Explaining Victorian Britain

Summary

History 102: Explaining Victorian Britain Hosted by Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Release Date: April 4, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of History 102, Rudyard Lynch, the creator behind the popular YouTube channel WhatifAltHist, joins Austin Padgett to delve into the complexities of Victorian Britain. They explore the pivotal role Victorian Britain played in shaping the modern world, drawing parallels with ancient civilizations and examining the intricate social, cultural, and technological dynamics of the era.

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Victorian Britain vs. Ancient Athens

Rudyard Lynch initiates the discussion by comparing Victorian Britain to ancient Athens, highlighting how both societies—despite their relatively small size—instigated significant global shifts.

Rudyard Lynch [00:30]: "Both of them are incredibly small places that set into motion these enormous historic shifts that impacted the entire world in vast disproportion to their scale or their population size."

He emphasizes that specific subclasses within these nations were responsible for much of the innovation, leading to breakthroughs in various fields such as democracy, philosophy, industrialization, and scientific theory.

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Technological and Scientific Innovations

The conversation shifts to the remarkable technological advancements of the Victorian era, which laid the foundation for many modern disciplines.

Rudyard Lynch [02:50]: "It was this huge explosion that saw the creation of entire disciplines in a way that's difficult to understand, but it's this enormous flowering that we live in the aftermath of the world the Victorians created."

They discuss how Victorian Britain was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, Darwinism, and numerous scientific fields, drawing attention to the unprecedented rate of innovation during the 19th century.

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Cultural and Social Structures

Austin Padgett points out that the Victorian age is often underrepresented in modern education and cultural memory, despite its profound impact.

Austin Padgett [02:50]: "It's amazing that this age of history is kind of hidden in our cultural memory."

Rudyard responds by critiquing contemporary perceptions of history, arguing that modern narratives often oversimplify or misrepresent the complexities of past societies.

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Moral and Historical Narratives

Rudyard criticizes the current societal narrative that disparages past eras as ignorant, juxtaposing it with Victorian achievements.

Rudyard Lynch [06:11]: "The idea that 1960 is stupid and dumb is just complete. Anything before 1960 is stupid and dumb is completely unjustifiable."

He contrasts this with the Victorian belief in progress and the foundational role they played in building modern civilization, suggesting that current society fails to recognize the hard work and innovation of the past.

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The Dual Nature of Victorian Society

The hosts explore the inherent contradictions within Victorian society—its blend of scientific rationality and passionate subjectivism.

Rudyard Lynch [27:02]: "Victorians had this caring, mechanical, standardized side that came with the Industrial Revolution. And they also had this crazy storm, subjectivist, emotional, aggressive side."

They discuss how this duality led to both remarkable advancements and societal issues, ultimately contributing to the decline of Victorian Britain as the managerial class overtook the industrial foundations laid earlier.

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Victorian Morality and Sexuality

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the nuanced views of morality and sexuality in Victorian Britain, challenging the stereotype of the era as overly repressive.

Rudyard Lynch [45:48]: "Victorian Britain had amazing food... So the Victorians were not uncultured and they had a tremendous art scene, they had tremendous musical advancement."

They highlight the coexistence of strict moral codes with widespread prostitution and evolving sexual norms, illustrating the complex social fabric of the time.

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Impact of the Industrial Revolution and Social Reforms

The episode delves into how the Industrial Revolution and subsequent social reforms addressed the dire conditions of the early Victorian era, fostering social mobility and reducing class tensions.

Rudyard Lynch [68:01]: "Victorian Britain had higher social mobility than Britain today by a big margin."

They cite North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell as an example of contemporary literature reflecting the societal transformations and improving quality of life during the period.

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The Decline of Victorian Britain and World War I

Rudyard Lynch posits that World War I marked the end of the Victorian era, shattering the established social trust and leading to a psychological and societal crisis.

Rudyard Lynch [75:10]: "World War I was the death of the Victorian world."

He argues that the trauma of the war disrupted the progress and stability achieved over the 19th century, paving the way for modern societal challenges.

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Queen Victoria’s Role and Legacy

The discussion concludes with an examination of Queen Victoria's influence, both symbolic and cultural, on British society and beyond.

Rudyard Lynch [81:42]: "Queen Victoria had an enormous impact on fashion... They established British fashion where almost all of our things about Christmas culture came from that royal family."

They acknowledge her limited direct political power but recognize her significant cultural and societal influence, particularly in shaping modern traditions and gender roles.

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Conclusion and Teaser for Next Episode

Rudyard and Austin wrap up the episode by reflecting on the enduring legacy of Victorian Britain and teasing the next episode, which will explore the British Empire in greater detail.

Rudyard Lynch [87:08]: "Next episode is the British Empire."

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Notable Quotes

• Rudyard Lynch [00:30]: "Both of them are incredibly small places that set into motion these enormous historic shifts that impacted the entire world in vast disproportion to their scale or their population size."
• Austin Padgett [02:50]: "It's amazing that this age of history is kind of hidden in our cultural memory."
• Rudyard Lynch [06:11]: "The idea that 1960 is stupid and dumb is just complete. Anything before 1960 is stupid and dumb is completely unjustifiable."
• Rudyard Lynch [27:02]: "Victorians had this caring, mechanical, standardized side that came with the Industrial Revolution. And they also had this crazy storm, subjectivist, emotional, aggressive side."
• Rudyard Lynch [75:10]: "World War I was the death of the Victorian world."
• Rudyard Lynch [81:42]: "Queen Victoria had an enormous impact on fashion... They established British fashion where almost all of our things about Christmas culture came from that royal family."

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Final Thoughts

This episode of History 102 offers a comprehensive and nuanced exploration of Victorian Britain, challenging modern misconceptions and highlighting the era's profound contributions to today's world. Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett provide insightful analysis, encouraging listeners to appreciate the complexities and achievements of the Victorian age.

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Transcript

[Whatifalth]

Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist, Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Hi everybody. Boricua. And welcome to a new episode of History 102 with our co host, Austin Padgett. And today is the Victorians.

[Austin Padgett]

Excellent.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Today we're going to cover Victorian Britain. And the way I conceive of Victorian Britain in abstract is that in the civilizational cycles of history I study, I consistently find that there's this parallel that people draw between ancient Athens and Victorian Britain. And the thing that I find interesting in this is that both of them are incredibly small places that set into motion these enormous historic shifts that impacted the entire world in vast disproportion to their scale or their or their population size. Especially so when you look at Victorian Britain or ancient Athens, that there was this specific subclasses inside those countries who did the vast majority of the innovation where it wasn't even most of these relatively small populations. And with Athens, you see the creation of a lot of modern tragedy, modern democracy, philosophy, rhetoric, architecture, so many other fields. Of course, those innovations went back a little bit further into Greek history, but the Athenians perfected them. And then with Victorian Britain, you find that this is a society that sparked the Industrial Revolution. It sparked the theory of Darwinism, it sparked so many breakthroughs in a sub variety of scientific fields. And we talk about scientific innovation, it's really easy to forget how huge the jump from, let's say the U.S. civil War until World War II was. There were boys who fought in the U.S. civil War at age 18 who lived to see the atom bomb. And the innovations in the 19th century that occurred in technology were not even an easy stuff. It was stuff like complete breakthroughs and creations of fields in biology, in physics, and study of history and anthropology and political science in this time period. It was this huge explosion that saw the creation of entire disciplines in a way that's difficult to understand, but it's this enormous flowering that we live in the aftermath of the world the Victorians created.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, and people. It's amazing that this age of history is kind of hidden in our cultural memory. It's not really featured very heavily in most education. It's not really tied in with key foundational myths for our political systems. It's kind of ignored because the conclusions of, of looking at it will open up some pretty big questions, like why was this by far the largest period of Growth and innovation in our history. And if you, you know, have seen this kind of process happen in a developing country, then you know how significant it is to their history. The. The development period is. Is everything. So going 50, 100 years down the line from that, we'll see how that story is told in those countries. But when it's happening, everybody knows the significance.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I saw this meme yesterday that just really got me to chuckle. And it's how normies perceive history, where. I don't know if you saw this too, where it has ancient Greece and Rome, Dark Ages, and then it jumps to anal sex. Discovered John Lennon's Imagine the 1960s and then the invention of the ey iPhone. And I find it hilarious. And to explain why, I've said before that I think red states and blue states are different civilizations at this point, that the conflict over politics is religious and civilizational. And it wasn't the case, I'd say, 50 years ago. But what happened is that progressivism built this moral and historical vision of the world that has more in common with the Soviet understanding of history or a Marxist understanding of history than it does with the previous understanding of history. We had, and I remember the older society where the narrative was that we came out of the Dark Ages with the Renaissance, which isn't true, by the way. And then you had science and you had the age of discovery and the Reformation where modernity's greatness came about with around the early 16th century. And then you saw the flowering of Western European civilization until. Until the present, where it's this straight line up. And the thing I find interesting about the current narrative, the one that our society has, is it treats World War II the same way the old narrative treated the 1500s, where World War II was the breaking point when we left superstition and bigotry and imperialism and hatred, and then we had this new flowering. And I think the old narrative itself was kind of silly, that all of human history before 1500 was stupid and dumb. I don't think that's right. But the idea that 1960 is stupid and dumb is just complete. Anything before 1960 is stupid and dumb is completely unjustifiable. And secondly, the earlier narrative gave the Victorians this understanding that they were the builders of the modern world. And the current narrative are basically just spoiled brats who have no comprehension how the wealth that their free riding off was initially created and how this entire civilization that gave them such safety and prosperity was created.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. The 1500s marker was. It was correct to view it as a Category difference, even if there was no useful information before, which obviously there was, because everything they believe came out of a long progression of history. So it's. And that's different than kind of the category change being referenced in the 1950s, which is more of a devolution than an evolution.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I agree with that. I have a bunch of different conversation threads. I can take this, but I'm going to choose to be conservative here and stay on topic. And the way that you should see the Victorians is with lots of these historian historians I read from a century ago. They frequently muse about what the death of the west is going to look like, because these are authors who had studied every major civilization, so they knew that as a natural law, our civilization would also have to go into decline. And the thing with. With that is that there's this arc of our current modern civilization. And the arc went up over the course of the 19th century. It hit this plateau from World War I until the present, and now it's going down. And what I mean by that is that the Victorians established industrial civilization, and there was this tremendous optimism that the Victorians had. And there's something very innocent and joyful in the Victorians that I want to get to, which we ignore today, although the Victorians did have negative traits. And then the plateau from World War I till the present is this sort of weird moment where we intellectually know that there's something deeply wrong with industrial civilization, but we don't know what it is, so we keep poking in the wrong areas. In my best guess is the event that we're seeing now over the next century, we'll see the gradual creation of a completely different worldview and paradigm that sees itself as completely distinct from the first stage of industrial civilization.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, it's interesting. I think it'll be distinct, but I think the paradigm will also be calling back to the first stage of industrialization to create the evolution. Because like CS Lewis says, if you want to be the most progressive, go to where you made the error and go forward from that. And that's the general period where we had this explosion and also huge waves of immigration, and we didn't have the institutions to carry that forward. There's a few reasons for that that we can go into, like the fact that you had simultaneous populist movements in rural and urban areas, combined with a huge number of poor immigrants coming from Europe, which led to an opportunity for kind of democratic, progressive politics to institute certain systems. And now we're at a period where we might be able to finally start sorting through where we went wrong in that era and continue without, you know, shake off that opportunistic system.

[Rudyard Lynch]

What happened is that in 1800s we established the economic and political institutions that allowed our current prosperity where capitalism came before the managerial state. And the 1800s is what Francis Fukuyama and we're going to just going to focus on Britain in this video because Britain itself is complex enough where this, these two islands have enough going on that they deserve their own video. And when you look at the Victorian ness outside Britain, it's equivalent to how the Renaissance was concentrated in Italy as the culturally generative force. But you saw the influence of the Renaissance in England and France and Poland, in Spain, in the New World where Italy was this generative force. And then Italy kind of rubbed off across the entire region. Where in Britain, Britain had its own generative Victorian force. But, but Victorian Britain had an enormous effect on America where the Americans were completely obsessed with British fashions. Same thing across Europe where if you look at the fashion of this time period or the culture or the literature, it's all people aping the British aristocracy. They'd wear the British aristocracy's riding boots, they would wear their hunting jackets. Where a funny thing is that Victorian fashion over the course of a century went from. It was whatever the rural upper classes hobby was. So polo shirts were from the riding sport, polo. Because the aristocracy would play polo in the polo shirts. And now polo shirts are things that, that people just wear to work or I think this kind of shirt was seen as vacation clothing. Or in the start of the 1800s you saw these ridiculous capes. They're not ridiculous, they were cool. You saw these capes that were in fashion and the capes were supposed to be. They were supp. Be recreational clothing. So yesterday's recreational attire becomes the future's formal wear. But I had a point there. We're just going to focus on Britain. And the other point I was trying to make is that there 1800s we establish the industrial prosperity, the social trust and the cultural traditions for the industrial world. What happened in the 20th century was the managerial class inserted itself due to the world wars on top of the pre established cultural and economic system built by the 1800s. Then over the course of the 20th century, the managerial state tried to crush more and more of that earlier industrial society. But in the process they impoverished themselves without the realization that they're dependent upon it. Where this is what happened in Britain as an example, where Britain was incredibly prosperous, Britain was the center of the world around World War I. Then what happened? Over the course of a century, Britain became economically irrelevant as the managerial class consumed the things that made Britain great in the Victorian period. And now we're in a juncture as a society where enough of the Victorian institutions are left that you can still see them today, but the managerial class is trying to consume them. But also we're in a completely new age. So you're seeing the remnants, both the 19th and the 20th centuries with just the creativity of the 21st century operating today.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, it's, that's a really good description of it. I forgot the train of thought. I was going to go with that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

They invented trainer, but.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, oh yeah. So I, I mean this is more US statistics, but I'm sure it's the same in England where the, the trains expanded in insane ways. Maybe we can tie the World Fairs into that too because you asked the question, you know, why don't we have World Fairs today like they had back then? They had the Paris World Fair and the Chicago World Fair and other ones where they featured all these new crazy inventions that were happening. And then I think about, you know, the Popular Science magazine over the last 20 years. I used to be really interested in it, looking at it, looking for new inventions. And every single thing that was published in Popular Science magazine before it went out of business was a gimmick. I never saw anything in that magazine that I actually saw pop up in the real world. The. But back then they had just absolutely world defining technologies all the time, from electricity to the trains to I mean, you could name a bunch. The foundation of almost every industry that exists today was created in that period. And today the only kind of things that would be able to feature at a World fair would be maybe self driving cars, electric cars, satellites, Internet, you know, stuff like that. There's very few categories that are. And we're starting to get into a zone where we might see the level of innovation where you could put on a World Fair. But that's the reason why they died. And it shows how special that period was.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You literally only listed industries. Elon's in.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, those are actually my examples. Give me another one. I'll take it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I mean the problem is that that's the existential reality.

[Whatifalth]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

Well, there are so many whatchamacallit. Again, there's so many barriers to progress established either by the culture or by the scientific nature of reality, or by the government, which create barriers to scientific development. Which which means what you end up with is that pure force of will is the only thing that can get stuff done. And that's normally why when you see singular individuals do stuff like that it's due to a variable like that, that it's against the general current of whatever it's against. It's, it's possible. But then the society makes it difficult for it to operate organically. And so when you see a big sociological jump, and I'm not really talking about Elon here per se, I'm talking about historical, in the historical tradition is you'll see a jump where a single person does the thing because it's possible and there's opportunity in achieving it. It's just the cultural current makes it difficult to do. Does that make sense?

[Austin Padgett]

Yes. And that's a perfect description. And it's why the only space where you're seeing these kind of new innovations are areas where technological acceleration has been effective, which is basically where you invent a technology that's outside of an already regulated area and then you can, you can grow it. But all the, the legacy industries are so locked down that that's why you're not seeing it broadly across the board. Because like you said, the managerial state asserted itself on top of this previous productive productivity generating order. And it cannot, there is no making it work. The only way that the managerial state can function is to remove itself from the equation. So, yeah, it's an existential crisis for the managerial state going on right now.

[Rudyard Lynch]

All my homies hate the managerial class. Yeah. So I think we have the opportunity for immense scientific, scientific innovation. It's just we have to shed. Shatter our preconceptions for what we believe reality to be. And that sounds schizo, but it actually makes sense where so many of our perceptions of the world are mental categories that we established in order to make the world comprehensible, but they themselves do not exist. And the canary in the coal mine is our society saying that biological sex doesn't exist. Which is so insane that it's so insane that it makes you wonder what else have these people been making up? Or a recent story is that the Trump White House says that we've been holding back research in physics since 1971, that the government's purposely stalled research in physics. We've seen this in a variety of other fields where once you remove all of the principles of what we believe to be correct about the world and you actually study the world for what it is, you'll see the mass opening of potentials of things we couldn't even understand before. We need the death of the new scholasticism.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. We're not used to standard deviations of change.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And that's what this era was experiencing. And when you're in that kind of environment, you think completely differently. It's the same as living in a developing country. When things are changing that fast, you're used to a different level of possibility.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

And that's why they had stuff like Jules Verne and they were dreaming of. And we're seeing a return of that with kind of better science fiction. I think we're starting to get ready to dream again. And in the 50s we dreamed a little bit, but it was an illusion. Where we came out of the World War II and fascism and socialism were unpopular. So we rebranded as neoliberal and there was some growth. And we had the Jetsons. Right. And we pictured the future like the Jetsons, but that was kind of an illusion. That was temporary and hopefully now, yeah, we're getting back to the place where we can dream again because those futures that we previously dreamed of were stolen from us. If you do the math and take Victorian era growth of 5 to 7% and put that on 1950 to 2000, we would have had our economy would have been twice as large, we'd had like three extra Japans. The level of it would have been a basically entirely different world. And that's all unseen. We don't all we've seen as progress, but the gap of what we've missed is much larger than the progress we've even had.

[Whatifalth]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

Victorians were hard men and this is One of the things that we don't get about the Victorians, where they were innately tough and they were innately willing to bear a lot of suffering, and they were willing to look at the world in very uncomfortable ways and they were willing to bridge gaps that seemed impossible, possible. And you look at, I'm going to use this example, I'm from Philadelphia, which is mostly a 19th century city, and you see these enormous constructions that were built in, in that time period in Philly that would never get built today because nothing gets built in Philly. You look at this huge bridge built in 1881, and it straddles the entire Delaware river, which is enormous. The Delaware is bigger than the Delaware, is as big as the Mississippi or the Nile or any river. And it's just built out of stone and it's mammoth. And you think, what kinds of men built this? And you look at the Victorians who establish this global spanning empire where our next episode is going to be the British Empire. And the British had colonies on every single continent and they created a global spanning system that literally linked the entire planet in railroad steam engines and in telegraph cables. And there's the interesting last man analysis by Nietzsche, who is himself a Victorian thinker. Because there's these two contradictory tendencies inside the Victorians which are themselves the same. Two contradictory tendencies inside our civilization. It's just where the decayed form of them, one of which is the utilitarian, scientific, rational, leftist, egalitarian mental frame. And the other is the passionate, subjectivist, nationalist, conservative, mystic, romantic element. And I'm going to use Carlisle, who I just finished reading yesterday, he's a great authority. And Jeremy Bentham is two symbols for this because it's. I like to say that modern society is divided between the autistic masculine and the hysterical feminine. And so back then, the Jeremy Bentham idea that we should just make people softer and we should. I'm not giving it justice. They wanted to, the Jeremy Bentham types wanted to genuinely improve the world where their idea, and the idea in utilitarianism, which was a philosophy developed in Victorian Britain and in some ways is symbolic for the Victorians, is we want to mathematically assess the degree of suffering in the world and then do the most stuff that can benefit the most amount of people, which is one of those ideas that intuitively makes sense on a sort of ground level. And then once you extrapolate outwards, it goes insane pretty fast. And so the Victorians had this caring, mechanical, standardized side that came with the Industrial Revolution. And they also had this crazy storm, subjectivist, emotional, aggressive side. And these two are constantly in war inside the Victorian soul. And what happened over time is that the standardized element gradually consumed the subjectivist element.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Maybe with the overwhelming trend of the industrial change, which was more materialistic focus and got people thinking in that way.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, I agree with that. Where the Victorians built their civilization with their insane romantic vigor. I need a better word for that. And that was the thing that built the British Empire. And then as Britain became urbanized and standardized, you saw that get subliminated into this bureaucratic civilization that ultimately killed Britain's spirit in the 20th century. And when Nietzsche was writing in 1880 saying that in the 21st century the society would be completely taken over by the desire for equality and comfort and weakness, instability, he was looking at a trend that existed in the Victorian period, but grew beyond its healthy role in the 1800s.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Could you describe that as similar to the other dynamic we were talking about, where when you create this new technological capability, it's tempting to start looking at things like Legos. And what if we just laid these water systems here and just threw a couple of trains? It would make a huge. And then you start thinking in a utilitarian, managerial way and you lose the. The basis for it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I was just reading a book by. I was just watching a podcast with Ian McGilchrist, who's the author of the Master and His Emissary, which was an important book for me, that talks about neurology. And his big theory is the Left and the Right hemisphere, where the left hemisphere is mechanical. It only see the world through money, the world through money and power. It only sees the world through flowcharts. And it's incapable of seeing subtlety, it's incapable of humility, and it always thinks it's totally right. The right hemisphere is capable of getting the correct answer when tested. And the interesting thing is the left hemisphere can only draw half of a picture, and the right hemisphere can draw the whole picture. And the right hemisphere is capable and seeing all these contextual things that the left doesn't. In the 1800s, you had a relatively healthy balancing the right and the left hemisphere. But at the same time, you saw the left hemisphere start to gather control over certain intellectual fields. And from those fields, it was able to gain complete control in the 20th century. So lots of the psychological issues we see today ultimately start in the 1800s. And they were controllable then, but they were still growing in influence.

[Austin Padgett]

Fascinating. How much do you think it has to do with the fear of death. Because you mentioned, you mentioned the, the death was all around in the Victoria era. You mentioned the softness. So they, they were, they had like an awareness of death. It was very visible in their, their daily life to today, where not only do we rarely see kids die, but we don't even see animals die. And is part of that softness going from being really hardy around the conception of death into our modern conception of pushing death outside of our minds? And that relates also to developing countries where you notice they're much more aware of death and they have a culture where they actually talk about it. And there can be some cultures that definitely overindulge in that. But just even the cultural concept of having an awareness of death and, and the importance of it is non existent now. And people used to like, you know, there's the famous goth Victorian stuff where they used to hang out in cemeteries, because those were the public parks.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And they were like, they were gardened and stuff. And that's an interesting, that might be an interesting connection with the softness.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The Victorians were incredibly complicated people and they're one of the most complicated people in history. And I think that the highest point of intelligence ever in world history, and this is pulling from spengler, was around 1800 in Western Europe and you could say the 19th century in general. And so when we look at this time period, we need to psychologically understand this is a side that was smarter than us. And because of that, we can't fully understand their entire, their entire character. Because you can't. It's very difficult to understand something that's more developed than you are because you're stuck at your current level of development. And when people talk about the Victorians being racist, that was partly true. But this was a deeply complicated society that genuinely had a difference in point of views, that genuinely believed in free speech and science and free inquiry. We pretend to believe in those things as a sort of right to rule, but we don't actually believe in them. We've become significantly psychologically closer to, I think in a lot of ways places, the average person now is psychologically closer to a inhabitant of the Soviet Union than a person in Victorian Britain. And.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. They would be less committed to a fundamentalist position on race.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. Where back in the 1800s it's a society that did have racist elements. I mean, there's colonialism and slavery. But then you had a wide Overton window of people who were not racist. Where you had a large population, people who were anti racist. In the 1800s you had a mostly indeterminate population who did not care and who never thought about black people because they didn't interact with them. And then you had. You did have racists. So there was a wide fluctuation in opinions where you could have gotten loads of intellectuals in the 1800s to say stuff like, I don't fundamentally think race matters that much, or you, you friggin. You had the entire north of the U.S. fight a long and bloody war to end slave. That means there was enough critical mass opposition to slavery that you could see that in a national scale. And one of the things I've heard many historians say is almost every culture in the world practices slavery. But Victorian Britain was a society that chose to end it because when you look at the abolition of slavery, it was mostly an Anglo Saxon movement where the French didn't really care that much. They did in the French Revolution. They gave up. And then the British pushed it. And then after the British pushed it, the. The Americans. The Americans got rid of slavery. But at the start of Queen Victoria's reign in the 1830s, Britain abolished slavery. And they had a system where they would pay off, they would bought the slaves off the former slave owners, and they would ship former slaves back to Africa and Sierra Sierra Leone if they wanted to. Then the British forcibly ended slavery around the world, where they cut out the African slave trade both inside Africa and outside Africa, and they ended the. The Asian and Middle Eastern slave trades as well. So Victoria and Britain not solely stopped their own slavery, they practically abolished slavery across the entire world. And I think if this era is willing to put that much effort into. Into that, you can't say that they were purely racist and evil. And because our society lacks the balls to do anything that's serious or deep. Where if the north fought the civil war to end slavery, that's a legitimate greater degree of sacrifice than people just putting pronouns in their bio.

[Austin Padgett]

And you got to remember the context of the time in terms of what they had seen before that and what they were seeing now. Yeah, all the only context they had were more and more examples showing that race maybe didn't matter as much as they thought. Because previously it's just like, okay, these are all these tribes, these civilizations are all this tribe, this tribe. And now they're starting to see like, oh, Dumas is a quarter black, he's writing books or something. Or they see Frederick, Doug. Oh, black people can talk. You know, like that's the only new context that they're getting is seeing these things.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, the Victorians had this Critical tension inside of them, where this was a society that was strongly Christian. And if you read authors from the 1800s Like I do, they literally write Christianity into the history of the world. So they'll talk about how the innate truth of Christian doctrines spreads around the world and through conquering other nations, Christianity shows itself to be superior. Or they'll talk about these are these ways God dropped hidden truths to the world and this is how these different philosophers could connect to the will of God as part of this narrative of the improvement of humanity towards God. So Christianity in this era wasn't stupid, it was very intellectually intermeshed into the population. But the French Revolution, which occurred before the Victorian period, that was openly atheist. And then there was a conservative reaction over the course of the 19th century. But then you started seeing stuff like Charles Darwin develop the theory of evolution, that humans are. That were monkeys basically that was a huge push against religion. Same thing with the popularization of Marxism or just there are basically no urban religious societies in history. And Britain after 1850 became the first majority urban society ever in history. So you saw this very strongly Christian society competing against this scientific, materialist, rational view of the world. And much as the trend we talked about earlier, this one gradually gained force over time. So that by then we get to the 20th century, this Christian heritage had been completely surrounded in public discourse where you couldn't use it in science, you couldn't use it in culture, you couldn't use it in art, etc, and then in the 20th century you saw this materialist, scientistic vision of the world win. And with it you saw the death of the traditional Western culture because the Victorians have this, are, are the latest. The west had made an attempt to maintain its culture where they would read the ancient Greeks and the Romans and they would study history. This is the most historically literate society ever. And they had these elaborate codes of politeness and social traditions. Nationalism was very strong. The fashion was rooted in the past. And so it was this attempt as an industrialized society to maintain Western civilization and then over time as the industrial, as Britain became a less rural society, that finally broke down with World War I.

[Austin Padgett]

This kind of alludes to what I was saying earlier in, in which in this time the elites were kind of outpacing the population and the development of thought. There was still a strong Christian tradition among people, but they were not, they didn't. People didn't have access to books and history and things like they do today. So it, even though you had a really smart elite, it was there were opportunities to harness the populist energy around all that destabilization.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's a good point.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. Take advantage of the situation.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I want to say this and then I'll jump on to the point you said where the Victorians had this very interesting combination of religion and science where they saw, they saw science as the reflection of the will of God. And so through discovering science, they could create progress in the image of God. So their idea was using a combination of liberalism, Christianity and science, that you could create this advanced Christian scientific society where they used science as a way to reflect basically figuring out the mind of God. And part of this was due to the popularity of Masonic lodges who have a philosophy that's somewhat similar to this, where in the 1800s Masons had the most power of any era ever. And it's why you have so much Masonic symbolism on the US Dollar as an example. And the Masons were emblematic of this concept of scientific, religious, cultural progress, where the Victorians were an incredibly naive society. They believed in progress in science vastly more than we do. And so there was this naive hope that they had already figured things out and that there was this cultural direction towards progress. And then World War I just shattered that like an atom bomb.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. I, that's, that's funny because I think they were onto something where they did, they did figure something out. They just didn't see how it would get undermined. And this is. So this is why Jordan Peterson blew up on integrating science and religion. Because that brings us back exactly to that place where we can.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Where they were able to do that in ways that were more effective than us today.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You, you know that I agree. The. So trying to figure out, I'm trying to cover the final cultural things at the Victorians before we get to the actual politics. I like front loading the culture because it gives you the vibe. But oh, I want to talk about Victorian attitudes about sex because that's important because it's one of those things that our society, we project a lot of ourselves onto the Victorians because we really dislike the Victorians and they're this mirror im of what we ourselves want to avoid. But at the same time, in the process of doing that, we show who we are more than we show who the Victorians were where. And I'm going to talk about sex and emotions and humor here because these are things where our conception of the Victorians is that they're the most stuck up, Puritan cold people possible. And the more I studied the Victorians, the more I realized that's just not true. Where romantic literature was incredibly popular among the Victorians, where it's Gothic, gothic grandiosity. And this is a society where if a guy proposes his love to a girl he just met and then she rejects him, that scene is noble. And in today that would be seen as mentally ill. And, and so you also see when you read the Victorians, they, they drank a tremendous amount. They were, they like, they had an organization called the Venerable Elk Society and they would just randomly build up these Greek columns and they invented Victorian Britain had amazing food. There was this English culinary tradition that stemmed from their rural culture that they, they would create dinner parties where they had 20 different type of sauce. So you would get a certain type of roast beef and then you would mix between the different 20 kinds of sauces and beef Wellington, where you have this huge cut of beef bread that's breaded, that just breaded with mushroom and pate. It's very good. So the Victorians were not uncultured and they had a tremendous art scene, they had tremendous musical advancement. And, and so this is not a boring or colorless or emotionless society. And sex is another interesting thing because it's taken as axiomatically true in our culture that the Victorians were sexually repressed. And what I find with any cultural understanding of history is it's half true and it's half not true. For example, we see the Greeks and the Romans is super rational and scientific. The thing is that's true. They were also friggin nuts and did psychedelics and would in all of these, Greek philosophy was part of their religious tradition. We see the Middle Ages as stupid and primitive. And that's not true as a credit incredibly advanced society. And so when we view the Victorians as sexually prude, we're looking at a certain subcast of Britons in a certain time period. At the end of the 1800s, upper middle class Victorians were incredibly sexually prude. And as a funny example of this, so this was the era most against male masturbation ever. But then they were dealing with these cases of female hysteria and they invented the vibrator in the 1890s to solve female hysteria. And they didn't even think of it as masturbating, they just saw, oh, women need to like let off steam. And, and so with the Victorians you find these bizarre backwards attitudes based around, based around that. But at the same time, this was a society where London was absolutely crawling with prostitutes. There were so many. And the nobility would keep mistresses and most Britons lived in degrading poverty. So most British families, they literally saw their relatives sleep with each other because they're stuck in the same room. And so when you see the Victorians, you're seeing one element of them, but not the other side. Where, for example, and sexual norms got more constrictive over the course of the 1800s, where we culturally see 1830 as the same thing as 1890. Well, the reality is that saying 1830 is 1890 is like saying 1990s, like 1930. It's a huge cultural difference. Where Lord Melbourne, the. The Prime Minister in the start of Queen Victoria's reign, he was openly into BDSM and he would tell Victoria about it and Victoria talked about enjoying sex. And so this was a society that was very prude in one way. But I like to say whenever you see us as no society ever is sexually liberated. And any society where you see. Any society where you see extreme sexual purity, there's always some outlet. Right. And so when you're looking at the Victorians, what we're really looking at in most cultural understandings is this subgroup of upper middle class bourgeois English people that's almost all of our frame of understanding of Victorian culture.

[Austin Padgett]

You could even say, like, bans on prostitution are part of the like managerial state or even puritanism. And ironically, they kind of undermine monogamy more than. Than the. The other social attitudes of like, more. More gay stuff and more. More that stuff.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Has a bigger impact on the monogamy where. Whereas prostitution is kind of an outlet that can help maintain it through the people that are not able to find mates, basically.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Sex.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You have truly lived in Asia. Yeah, yeah. Lots of the most famous Victorian figures lost their virginity to a prostitute. Nietzsche, Napoleon, a bunch other people. So you're looking at that thing that would be completely sexually bizarre today. That was relatively normalized back then. But when I see what we look at the Victorians, I see two things. The first is it's emblematic that a lot of our elite are distinguished of Northeastern Calvinists who were genuinely fun hating. I mean, a lot of our media elite is based out of the Northeast and their ancestors were legitimately, incredibly repressed and, and judgmental. And I see a lot of popular culture being Northeasterners trying to work through their own generational guilt by saying white people hate having fun. White people have no culture. White people are judgmental. And I'm like, no, a very specific sub demographic of white people are. The rest of us are chilling. But the. Oh yeah. So our society is Very cold and emotionless. We're very inauthentic. We have a rigid moral code, will never break, even when it's stupid. We're not good at handling social fluidity or. The Victorians had very elaborate codes of politeness, but that kind of masked a greater ability to deal with the human condition, if that makes sense.

[Austin Padgett]

What. What masked it? The.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So, for example, there's a great TV show called Manor House, which is a. It's a reality TV show made by the BBC at the start of the 21st century. This was before the BBC was gay. And it's about modern people recreating an Edwardian manor house from 1910. And it's interesting to watch because partly you see how Dickensian the work conditions are. And it's funny, I didn't bring up Dickens, that he was the biggest writer. Dickens, he made his career out of writing about how horrifying the poverty of average British people was. And it was where you're watching Manor House and the servants literally work 15 hours a day, seven days a week. It's like the Chinese school system. And so you see the modern people start to physically break down, and then what happens is that the. The masters where they take a banker today and they make him the. The lord of the manor house is that he gradually fulfills the role and he gradually starts becoming more egoistic and dominant and that stuff. So you see modern people gradually morph back into their conditions a century ago. But one of the interesting things in there is that there's all of these things where servants have to sit in the order based on their hierarchy every time, or there's very specific knives and forks for fish, for dessert, for that stuff. So it's a society with this incredible, I would say, obsession with civility. And then we threw that away. And in exchange for it, we established moral codes based around. Around a Marxist framework.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Yeah. And it's connected to that Puritan culture and the kind of regulation of expression within society that it was used to. Like they would. They would have. And this is why when you look. Think about periods of England, people forget how different different parts of England are. Right. It's. It's. There's a bunch of different cultures in England that have genuinely different cultural expressions. And they were also aware of these back then. And so, yeah, they would regulate clothing, so you can only have a few colors, you know, similar to Bernie Sanders. You know, why do you need 23 options of deodorant? You know, really, it's. Yeah, yeah, they would. They would regulate the number of clothes that the Calvinists.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Oh, I thought you're talking the Victorians.

[Austin Padgett]

Right, well, you're right, right, right. Right through that period, probably dropped that at that point.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Calvinists were 200 years earlier. So that's why I was clarifying society is always need to find places where they have a rigid moral code and then places where they are more loose. And so in our. When we made a moral code as a society, we said we want to permit everything that relates to oppressed groups. And thus questioning that permission became our taboo. It's paradoxical like that. The Victorians have a really interesting arc to them and it's. The Victorians are a genuine example of a society making a very good decision. At the start of Queen Victoria's reign, you saw the potential for a revolution where after the Napoleonic Wars, Britain finally beat France and Europe had this forced return to conservatism, where the French Revolution was atheist, it was socialist, it was populist and blew across Europe, conquering out to Russia. What happened then is at the Congress of Vienna, the British, the Austrians, the Prussians, the Russians teamed up to force religion and monarchy down the throat of the public, non consensually. And Britain was also part of this. And there's a great book by Bernard Cornwell about this time period where it's 1821, where Britain had this horrifying recession after the Napoleonic Wars. And what happened is that it was pretty horrifying class repression, actually, where they would hang a poor man from steal for stealing bread to feed his own family and they had hangings for almost everything. And Britain threw so many people in jail and that they literally exported them to Australia just to get rid of them. So this comes across as very cruel. And it was where the worst aspect of it was Ireland, which actually affected my ancestors because the British had conquered Ireland in the early 1600s and they had kept it in this horrifying controlled position where the Irish were treated worse than I would say the Indians or the Africans were. Later in the Empire, the Irish were not allowed to vote, own property, obtain an education. They were completely stripped from public life and they were conquered. What happened was that Ireland's population ballooned and Ireland's population ballooned and it went from half a million in the year 1600 to 8 million in the year 1840. 40. Then there was a potato blight that wiped out potatoes, which were the crop Ireland was completely dependent on. So one third of Irish immigrated to mostly America, which was a wonderful evolutionary Strategy. There are 70 million people of Irish Descent now almost all in North America, a third died and then a third stayed there. And the British basically didn't lift a finger to stop this horrifying atrocity. In Ireland, they didn't even ship food out because their attitude was that due to Malthusian pressure reasons, when the population needs to die, it's going to die because the population needs to reset to stable levels. And that did work. Ireland now has. Is no longer an overcrowded country, but holy shit, that's hard. And when you look at the Earth, when you look at.

[Austin Padgett]

Fits in with the utilitarian framework, because they were probably viewing it like, oh, yeah, we helped the Irish out. We increase their population by 8 million. A 30% cut is still like, they're still plus 6 million.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Or something like that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. It's this interesting dichotomy between the Victorians where they're simultaneously super hard and soft at the same time, where the reason they were so brutal to crime was that Europe in this time period faced excruciating overpopulating. And Marx talks out the degrading poverty of that time period as caused by capitalism. But it was a global condition. You could see the same thing in India or China or Brazil. And it occurs for these rhythmic Malthusian patterns in West Europe was slated to have a revolution in the early 1800s due to that. So Britain was experiencing horrifying overpopulation. And in the 1840s, when the British didn't feed Ireland, the English were hungry too. Where Britain faced this bubbling up of dissent in the early 1800s that nearly led to revolution. And the British were incredibly intelligent about spotting the factors that caused revolution and then stopping them, I think, because there was an entire generation of British thinkers who studied the French Revolution very deeply. So and they were working with the British government, so they figured out what caused the French Revolution and stopped it. We're in the early 1800s, partly due to the effects of the Industrial Revolution and partly due to overpopulation, there was this huge liberal push where only 3% of Britons could vote in this time period. And so there was this push by the Chartists to increase the voter registration of. Increase the voter registration of the amount of people in the population who were allowed to vote. And what happened was that the British, realizing that this was due to Malthusian pressures, they tried to establish incentive structures for high group cooperation. And it actually worked. Where their idea was that if people are poor and they're starving, we have to provide literally every single incentive so that they don't defect from the system. So anyone who steals literally anything will immediately die. Where they're like, we demand you, you work and we demand that you produce capital. And the thing though is it's brutal. But this did create the industrial revolution. People shit on the Victorians, but I'm like, this was a society where their strategy worked. And do you have any questions before I explain what the British did to get out of this?

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, I guess just extra, extra context about what it's like because there's huge, huge changes which can create these, these overflows and tricky situations. But. Or infrastructure, urban infrastructure not ready for the number of people coming in. But there's a reason that people were going to the cities.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

And it fits perfectly with modern narratives where we call China a factory sweatshop labor when the whole town celebrates and has a party when they come in and they can make four times more savings because subsistence farming and low level farming you, faith face dearth every five years was really bad and deadly famine every 20. So that's a. And then, and then by the other token, there's all this crazy technological change and there. And you're not used to, you don't. You hadn't learned to adapt to certain things. Like we didn't know the wall green wallpaper would kill you because of the chemicals inside of it. Or what like level of inhalation would kill you. Or that, you know, we, we would go to these freak shows and I went to a freak show in Asia because they're still, they still go on there where you just like they have people with weird deformities and everybody goes and looks at him. And then that kind of got like awkward. You know, people realized some people were mistreated or whatever within those institutions and then it became less popular. But like everyone's just, you know, going and doing stuff and looking at stuff and curious. It's not, it's not as much like people were, were forced into these situations. It's a lot of mistakes were made because it was very chaotic.

[Rudyard Lynch]

There's a great book called north and south by Elizabeth Gaskell and It's set in 1854 in Britain and it was written by someone at the time. And it's a rom com where it's this girl from R. England immigrates to north England and then there's this edgy loner industrial tycoon who she hates at first, Then she realizes he's a great guy and she loves him. And it's an interesting book because it's a sociological study of the Industrial Revolution in this exact era. And it covers a lot of things that you would not notice later, but were incredibly important at the point where. At that point where one of the biggest themes is the breakdown of the old social structure. Where her study of South England is that it's this genteel society where everyone takes care of everyone else and there's shared social trust and there's these parochial understandings of social class and everyone knows their place and everyone has friends and that stuff. And so she starts there. And interestingly, the people from the south of England populated the American south, and the people from the English Rust Belt populated the American Rust Belt belt. So it's the same dichotomy as the US between the south, that was agrarian, in the north, that was industrial. Then she moves to north northern England, and she moves to this mining town, or not this mining town, this industrial town. And she hates it at first, but then she grows to appreciate it because you see these huge factories, people working these depressing, depersonalized jobs. You saw the breakdown of the old social classes and codes. And she starts to admire the strength, how driven, and the innovation and the toughness of the North English industrial society. And she dislikes the tyco. The tycoon. And then over the course of the story, she basically grows to fall in love with how much of a sigma she is. He is. Where she's like, I admire his drive and I admire his quiet patience and his. His intelligence and that stuff. And with that, you're seeing a complete sociological change. And one of the interesting things is that when she's writing in the 1850s, there is this. There is a legitimate improvement in the quality of life for the average person, where she said, oh, they only work 10 hours a day. And this is an improvement from 14 hours a day, which they did earlier. Because once you get to the 1850s, she was surprised at how wealthy the factory workers were, where she said, they all have their own houses, they can support their families, they can eat meat, they can have wooden chairs, because South England was actually poorer. And it's interesting where you see the. You see the breakdown of the old society and then certain advantages brought by the new society that came with immense psychological issues. As an example of this. Ghost sightings were huge in the Victorian period. And we've used ghost settings as a proxy for mental health issues because there was this huge mental health breakdown that occurred in the 1800s due to the loss of all these traditional ways of life. And it was exported until political radicalism.

[Austin Padgett]

And how was it exported into political radicalism?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Oh, the people who didn't like the system became Marxists or classical liberals or push. Yes, right, right, the colonies. And so start of the Victorian period was genuinely terrible. And you'll hear these horror stories of people crowding 20 into one room and you'll hear stories of people working 16 hour days, people waking up at four in the morning to work, these children being chimney sweeps from age six onwards. It's just horrifying. And that's more so at the start of the century. And those were the conditions that pushed for the social reformation which saved Victorian Britain, where first of all, they did expand the voter franchise. I think it went from like 3% to 6%. And at the end of the 19th century, they were at 12%, they were at 12% voters. And then with World War I, they had to give universal suffrage, so they slightly increased the voter franchise. Then on top of that, Britain had this system called the rotten boroughs, where they were using numbers from the 1300s to get parliamentary seats. So these places that were medieval big in the Middle Ages and now had no inhabitants, they had lots of voter registration. And the new industrial cities like Manchester got no representation. So what people would do in British politics and Britain was a parliamentary democracy with two parties, the Tories and the Whigs, which we can explain if you'd like. But what, what they did is that someone would be moved to one of these old medieval cities, become the only inhabitant or bribe the one inhabitant and then take their votes. So there was enormous corruption in the British parliamentary system that they had to clean up. And they also, they also passed the Corn Laws, where the earlier laws were that they would artificially keep the price of grain up, they would artificially keep the price of grain up to support the British agricultural fields. And then they realized people were starving, so they changed the laws to allowing cheap importing of grain from elsewhere. And this sounds unimportant, but it was a huge transition point in British history because it saw Britain move from an agrarian society politically to an industrial society where Victoria and Britain had this combined noble business elite, where Britain was originally a feudal society. And then as the Parliament won, the business owners started to get into power and they took over most power in the 1600s. But if you were to look at the prime ministers and the people in power, they were still the nobility. And out of any nobility in the world, the British nobility did the best job of integrating with the new technological business class they made. They invested in Argentina or South Africa, they fought in the Empire, they invented new technologies. There was. The British nobility in the 1800s are probably the most noble governance class in human history. And when I look at the harsh thing they did earlier in the century, you can see that there is this genuine desire for social justice where there was this huge outcry for social justice in the early to mid 19th century to help the poverty, where they saw the poverty, genuinely cared, tried to improve it. And there's a great book called Fairness and Freedom by David Hackett Fisher, which is comparing how the foundation of New Zealand in the 19th century parallels the foundation of America in the 17th century. And the book is about how the character of 1800s Britain imprinted itself on Australia and New Zealand in the same way that America is a remnant of 17th century Britain. And the biggest theme is that he talks about is social justice being implicit, or fairness, as he calls it, implicit to Australia and New Zealand, which is why they're so derangedly woke. But it was coming out of this genuine humanitarian catastrophe that was early to mid 19th century Britain.

[Austin Padgett]

That's really interesting. And yeah, the, the, the nobility really believed in the values of the culture from every range of it. They kind of, they were radically pro market, like, to a degree that would be considered unusual. Like it was, it was a very big assumption that certain things in terms of regulatory protectionism were just, or even mercantilist kind of policies were just absolutely unheard of. Like, like as if that was a thing that had ended and would never come back. Like it was a shared understanding of its immorality and its impracticality at the same time. Like you mentioned, England had more of a leftover nobility than the us so they experienced this age a little bit different than us, where there was a lot more unfairness and there was that whole understanding of social justice. And then there were people using social justice to alleviate guilt while staying in control. You had basically every kind of a parallel to today.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's interesting, Victorian Britain had higher social mobility than Britain today by a big margin, which is not something you think. And one of the things they talk about north and south is they say that if a poor man is genuinely competent and responsible, he will move up in the world where it's a lot like, I would say, developing countries such as Mexico, where you go to Mexico and if you're middle or upper class, you have servants there where you'll have a maid, you'll have a nanny, you'll have a driver, because you have this huge social class of very poor people. And then you Have a small group of very wealthy people, but then in between you do see the genuine ability to have social mobility through development. At least that's my understanding of Mexico. And maybe not Mexico, but other developing countries. They're like in Vietnam there's definitely social mobility.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, huge. Ridiculous. I've obviously seen it because.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yes. And so one of the things with the industrial world's social Darwinism was this was a genuinely socially mobile society. So there was this assessment that in Victorian Protestantism the idea is that God rewards the victors. And because this was such a capitalist and industrializing society there they thought if you're, if you're competent, you'll rise to the top. So the system was seen as fair. And on top of that, enough of the people, if you were genuinely competent, you would have social mobility equivalent enough to your competence to satisfy you. Which is why Victoria and Britain didn't have the revolution while the rest of Europe did. Because the industrial revolution was able to suck up enough of the competent people as well as the empire that you didn't have this huge dissatisfied class.

[Austin Padgett]

I have a really great real example of that.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Where one of my co workers in Thailand was from the Philippines, Mackie. And he did video editing and marketing and videos for the company. Like you know, a big company, very like nice office job. And how he started was by taking sacks of, I don't know if it was some material or fertilizer there was or coal or something. It's literally like he would take stacks, a bunch of heavy sacks, put them on top of a bus ride 8 hours, get him off the bus, drop them off and then go back and make like a very teeny bit amount of money. And he built that up into just like a middle class office lifestyle.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. It's funny, the Victorians saw inflation as a moral evil. They saw inflation as a sign of weakness that, that the government needed to operate within its spend is. They said inflation killed the little man, which is.

[Austin Padgett]

They saw it as theft. Yeah, it was anti. Inflation was a huge working class issue where they're like we demand to be paid in gold and silver. Also hilarious. We paid our Indonesian workers gold. They wanted to be paid in gold. They didn't want to be paid in money because it avoided the taxation and also inflation. This was on their bonuses. It would have been hard to get away with the whole thing. But yeah, these attitudes like and like 20 years ago today it's a little bit different. But nobody knew the Fed or the effect of central banking on inflation in the late 1800s, the poorest guy in the world knew. Everybody knew. Yes, they justified it based on taking from the rich or something.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, there's. You'll see that this was a very high trust society in a few ways. For example, when you look at World War I and World War I was the death of the Victorian world. The long 19th century is Waterloo 1815 to World War I, 1914. And with you saw that the Germans and the British played soccer with each other on Christmas. The opposing armies, or Catgirl Kulak told me an interesting story. In World War I, a bunch of soldiers saw a man deserting from the front line of battle. And they cried out and they said, you are a traitor. You're a traitor. Why are you doing this? Can you please fight with us? And the man ran back, apologized and then cried, said that he felt sorry that he betrayed them and he would die like a man with them. So you'll hear World War I is all of these heartwarming stories like that. In the horror we're like, wait, these were genuinely tough and good men. And then you'll hear other stories where Britain had basically no crime at the for a lot for at the end of the 19th century, where they built up a very high trust society where once poverty. It's funny, authors in the early 1800s said that if we end hunger, crime will end. And that was basically true inside the European context, because they had built up these high trust societies that basically blew their sociological load on World War I. World War I was the continent of Europe basically blowing its social trust to fight in the trenches. Because when those men went off to World War I, they went off. They brought with them their religion, their nationality, their culture, their genetics. The Victorian period had cultivated all of these concepts of identity that were used to get young men to fight each other in World War I. And World War I was so horrifying that it destroyed this shared social trust. And the reason that the nations of World War I were so willing to fight in this horrifying war, where at the start of the war, there was a period called the July Madness when there were parties across Europe, these people were excited to go to war. Men would cry and they would break down upon realizing they wouldn't be able to go into the army because they so wanted to go to the army to serve their nation. And that's a degree of earnestness and social trust we can't imagine. Because Europe's elite had done a good job of helping their populations in the century beforehand. The average European got wealthier where at the start of Queen Victoria's reign, Britons were living in degrading poverty to buy the era of World War I. Yes, there was still a working class who worked 12 hours a day who lived in poverty, but then the degree of the middle class had grown enough that if you wanted to be in the middle class, you could be. And you also saw the creation of all this new technology. People's diets radically improved, people worked less hours. There was this huge movement to shave working hours. There was sanitation, there was increases in health, there was the growth of these empires. And so although the Victorian period started really bad, by the end, its leadership was able to pull a Hail Mary so that everyone saw the previous century as progress being obvious.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And it's basically hard not to. Yeah. And it's so terrible to take such good quality and trust and goodness and to take advantage of that and abuse it because with the world wars and just destroy that. Because if, if you're legitimately good and it gets you taken advantage of, the lesson is, the lesson can be to drop the. So you, you stop caring about nation, you stop caring about honor. It's like, no, you were just taken advantage of. But those values are very important. They're foundational. So taking advantage of goodness is one of the most evil things you can do.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, it's. It's interesting you say that because World War I was the end of an age and the Victorians were the culmination of that age where the modern period, from Christopher Columbus Until World War I, European colonialism, Christianity, science, reason, et cetera, and capitalism. You saw the buildup of all these modernist trends that felt like history had a direction that was going towards progress. Then World War I went psych. And we haven't been able to psychologically recover from it because we feel so traumatized from our earlier narrative. But we've also let in very bad attitudes in very bad ways of life that have shut down our ability to think rationally. And there's two authors who I frequently seen being the end of the end of the Victorian era, that being Sigmund Freud and Einstein, both Austrian Jews. And Freud's concept of the subconscious that we have these underlying principles fundamentally motivated off sex, off our most base understandings that humans couldn't control. This was in direct opposition to the Victorian ideal of masculine taking dominance over your life and through willpower. Where the Victorians did have a concept of psychology, but their psychology was when you read Victorian novels, they'll have a two page thing at the start of the Two page thing in the story explaining the bearing of a random character they met. Where in Victorian novels they'll be like, oh, my best friend Emilio. His bearing, noble, however, his intelligence, mediocre. Mediocre. But he had a profound understanding of sailing and he was spurred by a lover 5 years ago and he's never recovered. They did understand the human condition. It's from a different, different frame, though. And World War I really freaked them out because the things they had repressed had come rearing out the horrors of human nature which they externalized to the savages abroad they saw at the core of Europe. And the thing with Einstein is you saw the breakdown of the mechanist Newtonian universe, where the Victorians saw all of the universe as these rational blocks moving around, being part of God's will. In a comprehensible universe, Einstein is like, psych. Space and time are the same. There's these wave particles. Newton wasn't completely true, and both of them brought psychological anarchy rather than any new paradigm. So with the Victorians, we last. With the end of the Victorians, I believe the west lost its soul and it replaced it mostly with a purposeful anarchy that we put in place so that we could dupe people into doing bad things. Things where we kept these ideas of nihilism and of the universe not making sense and all these things because the Victorians were gullible enough to not understand the potential to understand what they didn't know. We took that to pure, practically demonic nihilism, which I believe elites pushed for and the managerial class pushed for in order to disorient the population as much as possible.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Even though they were on the right track, they took the things that they couldn't explain in order to engender a sort of nihilistic uncertainty.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And so that's all I have to say about the Victorians. Next episode is the British Empire. Anything else you want to cover, Austin?

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting. Yeah. I was just kind of thinking how this, you know, the. The Victorian age goes into. Yeah, go ahead.

[Rudyard Lynch]

We didn't talk about Queen Victoria.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, yes. Yeah, let's do it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Queen Victoria took power when she was young. I frankly don't find her interesting. And she didn't do that much that was capable. She saw the decline of the monarchy's power, and because of the start of her reign, people thought that British monarchs could wield power much like George III had, and that because she threw away power, what occurred is that over the course of her reign, prime ministers became the de facto heads of the British State, where Disraeli is a good example, who was an ethnic Jew, who was also a popular novelist. He was Prime Minister of Britain under the Conservative Party. He made her the Empress of India. And so he was like, I'm going to give you this ceremonial title so you can reconcile yourself to having very little actual power. And Disraeli's enemy was Gladstone of the Labor Party. So Queen Victoria presided over Britain's rise to dominance and she presided over this enormous period, but that was mostly done by Britain's democratic system and by the British people, where she was remembered for this glorious period of British history that I don't think she had any real hand in.

[Austin Padgett]

So she. Is she given credit and the popular psyche, or was she at some point given credit? Like at the time, did people see her as being like a great. Okay, so that's the same in Thailand, where they see their king as a George Washington like figure because he presided over industrialization. He did absolutely nothing. But also with Queen Victoria, I think it's fair to say to her that she was also representative of the values at the time and that she generally agreed with most of the positive values at the time. And so that's why she didn't see it as even letting go of control. It's like, no, that's. I believe that these systems should function this way. You know, do what you want.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Queen Victoria had an enormous impact on fashion, especially with her relationship with Albert, who she genuinely loved. The norm for Victorian marriages among monarchy was the king got a wife for political reasons and then he have a bunch of mistresses he actually cared about. And it was always strange that Albert actually loves Queen Victoria and their relationship is beautiful. A lot of genuinely touching things. But they helped establish British fashion where almost all of our things about Christmas culture came from that royal family. The Christmas tree Albert brought over from Germany, our ideas of, like sugar plum fairies or these Christmas baubles or Christmas presents, they're all Victorian era conventions. And when you look at the idea of the modern homemaker, it's a Victorian creation because in previous eras of history, if you were a peasant woman, you just worked, and if you were a noble woman, you were part of your husband's family business, that being the dynasty. And then in the Victorian period, you saw the creation of this wealthy middle and upper class of women, or middle class women who basically didn't have much to do and because their husbands did the work and they were in industrialized cities. And so that's where our idea of the housewife comes from it's not really a historic convention. And they were having a wife who didn't work was seen as a status symbol. But on top of that it was also seen as for the woman's own safety because Victorian work was brutal. You're working in a frigging coal mine for 12 hours. You're in a dirty factory. And so our modern notions of tradition and family in most cases stem lots of things that we just see as traditional and normal stem to the creation of bourgeoisie middle class Victorian women. They've set the cultural standards for a lot of things. We still have.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes. I also like their art style because it's incredibly detail oriented. They have really colorful detail. I forget the name of this style, but it's also something that's becoming more popular now and a revolt to the minimalist, you know, metallic white, whatever you got going on. And they had all sorts of quirky stuff where yeah, they got into taxonomy was really, really big and out there were. There were guys who were more famous for it than others who would just make these really quirky setups with animals, which is like their kind of way of. Of cartoons. And that became the basis for Alice in Wonderland. All that stuff was inspired out of those famous taxonomy setups. And then just a couple more fun technologies like voice recordings where you can record your voice on a cylinder for the first time. Pictures. All that stuff is. It's very magical. It's almost like technology got so magic that they stopped believing in magic.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. Yes. There was this subclass of Anglican ministers who had stable incomes and lived in the countryside. And they are responsible for more innovations than we notice. If you look at some strange field like taxonomy, I don't know, like, I don't know the exact scientific fields, but one of them is the understanding of sea currents. That was some Anglican minister who was bored. A lot of the people who were into paleontology at the first Anglican minister who was bored. The gentleman scholar has been hugely important to history in a way that academics writ out. Because until recently the only. You can only talk about a topic or make an intellectual discovery if you're an academic. And that's a complete psyop because almost any given field was made by some Victorian gentleman where Edward Gibbon was just a guy who was obsessed with the fall of Rome and he basically invented the discipline of modern history indirectly. Charles Darwin, just some guy. Karl Marx, also just some guy. Our understanding. There's a story one of my friends has. Who's a. One of my friends has this story. He's a classics major is our understanding of Greek columns and our understanding of Attic vases were both from Victorian gentlemen who collected this stuff and wrote all the books on it. And now the modern academics are trashing the Victorian gentlemen who built their fields, saying they didn't do a good job. Troy was discovered by some wealthy German American guy. And so I think this is a good place to stop because it shows such a good symbol that the Victorians did it. They had the balls to go for it. And now we're going to criticize the Victorians for building the world we live in, although we're dependent upon them. Them.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. Every scientist back then basically acted like Randall Carlson.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Who, yeah. Broke through a lot of paradigms and is, you know, done it on his own. Has much better research. So I'm excited for us to kind of look into this era more and help us break through some of our current paradigms. Because if we start thinking like those guys today, there's no limit to what we can do with our advantages. It's going to be awesome facts.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Catch you soon. For the British Empire, Goodbye Peace.

[Whatifalth]

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.