the Netherlands, their wealthiest colony, that was in rebellion. And the Spanish had this thing called the Spanish Road, where they'd sail to Italy, march over the Alps, across Germany, to the Netherlands. And they did that because the English blocked them from sailing through the English Channel. And that radically increased the cost of their war in the Netherlands. When the Spanish launched their Armada, their hope was to wipe out England, the only major Protestant country in Europe, and thus seize the Netherlands and totally drive Protestantism from Europe.
- [50:59]
B
And would that have succeeded if not for there was a Storm, right.
- [51:03]
A
Yeah. There was the Spanish Armada is, it's a sort of interesting campaign. I've read multiple military histories of it. England maintained a bunch of privateers, including Sir Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. And Drake burned the entire Spanish fleet at Lisbon earlier when they were still in the port. So the Spanish had to rebuild their entire fleet to go after England. And they loaded up with the huge, huge military that if it had landed in England, would have almost certainly worked. But the English skirmished against the Spanish through the English Channel. And the English got a strategic advantage because they had much lighter, more nimble ships, while the Spanish had these huge galleons from the Mediterranean warfare that had significantly higher payloads. But the English could move faster and they could shoot further too, and were highly nimble. And so the English would just basically go around the Spanish formation taking pot shots. And there were several points where the English did gain a military advantage over the Spanish and weaken their strategy, where the English did fight quite well. But the major variable was the weather because the Spanish sailed into the North Sea to hook up with their allies with their Spanish formations in Belgium to attack England. But then what happened is they got stuck in a storm that shoved them into the northeast, into the North Sea. And as they gained damage from the English attacking them and the weather destroyed them, the Spanish fleet kept going north until they had to circle the long way around Scotland and Ireland back to Spain. And almost none of the men who started the voyage ended it and returned to Spain. And so the Spanish Armada is one of those huge what if moments because the Spanish probably should have won that campaign. But partly due to English ingenuity and partly due to good lucky weather for the English, the Spanish just didn't. And it was all downhill for Spain from there.
- [53:16]
B
Sounds like they should have just pushed through some shots and landed on the the beach. But I'm, I'm also not going to take away the story of the private military beating the Spanish army because that's pretty based.
- [53:29]
A
I remember I've read out the campaign multiple times and I was trying to remember why they didn't just do that. I think it's something to do with the English might have made the landing prohibitively costly or they were running out of supplies. It was one of those things where they got the timing wrong, where the timing at each different taunt part of it did not work out. They were either trying to hit a certain goal, then when they tried to get that goal, the timing zoomed out. But also their commander was a land based commander who had very little sailing expertise, where the English were commanded by these privateers who had sailed around the world. Like, that was later for Drake, but you know what I mean? Gone to the Caribbean. And so the English had a significantly better lead and more nimble military.
- [54:20]
B
Yeah. It's very interesting how different factors like that can make you really vulnerable, as naval warfare is complicated because it's hard to understand exactly what the dimensions are. Like, how fast can you go from here to there? How vulnerable are you going to be if you do this? Then you can. There's a lot of volatility in it, basically. Yeah.
- [54:42]
A
Queen Elizabeth's reign was a general golden age. It was called Mary England at the time because it was a period when the population went up, when there was an artistic renaissance with figures like Shakespeare. And Queen Elizabeth died in the early 17th century. And then James of Scotland took the English throne. And there's a story that on his march from Scotland to England, James saw someone commit a crime, and he said, you should hang him. And the local English official said, he has to have a trial here. And I find it the difference between Scotland and England and levels of rule of law or parliamentarianism, because the king of Scotland's like, yeah, I'm the king. I saw him commit a crime. Just kill him. It's easier.
- [55:30]
B
They're like, no, no, bro, you're the king of England now. We do things a little differently around here, and it's gonna freak people out.
- [55:38]
A
Yeah, yeah. And it's funny that the Stuarts, almost immediately, in taking England, they became English, where by the time we get to the English Civil War, where the Stuarts fled to Scotland, once they did, the Scots treated them as an alien power because they had spent the last 30 to 40 years in England, and they rarely returned to Scotland. And under Queen Elizabeth's reign, you would see in a gradual sort of polarization of English society that you could see the effects of even before the rise of the Stuart family in England. But they got exacerbated with the Stuarts, one of which is that most English were Anglicans, but the Anglicans did not have a lot of will or belief or any of the things. And in Nassim Taleb's terms, terms, the intolerant minorities, push history. And so you saw England gradually divide, almost like in an American culture war sense, between the west of the country, who had a moral code that was more traditional and based around the king and hierarchy, and the east of England, who had more capitalist, meritocratic, modern society. And this belied that 10% of England population were Puritan and 10% were also Catholics. And both of these were disproportionate for the most educated, powerful people, the Catholics, the nobility and the Puritans among the merchant class. And so England's Anglican minority majority being gradually polarized along the lines of, of are you part of the more parliament friendly Puritans or the more Catholic friendly Royalists? Although they didn't conceive of it that way till the English Civil War. Because the English Civil War was really the test of the underlying demographic. And what they found was that the more intolerant minorities could consistently win in the English Civil War. But Queen Elizabeth was always under this game of which of these sides do we play with at any given time? So the Anglicans pulled more from Catholic theology because the Puritans worried them and they religiously oppressed the Puritans, which is why they fled to America. But there were other points where they had to ally with the Presbyterians against the Catholics due to foreign threats. So the middle required a degree of skill to basically operate it. And the English Civil War was the middle falling in, out.
- [58:17]
B
And what do you mean by the middle falling out? That ca. How did that cause the Civil War or define the Civil War?
- [58:25]
A
It's much like modern America where people talk about appealing to the center and the center just doesn't exist anymore. I don't even know what the center means in modern American politics where, okay, you had a sort of English mainstream that got eaten out by both the Protestant radicals and the Catholics until you had to pick one side.
- [58:46]
B
Did the majority ever even care about their issues though, like the Catholic issue or the Protestant issue? I mean, generally, yes, but I mean the most extreme Protestant positions in the. And then the Catholic traditionalists, like, did the mainstream shift towards their views or did they just keep the same views but have to pick a side? Probably both.
- [59:06]
A
Part of me is inclined to say no because it was generally an idea that the lower classes did not have political opinions in this time period. At the same time, England might be an exception because it was one of the most commercialized societies in Europe. England did not have a large peasant class where even the farmers were sort of petty merchants. They would sell their goods, they worked for coins, they were operating in the market. And Protestantism also meant that a majority of England's population was literate. So England might be one of those, the few countries where the lower classes did have political opinions and they had a huge newspaper and pamphlet industry in the 16th century. And by the time of the English Civil War, England had newspapers. So it was a fairly literate society and the upper classes were significantly more literate than almost anyone today. That's true. Even in the early 17th century with a lot of the founders of Jamestown being hyper educated people, it's a big deal.
- [60:10]
B
It's almost more like the Internet than the early printing press, which was about books and Bibles. Because papers are like the daily news. Right. It's more of a gossip circuit.
- [60:20]
A
Yeah. And when you look at how the British Empire established these various incentives that allowed them to constantly break the game, I don't think that's by accident because John Dee, one of the founders of the British Empire and he was Queen Elizabeth's spymaster and her more foreign minister, he was obsessed with the Hermetica and he made the Enochian language to commune with angels. And so when you're looking at the British Empire do these various things like establish capitalism or the parliamentary tradition or these various incentives for mutual cooperation that how you to hit exponential transcendent returns. That was definitely something they thought through at the time.
- [61:09]
B
They anticipated.
- [61:11]
A
Yes.
- [61:11]
B
Their success and the radical transformation because John was coming.
- [61:15]
A
John D. Also said the center of the Anglo Saxon peoples would become North America. And that in conquering North America they would have to inhabit and take the local spirits to make a distinct North American civilization of English speaking peoples on top of the native land.
- [61:31]
B
Wow. This is, that's much more impressive than predicting like an industrial revolution. Now because we know how things work and have historical example, but that was pre the breaking of traditional game theory. So that's, that's a ridiculous level of vision.
- [61:49]
A
In the 13th century, Francis Bacon talked about helicopters, steam engines and tanks. Thomas more in the 15th century, in the 16th century created a utopian society run by scientific social engineers where caring for the group is the shared religion, where you don't have social class.
- [62:07]
B
Oh right, the Utopia book.
- [62:09]
A
Yeah. So these were ideas that were in circulation and you had People in 16th century England who were arguing for what was effectively the Industrial Revolution. Revolution. So when you're looking at the British Empire constantly breaking and remaking the world, these were things they knew about.
- [62:28]
B
Yeah. They didn't stumble into it by accident.
- [62:30]
A
Yeah. And. So 17th century James the First is a fairly good king. It's not fair that we skip over the good kings, but it is what it is is. And England hit all of the secular cycle issues we normally talk about like inequality, elite aspirant, overproduction, inflation. And you had Charles the First, who was the king when The English Civil War happened and we have a whole episode in the English Civil War. It's like over an hour, so I won't get too much into it, but you saw England's divided on a fight default line between the more western, Anglican, Catholic aligned traditional areas that supported the King and then the east of the country that supported the Parliament because England could not pay its budget, which was an issue every major country in the 17th century had. And due to that, the King tried to shut down the Parliament when the Parliament refused to raise taxes for the King and there was a whole issue at funding the navy. And the big central problem was the King of England tried to get Scotland to use Anglican religious books at their public events and Scotland declared war on England over that and then invaded northern England. And the English government was trying to raise taxes to get a military to fight Scotland, but the Parliament was controlled by Calvinists who had the same religious views as the Scots did. So the Parliament shut down the King from doing so. The King needed to raise a military to keep England going, so he shut down the Parliament. And this was part of a long standing trend of abuses of freedom that the King of England had done where before the English Civil War they had a sort of cross creeping weakening of freedom, much like it's occurring in our era. But the English Civil War kicked that down and you saw a reversion to freedom afterwards. And so the English Civil War spread from that where Ireland declared independence and they had a mass genocide of the Scottish migrants in Ulster. Scotland declared independence, invaded the north of England and then England was split east and west, meaning the Parliamentarians and the Royalists.
- [65:05]
B
Right. People will regularly betray their country for ideology. Like you have the, the Calvinist aligned Parliament right teaming up with the Scottish. It's like the democrats teaming up with the EU over the success of America. It's, it's just like predictable as clockwork.
- [65:25]
A
Not going to lie, I would 100% be a parliamentarian.
- [65:29]
B
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The context of that is different as well.
- [65:33]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [65:34]
B
I mean it's not necessarily always the wrong decision, I guess.
- [65:38]
A
Yes, life is complicated. The parliamentarians won and this was a huge symbolic shift in England. And I like to say the English Civil War is one of the most important events in history and no one remembers it. And it was a conflict between sort of the old cavalry feudal armies of cavalier gallantry against Cromwell's New model Army where everyone wore the same clothes. It was one of the first standardized militaries in Europe. It fired in ranks, started the redcoats they used drill. And that destroyed the cavalier Royalist advantage at a handful of battles. And there were a series of civil wars over the course of the English Civil War, where it was firstly within the Parliament and the Royalists, but then there were also a series of internal civil wars where as an example, as the Parliament won, they saw their own cannibalization of moderates, where one faction slightly more radical than the other faction would eat another faction, then would ripple out outwards until you ended up with the result of Cromwell. The leader of the military shut down the Parliament and made himself Lord Protector or effective military dictator of England.
- [67:04]
B
With the ultimate culmination of the Parliamentarians was dictatorship.
- [67:08]
A
Ironically, it was theocratic dictatorship by the Puritans.
- [67:12]
B
Right.
- [67:13]
A
And so England became a theocracy. They again, we talked about how the Puritans would ban not working on Christmas, they would ban having music or being edgy. And so England was a totalitarian state for a little. And although I shouldn't say that because 17th century England was not Stalinist Russia, I'm not going to water down that term. But England then went on a spur of conquering all the other neighboring areas in a horrifying war that was really the thing that unified the British Empire, where Cromwell invaded Scotland, who were again, practically the only people who were nearly theologically perfectly aligned with the Puritans. It's weird that you have the 17th century wars of religion. People will kill each other over the most minor theological differences, but then they'll also kill the people who they're religiously similar to. After fighting all of these wars for those religious positions, it's like the Middle east today. And Cromwell utterly slaughtered the Scottish armies, colonized Scotland, burned a lot of the country. And then he did the same in Ireland, where his ultimate goal was to complete genocide of Ireland and its replacement with English, English and Scottish settlers because he saw the Catholics as subhuman. And Ireland lost. I think it lost over a third of its population then. And then that doesn't even include being sold into slavery. One of my favorite songs ever is Tobacco island by Irish metal group Flogging Molly, about Irish slaves being seized by Barbados and sold into slavery in the sugar fields of Jamaica. Which was historically accurate and a brutal.
- [69:06]
B
Place to put an Irishman.
- [69:07]
A
Oh, yeah, it's cruelty. And he utterly destroyed Ireland. This was a big turning point in Irish history because they stopped being governed by their old nobilities in the forest and instead became under direct English rule. And the English heel over Ireland was pretty brutal, where they killed off the Irish Nobility. They gave away the entire country to these English landlords who didn't even live live in Ireland. They stopped the native Irish or the Catholics from obtaining an education, buying property, voting, engaging in a normal society. And so Ireland became, over time, incredibly poor, by far the poorest area in the British Isles. But Ireland also did go through a radical population increase due to the introduction of the potato. Ireland had like a little over half a million people in the year 1600. And in the year 1840, it had 8 million people.
- [70:04]
B
Right. And then they had a population crunch on their basically slave plantations. Taking all the land is just such a brutal way to introduce them to the system. Yeah, but it's probably connected to how they took control of the place in the first place. Right. Controlling the. The farms and then making them a central part of the society, because I guess they would have done more hurting before the potato. I didn't know if they were big wheat farmers. That gets too into the details.
- [70:36]
A
They did farm wheat. They weren't that good at it. Ireland was mostly a herding society, so they did, they did farm with wheat and other traditional European crops, but they were semi pastoral, semi nomadic. The currency of Irish society was cattle. And young men would show their virility by how many cows they could steal.
- [70:56]
B
And. And the parliamentary thing is interesting because they were brutal to the Irish. They're also kind of like socialist coded, but they're also on the merchant side, which is an interesting dichotomy. And then opposed to them is a more easily understandable traditionalist lens. Right.
- [71:15]
A
Early modern Europe did not feel the need for ideological political consistency because their identity was religion, so happened to have whatever political positions they had because the core thing they thought about was religion.
- [71:29]
B
Right. And the theological debates were often tied to the politics. Yes, but if there wasn't a theological contradiction or fight in connection to the politics, then the politics, even if they were different, weren't. Wasn't a sore spot.
- [71:46]
A
It's also, I think about this where if someone tried to understand the politics of life today and they read my work of me trying to explain it in the future, that would both be a fair indication of this era of history, and it would not be a fair indication because I would talk about a thing like mouse utopia, which is obvious at a sort of macro look at the situation where you, like I tell my friends, no variables of my life make sense. If you don't realize I grew up in mouse utopia because my entire life has been mouse utopia. I don't remember a world before Phase B. Of mouse utopia. And at the same time, almost no one else over the course of my life has perceived it that way. So it's fair if you're zooming out, but it's not fair if you're trying to understand the motivations in the actions of the people involved. So that's partly what you're seeing with the English Civil War, where we've done tests where different factions in the English Civil War correlate with different sort of British genetic subgroups of the population and also correlate with different ancestral migratory patterns to America, where the ancestors of both sides of the English Civil War are identical to the American Civil War. However, at the time, people would just say, I don't like different types of Protestant. And that was the COVID for these unconscious motivations going on elsewhere.
- [73:19]
B
Not only that, it goes back further because those groups also map perfectly on to Celts and Saxons. So it's literally thousands of years of history. And then you get like the Nordish Nordic influence mostly in Saxon areas.
- [73:34]
A
Yeah.
- [73:34]
B
Which kind of like concentrates the Saxon ality of it. Yeah, yeah, that was okay. So, yeah, we just boiled it down to that, which kind of makes it more confusing, but make it makes it more sense because, I mean, it's the same patterns today, but the ideas are also tied to it. And I mean, yeah, we'd have to go through a whole nother rabbit hole to categorize that.
- [73:56]
A
Yeah, that is true. The English Civil War ended with the central Puritan theocracy. And Cromwell was not actually that bad a governor. He was one of the more religiously tolerant leaders in English history, where that's a real ironic thing because he ran this theocracy. But it was a golden age for Protestant dissenting sects like the Quakers and the Baptists, who started in this time period. Or it was a golden age for weird political positions like universal suffrage or the land division or whatever. And England stabilized into the Cromwell tyranny. And Cromwell remade the English navy, the English military, the institutions. And after he died was a figure who I love that history has given no justice to, named Monk. And Monk was one of Cromwell's lieutenants, where rather than letting power pass onto his not very impressive children, Monk took power and then gave the parliament back where he reinstalled democracy. And I think of him where it could have been a situation where someone else names himself Lord Protector or king, but Monk did the. The moral thing of putting give of giving away power to the parliament, and we have no respect for him. But this one decision of making England parliamentary unlocked, multiple industrial revolutions and global spanning empire and all of these things, and yet we forget the drop that caused it.
- [75:36]
B
This is a great example of our responsibility point because to do that, Monk would have to have a great sense of the responsibility of the situation and have considered like the second order effects against his potentially selfish, selfish interest. And when you do that and you get a clear picture for him, it probably wasn't even a hard decision. It was probably a huge relief.
- [76:01]
A
Yeah, that's true. And that brings up a point that one of the things England got really right is it had one of the best leadership classes of any nation in history, where I don't think we give the English aristocracy justice for what they did, where partly they were incredibly noble. They gradually decentralized power, they didn't devolve into tyranny, they respected the commons and England was one of the freest countries in history over this time period. England then is freer than England now in a litany of different ways. And you saw the current English leadership class form as a side effect of the English Civil War where you saw this competition over the shared English dominance. And what formed was a stronger center as a synthesis of the two extremes of the Parliamentarians and the royalists, where.
- [76:59]
B
The mids won in the end.
- [77:01]
A
Yes, the Parliament invited the King back because they realized they needed the King to moderate them. And the King accepted the position of a. Of a position where the Parliament clearly had dominance over him, but the King was there. So the king gradually lost power. Charles II was largely a good king, although he did pretend to be a degenerate and to party as a way to sort of get around the English people's fear of having a king. And the English were widely hated and mocked at the time. They were called the King killing people, which was a European disgrace at the time. And.
- [77:37]
B
It'S like a French Revolution. Right. The English Civil War is kind of like a mini French Revolution. And Monk is the. He sort of represents the pre Napoleon French republicans. But if they were actually successful. Yeah. In dismantling dictatorship and, and that's why it's this like traditionalist and then social socialist merchant thing. Like you can take it to a socialist dictatorship or you can, once you've gotten rid of the oligarchy, empower markets. So it's kind of interesting ties in.
- [78:13]
A
Together the English leadership class. They formed from the local distinct regional nobilities who unified through the boarding school system, where they sent all of their sons to boarding schools. From the early 18th century onwards, they developed a unified ACCENT they would go to the same social events in London. And this shared British aristocracy is what built the British Empire. And they conquered the world where they prized honor and courage above intelligence, although they were also very intelligent and they would constantly integrate with the merchant class in the most competent of the common people. So the English aristocracy were gradually assimilating new blood that kept them vigorous. And they would invest in technology and the empire and all of these things. So the British Empire was held together by a very competent, brave, moral aristocracy. Although England was a country where only like 3% of the population could vote, they were pretty good at representing the interest of the English people. And you saw the domestication of the English Civil War conflict into a two party system between the Whigs and the Tories, who the Whigs were the descendants of the Puritans and the Tories were the descendants of the Royalists. And that's an oversimplification and they wouldn't have it that way. But that's de facto what happened.
- [79:45]
B
Interesting. It reminds me when you said they focused on bravery or courage over necessarily intelligence. Not that they didn't view that as important. Is very similar to like a recent returning attitude that conscientiousness can overcome iq.
- [80:01]
A
Yeah.
- [80:01]
B
Which is a weird reverse thing where merit autocracy, real merit autocracy is not just about iq, but if you get stuck in like a credentialist bureaucratic system, then people might lean on intelligence more or transfer that to EQ if they ever actually took an IQ test and couldn't hide from that reality.
- [80:21]
A
When I wrote a hiring guide, I made my two predominant traits, self control and synthetic thinking. And that worded people up like, why didn't you go for iq? And I said I chose synthetic thinking over IQ because synthetic thinking is the ability to create exponential value independent for yourself. If you have a lot of high IQ people, they can sort of just split sputter. And the thing that synthetic thinking allows is the creation of exponential victories. Like what the British did in this time period.
- [80:55]
B
Yeah. Because IQ is. It very much fits into the modern paradigm as well because it's really just small marginal increases in efficiency. You're not actually changing the dynamics of the game in an exponential way.
- [81:11]
A
Yeah. And England entered after a little bit of chaos where they had James II who was a Catholic, and then they kicked him out and brought in a Dutch ruling family because he baptized his son as Catholic, where he was a closeted Catholic and Catholics were vociferously hated. And it was okay that he pretended to be Protestant, but Making his son openly Catholic was aligned too far. They kicked him out of England. And the Dutch ruling family put themselves in charge of William of Orange with his English wife in 1688. And this created the longest period of political stability ever in human history, from 1688 until the present. And this will make the rest of the video a lot easier because peace does not create a lot of things to talk about historically. And the Stuarts sort of stood in France in their own resentment, where they tried to launch an invasion of the British Isles again in the end of the 17th century, which was intercepted at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland, where the British beat them. And after that, they again, in the mid 18th century, landed a force in Scotland that got Scotland to rebel against the English and succeed with Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart heir, trying to reclaim the throne of England. And Bonnie Prince Charlie made it half of the way down England. And he could have marched on London, but he gave up instead. And this is seen as a historic decision, but it's pretty impressive. He made it half the way down England and then his army was slaughtered by the redcoats at first, Culloden, which caused the mass depopulation of the Scottish Highlands, where most of them fled to America, because the English ravaged the north of Scotland, removing the last area that was not under the direct governance of London, but it was under the clan lines. And so when we're going to look at the 1688 until the 2025 period, we're going to see a long lasting period of stability. But keep in mind, at the start of this, or for a lot of it, there was the long lasting threat that England would get conquered by a foreign power, or it would have a dynastic dispute where just because it worked, don't take it for granted.
- [83:38]
B
Wait, so the current monarch of England is from the House of Orange?
- [83:42]
A
No, it was the same regime. They moved the kings in and out. And that's an indication that the parliament became the dominant decision making system, because you had the House of Orange, they got knocked out after a generation. Then you brought in the Navarians and they ruled England for a while. And now we're under the Saxe Coburg dynasty.
- [84:09]
B
And the context for William of Orange coming was back to the guild system, where the Dutch got rid of their guilds. They could make ships 10 times faster than England. They popped out a huge navy and were like, oh, I guess we should sail over and take out England's navy. And they destroyed England's entire navy, but didn't really have a plan for occupation. And then. And then the English made a navy and conquered the Dutch like a couple decades later on. It didn't take that long, but okay, so William of Orange, that's how he got on there. But it just cycled kings. And the Dutch actually didn't have a really occupation. They just. They just were like. They were like, we have the boats. I guess we should use them while we do. But they had no plans for a continual fight.
- [84:50]
A
It's interesting that most English history say the last invasion of England was in 1066, and that's not true. There was another one in 1215 that Philip Augustus of France did that made it as far as Lincolnshire that the English used amnesia to forget. And there's also the Dutch Invasion, the Glorious Revolution. But I love that it's called the Glorious Revolution because that's what winning looks like. When your revolution is called the Glorious Revolution, it means you have truly won the game of life. And it was seen as sort of the revitalization of the true English monarchy, where there's this 1930s movie called Captain Blood where this Irish doctor is sent to Jamaica as a slave for helping heal a rebel. And he becomes a pirate fighting against the foul stewards. And then when the hand of. Then when the Dutch seize power in England, they pardon him. And he's like, thank God we have a Protestant back in England, although he's Irish. And so it was sort of seen as, oh, oh, we got rid of the bad Catholic. Because the Dutch also didn't have the military force to occupy England, where they.
- [86:01]
B
Just built more boats. And we're like, I guess. And they had a debate about it. They're like, should we attack? And then they're like, well, we have. We have the ability to wipe out the English navy. We didn't before. Yeah, but that was a very temporary ability gained from the volatility of early industrialization.
- [86:16]
A
You also had the Anglo Dutch War a few decades earlier, which is another funny thing that the Puritans were so obsessive. They're one variety of Christianity and everyone else would go to hell. And they fought the only two other Calvinist powers in the region, the Dutch and the Scots. And the Dutch realized the Anglo Dutch wars that they couldn't actually beat England. And so they sort of gave up and let England rise.
- [86:43]
B
It was just a mistake to start. It was like, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. And they just couldn't resist blowing up the navy because it was unthought of that. Somebody could have the ability to just destroy the English navy, especially the Dutch.
- [86:56]
A
Also keep in mind they just beat the Spanish. And the Spanish had so much more going on than the English did. And so it's equivalent to after the Athenians beat the Persians, just the staggering boost of Athenian self confidence was so huge.
- [87:14]
B
Yeah. They couldn't resist it. And it didn't work out because the English ended up conquering the Netherlands not too long after. And it definitely took the momentum out of the Netherlands sales. They were under kind of control after that.
- [87:26]
A
But England never conquered the Netherlands.
- [87:29]
B
They blew up their navy. They did dominated the colonial.
- [87:33]
A
This is a history podcast. I'm going to fact check you on stuff.
- [87:36]
B
Absolutely. Yeah.
- [87:36]
A
But so you have the unification of the English system and England becomes sort of a boring two party state. That works. They happen to have the greatest innovation of any nation ever. They happen to create an enormous empire. Unimportant things. They happen to have a cultural and economic and artistic golden age where 18th century Britain was the period where they really became the empire. Before then, the British Empire consisted of a handful of shacks on the eastern American seaboard. And by the end of the 18th century, it was clear they were going to conquer all of India. Anglo Saxons had populated a huge continent stretching from Louisiana to the Canadian Arctic. And the English also had a litany of other colonies around the world in Africa and the Caribbean. And once the British Isles were unified with especially the integration of Scotland and Ireland, the British could direct their energies outwards. And the British Empire was always a useful sort of pressure valve for their own dissatisfied people, where for both the Scottish and the Irish, they could get out of English oppression. Because in the empire, these Celts were treated as equals to Englishmen. The only place an Irishman would not be treated as an equal to an Englishman legally was in Ireland. And it's not a coincidence that England was the only major country to not experience any real revolutions after the Glorious Revolution in Europe. Because England was also the singular country. England and Russia, the two countries that really had very few revolutions. They were the two countries with the colonial release valve.
- [89:32]
B
England and Russia.
- [89:33]
A
Yeah.
- [89:37]
B
Oh, interesting. Where did Russia colonize? Just Siberia. Right, okay.
- [89:43]
A
They colonized Russia.
- [89:45]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like what Russia is now. That's why they have so much land. Right, yeah.
- [89:49]
A
There's a. There's a degree of sort of bio. Anthropological analysis that the Slavs and the Anglo Saxons got up their score so much through colonies that they divided the European continent in the 20th century. Century. It's the two frontiers turning inwards to divide the continent.
- [90:11]
B
Yeah. Oh, I had thought about the, yeah, the, the colonial powers too because I mean that ended up being the two powers fighting in the Cold War. Although Russia didn't have the same type of colonization. But basically I thought the countries that were left out of the age of colonization, broadly along the oceans and the wealthy stuff like Germany and Russia, once the colonies empires got stretched, they were always going to join with the colonies to undermine the European powers that kept them out of the colonial game for so long. So like Germany with Japan and then if, if Germany had won World War II or, or something, or been in the positions of the Soviets, they probably would have also started teaming up with anti colonial movements all throughout the colonies. Kind of like Russia did in the Cold War.
- [91:05]
A
That's just how power politics works. Yeah, it's nearly a law of physics. And Britain played the great power game probably better than any given country. They had the best fundamental strategy which was invest in science and economics, keep their taxes as low as possible to make their society as innovative as possible. Where Britain did not actually have a standard military for a lot of this time period, they would have to call up militias or call up regiments out of their officers. Just hanging out in town seducing random girls. I mean if you literally read out the British military of that era, that's what they did. They would just hang out in towns and talk with the local people. And Britain played it very well because they were focusing on the empire. And Pitt the Elder for example, made the explicit calculation in the Seven Years War our only continental goal is keeping Prussia afloat. And then we're going to invest in Britain and America because that's where the future is. And that's how England really got the advantage because they built up the colonial empires which helped with having the best navy in Europe after Cromwell to protect the English Channel from European conquest. Because there was always this looming pressure from attack from Europe between the French or the Spanish or later the Germans, even the Swedish had a plan to attack England under their military genius leader Charles xii. And just because England wasn't conquered doesn't mean it couldn't have been. Even in wars we don't think about like the American Revolution or the War of Spanish Succession. There was this looming threat of the invasion of England that hung over the English's head because they knew that they couldn't, they knew that they couldn't really fight off a good foreign army. And they used Protestantism as a unifying identity and they used the Irish as a Sort of near out group to show the savage Irish as an indication of the savage Catholic powers that would destroy England.
- [93:20]
B
Oh that's. That's hilarious. Because the Ireland was nothing like the continental Catholic powers. It was a. Who were like decaying civilizations versus a nomadic. It's just totally different. So to put the stereotypes of Catholicism through the Irish nomad society is pretty comical.
- [93:41]
A
They just.
- [93:42]
B
I'm sure the people in Italy would have laughed about some of the.
- [93:44]
A
They just saw all Catholics as superstitious cultists.
- [93:49]
B
They thought, I guess there could have been overlap there.
- [93:52]
A
They thought the Irish were savages and they thought that Latin Europeans were sort of propagandized totalitarian cultists.
- [94:00]
B
Not totally wrong. And.
- [94:06]
A
Scotland unified with Britain partly because Scotland was in a really rough economic time and they were boxed out of England's trade. And also the entire Scottish nobility invested in a colony in Panama where everyone died of disease. And this was a larger economic crisis in Scotland, then the Great Depression in America by a significant margin. And the English offered to integrate them into the their trade system as well as to bail out everyone who lost in the economic crisis. And then the Scottish agreed to integrate with England which created the United Kingdom. And Ireland was integrated into the United Kingdom based out of London during the little bit around the Napoleonic Wars. So you saw the British Isles as a unified country with parliamentary representatives in London in. And the Scottish nobility went to the English boarding schools. They took on English accents. They would vacation in England. You have Scottish authors like Humes who wrote a history of England. And in his history of England he said, I am Scottish. I wrote the history of England because they are superior. And Scotland has no civilization, which was not fair because Scotland went through their own golden age after the integration with England between enormous wealth. They were one of the first countries to industrialize. They were more educated than England. The Scottish Enlightenment was more intellectually vibrant than the English Enlightenment. But in the long term the Scots did lose a lot of their independence and culture through being part of that integration with England. But in the short term it gave them an enormous advantage.
- [95:48]
B
I guess it's sort of that self criticism is the reason why they were so successful. Because they were able to take stock of things and be like, hey, we're behind in this area in that area and actually improve. Basically, yes.
- [96:05]
A
And the history of the British Isles in this time period largely stops being about the British Isles because you enter into the world stage where British politics are either dictated by fighting off the French threat from taking all of West Europe in the War of Spanish Succession or by protecting Frederick II of Prussia. Britain was constantly embroiled in these continental wars where Britain fought against France for over a century, on and off, in what some historians call the Second Hundred Years War, from the late 17th century through early 19th centuries. And England would work with whichever powers in the European continent they had to to stop France. At the same time, England had mass colonial powers where you saw a huge diaspora, especially in the Celtic countries, where their diasporas have seven times the people as their home countries. And in Scotland, this was the Highland Clearances, where the Anglicized nobility would kick out the old Scottish clans that they were dependent on and put sheep on the land. And so Scotland saw mass migration to America. And in England, they had done a version of that earlier by commercializing the shared village grazing lands, which created a mass diaspora to America. And in Ireland, it was a little bit later in the mid 19th century, when the Potato famine, where Ireland was totally dependent on potatoes, lowered Ireland's population by two thirds. One third died and one third went to America. And so over this time period, you have to imagine that there are these periodic torrents of huge amounts of people leaving for America because as of now, a majority of all British blood in the world is in the U.S. yeah.
- [98:02]
B
And a good portion of that is Scottish and Irish. So the English actually kind of gave them an indirect boost in determining the fate of the New World through their foreign burnings of Scotland and then later land domination. Potato death. Yeah, Ireland.
- [98:19]
A
I frequently think about how glad I am my family left Ireland. I would not want to be in Ireland now. And when you look over this time period, you have to remember that so much was going on that we're not going to talk about about, because it gets into other videos. I'm not going to talk about the European balance of power. I'm not going to talk about the Enlightenment, the scientific innovations, the artistic and cultural renaissances, the Industrial Revolution, because these are all different videos. And. But you have to remember that England was doing everything. It was a real global beacon, or, sorry, Britain. Britain was doing everything. It was a real global beacon. And Britain changed the world radically. And it was under this boring stable governance of the Hanoverians and then the Saxe Coburg or these German families, they brought in and you saw the gradual decrease of power. Where as an example, a major political event in England was actually the American Revolution, where the American rebels symbolized a strong liberal sentiment in Britain, much like the Vietnam War. The later in America, where the average Whig was actually more sympathetic to the Americans. Than the British. The British could not recruit their own armies in England for the revolution at the time because the English refused to fight the Americans, who they saw as cousins. And when the American Revolution worked, it forced the British to go through this large process of liberalization and meritocracy, which forced them to change their own political.
- [100:00]
B
Political structure, which was what they had at stake most in fighting the Revolution. Like, why did the British invest as many resources and armies in America as they did relative to the money it produced as a colony? A lot of it was the fears of the political effect that it would have. Yes.
- [100:18]
A
In the American Revolution was the last time the king was the deciding variable in British politics. Because earlier in the 18th century, you had prime ministers who were the top national leader clearly in advance of the king. Pitt is an example. Walpole was the first great British prime minister. But George III was trying to be the leader of the British Parliament in a way that kings hadn't been before, being the dominant strategic guide of the nation. The issue is that he lost the American Revolution, which forever discredited the English institution of monarchy as the dominant political organizing principle. And it never worked after that.
- [101:02]
B
Fascinating. And did he get a lot of shame for that criticism? Were they allowed to criticize him in the news? I never really thought of what happened to old King George after the Revolution.
- [101:14]
A
England had total freedom of speech at this point. England was a markedly freer country in the 18th century than it is today. Where they.
- [101:21]
B
Right, you can't. You don't have freedom of speech in England right now.
- [101:25]
A
They had complete freedom of speech. They had a completely free economics. They had complete. They had complete freedom of association, freedom of press. Practically all of the values that the American Revolution espoused in the Constitution, with a handful of sections like the King of England could quarter soldiers on private land, were things England practice. The reason the founding fathers put them in is they knew enough history that if they did not explicitly state the political freedoms that 18th century educated people had, they knew they would deteriorate over the next century. So they were just a 5D chess move there.
- [102:04]
B
That's brilliant. And it, It's. I mean, there's perfect examples of this today where these are really, really significant, not to be understated political dynamics. Like England is literally living through the dystopia that we panicked about in 2018. And, like, people don't even wake up to. People aren't even thinking about it at all. Like, we can literally see this happening over there. Meanwhile, in the US we're complaining like we haven't had any successes, even though we avoided the regulation of AI into three companies and the total censorship of information and a digital gulag in a desperate attempt to secure power and stop the Internet. Like we barely miss that.
- [102:49]
A
Would it be a dick move for me to jump across hundreds of years of peace to see the fall of the British regime? Is it too much of a dick move for me to just say the 19th century industrialized Britain had the greatest empire ever. It became the wealthiest society in history. First majority urban society, but it was peaceful. The Whigs and the Tories went back and forth. It was functioning society, best designed political system ever.
- [103:17]
B
And then this.
- [103:18]
A
Exactly.
- [103:19]
B
And progressive era strikes again.
- [103:22]
A
There's this book I keep on seeing that I have not yet read. And part of me doesn't read this book because I feel like I'm sort of telling things. Fate. No. It's like fate wants me to read this book by constantly shoving it at me. And I just tell fate no. And that book is the death of liberal England. I don't know why it always pops up in, like, my recommendations or bookshelves I'm near. And it's about how the Whigs got replaced by the Tories. Sorry. By the Labor. Wrong. Where the English conservatives did a really good job of adapting to the modern world. And they did so because the Whigs became these very smarmy, almost like woke people.
- [104:06]
B
Where like neoliberals. Almost. Right. They went from market to like neoliberals to labor.
- [104:10]
A
Imagine if libertarians were smarmy and difficult to deal with. That would be the English Whigs.
- [104:17]
B
Yeah, exactly. We need to have this reverse evolution.
- [104:23]
A
And so labor showed up because Britain gradually increased the. The franchise. Where in the 1830s they passed the Corn Laws, which let England remove the. The grain subsidies for their own landed nobility. That allowed the cities to balloon from foreign grain and for the industry to grow because it allowed English exports.
- [104:43]
B
They're obsessed with exports. The oligarchy. Go ahead.
- [104:46]
A
But part of the whole shift with the Corn Laws was it symbolized in Britain a gradual moving away from letting 3% of the population vote to letting 10% of the population vote. And this was a radical increase in power. And they got rid of the rotten boroughs where England's parliamentary system was stuck, using these stats from the medieval period for their population numbers. So places in the Middle Ages that were bustling, cities that had two people, they had enormous votes. And then these huge industrial centers like Manchester or Liverpool had none because they.
- [105:25]
B
Hadn'T adjusted the political system to the changing populations.
- [105:29]
A
And so Britain was quite. British politics of this era was quite corrupt. And you could move to one of these rotten boroughs, bribe the two voters, and then make yourself lord of that area. And Britain having a bureaucracy by having a nobility do the jobs that the bureaucracy was meant to do. The nobility did the regional government maintenance, like keeping track of the schools operated, running the local postman. And the nobility did do a better job than the bureaucracy. They just consistently got the sort of services to work, which the bureaucracy didn't. And with that, you saw the English nobility make a genuinely good decision to avoid another French Revolution, where they tried to improve the condition of the English poor who lived terrible lives in the early 19th century. They got Britain to industrialize, to form the empire, and they let the lower classes get more power to offset revolution. And by the end of the 19th century, England had a majority of the population vote. And this radically changed the incentives of English politics, because the empire was a passion project for the upper classes. And so when the lower classes got the vote, their predominant concern was increasing quality of life, which I don't really blame them because even In World War I, England was the wealthiest country on earth, but the average Englishman lived in one of the wealthiest countries on earth. America had passed them. But England was the wealthiest country on earth for a while. And the English lower classes still lived quite difficult lives. So from their perspective, I can see, see why they put in the welfare state. Although I still do not agree. I still think it should not state right.
- [107:14]
B
Especially once you get it started now. It's a much bigger problem than it would have been then to not start it in the first place. Just like getting rid of a central bank is so much harder than not starting a central bank in the first place. Much bigger challenges for us. But it's kind of like bad times create pro market, and then the pro market good times creating neoliberal douchebags, which creates labor.
- [107:36]
A
Yes, exactly.
- [107:37]
B
But we're in the opposite direction where we went from labor to neoliberal. So hopefully we'll get to market. You know, we'll go through the whole cycle of good times, bad times.
- [107:47]
A
Early 20th century, British leadership was just super gay. And I don't even mean that symbolically. If you actually look at the British intellectual and political and cultural elites of Twitter 20 early 20th century, they were vastly, disproportionately homosexuals. A lot of their dominant sort of cultural institutions were literally just clubs for homosexuals. But more so they were. They were weak and people tried to shit on Churchill for killing the Empire, which is just utterly insane because he was the one person who was against that trend where if you look at there was the Bloomsbury group who were, they were just pacifists and vegetarians against war. You had the Fabians who were British Socialists who their founder was an admirer of Mussolini and Hitler. And they had. I thought that was something James Lindsay did, that was good. Popularizing the Fabians where their images. Oh, Wolf's in sheep's clothing. But with giving the lower classes the vote to get them to fight in World War I and for the mass mobilization stage state, you saw the direction of British politics change from the Whigs and the Tories or these two elite groups to the Conservatives and the Labour Party. And Labour gradually gained more power where British labor is the only or one of the very few West European political parties that was controlled by unions. A lot of the rest were controlled by Marxists, but the British Labour Labour Party boxed out genuine Marxists who are at the fringe of British politics. But they still made England one of the most socialist countries in Western Europe. And they got rid of the empire where in the early 20th century England lost its imperial resolve in World War I. And then there was a conservative backlash after the war, much like America where they tried really hard to keep England on the gold standard which destroyed their economy because they just needed more capital fluidity for the growing population.
- [109:53]
B
It was just bad timing. Not that, you know, getting rid of central banking is, is not a good goal. It's just that like we said, it's harder when you have it.
- [110:02]
A
So they gave Churchill control of the Exchequer in the twenties and Churchill literally said, I had no idea what I was doing. And that was the worst thing I did. He was one of the worst British principles of the Exchequer in history. Because he was a. He was a warlord adventurer type, right?
- [110:20]
B
No, not very responsible or responsibility oriented as we were discussing.
- [110:24]
A
I mean, I think he was. It's just he's not like a finance guy responsible for the military for the British Empire.
- [110:32]
B
And I meant early days. Yeah, but go ahead.
- [110:36]
A
World War I opens the door for Ireland's independence because Ireland had the Easter Rising during World War I when they seized parts of Dublin, were crushed by the English. But the English didn't really have the hearts to keep Ireland down. It had been the biggest issue of English politics for the generation beforehand. Should we let Ireland have self governance? And this was basically the abortion of late 19th century English politics. And it shows how situations change where this was a multi decade disagreement, World War One happens and suddenly Ireland's getting into total independence, not home rule. It shows that you can have these multi decade culture war topics, much like the Jewish officer in France at the same time who was wrongly convicted. And then World War I happens and it totally changes the entire equilibrium. And once Ireland was gone and the English did murder a lot of people in their reconquest of Ireland, they bring machine guns into auditoriums and just kill everyone involved to suppress the population. That was sort of a sign they lost the resolve to maintain the empire. And Britain went through this phase of domination in the interwar period by these very sort of classist conservatives who were trying to maintain a conservative social dominance over the population. And they were radically anti communist, but they were also weak, where they kept on enabling Hitler and they allowed the gradual growth of the welfare state. Where in the generation over the World wars period, you saw the amount of bureaucrats in Britain go up over 10, 10 times over. And that was partly an outcome of Britain becoming urbanized, the first urbanized society in history. And I was reading Carlisle and he has a book called Past and Present where he was writing in the 19th century about how the erasure of the traditional English folk culture would be a natural disaster. And I thought Carlisle is just being a schizo, like what this is 1850. And I thought, oh no, he dissung more than a century in advance. Because as of now, you've seen the total erasure of the English culture, which I think is actually the core issue of Britain today. The political stuff follows from it. And you see a total desacralization of the world. And that's something Carlyle could probably, much like Nietzsche spot in the 19th century, that would pop up in the 21st century. But in the decades after the war, England became possibly the most socialist economy in Western Europe. They seized control of a lot of the industries. They had a 95% tax rate on the rich, which destroyed a lot of proud noble houses, mass migration to the Commonwealth to leave the horrible British economy because they had rationing for a decade after the end of World War II and they were stuck paying off their debts and they gave up the empire. And so it's interesting that the sort of neoliberal narrative was that 20th century England was this glorious ascent towards an enlightened society. And that's true in one metric quality of life, which was artificially kept high. But now the English quality of life is collapsing below what it was even during World War II. It might be worse than World War I now, especially for Middle Class people.
- [114:10]
B
The economy's actually shrinking.
- [114:12]
A
Yeah, actually shrinking year to year, which is almost never happens. And they can't get themselves out of it because they burnt all their bridges. And I'm thinking from any reasonable perspective, the 20th century was a disaster for Britain. And it's a case study for what happens when you bring in the managerial class. And it totally gutted Britain. And they used the increase in quality of life for two generations as a sort of Indian summer to cover over a very deep loss.
- [114:43]
B
And even during that period they had blackouts throughout the 70s like and rationing right after the war. Like you said, it would shock Americans to understand the actual conditions that they experience, which also colors kind of modern British politics. And people can people argue about Churchill and the decisions in the war. And that ties into US politics because his decisions can impact the US decision which is a whole another debate than England's decision. But there's no debate that after the war Churchill would have been the better prime minister. Like was he a better war time prime minister as he's normally sold? Maybe, maybe not. But after 100%, no one can dispute it. He would have been a way better peacetime prime minister. And I'm curious to break down because Churchill was very aware of like socialism, nationalism, communism, like national social, all the problems and he, he knew that. He described Hitler's system as more similar to Stalin system than either were to England. But he was also at odds with the English politics in between World War I and World War II, which you describe as kind of more pro market.
- [116:02]
A
Yes, I'm going to get my controversial opinion out. This never would have happened in our timeline. But Churchill should have installed himself as king because if he, if he was king, England would have maintained the empire. He could have made a new leadership class and that never would have happened in our current timeline because it flew at complete odds with all of the culture. There is a less than 1% chance that could have happened. But you can judge the health of a society by how it treats its heroes. And the second World War II ended. Churchill was kicked out of power and they brought in a socialist who, who didn't get. Who let in who let the empire die.
- [116:42]
B
And that's important. I mean that socialist killed the country. Yes, not just the empire like the.
- [116:48]
A
Country were many socialists who killed the country. And you can see with post war Britain in just the youth agitation of rock and roll, where if you look at early punk with bands like what's the rock, the Cosba band, they're, they're an English punk band, the Clash, like the Clash or the Ramones or Slade or an entire generation of English music. You can just sort of hear the depressed deindustrialization. And I'm from Pennsylvania, where it's the exact same thing. Where England was not in a good place when Margaret Thatcher took power in the early 80s. And she made a few neoliberal innovations but didn't change the system. And Margaret Thatcher allowed the city of London to grow wealthy while the rest of England and the rest of the British Isles largely failed. And this was at the same time as the IRA launching the bloodiest terrorism campaign in history over Northern Ireland. Because Margaret Thatcher allowed the removal of basically regulations on the intelligence economy which could go to London, often powered off foreigners. But she couldn't do it for the manufacturing economy because the labor union had a death grip on Britain. And you look at Margaret Thatcher had to fight the coal mining union for a very long time in her early reign. And they were holding England hostage where although the coal workers were very well paid, they kept on striking for more. And another issue is that because Britain was the first great industrial power, it was more difficult for them to do things like replace old equipment or adjust. So Britain first lost out to Germany and then America and then Asia industrially. So we've seen the gradual sort of degradation and emasculation of most British where it used to be. They conquered the world, they made the new technologies and the science. But I feel sorry. I have lots of young British friends my age totally screwed. And for them like 15,000 to $30,000 a year is a good wage. British youth literally look at American fast food wages or Walmart wages and salivate over them. I have seen this in person.
- [119:13]
B
Turns out the minimum wage isn't everything if you don't have actual wealth. And it's like the Rust Belt, right? Like Thatcher didn't de industrialize England. The socialist de industrialized England. The socialists, the labor unions, the regulations, they killed the Rust Belt. Thatcher failed to deregulate those industries. The only thing she could deregulate was finance. And then tech obviously is in a new, less regulated space. So you can't even really credit Reagan or Thatcher for those ones. And it, it's, it's, it ties into like responsibility and having to take a reality check and look at your real options. Because the, the Rust belt maintained production. They are, they, they lost, but they lost a bunch of market share within the US and relative to the globe. And they only maintained what they did through automation. But anything they couldn't fix through automation. They couldn't be competitive because of all the labor restrictions. And the labor restrictions restricted automation. So it's like trying to pull a blanket that's too small. Unless you just get better, no one's going to be satisfied.
- [120:22]
A
I just had a memory flash before my eyes that seeing the Rust Belt fall was sort of a prelude for me to see the rest of the world system fall. And I think that's more tricky for a lot of people because I already saw what it's like to live, grow up in a society that's clearly diminished from an older version of itself. And I think for a lot of people in China or California or Dubai or I don't know, Belgium, maybe not Belgium, but you know what I mean? They don't have a concept of that. They just think things are going to get better. And it's sad. And you've seen the growth of lots of cultural trends in Britain that we don't know where it's going to end. And I don't know what's going to happen to Britain because they're sort of not in a stable place where. So you saw the integration of non white British populations in the island who were still practically none of the population until the 21st century. Even in the 1990s, almost all British people were ethnically British. And Britain had not seen really any wide scale migration since the Dark Age period. And so the idea that Britain's always multicultural was a ridiculous lie. I remember going to Stonehenge as a child and at the Stonehenge sort of mural they made its builders brown. And I thought, what? Even as a kid I thought the guys who built Stonehenge were not brown, they were Italians, the darkest. And it's interesting to see a society devour its own culture. And you can see that the British managerial institutions are really a warning to us because the British are culturally close enough that if it happens there, it can happen here. And Britain has a very silly and a very Oedipal form of tyranny. Tyranny that stops you from growing and stops you from being real. And it's not a very smart tyranny. I periodically follow England closer than I follow America. And it's just crazy because every single week something new happens in Britain. And it's not some staggering evil, it's just the banality of stupid, stupid evil.
- [122:43]
B
And it's like an infinite banality, like the police with no weapons, like kind of talking to people as they're arresting them for innocuous posts it's just the most pathetic kind of show where the population is disgusted with the police but they're also powerless. So it's just like embarrassing all around. And the censorship thing really parallels the deregulation thing. And I think the only thing that can save England is the US creating a counter example or you know, reform where they could join or our counter example as we're doing it. Like England has a of lot, lot of potential there. And in terms of reindustrialization that's what the US is trying to do now. Like we've had huge deregulatory initiatives on AI which applies to censorship but also production. We've had direct deregulatory efforts on energy and the EPA that are huge. And then there's blanket executive orders to get rid of every regulation that violates the Chevron decision and a couple Supreme Court decisions which would be 90% of them if you actually staff the bureaucracy with people willing to carry that out. Yeah, we have 20 trillion in committed investments which will what we'll get this year and the next year will way over double what we're normally getting. I talked earlier about how when I was doing site selection in Asia, China was becoming. People were souring on China as a manufacturing location over a decade ago because they saw the investment is connected to politics. Because people anticipate political trends and make long term investment decisions off of that and they see where China's going, they are betting the US is going in a more positive direction. But how, how far we go will make a big difference. So I'm hoping we really put the gas on those angles and we're in the, I mean we're in the middle of re industrializing because South Asia was full. They were going to send it to Mexico, they're sending it to the U.S. it's coming in, we're building it, we're bunch of stuff.
- [124:39]
A
As one of the few white pills of the last 10 years, the rapid re industrialization of America. My concern for the English is I don't even know how many of them want to live anymore. I think in America enough people want to live. I don't know if that's true in England. And also another thing is that the only way to escape mouse utopia is to leave the cage. And in America there's lots of open lands to do that. In America you could have a total sort of repopulation to the countryside to basically societies fertile enough to return to carrying capacity. And I look at Western Europe and there's just not the open land for it in England. There's cities everywhere. There's practically no forest left in England. And it's weird and very sort of twisted in its own dark way how mouse utopia turns all of mankind's strengths against us. The very places that are most densely populated in the old society are the places most endangered by mouse utopia.
- [125:45]
B
Right. Because you don't have the outlet to keep going so you can build up fragility. It's like we didn't start improving soil health until we ran out of fresh soil and then we had to start improving. I talked to Benjamin Boyce about this example the, the other day, because people kind of get black pilled around the lack of a frontier. And that was an interesting point you made about America still having space. But often people will be like, oh, the only place we'll have freedom now is Mars. But remember, the Industrial revolution started within a very solidified Netherlands in England, like a very bureaucratic order. It was not a frontier by any means. So there's ways to fix things within without a frontier. Even if a frontier makes it easier.
- [126:28]
A
Yeah. I also think we'll get frontiers soon. I think the current crisis, it's going to remake the world enough that we'll have something like frontiers. I don't know what they're going to be.
- [126:38]
B
Also technological frontiers. Right. That's why we would have frontiers in the US because Internet means you could live in places you couldn't live before.
- [126:46]
A
There's also the frontier of the inner life, which I think is more rich than the frontier of the outer life. Yeah, yeah. And there's. It's a. Think of how much happened in Europe in a very solidified place. Because for thousands of years Europeans didn't really move. They were stuck in the same countries. But Europe was constantly on one adventure or another.
- [127:11]
B
Right. There was a lot of stuff going on. So yeah, things can change a lot without a frontier. So indeed, don't give up hope.
- [127:19]
A
This age of history is going to end. So at least we have that. It might get worse, but at least.
- [127:25]
B
I mean the. The only. Yeah, it's going to end and then that could be bad depending on the collapse. Because if it collapses too hard, then you lose momentum. The other negative scenario is a thousand years of bureaucracy. I think. I think we can escape both.
- [127:40]
A
Yeah. So thank you for this video. And the next topic is the Soviet Union.
- [127:46]
B
Oh, speaking of bureaucracy.
- [127:49]
A
Okay, bye.
- [127:50]
B
All right.
- [127:50]
A
Peace History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.