## Summary - **Christian values in a changing world.** [0:00](https://otter.ai/u/A7sq5oC5zUoZEeAWV_SkHsg1s28?tab=summary&t=1s) - Aaron Wren discusses how Christianity has become increasingly marginalized in the US, with a shift towards a more secular society. - Auron MacIntyre discusses new founding Talent Network, connecting high-trust candidates with aligned companies. - **The decline of Christianity in America.** [2:59](https://otter.ai/u/A7sq5oC5zUoZEeAWV_SkHsg1s28?tab=summary&t=179s) - Speaker 3 explains the decline of Christianity in America, dividing it into 3 phases: positive (1964-1994), neutral (1994-2014), and negative (2014-present). - In the negative phase (2014-present), Christianity is viewed negatively by official elite culture, and Christian moral norms are repudiated, leading to a new public moral order. - **Decline of Christian culture and its impact on society.** [5:41](https://otter.ai/u/A7sq5oC5zUoZEeAWV_SkHsg1s28?tab=summary&t=342s) - Auron MacIntyre questions the value of a general Christian culture, arguing that it can lead to hypocrisy and a loss of individual faith. - Speaker 3 suggests that while there was hypocrisy in the old Christian normative society, it was also high functioning and provided cultural categories for understanding the gospel. - Speaker 3 argues that Christianity provided a moral language and tools for justice, but its influence has waned in recent years. - Speaker 3 believes that the decline of Christian values has led to a more exploitative and parasitic society, with negative consequences such as lower trust and declining life expectancy. - **American identity and political scandals.** [10:40](https://otter.ai/u/A7sq5oC5zUoZEeAWV_SkHsg1s28?tab=summary&t=640s) - Analyst notes shift in public reaction to political sex scandals over time. - MacIntyre argues US identity crisis stems from lack of shared moral language due to unspooling of Protestant Christian consensus. - Eric Kaufman argues that the US expanded its identity to include immigrants like JFK's family, who assimilated into the American pattern of life in exchange for legitimacy. - **Evangelical Identity in Changing America.** [16:12](https://otter.ai/u/A7sq5oC5zUoZEeAWV_SkHsg1s28?tab=summary&t=973s) - Speaker 3 identifies three strategies undertaken by evangelicals: culture war, secret sensitivity, and cultural engagement. - The religious right's culture war strategy, initiated by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in the late 1970s, was unsuccessful in stopping the tide of demographic change in the US. - Bill Hybels and Rick Warren pioneered the nondenominational suburban mega church model in the 1970s and 1990s, respectively, by engaging with their communities and adapting to changing cultural norms. - Tim Keller and others developed the cultural engagement strategy in the 1990s, which involved having good-faith conversations with people from different backgrounds and perspectives, rather than fighting cultural battles. - **Elite culture and its shift in America.** [21:49](https://otter.ai/u/A7sq5oC5zUoZEeAWV_SkHsg1s28?tab=summary&t=1310s) - Auron MacIntyre discusses the decline of the Protestant elite and the rise of new elites, citing the importance of signaling one's belonging to the elite through cultural conformity. - New Founding's venture fund invests in companies that align with the vision of a better future, with a focus on elite theory and the circulation of elites. - Expert suggests collapse of old Wasp establishment in 1960s led to shift in US leadership culture. - Speaker 3 discusses the decline of the American establishment and its negative effects on culture, including the lack of moral or conduct-based standards among elites. - Speaker 3 notes the absence of Protestants on the Supreme Court and suggests that there should be a code of conduct and standard of behavior that exists in society. - **Societal changes and the rise of managerialism.** [28:39](https://otter.ai/u/A7sq5oC5zUoZEeAWV_SkHsg1s28?tab=summary&t=1719s) - MacIntyre argues that the shift to an ideological society led to the hollowing out of social bonds and the rise of the managerial class. - Managerialism has liquidated obstacles to unchecked rule, including the family and intermediary institutions. - **The role of Christianity in a declining society.** [31:47](https://otter.ai/u/A7sq5oC5zUoZEeAWV_SkHsg1s28?tab=summary&t=1907s) - Auron MacIntyre and Speaker 3 discuss the challenges of making Christianity relevant in a rapidly changing cultural landscape. - They argue that while strategies like "seeker sensitive" churches may attract people in the short term, they ultimately wear down the ability of Christianity to attract and retain followers. - Speaker 3 argues that as Christianity declines in America, it creates new opportunities for churches to stand out and set a higher bar for meaningful distinctiveness. - Speaker 3 suggests that churches should reject vices like porn, gambling, and profanity to create a culture that is distinct from society at large. - Speaker 3 believes that low-trust societies will require communities of actual trust to draw on, and that this will be a theme even apart from religion. - **Christianity and the role of institutions in society.** [38:15](https://otter.ai/u/A7sq5oC5zUoZEeAWV_SkHsg1s28?tab=summary&t=2296s) - Auron MacIntyre: People are searching for communities to rely on as trust in institutions declines. - Speaker 3: Decline in military enlistment is a serious issue for the system, as people check out and lose trust in the system. - Auron MacIntyre questions the effectiveness of trying to save institutions that have been corrupted by secularism and suggests creating new forms of community that model the kingdom of God. - Speaker 3 argues that Paul's teachings in the New Testament prioritize the needs of the church and its members, rather than trying to prop up external institutions. - **Shifting religious identity in America.** [43:58](https://otter.ai/u/A7sq5oC5zUoZEeAWV_SkHsg1s28?tab=summary&t=2638s) - Auron MacIntyre and Unknown Speaker discuss the challenges of shifting from a majority to a minority position in society, particularly for those invested in Boomer eschatology. - Speaker 3 highlights the decline of Protestant Christians as a demographic majority in America, with a shift towards a more pluralistic society. - Speaker 3 suggests that early 20th century Catholicism can serve as a model for Protestant Christians in America, who must create a distinct identity that prioritizes their religious values over their American citizenship. - Speaker 3 criticizes progressive evangelicals for not taking their own rhetoric about prioritizing Christian identity seriously, leading to a lack of distinctiveness and a blurring of lines between American citizenship and evangelical identity. - **Reenchantment and new spirituality in a post-modern world.** [48:52](https://otter.ai/u/A7sq5oC5zUoZEeAWV_SkHsg1s28?tab=summary&t=2932s) - Auron MacIntyre and Speaker 3 discuss the end of an unenchanted world and the rise of reenchantment, particularly in the context of Christianity. - They agree that younger generations, such as Gen Z and Gen X, will not have the same legacy baggage of culture wars as older generations, which could impact how Christianity is approached and justified in the future. - Speaker 3 discusses the rise of new age spirituality and its alignment with the search for reinstatement, as seen in the popularity of Jordan Peterson and the growing interest in Eastern Orthodox faith. - Speaker 3 argues that a different approach to evangelism and mission, rooted in a more experiential and less rationalistic understanding of faith, may be more compelling to people in today's world. - **Vice, gambling, and economic structures.** [55:25](https://otter.ai/u/A7sq5oC5zUoZEeAWV_SkHsg1s28?tab=summary&t=3326s) - Aaron Wren discusses his book "Life in the Negative World" and encourages viewers to sign up for his newsletter. - Aaron and Auron MacIntyre discuss the popularity of gambling and the government's involvement in legalizing it. - Speaker 3 argues that the profit-driven nature of modern society is leading to exploitation and moral damage, and that alternative economic structures are needed to address these issues. - Auron MacIntyre agrees that scale is the enemy of alternative economic structures, and that reducing the size of political units may be necessary to escape the current system's problems. - Speaker 3 argues that AI has the potential to change the elite leadership structure of society by eliminating the managerial class, but the managerial class will likely resist this change. - Speaker 3 believes that material forces, not just ideas, are crucial in shaping society and that conservative thinking neglects the importance of material conditions. - **Political ideologies and their evolution.** [1:02:41](https://otter.ai/u/A7sq5oC5zUoZEeAWV_SkHsg1s28?tab=summary&t=3762s) - Auron MacIntyre discusses the Jesus revolution and its connection to contemporary Christian music, as well as the concept of managerialism and its relationship to fascism, communism, and liberal democracy. - Auron MacIntyre and Speaker 3 discuss the relevance of communism and fascism in today's society, with MacIntyre arguing that these ideologies are no longer applicable due to their lack of popularity and the changing nature of society. - Speaker 3 counters by arguing that while these ideologies may not be as prevalent as they once were, there is still hope for change and improvement in the system through institutional refreshes and redefinitions of what America means. - **American politics, society, and religion.** [1:07:28](https://otter.ai/u/A7sq5oC5zUoZEeAWV_SkHsg1s28?tab=summary&t=4048s) - Speaker 3 expresses optimism that increasing numbers of people across the political spectrum recognize the need for substantive changes in the US, such as addressing issues related to competition with China and degradation of human capital. - Speaker Auron MacIntyre agrees that the story of America has been the centralization of power, and believes that the current structure will continue until people understand the wider problems and divest from it. - Speaker 3 discusses the need for the church to adapt to the challenges of the 21st century, citing issues with gender and masculinity. - Speaker 3 believes the church is irrelevant to the questions people are asking about their lives, and cites examples of secular influencers drawing in men with healthy and productive messages. ## Transcript [[Auron MacIntyre]] 0:30 Everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon, I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy. So it's pretty impossible not to notice that the culture has gotten very hostile to Christianity. We recently had someone get on MSNBC and explain that [[Christian Nationalism]] was the idea that your rights would come from God and not say, I don't know, the Congress or the Supreme Court. That's a vast change from the way most people understood American values our entire life. I have a guest today who's written a great book about negative world, the kind of world that we find ourselves in when it comes to Christian values. His name is Aaron Wren. Aaron, thank you for joining me. [[Aaron Renn]] 1:11 Thanks for having me on. Auron MacIntyre 1:13 Absolutely. You've got this fascinating essay that you kind of turned into a larger book about the three worlds that have kind of come when it when we're talking about evangelical Christianity and the way that it is framed the the world that we now live in today, I want to dive into the book that you expanded out from that essay. But before we do, guys, let me tell you about your absolute moral duty to hire based people over with new founding. Hey, guys, I need to tell you about today's sponsor new founding talent. Look, we all know that the job market is a disaster right now based people can't find good companies to work for and good companies can't find anybody to get the job done. The competency crisis is very, very real. So how do we get these two incredibly important groups together, we need organizations like new founding, new founding is created a network of high excellence professionals who are seeking to join grounded American businesses. These are individuals often in elite organizations who are ready for a team and a mission that supports their values instead of working against them. Aligned companies are already using this network to hire high trust exceptional individuals who can match the culture and mission of their teams. So if you're looking for better employees, to build a better world, you need to go ahead and apply for access to the new founding Talent Network at New [founding.com](founding.com) backslash talent, you'll get connected with candidates who will build your business. That's new [founding.com](founding.com) backslash talent, check it out today. Alright, So Aaron, I know that this book began life as an essay for first things where you talked about kind of the three worlds framework for people who are unfamiliar. Could you explain the three worlds framework? Sure, Speaker 2 2:58 unlike in Europe, America never had a state church. But for most of our history, we did have a sort of softly institutionalized generic Protestantism as our default national religion. So as recently as the 1950s, about half of all adults attended church every Sunday, that was actually the high watermark of church attendance in America, we had prayer and Bible reading in public schools, we were adding in God, we trust our money under God to the Pledge of Allegiance. And so this was really a Christian sort of normative society. Although we didn't have an official established church or anything of that nature, this old consensus began to unravel in the 1960s. And I divide this period of sort of the decline of Christianity in America from 1964 to the present into three phases are worlds that I call the positive world, the neutral world and the negative world. So the positive world is from 1964 to 1994. And I want to be clear, this is a period of decline for Christianity, all is not going well for Christianity in America at that time, church attendance is down a lot, for example. And yet Christianity is still basically viewed positively by official elite culture, to be known as a good church going man makes you seem like an upstanding member of society. Christian moral norms are still the basic moral norms of society, and to violate them can get you into trouble. About 1994, we hit a tipping point and under what I call the neutral world, which lasted from 1994 to 2014, in which Christianity isn't seen positively anymore, but it's not really seen negatively either. It's just one more lifestyle choice among many, in a sort of pluralistic public square. And Christian morality has a sort of residual effect in society. But then in 2014, we hit a second tipping point and enter what I call the negative world where for the first time in the 400 year history of America, official elite culture and Now of use Christianity negatively, or certainly at least skeptically, we can dive into that if you want to be known as a Bible, believing Christian doesn't help you get a job in the elite sectors of the economy quite the opposite. In fact, Christian moral system is now expressly repudiated, and in many ways, is now viewed as the leading threat to the new public moral order. Again, all of that rhetoric around Christian nationalism, I think illustrates the way it is seen to some people. And this is obviously again, unprecedented in the history of America, and very dislocating to many American Christians, especially evangelicals. Yeah, I Auron MacIntyre 5:41 think it's really critical that you make it clear that even in the positive world when you start out with that, with that, with that title, a lot of people assume Okay, well, this is great. That's actually the beginning of decline, or it's a period of decline. For the church, as you pointed out, a lot of people have debated whether it's more valuable to have a general Christian culture, or to have a more specific kind of energized church in the individual sense or in the in, you know, in each one of these churches. And I wonder what you think about that, because I think for a lot of people who look at what happened, the slide there, they might say, well, maybe more people are going to church or less people are going to church. But is there really any value in a general Christian culture? And I just wonder what you think about that, because as we're looking at the story in the story of the client, it feels like that story is not just a loss of individual faith, but it's the loss of a wider culture, being able to animate and hold itself to a particular standard. Speaker 2 6:42 I think so there are a number of people who say good riddance to the old sort of Christian normative society, in their view, it's basically just a breeding ground for hypocrisy. And it's certainly fair to say that a lot of people who went to church weren't especially sincere in their faith, when Christianity is the thing to do, it's, it's what's expected, then people do it, because it's what is expected. Just like a lot of people in corporate America, you know, you know, put the BLM square up or whatever, regardless of what they really think of it, because that's what people do today. So certainly, there was hypocrisy, in that sense, although I don't think anyone ever pretended that everyone who attended church was was a genuine convert. At the same time, you know, that society was also extraordinarily high functioning in a lot of ways. You know, it was really the underpinning of a lot of the Western ideas, you know, are somewhat out workings of Christianity, it provided all the cultural categories in which people can understand the gospel, if preached for them. And even in the cases where there were incredible and legitimate in justices that existed in society. And certainly we had them throughout our history, Christianity also provided the tools that could be used to critique that, you know, for example, the, the fact that much of the the animating power of the civil rights movement was by black ministers, who made specifically theological arguments about why segregation was wrong. Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail, I believe it's addressed to my fellow clergyman, and it's very much written in a sort of theological register. And so it provided a sort of common moral language, you know, a common set of values, and also a lot of, you know, a lot of great tools for, you know, the pursuit of justice. And so I think we should be sorry to see it go in many ways. And I think there's a great irony, when you look at some but one, when you look, for example, at the election of Donald Trump, the very people who are professed to be the most horrified about Donald Trump, are the very people who tore down all the old standards of what what society should be. I mean, I think it's fair to say, right, in 1950s, America, someone like Donald Trump was probably not gonna get like Brexit, elected president, his candidacy is only viable in a negative world. And, and of course, you know, we see all the negatives that come with things like the fact that everything that the Christian society used to say, we're not going to do that it's a vise, or it's dangerous to certain people, we need to protect people with low impulse control, etc. And now it's gone. So everything used to have to go to the mob to get is now a fully legitimized multibillion dollar business. A gambling is one of my favorite examples. You used to have to go to Las Vegas to gamble. Well, now you just pull out your phone, where, you know, you know, they've uh, leagues poor Pete Rose, I mean, banned for life from baseball, for bedding, and now the leagues themselves, and all their leading stars are Like, knee deep in gambling and I think it's really the case that kind of clean cut All American Boys like Peyton and Eli Manning feel completely comfortable getting into the gambling pitch business tells you, you know, everything you need to know about how society has changed. And of course, it's gonna have horrible damage in our society as his drug legalization as has the elimination of all the usury laws and many other things. And so it's going to be a more exploitative, more parasitic society, declining life expectancy, etc. It's going to be lower trust. I don't think those are things we should want. Yeah, I Auron MacIntyre 10:39 think it's interesting. You probably, I mean, obviously, you had these things. I think if you look at the life of JFK, or Martin Luther King, Jr, himself, their sexual improprieties were pretty epic. And so I think it's less of those things didn't exist, but you had to, you had to keep that in the background there, there at least had to be an understanding that this was not okay. And that this was not the book that you put forward with someone like Donald Trump doesn't really care one way or the other. And it doesn't seem to matter very much one way or the other, Speaker 2 11:08 it would have never occurred to anyone to say that these affairs were great. And the truth is, if those had been publicized, it probably would have meant the end of them. You know, it was actually noted at the time that Ronald Reagan was the first president who'd ever been divorced, right. And then, in 1987, when Colorado Senator Gary Hart, who was the front runner to be the Democratic nominee in 1988, was revealed in the press to have allegedly had this young woman's to hell night in his townhouse in Washington, he was forced to drop out of the race over that. I mean, that would not be happening today. And indeed, so you can you can really illustrate this change through sex scandals, in a lot of ways. Again, look at the difference between Gary Hart and the Clinton Lewinsky scandal in the 1990s, the late 1990s, getting into the neutral world, badly damaging to Clinton, but he survived it. And then fast forward to, you know, the Trump campaign October 2016, the Access Hollywood tape. I mean, in retrospect, that was like a 48 hour blip. nobody even talks about it today. Yeah, it was a minor footnote at best. Auron MacIntyre 12:19 Yeah, it was very interesting in the book that you tried each one of those transitions to a scandal in the way that the public reacted to it. But I think it's also important that you point out this kind of background identity of the United States, because I think one of the problems we have today, particularly on the right, is the notion of identity politics as the core of our problem. There's right a lot of truth to that, in many ways, right? That, that the focus on certain types of identity is divisive, and especially those that are completely destructive to the human being like, like trans ideology is destructive. But I think in many ways, the problem for America is a lack of identity. It used to be that Protestant Christian identity that you were talking about, you know, we had a very, very wide selection of people from all over. And they had many different traditions, even across a geographically very large country, which would have been many different countries in a place like Europe, we were still able to operate mainly because we still have this type of Protestant Christianity, we never really truly had an ethnogenesis in the classic sense in the United States, but the Prussian Christian dynamic and our kind of extreme federalism allowed us to still operate with with one shared understanding of American identity. And it feels like the the unspooling of that is also the story of your transition of worlds here where, you know, it's interesting that you point out 1964, I mean, you as kind of the beginning of this, that's also the beginning of the civil rights revolution, the next year, you get heart cellar, there's a lot of things that are tearing away at what had been kind of the president Christian consensus. I think that it existed prior to that. And that made it makes it very difficult, I think, at this point for us to even have a shared common moral language, because we're all grasping at these these terms about justice, and, you know, freedom, liberty, all these things. But but we mean entirely different things by them, because we no longer have that shared identity in Protestant Christianity. Yeah, Speaker 2 14:22 I mean, you know, political scientist, Eric Kaufman did sort of argue that there was an American kind of ethnic ethnogenesis in the early 1800s, as we sort of separated ourselves from our British identity. It was heavily Anglo Protestant in its conception. And, you know, I think, you know, by the 1950s, that was simply no longer viable because of demographic change. I mean, we were heavily, heavily Anglo Protestant demographically. And then with Ellis Island emigration of people you know, such as my family from Catholic Catholic peasant stock in German Many insists and, and Sicily and places like that others, you know, there was kind of I think a spelt need that, you know, this, we had to expand the circle to become more inclusive of those people. And the idea, I think originally was that they, they would, you know, in essence assimilate into basically American pattern of life. And, you know, in return, they would get get legitimacy. So, if you look, everybody always claims, for example, that JFK didn't wear a hat or at his inauguration or something. In fact, he did. In fact, he was wearing a morning coat, and a top hat. And JFK very much imitated the Wasp, upper class aesthetic, and tried to embody, I think those ideals in his public persona, precisely as a way of showing that this, you know, Irish Catholic guy, you know, was was really, you know, authentically American. To me in a way enough Buckley's sort of accent and sort of affected Wasp mannerisms, even though he was Irish Catholic, was probably something in this line. But maybe with the assassination of Kennedy, that's actually the thing that I latched on to is the sort of date when everything seemed to go crazy. The dream of all this congealing sort of blew up, and rather than sort of this more expansive American identity that would be inclusive of Catholics and Jews and things coming out of World War Two, and this great victory while these people fought side by side under the American flag, and that dream sort of blew up. And so they're certainly, you know, it took a historian to really dig into exactly the whys and wherefores, but we're sort of, we're sort of a little bit in that same condition Today as a country where we've had massive demographic change in the country. And so, you know, even the the more expansive idea that you know, we're a Judeo Christian nation, is just going to be completely increasingly untenable, right as the demographics of the country change. And so who knows exactly what it's going to be in the future. But it certainly augers for another redefinition of American identity. Auron MacIntyre 17:16 So, in this situation, obviously, we see a significant shift, you have the strategies that worked in positive and neutral world, and then the ones that might work in the negative world, could you talk a little bit about the assumptions of positive in a neutral world the things that we were attempted there, and why they might have led to some of the things we're seeing now? Speaker 2 17:40 Sure, well, I identify three different strategies that were undertaken by three different groups of evangelicals. So I'm not looking at Catholics and other or mainlanders, I'm looking evangelical specifically. And I ended up by three, two from the positive world to a one from the neutral world and the positive world that was culture war, and secret sensitivity. And in the neutral world, it was what I call cultural engagement. So culture war, is the religious right, that we know, you know, initiated by people like Jerry Falwell, and pat robertson in the late 1970s. As part of that broader new right movement of the era, I think, the very name of Falwell's organization, moral majority, it just speaks to a positive world. Now, that may not have been true even then. But at least it was pausable. To claim that you spoke for the Moral Majority. Well, sort of like Nixon silent majority, if you will, certainly no one would ever claim that today. And clearly they were not successful at sort of stopping the tide, if you will know whether they could have been successful, I think is an open question. But they certainly weren't, weren't successful. The secret sensitivity people that was pioneered by people like Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Church in suburban Chicago, or Rick Warren at Saddleback Church in Orange County, and what this group of people did also in the 1970s, and saw people weren't attending church. And so they just said, Let's build a church that people actually will attend. So the origin story of Willow Creek is that Bill Hybels went door to door in suburban Chicago, doing surveys of people, why don't you go to church? And he said, they gave me an earful until you design a church, low attendance. Let's get rid of all these old denominational distinctives. People don't care about, you know, stodgy hymns. Let's be more informal, more contemporary music, more sort of topical therapeutic sermons. And this really became kind of the progenitor of the nondenominational suburban mega church that we all know and which in many ways is the evangelical mainstream. I think though, the very term secret sensitivity and the very idea of going door to door asking people why they don't go to church again, that's very positive world. It assumes a lot of people Over seeking, and that most people kind of have a vague idea that they should be in church, you know that they almost have to justify to themselves why they don't go to church. Again, I don't think somebody starting out today would be going door to door in the suburbs asking questions like that. Then the third started in the 1990s, as cities came back under people like Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York, and this is the cultural engagement strategy pioneered by people like Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. You can think of this either a couple ways. One is as a secret sensitivity for the cities. The nose, just as the high bowls in the Warrens reached suburban boomers, these guys were reaching the new educated urbanites. You could also think of it as the opposite of the culture war, rather than fighting with people all the time, why don't we take advantage of this pluralistic Public Square and have a conversation with people. And again, this was very successful in its day, and there's still a lot of these people around in cities. But again, I think this idea of engaging with the culture kind of assumes a little bit of a neutral perspective that the culture is interested in what you have to say that you can sit down and have that conversation, a good faith conversation, even where there are major differences, and still leave with goodwill. And think that error is increasingly passed in America. And you know, not even just religiously, but politically in terms of people's ability to have those conversations. And so I think, you know, they were all sort of built on certain cultural assumptions of those previous eras that are no longer true. And so that's one reason I feel like there's there's a lot of turmoil in evangelical land today, is because people are still doubling down on sort of existing strategies, rather than they've developing kind of new strategies, which admittedly, I think is very difficult to do in this environment. Absolutely. Auron MacIntyre 21:49 And I definitely want to touch on those new strains. And most importantly, I think I want to talk a little bit about why our elites change their disposition to all of this. But before we do, guys, let's hear about new Fanning's venture fund. Hey, guys, I need to tell you about new founding venture fund. Look, we all know that the current system, the current companies out there, the current institutions, they're old, sick, dying, they're sclerotic, they're lame, they can't produce anything of value. And that means that young, talented, innovative people are trying to break out break free. That's bad news for the establishment. But it's good news for us. Because that means those people are gonna go out and found new companies create new technologies, and figure out a way forward for our country. If you're interested in being a part of that exciting new future, then you need to check out the venture fund new founding has rallied the founders who have massive visions for a better future, and is investing in these companies through its venture fund. The companies they invest in are defined by simple question, does the country we want to live in need the company this person is building? Look, venture investing isn't for everyone. But if you're a serious accredited investor who wants to see a more hopeful future for this country, go to New [founding.com/venture](founding.com/venture) fund and apply to be an investor again, that's new [founding.com/venture](founding.com/venture) fund. So Aaron, earlier you had mentioned that many people who were attempting to ascend wanted to mimic the WASP culture, they wanted to signal that even if they weren't from that elite, they understood that it was part of part of being American and part of leading Americans was to join that elite. And that's what we expect. we're big believers in elite theory on the show. We believe that elites are those that drive things Vilfredo Pareto talked a lot about the circulation of the elites and the need for those who would rise amongst the elites to rejuvenate its ability to go ahead and still conform to many of the traditions and pas to signal themselves as adopted into that elite just like you were talking about there. And I'm wondering for you when you think that shift occurred, because it's hard for people not to notice that the Protestants have fallen out of elite culture almost entirely. They've certainly fallen out of all the institutions when we see people looking to go ahead and play someone on the Supreme Court seems invariably to be a Catholic, you know, someone who is not from that kind of classic Protestant background. Why did we end up seeing this shift? Why did we see last seem to abdicate their responsibility to continue their leadership role inside the United States? Speaker 2 24:25 That's a great question. In Part beyond kind of kind of my expertise, you know, as you may know, I've definitely been partial to the work of a sociologist named E. Digby bolts. I'll be al tz e LL, who was the foremost scholar of the American upper class. He basically popularized the term Wasp with books like The Philadelphia gentleman, the Protestant establishment and Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. I do think the collapse of what they call the old Wasp establishment in the 1960s It was a critically important event in Oh N from that, you know, America's leadership culture was irrevocably changed. Because there was one thing that it had was a sort of hereditary component to it. So it wasn't just the richest person who got the job. It wasn't just the person with the highest test scores, who got the job, it was to some extent dependent on did you come from one of these families? You know, were you from the right, you know, did you come up to the right institutions in that respect, and there in some respects, was amazing continuity of some of these lineages. So the the president of Yale, during the Vietnam War was named Kingman Brewster. And he was the 11th generation descendant of elder William Brewster from the Mayflower, there were members of the Addams Family that were still prominent in America, up through certainly the mid 20th century, and maybe even to the second half of the 20th century, Charles Francis Adam, the forest, for example, was the president of Raytheon. And one of the things bolts all talks about is that when you have this sort of upper class that has this hereditary component to it, they play a key role in society, in establishing sort of norms and codes of behavior, the code of the gentleman what it meant to behave like a gentleman. And if you wanted to be part of their society, you had to live by these codes. And people looked at these codes as sort of aspirationally, what everyone should aspire to be, it allowed them to sort of enforce the the unwritten rules and the norms and the rules of the game of these things. So, you know, what are the interesting things, you'll look at some of these guys, they were so motivated by genuine public service, that they actually spent down their entire family fortunes. So Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, I read a biography of him called the last Brahmin, you know, he basically spent his entire life is things like ambassador to the UN and Ambassador to Vietnam, South Vietnam. And, you know, whether you agree whether he did a good job or a bad job, at the end of his life, he's basically selling off artwork to raise funds. I mean, there's nobody like that in America today. You know, you go into public service, to get rich price, or to get something for yourself, or whatever, you know, you're the White House spokesman. And the next thing, you know, you're buying multimillion dollar homes. And so I do think the collapse of this establishment created very negative effects in our culture, where we have had a turnover of elites who don't come from any social community with standards, whose standards are entirely ideological in nature, not moral or conduct based, and thus, they're constantly changing all the time. So you have to be hyper attuned to what's going on. And so we've certainly had, I think, a, a nod. I mean, there's good things about what we the fact that actually, you know, that you can be Catholic and, you know, get on the Supreme Court. And it's not just, you know, eight, eight Protestants and one Jewish guy, which it was for a while, is a good thing. On the other hand, it probably shouldn't be zero Protestants, either. There actually is one Protestant, but he's actually a convert from Catholicism on there. And there should be a sort of code of conduct and standard of behavior that just doesn't exist in in our society. Well, I Auron MacIntyre 28:39 think the transition to an ideological society is a critical point, because we had an organic understanding, again, even if it was a bit of a hodgepodge from across Europe, we had to organic understanding bound together under again, that Protestant Christian identity that, again, had had a more natural way of being it had had certain traditions, it was tied in, as you pointed to do because it was very hereditary. And the fact that you basically changed the composition of the United States so radically, that you can no longer identify Acropolis those lines meant that you had to go to a higher level of abstraction to bind the society together. And once you get far enough out, you have to go to the realm of ideology, but the problem of ideology is, it's not actually organic, it doesn't actually have the kinds of things that create true social bonds. So it'll it'll throw a coalition together under the head of conservative or Democrat or Republican, whatever. But it won't actually create the kind of bonds and communities necessary to perpetuate any tradition and the kind of chain of being that really makes people who they are. Yeah. And so we as soon as we allow that, that great shift, I think, in who we were, as a society, it was inevitable that we were going to have to abstract out the kind of things that bound us together. It would hollow out and lead us to kind of situation where now. Speaker 2 30:03 Yeah, and I think the other thing that you could probably put on this and which balsall missed, in my view, was the managerial revolution. And I think one explanation you could use to see this is essentially the rise of the managerial class. And they have essentially been liquidating, you know, all, you know, obstacles to their unchecked rule, or to the unchecked rule, essentially, managerialism, one of the core functions of the old upper class is, it was actually a community, much like their aristocracy in England, they were a sort of rival power bloc, they stood apart from corporate power, or managerial power, or financial power, and could be part of this series of like, you know, internal, you know, division within the elites that preserves freedom. Well, you know, managerialism is now liquidated is basically liquidated, everything else is liquidated, those guys, it's liquidated our intermediary institutions, is done all essentially liquidated the family, the family today is certainly nothing like what it was in the 1950s, it's at best a highly contingent entity. You know, the fact that, you know, we're so you know, we're now seeing, you know, complete abandonment of family formation and having kids and other people in so I think the advance of managerialism is definitely one of the stories of why all these other things have gone into decline, because the managerial class and sort of the managerial mindset is deeply hostile to anything that might inhibit managerial, you know, structuring of certain control over society. Auron MacIntyre 31:45 I think that's right. And in fact, I think there's an insightful book coming out about that soon. Speaker 2 31:49 It'll stay I imagine. So I imagine. But, Auron MacIntyre 31:54 but but we talked about that transition in styles. And you pointed out that a lot of this was reliant again, on those assumptions of positive and neutral world, you know, assuming that people would have an understanding that the place is, the church is a place you should probably be, and this is, this is something you should probably participate in. And so we'll just go ahead and change the way that we present church to make it a little a little more interesting to those who maybe have fallen away from the more stymieing aspects, I think it's interesting that all of those approaches were essentially deconstruction, they were all looking to go ahead and strip away many of the traditions liturgies things that, again, provide that structure that maybe put the the church in the past, and instead, you know, if we can just remove that stuff and reduce the amount of friction between people and church attendance, then all of a sudden, they'll be very interested, that creates the short term burst of attendance that you might get from some of these secret sensitive strategies, like you're talking about, but it does seem overall, to wear down the ability of Christianity to actually attract people or keep them engaged. It seems like we're not learning the lesson in many ways, you know, Christians, that it is actually the things that set you apart from the culture that matter. It's actually the the fact that you don't conform to these things, that there are demands placed onto you that actually are more likely to make your your community last longer, especially as the culture around you grows more hostile, it's retreating into the things that separate you and the differences that actually make you longer lasting, rather than trying to make yourself as accessible as possible to the culture at large. Speaker 2 33:39 I agree completely, I would put Vatican two, in sort of the same category of Cold War, I call them relevant strategies, you know, the ideas, you know, changing church to become more relevant. And there's sort of a double edged sword there. You know, on the one hand, I think people have long criticized, you know, the shallowness of some of the, you know, seeker sensitive site type churches, and those things. On the other hand, it actually did work to get a lot of people in the door. You know, the mainline denominations really dominated the religious landscape of America up through the 1950s. And, you know, when they started losing people, they never really figured out how to get people to come in the door. And I mean, they tried, they tried, you know, becoming super liberal, politically, many other things. It didn't work. And, you know, I think we feel keenly the loss of those denominations, by the way, but, but yeah, there is this sense that I think when you get into like a negative space versus a positive or a neutral space, the calculus really changes a lot. And you know, when you are when Christianity is the sort of default religion of society and there's sort of a normative expectation around it, you do have to have a sort of least common denominator religion because if People are expected to go to church on Sunday, you need to have a place for everybody who shows up, you know, they need to be welcome. You can't simultaneously say this is who we are. And it's an extremely difficult standard, only a very few people who can meet. And I do think that as Christianity declines in America, it actually provides up new opportunities. One of them is to say, we don't have to be maximally relevant anymore. You know, we don't have to think that, you know, we have to have it, you know, everybody just just shows up can kind of feel comfortable as they are, and what we're not going to ask them to do all that much or change all that much. And I think we can have, we can set a higher bar, and there is going to be a tremendous need for churches to create a culture that is meaningfully distinct from society at large. And that, by the way, doesn't have to mean, you know, hatred of other people out there, or actually fighting with them. It just means like, This is who we are, and we live very differently than the rest of the world. You know, I just put up an article this week, where I said, you know, one of the things I think we ought to do is we need to reject all these vices that are out there. You know, we shouldn't be watching porn, we shouldn't be smoking pot, we shouldn't be gambling on our phone, probably shouldn't be using profanity, probably shouldn't be, you know, having other forms of vulgarity, and things of that nature. And again, some of these things, you know, you can have a debate as to whether they're objectively sinful, I just argue, you know, it's like Paul said, All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable. And so I think, you know, which activities are profitable, we need to have a distinct community. The truth is, you know, I think the Mormons have actually done a great job of this, you know, they've managed to create an environment in which people still basically get and stay married, in which people are generally very successful in life. And, you know, you look at Utah, which is very Mormon dominated, it's an extremely high functioning society. It's like the last American state, where it's still like the old America, in terms of being an intact, higher trust, you know, socially functional society. And, you know, I think more and more, you know, we're going to have to have, and this is going to be, I think it's going to be a theme, even apart from religion, we're becoming a low trust society. And in a low trust society, you have to have communities of actual trust, you know, actual, genuine, trusted relationships to draw on, because you're not going to be able to just by default, rely on the stranger. That means the people who don't have family are going to be at a disadvantage in life. It means the people who aren't part of like a high trust church, you know, are going to be at a disadvantage in life. And so I think we're going to we're going to be seeing this. Yeah, Auron MacIntyre 37:55 I did a did a stream with Darrell Cooper, the martyr bade podcast. Yeah. And we talked about why the state ends up breaking up, you know, families ends up breaking up higher trust communities, and has to in order for it to kind of like, as we spoke about with managerial revolution, and increase its power. And so one of the things that, you know, yes, decline, bad, but also decline good in this way. One of the things that happens, as you say, is when people can't rely on the state anymore, when they can't assume the high function, the high trust of the society, they have start looking to rebound themselves into those communities, it's no longer an option is just default, and assume that everyone around you is going to have some level of social coordination. And so you have to start searching for those groups again. And Speaker 2 38:43 it's also I think, undermining the state. In a sense, I mean, we've basically got a bet going on, you know, will, will our technology advanced fast enough to replace human buying into the system? Or will the system classrooms I mean, like, you know, the, you know, complete catastrophic collapse and trust in public education, post COVID that's been going on not just among religious people, but others, you know, the 11% of people. Now, homeschooling private schools, like have lines out the door, people are getting out. People are in the collapse and enlistment in the military, which I think is a beautiful thing. You shouldn't have it. And I'm not saying no one should enlist in the military. But the fact is this idea that, you know, sort of the, you know, you know, proverbial Trump voting families in, you know, rural America did keep sending their sons to die or get their arms blown off in the service of some foreign war. But it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You know, and, you know, people checking out and it's a huge problem. I mean, decline, decline in military enlistment really is a huge problem for the system. And so sort of the The fact that people are hitting the exits on these institutions, because they have so undermined, they themselves have undermined trust in the system really is a serious is a serious issue there. And again, they don't have the, you know, they can eat, they can disrupt your organizations and things of that nature. Yes, they can. But it's very hard for them to get you to, you know, be actively investing back into their system. Auron MacIntyre 40:24 And that's an interesting question, I think, for a lot of Christians, because simultaneously, they're naturally conservative, they want to commute, you know, they want to go ahead and contribute to their community, they want to be a positive force. But at the same time, it's hard to do that, because every major system that you look at is actively hostile to them is actually applying poisonous ideology to everything around it. And so they probably look at these situations and say, you know, I want to be someone with honor, I want to be someone who's a powerful social force I want to be contributing. And the fact that we abandoned many of these institutions early on to the thinking that they would remain neutral without constant evangelical Christian involvement was kind of one of the problems. But what do I do in this situation where, you know, are these institutions too far gone? Can we save them through entry ism? Do we create something new in parallel? Like, what is the solution to the Christian who wants to be involved, but recognizes that the institutions that they would normally involve themselves in are completely rotted through? Speaker 2 41:26 Sure, I mean, I'm not a pastor or a theologian, you know, I always say that. So this is sort of my own lay reading of the New Testament. You know, one time I made a list of all the commands that Paul issued in his epistles, and I divided them into various categories. And the thing, one of the things that really came through to me is, he had remarkably little to say about the world outside of the church. And most of it was really about how to accommodate yourself to it with the least disruption, how to avoid, you know, having the eye of Caesar fall on you, for example. So he would say, pay taxes to whom taxes do give honor to whom honor is due, so far as it depends on you be at peace with all men, all of that sort of stuff. And I think there's a lot of wisdom there. I think a lot of Evangelicals candidly go out of their way to make themselves unpopular in ways that's not necessary to do. You know, and on the other hand, he was not saying that you should try to prop actively prop up the institutions of the Roman Imperium, he wasn't actually concerned with them all that much. He was mostly concerned with life inside the church, and how Christians were living. And he also prioritized, you know, the needs of the church, the needs of the people who were in the church, right when they were, you know, even from the earliest church selling their property and bringing it in, they were giving the money to the widows in the church and distributing it to the widows in the church. So yes, it's good to help other people, as Paul said, do good to all men, but also, especially to the household of the faith. I think, as he said, and so, you know, I don't think Paul was telling people, I didn't think they were based telling people, let's go prop up a corrupt system by becoming a Roman legionnaire, or something of that nature. It's like, let's create a, you know, a distinct form of community here. That models you know, the kingdom of God and a new way of living. And then it will work out into the world, through the way that we do sort of serve others at the retail level, helping the poor, for example, however, that looks like in our society may be different than how it looked like and that that's still very much part, I think, very much part of the mission of the church. But you know, propping up the instruments of the globalist American empire, I don't think is any more of the call of the church than propping up, you know, the Imperium of Rome wasn't imperative for the church. Auron MacIntyre 43:58 Yeah, and I think that's right. But I think it's really hard for a lot of people to make that mentality shift, because a lot of people I think are, they have what I like to call Boomer eschatology, where we have, you know, it's the church, America and Christianity were the same thing and they were always going to be the same thing. And the only way they could imagine basically like America not ushering in the new millennium was was if the return of Christ like that's it, there's there's no way that America could fall there's no way that America that the Christianity of America could fall away. This was the end of history in this is the right wing evangelical version of The End of History Boomer ology, I'm Unknown Speaker 44:35 going to remember that. Yeah, yeah. Auron MacIntyre 44:37 And so and so there's just this idea that they didn't need to protect it and they didn't need to that basically the institutions, the United States would always uphold the Constitution especially, we just always ensure that America was going to be Christian forever and its institutions be Christian forever. And investment in those institutions was investment in Christianity. And so I think it's very hard for them to to shift to some You talk about in the book, which I like which, which is the the adopting the minority position, what do minorities that want to protect themselves? You know, how do they interact in a society? I think it's hard to make that switch when you still are wrapped up in that Boomer eschatology, Speaker 2 45:14 for sure. I mean, you know, the reality is Protestant Christians were the demographic majority of the country. I believe the Protestants are still maybe a plurality in America, believe it or not, Protestant by identity, at least, down to a minority and shrinking. You know, certainly Christianity, you know, was the majority, you know, position in America, that, you know, a lot of people talk about, like the mainline versus fundamental debates, you know, the old debates between the liberal Protestantism and you know, traditional Protestantism, but when it came to ethics and morals, they all believe same thing. You know, they might have disagreed about the virgin birth, but they had no disagreement about like adultery, you know, Thou shalt not commit adultery and things of that nature. They agreed on that stuff. And like, now, it's a painful shift when you're used to when you consider yourself the majority. And now you are a minority. And it can be very embarrassing when people realize that, in part, they have become a minority, through the conscious actions of, you know, some people in society and choices that were made along the way. But you got to adapt to that new reality. That's the fact. And that's where, like, you know, I point to early 20th century Catholicism as a model, because, you know, Catholics never had this sort of mindset that they were the majority of America. And so they always had to self consciously steward, and sustain a distinctively Catholic identity within this Protestant country. And so sort of Protestant, you know, evangelicals and Protestants have to learn from what other minority groups have done, I think, again, you know, I think Catholicism was a good example, early 20th century Catholicism as a good example, to follow, but you could think the Mormons maybe been another good example, to follow. You know, evangelicals now have to create an identity for themselves, that is distinct from this idea that being an American and being an Evangelical, it's like all, you know, that's all part of the same complex of things. Because it's not the irony is, it's the sort of progressive evangelicals, the ones who are always saying things like we should identify primarily with Christians around the world we're not citizenship is not in America. You know, our citizenship is in heaven, all that stuff, people like Russell Bohr and David French would spout. The truth is, if you actually took that seriously, you would say, Yeah, Protestant Christians should be much more concerned about bonding with other Protestant Christians here in America, and a lot less about propping up the globalist American empire. You know, those are not the same things. You know, they don't actually take their own rhetoric, I think as seriously as they could. And if you think about it that way, if you just listen to what they have to say, and take it seriously, well, then it does lead to that sense of creating a distinctive, an identity, that doesn't reject American citizenship and say that we're not citizens of America, we should hate our country or anything of that nature. But it also says, you know, just being an American and being kind of a an evangelical are not the same exact same thing in America is not going to embody the values that that you have in your religion. You have to get beat up. You have to you have to get beyond Boomer eschatology there. Auron MacIntyre 48:51 Absolutely. We have a lot of questions stacking up. So I want to switch over those in a second because I want to get through those. But before we do I have one more question I wanted to ask you. I think another big aspect of what's happening is the end of an unenchanted world, we've kind of the Enlightenment. A experiment has run its course we've made things as hyper rational as we can. And I think we're running kind of into the end of the utility of that for human beings in general and certainly for Christians who have been trying to do that to their own faith in many ways. I think re enchantment is a is a step that we're seeing. I think that's why you see a lot of people looking at things like Eastern Orthodox Christianity, because it's something that has a far more mystical aspect in a ways that hyper Protestant denominations probably didn't have access to. And Alexandria Dugan talks about how there's a there's a post postmodern moment where, you know, you're modernism is the death of God and kind of your post post modernism moment is the death of who people don't even know what that means anymore. There's no not even the question of, you know, the the death of what deity. And I noticed this because when I was teaching a lot of the kids in fact, I had entire classrooms of kids who couldn't even tell you anything about the birth of Christ. They didn't know what Bethlehem was, they didn't know who Mary and Joseph were, there's just, it's not that they're unchurched. It's that they literally just aren't complete voids, culturally, like they, they can, they can tell you what Pepsi in you know, and Pizza Hut, symbols look alike, but they have zero connection to anything of the spiritual. And in some ways, that's super terrifying. But in other ways, it means that there's a whole generation without any of the baggage that came with kind of these these culture wars and and all these things, these attitudes about Christianity. And I wonder what you think about the idea that, you know, moving forward that that creates a whole nother there's a whole nother paradigm about how you can approach those people and, and the way that we do so might not fall in line with kind of our previous hyper rational understandings of, of trade tried to justify Christianity to a modern person. Speaker 2 51:18 I agree, I think that's a great insight. You know, I hadn't necessarily thought about it that way. But you're right, these younger generations, the Gen Z's or even the Gen Xers our alphas, they're not going to have this legacy baggage of the culture wars, in a way that a lot of the people who are writing for some of the magazines and things today Do I agree completely about reenactment as a huge theme, you know, Rod RIRs, writing a book about reenactment he's very good at putting his finger on things earlier. I think it's going to be one of the big themes in the next decade. And, you know, yes, it's going to be in the church. But I think also we see it in the world, as well, the search for reinstatement. And I think this, this rise of sort of a new age, spirituality, you know, that we're seeing is very much aligned with that what I mean, by New Age, everybody who's into psychedelics as a gateway to spiritual experience, I'm gonna go on Ayahuasca trip, you know, to South America or something. I think the Jordan Peterson phenomenon is heavily driven by a sort of new age sensibility, sort of a, his, his sort of young GI and mysticism. There, you know, he's got a new book out called we who wrestle with God, I don't think it's actually out yet. He's got a tour, I went to see him. And it occurs to me, you know, his, you know, one of the things that put him on the map was his Genesis lectures, and this idea of taking the old religious content and packaging it in a sort of new age way, you know, to the people who are hungry for spirituality, I think is there and I do think there's a huge lesson from the rise of Jordan Peterson, that it shows that people are hungry for something, you know, they're hungry for something, and he very much tapped into it. And he was able to, you know, attract people for a variety of things. But one of his, one of his gifts was to talk about the Bible and religious themes in a sort of way that's compelling to people. That sort of speaks to what the types of questions that they're trying to get answers to today, the types of voids, that they're trying to fill it. So I do think his understandings of the Bible are far from orthodox. Let me put it to you that way. I don't think it's any accident that this guy who talks about the Bible all the time, rarely actually engages with actual Orthodox Christians, other than Jonathan Pergo, the Eastern Orthodox icon painter whose hyper symbolic understandings of the world align very well with Peterson. He doesn't seem to have a lot of like, traditional Christian guests on his show. He's talking about things that he knows that he's not. He's far from Orthodox Christianity. But I think if we could find a different way, and I think, as you mentioned, the rise of Eastern Orthodox faith, it's showing that a sort of different way of talking about what it means to be a Christian, one that's not rooted in a sort of hyper rationalistic. You know, maybe Ultra Calvinistic type of, you know, intellectualized approach to the faith can be quite compelling to people. It's also why Pentecostalism has been growing so powerfully. It gives people the sense of a genuine encounter with the divine in speaks to the real world problems, you know, that people are having. I don't think it's any accident that Pentecostalism is very strong among people with very serious As problems, you know, because if you're a recovering drug addict, you are keenly aware that without the power of the Holy Spirit, you are sunk. And so I think that there are these things. This is a way to think about evangelism and mission. I wish I could have put some of that in the book that you just said, because I do think this idea of thinking about a reinvented view and how we talk about faith and talk about the world is very important. Auron MacIntyre 55:25 Absolutely. All right, guys, we're going to transition over to the questions of the people. But before we do, Aaron, could you go ahead and let people know everything the name of the book where they can find something like that? Speaker 2 55:35 The book is life in the negative world confronting challenges in an anti Christian culture. You can buy it obviously on Amazon or anywhere else fine books are sold. Any one should be able to get you a copy if they don't have it in stock life in the negative world. And then all of my writing I you know, I put up on my own newsletter, Aaron [wren.com](wren.com), Aaro, n [rtnn.com](rtnn.com). Please go there and sign up so we can stay in touch. Excellent. Auron MacIntyre 56:03 All right. Let's get over to our questions here. fizzle crack says, I know you don't like burrin SCO. I don't know who that is. So I don't know how I could not like it. Maybe Maybe Aaron does, but she found a real big political party, the commies who have a plan to topple US government. Please look into it. I gotta say, sorry. Yeah, sorry. I didn't go. I don't know that person. Yeah, maybe they have made an amazing discovery. I mean, I don't think you have to look very hard to find a party full of Communists who want to topple the United States. I think it was called the Democratic Party. Pooper weirdo. Sis. I know it's not the biggest problem in on the right. But how do we stop the Catholic Protestant faith measuring contest? It's annoying, and not hetero? Yeah, I mean, obviously, we have bigger fish to fry at the moment. I think that that's a big story for for Christians in general. But Aaron, what do you think about the internet AC and Christian comm? Speaker 2 56:57 You know, I'm not as familiar with this one either. I guess maybe I don't. You know, I'm not I'm not not like a Catholic hater by any means. Auron MacIntyre 57:03 Yeah, I think there's just a lot. I think there's always a desire to kind of, you know, own a particular space. And you know, that there's there certainly differences there to be sure, guys, but I don't think now is the time. Let's see here. Matt greeter says it's crazy that gambling has become so popularized and isn't taboo anymore, another vise that we've suddenly decided is totally fine. Speaker 2 57:27 I agree. It's really kind of insane to think about that, you know, the government's in on it. You know, they can't legalize different forms of gambling fast enough. Everybody knows that. It's like the 3% 5% of people who are prone to gambling addiction, who are the people where a lot of the profits come from? It's literally a form of exploitation, highly asymmetric. First, we know the house always wins. Secondly, on these phone apps, you know, these companies are using the same sort of cutting edge psychological techniques, you know, that the social media companies used to keep you scrolling, they're using it to keep you betting. And, you know, it's, you know, this is the world we live in. Auron MacIntyre 58:13 Yeah, it's amazing that people don't understand. I mean, look, there's always going to be vice, but putting those barriers between people and bad decisions matters. And the more you can deliver these things to the phone in people's pockets, the more you're going to guarantee their ubiquity. And so I think that yeah, that's exactly right. The Speaker 2 58:31 other thing I'd say is, you know, here's the here's the stone cold reality, unfortunately, if you ask the very people who are most victimized by these things, you know, or even took a let's take a poll among the quote unquote, conservatives who are going to vote for Trump. I guess I doubt that there would be a majority for rolling back in length legalization, I think very few people support. The reality is, you know, it's like, it's like the old HL Mencken, quote, that democracy is this the belief that people know what they want and deserve to get good and hard? Unfortunately, that's what we're getting. Auron MacIntyre 59:04 I think the same thing with with usury, you know, the, as you mentioned, these are just things that have become so normalized, most people can't imagine operating an economy without it. And because of that, you see an amazing amount of financial damage and moral damage done to our communities. But, again, people would just have a hard time understanding how that would even get rolled back at this point, right? Maximum cutting says what's the replacement for profit centric managerialism we live into now, we need alternative to commie economic agitation? Well, I think this is a structural problem. First and foremost, again, there's a book coming out about this if you want to get to dig deeper detail, but I think I think scale is the enemy. And I think that managerialism is unavoidable as long as we intend to operate our civilizations at the scale we do now. And so if we, if we don't, if we don't intend to scale down our political units, we simply cannot escape the structures that they currently hold. Yeah. Speaker 2 59:59 I, I would agree with that, in general, but I think it's interesting to look at the rise of artificial intelligence. The truth is that is that if it if it develops in the proper directions, and is allowed to develop in the proper directions, AI provides a plausible alternative to many of the managers. And if AI is targeted at eliminating the managerial class, then, you know, AI allows us to essentially change, you know, again, have a little bit of a change in the elite in the leadership structure of society. On that basis, I think AI is the potential game changer. And of course, I would expect the managerial class to do everything in their power to prevent AI from doing that, but well, they're Auron MacIntyre 1:00:56 making it as dumb as possible right now, for a reason. Yeah, right. Aaron, run actually closet, Nick, land fan, are you? Speaker 2 1:01:05 You know, I do. I haven't read much Nick land. You know, but let's just say I think I've I've been influenced by people who are influenced by that point. It's quite accelerationism in I don't think I fully understand accelerationism. But I do think, you know, one of the things that the managerial writers like Burnham and his predecessors note is, you know, the elite class is a product of where the wealth, the people who control the wealth producing entities of society, so we were an agricultural was when we have an agricultural wealth producing system, it was a feudal economy, you know, when we shifted to, you know, a manufacturing base, commercial base economy, you know, we went to a, you know, essentially laissez faire, you know, the capitalist, the mercantile class, then as we got so big, the managerial took over. So, if we don't have something to change the basic economic structure of society in some way, we're not going to have a change in elites, Auron MacIntyre 1:02:05 because we get to do a little Marxism to get it all here. Speaker 2 1:02:08 I think, Well, I think that is true. I mean, I think I really believe the biggest flaw in conservative thinking is the lack of attention paid to material conditions, not just economic, not just the economy properly, so called, but changes in the structures of society, you know, changes in, you know, many things. I mean, you know, ideas have consequences, but lots of other things have consequences, too. And, you know, so I'm not I don't shy away from saying that material forces are extraordinarily powerful. Auron MacIntyre 1:02:41 This is why we, this is where we get our distributors lecture, right. All right. Cooper weirdo says, How does the Jesus revolution fit into all this? I'm not super I know, I know, a little bit of the background, the Jesus revolution, but I feel like it was mentioned in the book. Right is Speaker 2 1:02:59 are you talking about the Jesus movement was I think that's probably what it was a film called Jesus revolution, I think might have been about the Jesus movement. Yes. Yeah. So the Jesus movement was basically sort of a Christian expression of the counterculture, contemporary Christian music came out of that. And, you know, I'm not an expert on it. But I would I sort of see it as a sort of a precursor maybe of strands flowing into seeker sensitivity that I do. I do mention in the book that I think some of the developments around informality and contemporary music, very much flowed into what became secret sensitivity. Auron MacIntyre 1:03:42 Life of Brian here says, How does managerialism glom into cover ideologies like fascism and communism, they never call themselves managerialist? Yeah, again, this was the thesis of the managerial Revolution by James Burnham was the idea that whether it be fascism, communism, or liberal democracy, all modern states were managerial in nature, and we only difference you were looking at was the kind of the way the political formula justified managerial power, and more importantly, whether or not it was a hard or soft managerial class, we ended up with the soft managerial class, soft managerial system, the fox LED system tended to be more resilient, especially because the majority of the problems that managerial societies were trying to assess were ones that were logistical and coordination based rather than hard power base. And so that's why you end up seeing this. Give three different coats of paint, but always being a similar structure. All economies had to become centrally planned, functionally. And we just came up with three different excuses for why we were going to do that. Yeah, Speaker 2 1:04:47 I don't I don't think it's useful to talk about things like communism or fascism today, because those ideologies as understood don't exist anymore. You know, I don't think they're are very many people who are communist or socialist, in terms of things like, you know, wanting state ownership of the means of production. I mean, there are a few. But you know, we apply these names to things that are very different from what they were before. And I think it obscures more than it reveals. Auron MacIntyre 1:05:19 I think the mystery Grove definition of communism, which is like it's just an ideology for Ugly people to destroy people and take things that works a little bit, but yeah, if you're actually talking about the real application of, you know, gin, talese fascism or Marxism, like these things simply don't actually get Speaker 2 1:05:37 applied. I mean, there were also things like, you know, Francoise meter Han, was a socialist of sorts, he did want to nationalized companies, you know, and he wanted people wanted to do things like that. And that was still alive issue, you know, in the 1980s. Whether you should nationalize bank nationalized major companies in Europe, like nobody talks like that anymore. Auron MacIntyre 1:06:00 Let's see, Jacobs and Dell you may be pleased to know that when you add the total state to the cart on Amazon, Bertrand jounal, do Juvenal is the frequently bought together recommendation to us? Yes. I appreciate that very much. Definitely a heavy influence and honor to be paired with him on Amazon, Florida. Henry says Love you guys. But it's over Reaganomics gutted Middle America and funneled money to the hateful coasts. I worked all over and everyone is fat, drugged and hopeless. Henry, I appreciate that. I understand what you're saying, man. But sorry, it's not over. It's just that there's there's still plenty of hope. It's, it's gonna be on the other side of some difficult things. But there's plenty hope, man. Speaker 2 1:06:39 Yeah, I always tell people do not become invested in the idea that America is over. And that the system is crumbling. I do think people are withdrawing troops from the system. And I think that's healthy. Because until, you know, until there is a problem, we typically don't address the problem, you know, and, you know, but the idea that like, this is the worst it's ever been, you know, the Civil War was, you know, that was a much era that was a much greater threat to the country, the depression was a much greater threat to the country. And you might not like the solutions, but people came up with essentially institutional refreshes, we redefined what America was we sort of rewrote the Constitution a little bit after the Civil War, we did a little bit, we did the same thing, you know, with the New Deal. And with the post war, security architecture, and all these things, there were problems. You know, you know, the Civil Rights Act was a response to legitimate problems. You know, in society, it wasn't some, there wasn't just some plot to seize power. And so we've, you know, we've seen these problems, and we come up with institutional solutions to those problems. Now that I think there's a real question as to whether our current elite class, you know, our managerial class is actually capable of creating these institutional repressive fractures in the way that the old wasps were the Wasp, were capable of building things like the postwar security architecture. So it is an open question. I wouldn't say it's guaranteed. But you know, you know, say in the 70s, you know, we did figure out how to crush inflation, and reform became a bipartisan consensus around, you know, things like deregulation, which actually began under Carter, not Reagan, things of that nature. And so I think, you know, I'm actually optimistic in one sense. And I think there are increasing numbers of people across the political spectrum, who realize that we have very serious problems as a country. And we actually do need to make substantive changes. related to some of us related to competition with China, some of its related to, oh, we realize our defense industrial base is eroding. Some of its we're realizing that our you know, our burden, our human capital is becoming degraded. And not everybody agrees on what to do. But there are lots I sometimes get invited to these little weekend retreat things where they bring together people from different political persuasions to talk about issues. It's amazing how much agreement there is, on a lot of things to people wouldn't say publicly. And so, you know, I think there's a growing recognition of some of these things, even among, you know, the secular elite class and, you know, will the political the politics align for that at some point? Who knows, but I think it's, I'm not, I'm not counting on America, I think historically, we have risen to the challenge. And we shouldn't want America to fail. We should want, you know, you know, we should want the country to transform in a positive way. Auron MacIntyre 1:09:42 Well, I do think that the story of America has been the centralization of power. I think that, you know, whether it be the Civil War or the civil rights movement, especially the civil rights movement was, while legitimate problems were there. It was mainly used by the managerial elite to create a The power structure that allowed them to govern from the state of exception and not through the Constitution. And I think that that will probably continue a pace until people understand that there's a there's a wider problem there. I do I am with you that I think it's good that people do divest from current structures. I am long on the American people, but I'm not long on the current mirror American structure. I don't think that that can that can continue to hold. Speaker 2 1:10:27 But no, you're right. You're right about that. And the truth is, we're not still using. We're like on our third or fourth iteration of the structures of America. Oh, you're changing the structures of America is as American as apple pie. And so anybody that tells you that, you know, NATO, as originally conceived, is, like, just as sacred as the Declaration of Independence. Like, no, we created NATO, because we needed it. And now we're gonna say, what do we need today? When it comes to China, for example, pretty sure NATO is not going to help us with China. So we need to think about what we need. That's new. What we need is different for the challenges of the 21st century. Auron MacIntyre 1:11:08 Last question here, CB says, thought on thoughts on bringing more men into church, does Christianity have a masculinity problem? Speaker 2 1:11:18 I will say definitely, by the book Life and the negative world, the longest chapter is on gender. I think there's huge issues in the church, things that are just not being taught at all entire sections about what it means to be a man or woman are not talked about. And then a lot of the things that are being said are wrong. And to be honest, it's quite embarrassing. When you have so many secular influencers who are drawing hordes of men, and they're not all bad people. You know, yes, Andrew Tate is a bad person. Jocko Willink is not a bad person. He's like, actually, like telling you like productive, healthy things to do. And yet people are not turning to the church. I think it's embarrassing that you're considered not just, again, not just wrong, but just irrelevant to the questions people are asking about their lives. Auron MacIntyre 1:12:12 Absolutely. All right, guys. Well, we're gonna go ahead and wrap this up, make sure to go ahead and check out the negative world. I think it has a lot of very interesting things today and to say and make sure to check out the rest of Aaron's work. Of course, if this is your first time on this channel, make sure you go ahead and subscribe turn on notifications hit the bell so that you can see when our shows go live. And of course, if you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, make sure that you go ahead and subscribe to the or McIntyre show on your favorite podcast platform. When you do leave a rating or review. It really helps with the algorithm magic. Thank you so much for coming by guys. Have a great weekend. And as always, I will talk to you next time. 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