The Death of Culture: Marxism, Economics, and the Looming Crisis in America - WhatIfAltHist X Tom Bileyu on Impact Theory

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu: "The Death of Culture: Marxism, Economics, and the Looming Crisis in America"

Guest: Rudyard Lynch (WhatIfAltHist)
Release Date: November 4, 2025
Summary: Part 1

---

Episode Theme and Purpose

This episode dives into the structural crises facing modern American (and Western) society, exploring the interlocking causes of cultural decay, Marxist influence, economic breakdown, and the unprecedented rate of technological and social change. Host Tom Bilyeu and historian Rudyard Lynch tackle uncomfortable truths about collective identity, the unraveling of shared myths, the destabilizing power of economic dysfunction, and why, historically, societies like America’s current state experience revolution.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Historical Precedent for Upheaval

• Societal distress is likened to previous eras that foreshadowed revolution.
• Nietzsche’s “Age of the Last Man”:
  • Lynch paraphrases Nietzsche’s prediction of a 21st-century West afflicted by complacency, lack of ambition, and the dissolution of traditional values, leading to demographic and existential crisis.

    "It would be the most dangerous period in our history because it would be so complacent... There wouldn't be space to live. People would not be procreating." (Jordan Peterson/Rudyard Lynch, 01:25)

• The "sickness" Lynch diagnoses is a society no longer engaged in transmitting core traditions or meaning, resulting in generational amnesia.

2. America’s Lost Story & Fragmented Identity (05:01–07:49)

• America’s shifting national myths:
  • From a republic, to an Anglo-Saxon nation, to a “frontier spirit,” to a melting pot, to a narrative of oppression.
• The fragmentation of shared stories produces division and instability.
• The importance of transmitting a coherent culture, including religion, norms, honor, and national identity, is lost in modernity.
• Quote:

  "We've gotten rid of having a coherent culture, which is a really big deal that no one thinks about…The nation is a generational inheritance and we've thrown that away." (Jordan Peterson/Rudyard Lynch, 02:30)

3. The Marxist Strategy and the Loss of Anchoring (07:49–12:38)

• Lynch asserts that Marxists (Gramsci, Marcuse, etc.) purposefully disoriented society, aiming to destroy unified culture, exploiting rapid change and the lack of cultural anchoring.
• The “Maps of Meaning” Insight:
  • People need internalized frameworks (“maps”) to navigate reality, without which collective action—or even stability—is impossible.
• Modern societies excel at concrete/scientific problem-solving but fail at integrating big-picture human wisdom, unlike ancient or medieval cultures.
• Quote:

  "Marxists explicitly set out to destroy the unified culture... All the steps happen in reality." (Jordan Peterson/Rudyard Lynch, 07:49)

4. Is Economics or Culture the Root Problem? (14:49–22:24)

• Bilyeu presents his thesis:
  • Modern problems come from economic distortion (1913 fiat currency, money-printing, inflation), which bred inequality and social unrest.
  • When people sense unfairness (“Gini coefficient” as neurobiological trigger), revolution threatens—akin to the French Revolution.
• Lynch’s response: Both economic and cultural breakdown are foundational, but economic pain can mask and temporarily delay deeper cultural issues.
• Quotes:

  "Hundreds of years from now, for the population number, they'll have: line go up, line go down...Money could paper [problems] over." (Jordan Peterson/Rudyard Lynch, 17:34)
  "We are no longer transmitting via culture ideas that keep our society strong and stable...But your hypothesis is that the issues that we need to address, the more foundational issues, are ones of culture." (Interviewer, 21:35)

5. What Is Marxism Hoping to Achieve? (23:03–32:06)

• Marxist/social engineering attempts to divide rather than unify, focused on power, envy, and control.
• McGilchrist's Left/Right Brain Analogy:
  • The left brain (Marxism, modernity): Sees power, numbers, division, but not context.
  • The loss of religion is seen as the final blow, since faith anchors a society.
• Quotes:

  "Marxism is probably the most left hemisphere worldview. From their desire for just power and destruction, then it totally makes sense..." (Jordan Peterson/Rudyard Lynch, 25:43)
  "There is a tradition here and the Marxists fit into that. They're very deluded." (Jordan Peterson/Rudyard Lynch, 28:04)

6. Predicting Revolution: The Historical and Economic Cycle (32:06–39:27)

• Lynch, using patterns from global history, sees no path but to another major societal rupture—possibly a revolution or civil war.
• Economic instability and the breakdown of shared narrative are global, mirrored in crisis-prone countries worldwide.
• The Monetary Mechanism:
  • Whenever a currency is debased—be it the Roman denarius or the modern dollar—the social contract breaks, leading to civilizational stress.
• Book recommendation:
  • "The Great Wave" by David Hackett Fisher: Explores correlations between inflation and political crisis.
• Quotes:

  "Whenever a currency is debased...what you end up doing is the average person cannot save. And I think it's an immoral decision..." (Interviewer, 34:39)

7. "Mouse Utopia" and the Problem of Excess (39:27–41:09)

• Explains the famous experiment: When all needs are met, societies (of mice, and by implication, humans) implode—birth rates fall, violence grows, purpose disappears.
• Crises can come from both wealth and poverty, but wealth-induced crises can be more insidious.

8. The Modern Left: Fracture and Inauthenticity (41:09–46:43)

• The left is unraveling:
  • Older ("Boomer") left vs. younger ("Zoomer") left.
  • Younger leftists view their elders as capitalist oppressors and turn to social media influencers.
  • Tolerance for violence is rapidly increasing among the younger faction.
• The left's current predicament: Inauthenticity, insularity, and disconnect from human nature and practical aesthetics.
• Quotes:

  "They live in such an artificial world, they can't relate to other Americans, or know what they did wrong...No good new left wing art because they've sort of cut themselves off." (Jordan Peterson/Rudyard Lynch, 45:28)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Cultural Decline:

  "We're an insane aberration of a bunch of variables thrown together." (Jordan Peterson/Rudyard Lynch, 02:30)

• On the Power of Economic Instability:

  "We thought we could get rid of culture. The boomers are at the peak of that. Then the death of culture...Once you no longer have a culture...Now they're just so greedy that they're going to do it anyway." (Jordan Peterson/Rudyard Lynch, 18:26)

• On the Mental Illness Analogy:

  "Where's the line between malice and mental illness? You can make that a T-shirt, malice and mental illness..." (Jordan Peterson/Rudyard Lynch, 26:50)

• On Mouse Utopia:

  "If you create a situation where the mice have everything they need...they end up stopping having children, they end up killing each other. It's wild." (Interviewer, 38:46)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:32–05:01: Introduction to the "sickness" of modern culture and framing the problem.
• 05:01–07:49: Lack of shared myth, instability of American identity.
• 07:49–12:38: Marxist influence, "Maps of Meaning," the wisdom gap between ancient and modern thought.
• 14:49–22:24: Is the root problem economic or cultural? Analysis on both fronts.
• 23:03–32:06: Marxist motivation, left/right brain analogy, breakdown of wisdom transmission.
• 32:06–39:27: Predictions of revolution, historical cycles, the role of currency debasement.
• 39:27–41:09: Mouse utopia and the downside of material plenty.
• 41:09–46:43: The unraveling of the left, authenticity crisis, and loss of creativity.

---

Closing Tone

The conversation, while critical and often bleak in its conclusions, carries a sense of urgency and intellectual curiosity, encouraging listeners to interrogate received wisdom—not just about economics or politics, but about meaning, culture, and what holds a society together. Tom Bilyeu’s probing, hypothesis-driven approach meets Rudyard Lynch’s sweeping historical analysis, resulting in a candid, big-picture diagnosis of America in crisis.

---

To hear expanded insights and future-focused discussion, tune in for Part Two.

Transcript

[Jordan Peterson]

Time.

[Carvana Advertiser]

It's always vanishing. The commute, the errands, the work functions, the meetings. Selling your car. Unless you sell your car with Carvana. Get a real offer in minutes, get it picked up from your door. Get paid on the spot so fast you'll wonder what the catch is. There isn't one. We just respect you and your time. Oh, you're still here. Move along now. Enjoy your day. Sell your car today, Carvana.

[Jordan Peterson]

Pick up.

[Carvana Advertiser]

Fees MAY apply.

[Interviewer]

Rudyard lynch, welcome back.

[Jordan Peterson]

Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure.

[Interviewer]

It is amazing to have you. Part of the fun of sitting with you is the research that I do coming up to this. I think you're thinking a lot through a historical lens about what's going on right now in the foundational way of what is creating the moment that we're living in, which I think is a pretty distressed moment, maybe diseased would be a more accurate word of what I think is happening. You've said a quote, though, that I think is really powerful, which is there's no historic society that has looked like us that didn't have a revolution. And I want to get a sense of what is it that we look like.

[Jordan Peterson]

The best example I've gotten recently, since we last spoke is that Nietzsche had a term called the Age of the Last man, and he was writing in the 1880s, and he said that no one would truly understand his work until the year 2000.

[Interviewer]

Really?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Yeah. Whoa. And so the Age of the Last Men is in the 21st century. And it's a society where he said the west would be dying because it would push envy and crabs in the bucket and lack of ambition and conformity to a point where there wouldn't be space to live. People would not be procreating. The west would not be able to survive. It would be the most dangerous period in our history because it would be so complacent. And it's really interesting when he frames the Age of the Last Men, that all these things which we see as moral are actually profoundly immoral, because there are lots of things where not doing something is immoral. And we're a society where we're not doing a lot of things. And so I think we're a profoundly sick and endangered culture.

[Interviewer]

So what are the things that we're not doing that we should be doing?

[Jordan Peterson]

Traditional human societies. And I want to sort of set a frame for this where our cultural frame as a society is like 30 years. We can pull music from the 80s and we're still running out of 80s music. And we can't go back further. The furthest we can imagine sort of World War II, but at the same time, the scale of human history is thousands of years around the world. And if you're only looking at us, you're going to think we're less than we are. Less than 1% of the human race and every other society in history had vastly different social norms than us on a variety of things. So we've gotten rid of having a coherent culture, which is a really big deal that no one thinks about. When you pass on things through generations. The nation is a generational inheritance and we've thrown that away. And that includes the religion, the social structure, codes of politeness, a national identity, a source, a sense of honor. And there's a series of beliefs that practically every pre industrial society has that we don't. And we sort of. I mean, this is a huge topic I'd be happy to unpack, and we've got several hours. But we don't realize that this is not the end point of humanity. We're an insane aberration of a bunch of variables thrown together.

[Interviewer]

I think it's worth going in so that people can have landmarks as to what exactly is going on. So writing about what a shared myth is something I've been focused on recently. Getting people to understand that we all live inside of a frame of reference, that we tell ourselves a story, and that we can't even agree anymore on what America was founded on. Like whether we are a profoundly racist culture that is just about colonialism and slavery, or whether we have created the most prosperous nation that the world has ever known. Like we have both of those stories being told at the same time. And the fact that we don't have anything to share, I think has profoundly problematic consequences from a divide the nation up standpoint. So I'd love to hear what are some of the landmarks that, that you see? What are the things that like specifically are dissolving that you think are problematic? And the line of questioning started with what are we not doing? So what are the things that we're not doing that are problematic that have led to those things?

[Jordan Peterson]

You gave me a lot of interesting conversational threads and so I'll pull out a few of them, but I don't think I'll have to get to all of them. One of them is so people know Jordan Peterson for his pundit career, which has gotten quite popular. But I think Peterson's most important work is something no one noticed, which is maps of Meaning, fantastic book. Yeah, it was such a hard read. It took me two years, but I finally completed it. And it's so intelligent because he's looking at human neurology and biology and all these different things and saying, how come countries will die fighting over their religion? How come two countries are willing to go to nuclear war over something? How could anything be important enough for that? And the thesis is that humans have to sort of build frameworks of how we interact with the world or maps of meaning. And these exist inside our neurology where we have to interface with good, evil, higher, lower forms, a variety of things just to function as an actual human being. And that's very important. And another thread I want to pull at is there have been multiple myths about what America is over its history. The first one, which came about after The Revolution, early 19th century was America was a republic. Then with the Mid to late 19th century, America was an Anglo Saxon British nation. Early 20th century is America was a frontier culture built off sort of the shared challenge of entering a new land. Then the theory from World War II until the mid to late 20th century was America was a nation built off sort of diversity, mixing peoples together. But back then it was seen more as like Italians, Irish Jews with the local Anglo Saxon population. And then the theory in the 21st century has been that America is built off oppression and colonialism and racism. And for all of those questions, do you want me to unpack which of those I believe it'll be helpful to.

[Interviewer]

Understand what you believe, but with a specific eye towards why does it matter? Like, does it provide stability? Because when I look at your work, one of the things that I feel like you're trying to do is understand the different ingredients that have made this moment dangerous. And that gives me a sense of I can follow cause and effect in your thinking. And so I'd love to hear those narratives through the lens of, well, if you believe this, this is sort of the knock on effect. And you can see it in society today.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, life without identity is very difficult because difficulty has no meaning without identity and life has a lot of difficulty. So if you have no framework for who you are and what you stand for, you're kind of just going to float around and the world's going to feel empty. And I think that's a huge issue that the entire society has today. And every single attempt to build identity has been destroyed. And this is going to sound like it's a conservative talking point, but if this was a murder, we have the gun, the guy who did it claimed he committed the murder, you see the body and I don't know, you have witnesses and that's that the Marxists explicitly set out to destroy the unified culture. And that's what thinkers like Marx and Gramschi and, sorry, Gramsche, Marcuse, Yuri Besmanov, all these Marxist thinkers had a legitimate process of social disorientation which they planned out each step and we've seen all of the steps happen in reality. But the only reason that worked, because in a normal society you just brush that off, is that with the rate of change, with the Industrial revolution and we talked about mouse utopia last time, there wasn't that unified cultural anchoring.

[Interviewer]

Okay, so we've got explicit attempts on the part of the Marxist to go in to leverage essentially the rapid rate of change, to know that people are going to just try to make sense of that world. And while they're doing that, we're going to slip in all these confusing conflicting notions. So it's going to be hard for them, now I'm using my language, but it's going to be hard for them to even leverage a heuristic of just mapping to somebody else's thinking to say, oh, at least if I just follow them I have clarity. Now you're following somebody who's very eloquent, very erudite, and yet they intentionally have woven in these beliefs that are contradictory. And so now you are parroting something back, but you don't necessarily understand it.

[Jordan Peterson]

That speaks to a point I made in the video I just recently wrote and I'm about to record today. And so the issue we have is that modern thinkers are pulling people from last 200 years. They're very bad at big deal, big, big detail in context and sort of understanding how the world works. Take Marx as an example, who's had an enormous impact on the entire world today, even though people paper that over. But even right wing people are hugely impacted by Marx. I mean I am, I've done class analysis, I've looked at, I have my own sort of dialectic of history. Marx built the idea of sort of splitting history and society into different principles and jostling them together. But Marxism is built off all these assumptions, like if everyone is the same, which is not true, if history has a direction, which is not true, if the state can socially engineer people, which are not true, if there has to be a rebellion of the proletariat, which doesn't actually have a government system, which will result in utopia where you've added together 10 logical assumptions. And if you do that in coding, your code's going to crash. And so that's what happened with society. So last 200 years, we're really bad at understanding how things interconnect, where we can understand things that we can prove with science very easily. Sort of material shifts like how the weather occurs or genetics or whatever. But we're very bad at using sort of wisdom to figure out what it actually means. Meanwhile, the, the thinkers before then from like, I don't know, the ancient world, the medieval world, they often have pretty good sort of like total world human experience wisdom. It's why religions like Christianity still work today or why people still read Marcus Aurelius. But the way their wisdom works is often in such like a differently coded way than modern people that modern people don't really understand it or they just think of it as a silly story. When you look at these ancient myths, you have to compare what part of this was a silly story and what part of this is symbolic wisdom. And that's a very thin line. But so we're stuck with this gap where we can't find the ancients identifiable. But then the moderns don't really know what they're talking about in a lot of cases.

[Interviewer]

Taking a short break.

[Host/Announcer]

But there's more impact theory after.

[Interviewer]

Stay tuned.

[Host/Announcer]

Let's talk about the hidden cost of DIY when you're running a business. Most founders think they're saving money by piecing together their own financial system. But that DIY approach isn't saving you money, it's costing you money. Every hour you spend switching between systems is an hour not spent. Growing your business Found consolidates everything into one business banking platform, expense tracking, invoice management, tax preparation, virtual cards for different spending goals, all in one place. Open a found account today for free@f o u n d dot com. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank member fdic. Don't put this one off. Join thousands of small business owners who have streamlined their finances with foundation. This is a paid advertisement. Hang tight, because if you run a business, this could be the most important 60 seconds of your week. Here is the reality. By the time you hear about a supply chain issue, a tariff change or a cash flow crunch, it's already cost you. Revenue's gone, time's wasted and momentum is shattered. You cannot afford to run your company in the dark. That's why over 41,000 businesses trust NetSuite by Oracle, the AI powered business management suite built to give you real time visibility across everything. That matters. Accounting, inventory, HR, financials, all in one platform, one dashboard, one truth. NetSuite does not just help you track problems, it helps you see them coming. With AI driven forecasting, automation and global visibility, you get the power to pivot fast. Right now get your free business guide demystifying [e-mail] fast theory. The guide is free. Just go to netsuite.com theory again. Netsuite.com theory.

[Interviewer]

Thanks for staying tuned.

[Host/Announcer]

Now let's get back to it.

[Interviewer]

One thing that I want to see if I can get to understand is I have a really. It's overly simplified to be sure, but it is so directionally accurate that I repeat it often. And it's my hypothesis about why exactly society is broken right now. And then that predicts exactly what we would need to do to fix it. It goes like this. All of the problems that we're facing as a society right now are economically, they're born from bad economics. What we've done is in 1913, when we went onto a fiat currency by establishing the Federal bank, the Federal Reserve, we went into a system where we could print money. By printing money, we were able to steal from people through inflation. By being able to steal from them via inflation, we created hyper inequality, which, I mean, it took 100 years to manifest, but it's manifesting pretty horrifically right now. And so we had an American dream where it was like there is a truth to be faced that there's one asset class that humans understand intuitively and that's the house. The only way to protect yourself from the devastation that is inflation is an asset. And so now you have the situation. This is a literal statistic. 10% of Americans own 93% of the assets. And people wonder why, you know, we're getting just ever increasing inequality. Put that together with the fact that we have an evolutionary algorithm placed in our minds that makes us absolutely go ballistic when we see something as unfair. And so the Gini coefficient, which says basically if somebody looks around and sees somebody else has more than they have, they're going to go bananas if it gets too big. And so the Federal Reserve made it possible for wealth inequality to just spiral completely out of control once houses became unaffordable, then you get this hollowing out of the middle class. And so now the wealth inequality is going like French Revolution levels because of all those things. I think we actually are headed towards a French Revolution. But it's economic in nature. Everything else that's manifesting is simply because the economics broke. And if you Fix the economics. There's enough prosperity that people sort of fall back into comfortable patterns and they can overlook all the schizophrenia that something like a Marxist philosophy might bring. And so that like encapsulates my core thesis as to what is going wrong and therefore what we would have to do to fix it. As you pull all these threads of history, do you have a similar thesis that you can lay out? Is it tied to Marxism, Is it tied to leftists in general, or is it something else completely?

[Jordan Peterson]

So we're in a really awkward position because I have a joke that hundreds of years from now, for the population number, they'll have line go up, line go down. Where 20th century is line go up in demographics, 21st century is line go down. And we're at the point where line go up is starting to go into line go down. And this would be very psychologically disorienting for people because I think if you fixed the economic issue, you'd put a band aid in a lot of these underlying things. But I think we do have a pretty severe cultural issue, which is sort of working with the economic one. And we didn't have the cultural issue until recently because money could paper it over.

[Interviewer]

And can you define what the cultural issue is?

[Jordan Peterson]

So you look at the baby boomers. They got rid of a unified culture where it's the shared story we talk about. It's that people have lots of things people don't think matter, in fact do. Where one of the great things that living in Texas is there's sort of like a fluid degree of social trust that makes doing things easier. You can trust that. Like, let's say I, I forgot my, my debit card at a restaurant yesterday. I just went back and got it and they just noticed me like, oh, yeah, you, you, you can have it. We know who you are. That's possible in certain cultures, but then not in others. Or if like you have an employee and you, if it's a high trust society, you don't have to watch over them every second. And I'm if you don't have to micromanage or always check in where culture affects absolutely everything. But what happened was that we had centuries of increasing wealth where we thought we could get rid of culture. The boomers are at the peak of that. Then the death of culture. Also chicken and egg, a lot of variables. But once you no longer have a culture with things like the federal government's responsible to the public, you shouldn't print infinite money because that's bad form and it's going to hurt people. Now they're just so greedy that they're going to do it anyway.

[Interviewer]

So would it be wise to define culture as the way you mean it? Informal rules that are passed on from parent to child, person to person, without necessarily being documented? Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

So anthropologically, culture is sort of a net sum of how a society operates. It includes the government system is dependent on culture. The religion is the manners, the accent, how child rearing occurs, how they cook. The culture is just the sum total of the human interactions. And what happened is that modernity had lots of implicit issues which we used money to paper over. And then once most people slid into misery, money didn't do that anymore. I mean, as an example, we don't have. We have lots of very sort of sloppy social rules in our culture. Equality is one. Equality is just not an accurate depiction of reality. And you can believe in it as long as your society is wealthy enough that you don't deal with these conflicts. But then once you get to a place where one person gets to make their bills and the other person doesn't, all the pleasant notions sort of become very costly. For example, globalization worked in a world where there were. The pie was growing for everyone. But in a world where that isn't true, you then realize other countries aren't on your side. Does that make sense?

[Interviewer]

Where 100%. Okay, so we are no longer transmitting via culture ideas that keep our society strong and stable. When that happens, at the same time that the economic pie begins to shrink, suddenly you see all of the issues. But your hypothesis is that the issues that we need to address, the more foundational issues, are ones of culture.

[Jordan Peterson]

No, I think both are foundational. Economic is first because people are really struggling economically. And you need to fix that in order to just have a functioning society. Because so many people are just barely paying bills and living really miserable lives that if you don't fix that variable, that variable is going to tear everything else down.

[Interviewer]

Okay, so this moment brought to you by economics problem number one. And then culture begins to be problem number two. Now, if we start getting specific about culture, you were talking in the beginning about Marx, that Marx has had a huge influence on the right and the left, whether they want to acknowledge it or not. So far, what you've put forward about Marxism is it offers these conflicting ideas with the expressed intent of destroying culture. What I want to know, assuming that I've gotten all that correct, what is Marxism hoping to accomplish by destroying culture? And why is it so influential?

[Jordan Peterson]

Those who lack wisdom lack wisdom. You don't know what you don't know. And a lot of people don't know a lot. In fact, we all don't. In fact, we're all infinitely weighed down by the things we don't know. And Marxists have a tendency to sort of see half truths. I could talk about the neurology of that because there is a neurological scientific argument. But I've read most of the Marxist thinkers who did this, Yuri Besmanov, Saul Alinsky, Gramscki, and none of them see the world or society as a living thing. So when you look at Marxist economics, they're like, this is the pie. We can just divide up the pie. What they don't see is, is that this pie was in at least a fairly significant portion brought to you by the corporations and the rich people and the kulaks that you want to kill. So if you kill the revolution, if you kill off the most sort of economically productive people, this isn't your pie. This is your pie. And Marxists really have an issue with that. Where Yuri Bezmanov. And this just shows how deep and insidious it was. The Soviets literally had a department built around this where they had set procedures. And there's a certain degree of like kind of funny horror about it where you can watch again, you can read the stuff. You can, you can read Gramschi wrote for free online rules for radicals you probably get at the library, if they still exist. Or I mean, Yuri Besmanov has videos on YouTube you can watch. And the Soviets came to the conclusion, if we kill the religion, we can kill the rest of the culture. And they had like a, I can go through each step of the process, but they had a multi step process on how to kill a society. And they'll literally say stuff like, make sure neighbors don't trust each other, make sure parents don't trust their children, put a bureaucrat into everything. And then the end point they came to was that the functioning of a healthy society was dependent on religion. But the Soviet Union itself was an atheist state. And so Yuri Besmanov was studying India because he was supposed to destroy Indian society. And he thought, wait, I actually like Hinduism, I'm going to leave for America. And so it's a very sort of. When you see half of the equation, it makes sense.

[Interviewer]

When you see half of the equation of what destroying the society makes sense. So the only way that I can make what you're saying make sense is if they are driven by envy and a desire for control.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's true. The argument I'm making is from Ian McGilchrist's the Master and His Emissary, which is a book on neurobiology. And the thesis he has is there's two halves of the brain, the left and the right. And the thing, the parallel that I love so much from the book or the example is the left hemisphere can only draw half of an image. If there's a human, it can only draw half of it. And it can only see the world through money and power and measurable things. And the right hemisphere can see the world through context, flowing over time, immeasurable variables, all these different things. And modern ideologies really wire people to the left hemisphere. Marxism is probably the most left hemisphere worldview. Where from their desire for just power and destruction, then it totally makes sense because they're not thinking of all the stuff it took to build that world. They just want to take from it.

[Interviewer]

That honestly sounds like mental illness. Are you saying that that is mental illness?

[Jordan Peterson]

I mean, where's the line between malice and mental illness? You can make that a T shirt, malice and mental illness, but.

[Interviewer]

Well, I can actually answer that. So I'll be interested to see if they still overlap for you, if they're separate. So the difference between malice and mental illness for me is if you're mentally ill, you are no longer mapped to what is real, whereas you can have malice and still be mapped to what is. So Genghis Khan had malice, but he was mapped to what is real. And so as much as I would not have wanted to live anywhere near Genghis Khan, he did give us a Silk Road, he did unify things. He was very shrewd at leading, conquering all of that. So he clearly understood cause and effect quite deeply, but he had a lot of malice. Then you take somebody who's mentally ill and they may be legitimately confused about how the world works. They may hear voices, they may be unable to process certain data points. And so to your point, they literally can't see or experience a fundamental piece of what's actually happening and therefore are always, even if they have good intentions, they're always going to misplay the world because they are blinded to some of it, or they hear things that aren't there.

[Jordan Peterson]

Jordan Peterson has this four sided sort of matrix of you deal with a different difficult situation. You can either fall to hedonism, nihilism, totalitarianism, or rise to heroism. And the people closest to Marxists in history are religious fanatics. You could make a pretty good argument that Marxism is a descendant of sort of like radical Christian sects in the medieval or early modern or ancient world, where like at Munster in Germany, radical Protestants seized control of a city, went crazy, started practicing communism, forced sexual communism. They had multiple leaders who would murder each other, claiming to be prophets. And so there is this tradition here and the Marxists fit into that. And they're very deluded. I mean, that's just kind of obvious if you take off the ideological goggles and modernity creates lots of mental illnesses, though. I read this book from World War the World War I era, where he was going through all of these different things. It's interesting to see an author even a century ago state it because, like, when I was growing up, lots of moms were scared to let their kids play outside or they'd walk their kids several blocks to school until the end of high school. And that's not something that we would process as mental illness in our society. But you look at that and you think you have an anxiety issue.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I was gonna say I would, but you're reasonable.

[Jordan Peterson]

Most are.

[Interviewer]

As a feral Gen Xer, I guess we definitely see the world very differently. O I want to keep putting these pieces together. So we have the starting. My goal is to understand what's wrong with society because I for one find it incredibly meaningful in my life to try to help people right the ship. So we've got Culture transmits these incredibly useful ideas. Culture has ceased to transmit these incredibly useful ideas partly because there is. Modernity is empty, is helping people form certain types of mental illness. The one that you focused on so far, and I obviously first called it the mental illness. Don't mean to put words into your mouth, but Marxism, where what's happening is they're only seeing half the picture because they are so left brain dominant using McGilchrist's breakdown of that. And so they are obsessed with envy, power, money. And so their worldview naturally springs forward from that. They exacerbate the death of culture itself by intentionally and documenting it, shockingly enough, intentionally going in and creating an ideology that is confusing. Leverage the rate of change happening at the Industrial Revolution to take advantage of the fact that people would be more or less distracted and having a hard time categorizing things as a way to slip that in. And so now you accelerate the death of these traditional things that were being passed on that were in some ways holding society together by transmitting these ideas. Now, this is now me totally leaping forward with the prediction that your statements have made so far would be that now given the rapid state of change due to technology and Especially AI. We're going to go through another revolution of sorts. Third industrial revolution, fourth industrial whatever you're going to clock it as. But AI is going to usher in a rate of change that's absolutely unparalleled. And already seeing people like Mamdani rise up and see how much energy is going over to that, that seems to fit in with what you're predicting. Especially given that you said economics is the most foundational.

[Jordan Peterson]

You did a very good job articulating the chain of logic there. Besides that, to speak to your point, I agree with that. I had a failed prediction that America, that we'd have a thousand politically motivated deaths by last April. That turned out to be incorrect. But in the grand scheme of things, I still think we're going to have a revolution or a civil war. I just don't think there's any sort of causality here besides that.

[Interviewer]

You don't think there's any causality between what we've been talking about in the civil war?

[Jordan Peterson]

No, I said that incorrectly. What I meant to say is this is where we are. There's no trajectory where we don't have one.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Where this chain of causality doesn't continue. And that's deeply concerning. But I don't want to lie to you, it's interesting as well to see. To see it just manifest in both the right and the left and to see it also around the entire world where I think our foreign news is really bad now. I don't think Americans know what go on in the rest of the world. But if you look at Germany or France or Britain or South Africa or Brazil or South Korea or China or Malaysia, I have hobbies where I watch documentaries from different countries or look at travel guides. Different countries in all the issues we have in America are occurring in all of those countries. It's really remarkable to see how unstable so many global governments are.

[Interviewer]

Do you see connective tissue?

[Jordan Peterson]

Of course, it's. I mean, we spoke about this last time on the podcast. There's various historic cycles that predict that the world goes through these sort of cyclical patterns where the mid 17th century, nearly every country on Earth was having a civil war and an external war, often with plague thrown in. Same thing as the mid 14th century. So these things happen. Or like the Roman Empire fell at the same. The Roman Empire's crisis of the third century occurred at the same time as the fall of the Han Dynasty. So these global trends are sort of synced up. And I predicted that it would be a global crisis a few Years ago. Because these trends are. I mean, it's the same causal variables in each region of the world.

[Interviewer]

Okay, so I'll give you the breakdown that I think is happening right now. I'll tell you why I think that it's connected to the other places. Let me know if you see something I don't. To me, this is purely about the economy. And whenever a currency is debased, whether the Roman denarius and you're just chipping away at the silver, or whether the US dollar and your money printing ad infinitum, what you end up doing is the average person cannot save. And I think it's an immoral decision that people make because the people that are doing it know the average person doesn't understand investing. They don't understand how to escape this. And it puts them into a mechanistic situation where they will get poorer over time. And so anytime that you put people in a position where they cannot save their way to success, they cannot pass their wealth onto their children, you break a unspoken promise that, hey, work hard, be disciplined, don't eat the marshmallow now, put it off till tomorrow. All the things that basically religions have been telling us forever, this is how you win in this survival crafting game that we call life. And it's like once you mess with the underlying economics and you can no longer go mine the. Or find the gold, whatever, and build your stable society, pass things on, and feel like you have been justly rewarded for your efforts, you stop putting forward effort. And once you stop putting forward effort, then things begin to break back down. And so if you have, like we do right now, where people are like, oh, Tom, what are you talking about? It's no big deal that we're money printing. All the countries are money printing. Yes, motherfucker. And that's why we have problems in all the countries, because you are breaking the physics of the way that this game works. And the second you break the physics, like, people are not being honest about the fact that we have algorithms that run in our brain and they are evolutionarily placed. And when you build the game, you have to build the game around the. The algorithms that are going to run in the human mind. And so we get into these delusional periods largely on the back of success. And I would be very interested to see if most of these repeating cycles happen just on the back of big debt. And big debt is the answer to, hey, things are going great, print a little bit more money, and then you just get caught in this needing to Print to keep it going. All of your economy becomes a Ponzi scheme. And then finally it hits a tipping point.

[Host/Announcer]

It breaks.

[Interviewer]

And to your point, line go up turns into line go down. And that's why you're going to see this stuff happening in a whole bunch of places all at the same time. Because if you are in a globally connected world, in the way that we are now, in the way that we were in the moments that you're talking about, once that debt gets out of control, like it's going to spread like.

[Host/Announcer]

Wildfire, we're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action or.

[Jordan Peterson]

The best history of economics books I've ever read is the Great Wave by David Hackett Fisher. You should read it. It's like 100 pages and it goes through correlating the history of inflation over Western history with the history of political crises. It's really good and it says exactly what you say. Where? Over these rhythmic periods of political crises in western and the Turchin data says global history. Inflation's correlated with political disturbances. And you don't see this kind of inflation not have political issues. We talked about last time, French Revolution, 30 years, war, Black Death. I would connect the cultural issue with mouse utopia. I think the political and revolutionary, whatever crisis is of economic origin. I think mouse utopias of cultural origin.

[Interviewer]

Okay, so mouse utopia speedrun for people that don't know it. If you create a situation where the mice have everything they need, plenty of space, plenty of food, they end up imploding, they end up stopping having children, they end up killing each other. It's wild. Do you like. If you had to shorthand that, would it be something like this? When there is no adversity that you have to face, you turn inward. When you turn inward and become self obsessed, that you're no longer thinking about the group, what's good for the group. You're no longer disciplining yourself. You're no longer like reining in our worse impulses.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. What you said earlier is true that a lot of these previous cycles, because empires come and go. There have been lots of times the world has ended over history. It's just the world was the world they knew. And that's a lot of cases. You can either be hurt by wealth or you can be hurt by poverty. Crises of wealth are. I mean the ones we spoke of before where. Because inflation is an overabundance of wealth, where it stops Having value. Crises of poverty are situations like in Africa in the 19th century, where you have mass famine and migration, or the Huns, the barbarians, coming out of the grasslands, because they need to conquer outwards. As I like to say, you're going to die anyway. So it's better to die rich than poor, where you're going to have problems no matter what you do, but it's better to have more interesting problems. And that's kind of what's happening here.

[Interviewer]

Things have been too good for too long. Yeah, okay. Yes, I very much agree with that. My whole thing is I think some people need to be chased by a lion. And by that, I mean, really, we all need to be chased by a lion. There needs to be some adversity. Adversity is the thing that's going to keep us disciplined, it's going to keep us focused, it's going to keep us cooperating. All the things that as a species, we were meant to do. Okay, so help me understand how this ties specifically to the left. You did a video called WTF is going on with the left? What is happening? What do you see there? Why was that worth a video? And why is it one of your highest performing videos?

[Jordan Peterson]

It's one of the highest performing videos because it's politics content. And politics content is always the one that does best. Because, and I get it, it's perfectly reasonable to care more about the things that affect your daily life than what's interesting.

[Interviewer]

Though I didn't take that video to be overtly political. It certainly is talking about a political class, but you weren't talking about policy or anything like that. You were talking about a mindset. It felt more culturally to me. Did that one feel overtly political to you?

[Jordan Peterson]

The reason I say political is that with when I make these videos with like Yumet Marek and my editor and whatever, I subdivide the videos by subtopic. So I'll have the political subtopic, all of the anthropology subtopic. I'll have the history one. So I jump between them. So in my internal mental, I put all modern things in the political category. Got it? So I put everything like Incel Revolution or that video or Will America have a Civil War in the political box. So that's why I say it. You could move the categories around and I wouldn't care much. But the thing with the left is they're in a weird place. One of the things people don't notice is that the different sub coalitions of the left are fraying. Where, for example, the TikTok viewers don't trust the NBC, CNN viewers, where there's been a generational rift on the left, where the Zoomer left really does not like the Boomer left because they see the Boomer left as the capitalist oppressors. So they've stopped listening to their paymasters at DNC and then instead they follow accounts on TikTok and Instagram that have no factual basis. So they are the people who are turning up the throttle for violence. And it seems nearly every day, at least in my feedback, leftists are calling for violence in one form or another. And I think the NBC, CNN left don't really know what to do with this because on top of it, they've built out their ideology and coalition in a certain way that they can't back down. They fired all the reasonable people like a decade ago. If you've made it this far into the left, you cannot be reasonable. They've removed any way they change their ideology, but the American people have sort of seen through it enough and they've lost all of their flexibility. Look at the presidential candidates. I don't think anyone who the left is pushing as leadership, either for that or for a variety of things. They. They're so lacking because the left has pushed this culture of inauthenticity for so long. That's their core issue.

[Interviewer]

So if their core issue is pushing an agenda of inauthenticity, would becoming authentic solve the problem like this? Feels, I don't know how to make that.

[Jordan Peterson]

As I said that I thought I should take that back. They have lots of core issues. I shouldn't say that they have won. They have several that are eating them alive.

[Interviewer]

But I mean, doesn't this really go back to. If you were right in the beginning that this is a Marxist thing? That was the first thing you went to when I asked my first question and then I said, okay, this all makes sense if and only if that group is driven by envy and a desire for control and you added power and money to the equation. It's like, okay, yes, that all makes sense to me. When I look at the far left, there are plenty of people that I wouldn't put into this box that would self identify as left. But when I look at the far left, they don't make sense to me until I clock envy. Once I clock envy and control, like, oh, they just want to be in control. And they want to be in control in a. In a like, spiteful way of. I want to tear this down, I want to stop people. They don't have a clear vision of what they want to build. It's like anti against movement instead of a four or a building. If you were saying that was a problem, I'd be like, ah, yes, that maps to what I see in the world. Does that seem accurate or is that a misread from where you're at?

[Jordan Peterson]

So the reason I said inauthenticity is I was thinking, what's the core issue with the left changing strategy? And the issue is they live in such an artificial world, they can't relate to other Americans or know what they did wrong. They've made.

[Interviewer]

They're in an artificial world because they're telling each other a story about what's happening that isn't accurate because their way.

[Jordan Peterson]

Of life is in direct opposition to what humans would normally do. Where if you're in an environment where men have certain biological urges, women have other certain biological urges, if you're in a society which doesn't let you think about them, you're going to constantly be feeling a sort of internal jostling between your social performance or your internal self or in the left, they have enormous amounts of aggression and hatred, but they say that hatred is the worst possible trait. So on top of that, they've cut out any sort of new ideas or even aesthetics. There's no good new left wing art because they've sort of cut themselves off from everything. That's not ideology. So at this point, they're just so deep into the cult and the cult has so much programming that they can't program themselves out of the culture.

[Host/Announcer]

All right, that's it for part one. Make sure that you come back for part two. As we get into even more insights into how we can use this moment to our advantage. I'll see you there. Most healthy habits are hard. Meal prep takes hours. Gym routines get derailed all the time. Complicated supplement regimens fall apart, often within weeks. But AG1 Next Gen is different. AG1 NextGen delivers what your body actually needs. 75 plus vitamins and minerals. 5 clinically studied probiotic strains, plus prebiotics and superfoods. It replaces your multivitamin probiotics and more in one simple daily drink. AG1 next gen comes in three new flavors. Tropical citrus and berry. All plant based flavoring with zero added sugar, zero artificial sweeteners, zero erythritol. Every flavor maintains NSF certification for sport. So you know you're getting the strictest quality standards. Subscribe today to try the next gen of AG1 and if you use my link, you'll also get a free bottle of AG D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and five of the upgraded travel packs. With your first order, click the link in the show notes or just head to drink ag1.comimpact to get started again. That's drinkag1.com impact.