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- [00:00]
A
The problem in Britain, and I think in England in particular, there's a question of identity and who belongs. And that's one of the things that's being addressed in this conference and the current paradigm is that essentially there is no English identity and therefore there is nothing to stop us considering people to be in the sort of like Baconian interchangeable non sacred units. And we don't. So we don't think of anything dignified and important about our own culture and our own country. And so as far as we're concerned, it's just, well, we could just use this as an economic zone where we bring in a million migrants and let them have jobs and then this improves the gdp. I mean, not only is that true, but it also drastically changes the character of what's happening.
- [00:59]
B
I have an odd way of starting this inter Carl Benjamin, AKA Sargon of Akkad, which is, for all the years that I've known you, what do you consider yourself most? Are you a cultural critic? Are you a YouTuber? Are you just a guy in a suit who talks about politics? What. What are you?
- [01:16]
A
I think I might be.
- [01:17]
B
In your own mind, I might be.
- [01:18]
A
All of those things.
- [01:19]
B
Yeah.
- [01:20]
A
As far as I'm concerned, I'm someone like yourself, actually, who's on a journey because we, we met many years ago as very normal liberal people and we.
- [01:32]
B
Were normal back then. Was that something?
- [01:34]
A
Yeah, yeah, no, no, we were normal. On the Young Turks, you were the guy I'm most related to. You know, I saw a lot of myself in you and I can understand why you ended up having your schism. And it's interesting how like Anna's going down that same path.
- [01:46]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [01:47]
A
Because the more you dig into the doctrine of the left and the doctrine of liberalism itself, the more you realize that actually there are issues with this. And so this is why I ended up just doing a philosophy degree and setting up a philosophy website, luteseas.com to really get to the bottom of what all of this means and why things are going so wrong. And we've arrived on an interesting sort of part of that arc, as it were. Because finally the things we were saying in the wilderness many years ago are becoming accepted as doctrinal orthodoxy by the center right at this point, by the conservatives realize, oh wait, there is no concourse with these people. We can't have a peace arrangement we can't deal with. No, no, they're here to destroy us. They're here to tear down our civilization and stigmatize and drive us out. So we have to make sure that we have a hard barrier between, you know, what they believe and what we believe, because otherwise they're going to continue like termites eating away at our very identities. And so when, when I. When I think of it in that way, I. I suppose I'm some kind of rogue philosopher in some way. I mean, I did a degree of philosophy. Does that make me a philosopher?
- [02:57]
B
I guess if you have a degree in it, we'll put philosopher under why not? How about that?
- [03:02]
A
If you want. I'm doing a master's in it now as well.
- [03:04]
B
Oh, are you? Well, it is worth mentioning that while you were watching me on the Young Turks, when I started waking up, and people that have been tracking us for that, it's a decade now, which is insane, but for people that have been paying attention that long, you were the guy. When I started waking up, everybody started saying, dave, you've got to watch this guy at that time, Sargon of Akkad. You've got to watch his videos. Your face wasn't even in the videos. It was the moniker and whatever. And you were laying out your classically liberal beliefs and how they were in conflict basically with the progressives. Interestingly, in the last couple years, and last time I had you in studio, which was probably about two years ago now, you were talking about classical liberalism as a sort of incomplete philosophy.
- [03:43]
A
Yeah.
- [03:44]
B
And this has caused some tension with some of the classical liberals who like to believe it is a complete philosophy. Can we do a couple minutes on that?
- [03:51]
A
Of course.
- [03:52]
B
And for a guy that wrote a book defending classicalism, so.
- [03:58]
A
There'S something interesting that happens when you have a Denoted ideology, as in when you say, I have a series of propositions, and from these propositions I'm going to derive logical conclusions. What happens is you are extracting them out of the cultural context in which they exist. And so whenever you create a proposition, you necessarily ignore other things that are interrelated with that thing. And you say, right, this is the thing I'm going to focus on. And you don't notice that you're doing it, but in the back of your mind, it all kind of falls away. Other presuppositions that are attached to it that brought you to that place. And so you start deriving conclusions and these conclusions become abstract, not located in any one time, place, or people. And you say, well, these are therefore universal. And this is the problem with not just liberalism but any ideology is that it feels it could be detached from where it came from and applied to anywhere in the world, but actually in reality, to get to the point where you can identify a proposition that you could abstract, there was a huge amount of sort of cultural baggage and a mountain that had to be climbed to get to that point and basically thousands.
- [05:10]
B
Of years of stuff precisely to get there.
- [05:14]
A
And most of it's not rational either. Most of it isn't stuff that you thought about like you consciously had a plan for. Most of it is kind of unconscious and irrational and just baked into the way that we behave, you know, the way that we in the English speaking world in particular view this, the sort of sacred nature of our private property. This is a very English thing. And obviously the Americans and the Canadians and Australians have inherited this because of their English background. Of course it's my property, but that's actually not a given in everywhere in the world. So I mean there's a great book called the Origins of English Individualism by professor called Alan McFarlane and he goes through the historical records and finds that actually going Back to like 1200 In England there's a thriving property market. Now that's really weird because in peasant societies you don't have a property market because all the property is collectively owned by a family unit that exists on the land over a long period of time. But in England, actually only about one third of each village, the three generations live and die in it. So most people are actually moving around, purchasing property, buying and selling it. And so you can see why in Eng speaking world for 800 years we've done this. This becomes a core part of our character. And so we ex, we abstract that into capitalism. Well, it works for us because we've got the social systems required to make that work. We know how to deal with one another. We had high trust societies. And you see it in all of these small ways where it's interpersonal politeness, the way that we say thank you please and thank you and sorry and things like this, these are not universal characteristics. These are actually really particular characteristics to ourselves. So other Europeans even like you can find Germans very standoffish and impolite and especially the French as well, you can find them very impolite because they come from a different continuum of civilization. And so the issue with the ideology is when you do abstract it out, what is incomplete, definitionally incomplete, because you've got four or five predicates that you go, right, okay, this is everything is based on. But actually there was a huge sort of morass of things that were happening. Millions and millions of different interactions that were negotiated privately by individuals that forms this composite out of which you extracted it. It works in that context, but when you take it out of that context, you can find that it doesn't work and it can actually become destructive.
- [07:37]
B
So would this be similar to the criticism that say Jordan or some people have had, Jordan Peterson, obviously, or some people have had of sort of the new atheist idea, which was that somehow the Enlightenment sprung out of nothing in ess, and that's actually your argument or their argument, I think, and I do agree with this actually would be. No, that's not true. It came out of 2000 years basically of warring and good ideas beating bad ideas, thus led to the Enlightenment. But it didn't just magic, the Enlightenment didn't spring out of nothing.
- [08:09]
A
In essence, no, that's completely correct. The Enlightenment, I mean, intellectually we can chart exactly the history of it. The, the sort of primary mover in the scientific revolution which leads to what I suppose we're going to call the Enlightenment is Francis Bacon writing in contrast to the Scholastics. I mean, in his day he called the universities distempers of learning, as in it was doctrinaire, because the universities were founded by Christians. And so what they had was Aristotle's Organa, which is a collection of syllogistic logical works in order to try and derive truth from the premises set in the books. And then the Bible, of course. Now actually, as much as these works are incredibly valuable, they didn't have real truths about the world. What they had is a set of premises upon which there were constant debates about what the correct interpretation was. And Bacon said, no, look, we need to burn all of these things. He called the various things that created a kind of illusion in our minds, the idols, right? He's like, look, we've got four, four different idols. We need to just get rid of them and just look with clear eyes about what is. And he was, he wasn't an atheist or anything like that. He was like, no, we need to properly restore our knowledge to the state that it was with Adam in the Garden of Eden. We need to properly worship God's creation by properly understanding it. And you can see how this, it has traveled for a long time. This idea of we can use reason properly to manipulate and master nature. In that, though, there are also hidden dangers, because don't get me wrong, in 17th century England, that's a great idea, right? That's a brilliant idea because like you think of a hospital as a place where you go to get better, right? In 17th century England, a hospital is where you went to die. Right, right, right, right. The hospitals were awful. And so it was through this long, slow process of actually scientifically looking at the world and realizing how things had to be that we end up with the wonderful world that we have around us. But the problem with that is that what we' admitted in some way or discovered, we might be able to say, but I don't know how I exactly want to characterize it, but we've admitted that the universe kind of operates mechanically. And so in the sort of 18th and 19th centuries, we thought of it as a clockwork universe. He was just a divine clockmaker. He wound the universe up and let it go. But the problem with that is that God becomes more remote because until that point, everyone was like, well, God's in everything. And so everything that happens is God's providence. And if something bad happens, I can't explain. Well, God just will. That I can't explain. But science doesn't allow us to do that. Science allows us to find real material and mechanical ways of discovering these things. And that means that God becomes ever more remote. And eventually he gets to the point where at one point a scientist presented Napoleon with an orrery, which, you know, a thing that matched the planet's movements. And Napoleon's, oh, that's brilliant, but where's God in this? And the scientists just said, well, I've got no need for the hypothesis of God. And you can see why there are so many atheists around now. Right? And this is something that was baked into it. And so now we view ourselves as fungible material that can be manipulated. And we're at the point where we're thinking about, okay, well, we'll just have DIY children and things like this, like, oh, come on, there's gotta be a point at which we say, are we really? Do we have the authority to just start manipulating future generations for genetic technology?
- [11:37]
B
Right. There's gotta be something either under that or above it. Exactly, depending on which way.
- [11:40]
A
And if there's not, then essentially what you've done is erase the concept of human dignity. And that's pretty terrible.
- [11:49]
B
I will have you on again for a more proper long form philosophical sit down. But just in the interest of time, just give me a minute or two diagnosis of what's going on in your country right now. Because there is an Awful. There's 4,000 people down there, and we obviously are in London. There is an awful lot of concern about this place. And that's in stark contrast to what people are saying about America right now, which I agree with which is that it seems we're entering our golden age now. Or at least, at the very least, things are turning around. To what degree I guess we'll find out. But it doesn't seem that way here.
- [12:22]
A
The problem in Britain, and I think in England in particular, there's a question of identity and who belongs. And that's one of the things that's being addressed in this conference and the current paradigm is that essentially there is no English identity and therefore there is nothing to stop us considering people to be in the sort of like Baconian interchangeable non sacred units. And we don't. So we don't think of anything dignified and important about our own culture and our own country. So as far as we're concerned, it's just, well, we could just use this as an economic zone where we bring in a million migrants and let them have jobs and then this improves the gdp. I mean, not only is that true, but it also drastically changes the character of what's happening. And so everyone feels depressed. And one, one thing that is a difficult thing to accept and understand is that when, when lots of people who are very similar are in a particular place, you get a kind of psychic map on the landscape where everyone basically has a, a certain level of predictability about what's going to happen tomorrow. If I walk around the corner, I might bump into some Englishman and he'll say good morning and walk on. Well, if I walk around the corner in London, I don't know what's going to happen. It could be some masked youths who have machetes or something and I might have to run for my life. And so you can feel the sort of psychic sense of safety that people have in a place in England that's very much retreated. And if you go into a pub, you find these little islands of Englishness now where you go in and you can feel the psychic landscape where everyone, oh, everyone in here knows a lot about each other, even though they don't know each other because they come from the same culture and everything is predictable again. And so you can feel what England used to feel like everywhere in these little islands now. And that's what's gone wrong, I think.
- [14:14]
B
So next time we do this in.
- [14:15]
A
A pub, I would love to.
- [14:19]
B
All right.