Latest / Thinking Class / #122 - Richard IV - C.S. Lewis Said If You Don't Give Boys Knights And Warriors They Will Worship Pimps And Prostitutes & He Was Right

Transcript

#122 - Richard IV - C.S. Lewis Said If You Don't Give Boys Knights And Warriors They Will Worship Pimps And Prostitutes & He Was Right · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Richard IV.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Richard is a writer, cultural commentator, and men's mentor.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: C.S.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis once wrote that if you don't give young men heroes and warriors and great leaders to look up to, they start to admire celebrities, prostitutes and pimps instead.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Richard believes that prophecy has been fulfilled, that men are increasingly drawn to the roadman culture, to figures like Andrew Tate and to a kind of performative aggression, because they have no roots in anything real.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a symptom of a civilization that has stopped initiating men into anything worth becoming.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, we think out loud about the invisible initiatory order that once gave men a path through life and what happened when it was dismantled, why masculine identity in Britain has been left without a home, and what men have found in its absence.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: The Church of England, which is sitting atop one of the greatest spiritual inheritances in Western history, and has largely abandoned its responsibility to pass it on, and what it would actually take for the cycle to turn.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Castawait, you'll also hear something in my own story.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Growing up in Northumberland, I drifted for years through an identity that had nothing to do with my own people and then finding my way back through Aristotle, virtue ethics, and then the Christian faith eventually.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: I hope it can be of use to someone.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you value serious long form conversations like this, then subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and support the show on Substack.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Richard the Fourth.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me, John.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's a pleasure to be here.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Today I wanted to talk about a phenomenon that seems to be happening across the West, but certainly here in Britain where we are, and that is uh men and their attitude, I suppose, toward life.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: It appears uh that some and not a small proportion are struggling, perhaps drifting, and things are going wrong.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: I I think it's clear that men are less likely to form relationships, less likely to have families, depression rates and suicide rates are uh are are higher than anyone would be comfortable with.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh people seem to be living in in isolation and perhaps are increasingly detached from a clear sense of purpose or direction.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so it's not just a social issue, but I think a civilizational one.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you're the right person to speak to about these because you are a writer, you've become somewhat of a mentor to men, and uh you're a cultural commentator.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I I've seen evidence of you helping people rebuild their lives as well as understanding what's going wrong and what can be put right.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, welcome.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I uh would like to to ask, I suppose, uh Richards, at a high level, um when you look at men in the modern West today, um what what do you think that most people are missing?
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, big question to start, and uh you know I think if we were to really drill it down to one thing I would probably say it's an ontological understanding of who and what they are.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that isn't their fault either.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think perhaps if I was to be so bold, I I might say one reason why my content has appealed to men is for that reason because I've spent a long time due to challenges in my own life searching into and researching um masculine initiations, spiritual initiations, cultures from around the world, different traditional expressions of civilization and and manhood and everything in between, and probably been able to ascertain that cross-culturally throughout time men would have a path that the civilization would almost provide.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: And while that was different and would be unique within different cultures and religions and peoples, uh, varying levels of advancement, whether we're talking primitive tribes in the Brazilian rainforest or or the Catholic Church in medieval Italy or whatever, what we tend to find is there's this journey that the man goes on to become something like a light within his culture, a bastion of the tradition come alive.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think in simple terms, we can perhaps even understand that with our grandparents.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Many people can hark back to their grandparents and sense they they did have this uh essence to them, this fidelity to a sort of order and law.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, on both my uh sides, both my mother's side and my father's side, both my sets of grandparents exhibited that.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: But what's very interesting is neither sets of them were particularly bright.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't go to university, they weren't intellectuals, and they almost lived by this sort of invisible code.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I sense, you know, we all like looking at these lovely videos you get of um England in the 50s and so on.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's sort of uh fetishized a bit on Twitter and so on.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: But I think when we look at them, one of the things that's so powerful about it is this sense of invisible order to them.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: And you could say even by then things were slipping somewhat.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: But the point I'm I'm I'm making here is that there used to be something that that gave us a sense of orientation in the world that made us part of something bigger, and that had multiple levels.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: There was, of course, the social level in terms of how we act towards one another, there was a moral code which was perhaps deeper than that, but informed the social order.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then there would be the transcendent as well, our relationship with the universe, with the divine, our religious traditions, and so on.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: And now we we almost think about these things uh purely in abstract terms, you know, uh the academy, uh point's been made a million times, but it's gone very left-wing, so it tends to view everything as a sort of abstract and power relations and so on.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: But really, properly understood through a more traditional context, what these things are are differing levels of the hierarchy within which a man not just learns, but actively becomes part of.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it's almost the initiated man is the tradition manifest, if that makes sense.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: That gives his life true meaning.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now, modernity has somewhat flipped that on his head, and it it almost imbues modern men with the idea that the amassing of quantity will somehow secure them with what they need, whether that's in the form of money or many women or or status or or just becoming what their ego desires and demands.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm not saying these things are always bad.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: It can be good to have you know aims to do well for yourself and get a nice wife or whatever.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's all normal.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: The point is when that thing replaces the deeper essences of who and what we are, and you could say that intuitive knowledge was in our grandparents, and somewhere along the line it's been lost.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, although there are a million different directions we can take that, as a broad overview, that would be my my initial analysis as to why I think we find many Western men in particular are quite lost.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: It was very compelling to hear you talk about there being an invisible order that that seemed to hold things together.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: There is an invisible thread when you look at those videos of the past, because for anyone who has watched those, you see that people of every social class are very well dressed, uh, even if they might not have the finest tweed on, they are all wearing their their tweed three pieces and their various hats.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh what is interesting when you see the streetscape views is that all of the way that dress was appeared to speak even to the streetscape, so the gothic buildings, um the the vernacular uh architecture made out of the stone material, which somehow also reflected the vernacular uh clothing and attitudes, and you could see people's comportment, the way that they uh conducted themselves.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: That uh I suppose to contrast that with modern life, so I've just done a a road trip around England as part of a docuseries um I use probably a bit too grandiosely, but it's something that I'm putting on the channel, and it'll be six or seven episodes.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: But I went all around England to the parts where I might find old England, the ones that we've just spoken of, um, where you still find those cultural mores that we are all um so used to from the past, but also the new England, the one that um resides in uh post-industrial towns, or even just the places which are still economically vibrant but have become so detached from any other value other than economic uh growth or entertainment, um, that you basically can't find any link between that New England and the one that came before.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the one thing that I really noticed is that so many men are dressed in a way that I suppose you just described with regards to how people are orienting their lives towards um quantity, towards uh a massaging, I suppose, of the ego because I saw effectively, almost regardless of ethnicity, um in a lot of the post-industrial towns, this kind of very in-your face roadman culture, everyone dressed in black, uh trying to um look like they're particularly hard men, uh being overtly aggressive, and and I found this in town after town, city after city, but then when that wasn't there, in the places that were really just down upon themselves, what I found was um people almost living or at least appearing to live without dignity, looking really down upon themselves, uh men in men included, um almost men especially in some respects.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: And to see those videos of 60, 70, 80 years ago, it honestly, when you see those and then you go and look at what's going on on the streets, I think you can find that it's like we have woken up in a totally separate universe.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um what do you what do you think what do you think any of that might reveal about the inner state of of of men today?
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in fact, what I suppose what are you seeing about the men who come to you?
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: What did men reveal to you about their inner state, about how they uh feel about the modern world and them trying to find their way in it?
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, it's a good question, and you know, you touched on some very interesting things there that I think relate to the answer.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: And one thing I immediately thought of when you were speaking about noticing this general zeitgeist that we have at the moment, especially you know, with regards to the roadman culture, I suppose for any international viewers that that would be the sort of you know bad boy sort of stemming out of rap culture, really.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, one thing I I noticed again with my grandparents' generation is they were aspirational.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Both of them born uh or both sets born in working class arenas, one in the north, one in the south, but aspirational and did achieve i i in their lives and they did aim upwards.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: But by the time I was growing up in in middle class Leicestershire, really, on the edge of Leicester, which is of course a highly multicultural city, even when I was growing up in the 90s, it was already uh majority um non-white.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I was on the edge, sort of bit between both worlds, and I remember being about 17 in a pub just before I was legally allowed to drink, but you know, being a bit cheeky.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember one of my or she was a girlfriend at the time saying to me, um, why are you talking like that?
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I I I wondered what she meant.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: And and then essentially what she meant was, why have you adopted this almost rude boy MLE twang?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, God, I have.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: And back then I thought it was kind of cool, but looking back, I didn't really have a choice because the culture around you almost demands that you fit in.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I certainly remembered at school learning wasn't cool, aspiration wasn't cool, rejection was cool, you know, rejecting the mainstream society.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that really stayed with me for a long time until I could embrace education through uh what was then at least a rebellious way by adopting sort of Marxist ideas because it was still anti-the system.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: I've spoken a bit about this with, you know, you'll get working-class white lads who will adopt Islam, and in a sense, it's a form of rebellion that allows them to live a spiritually oriented life, however, imperfectly.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a bit like that with me when I was young.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: I, for some reason, I it was repellent the the tradition of my nation.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: I and I I didn't know then, but it had been almost indoctrinated into me, this idea that I should reject it through the schooling system, through the culture I grew up in, through the education system.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: And another thing that I I came to see more and more, and I think this is a thing that men come to me with quite often, is there hasn't been a form of acceptable masculinity for Western men.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's changing now, but it was certainly the case when I was growing up.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because with this this takeover that happened, you know, this this cultural fragmentation, and then the introduction of all manner of alien ideas.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to go too far back, but for just a quick oversight, you could say Thatcherism took many men into the market and the market ideology and earning was their job.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: So at the office all day, making money, that's how they became men, if you like.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: But their sons were growing up and being taught by women, and that really came into fruition in Blairism, where that Thatcherite male was still kind of there as an archetype, but it was replaced by this kind of modern guy, you know, he's a bit more liberal, these sorts of things.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: But he was a bit more spiritually feminized.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the point I'm making is, especially for young white Western lads, there wasn't really a masculinity to grow into.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the most common things I've heard throughout doing this channel and before that, because I've been very interested in this area for a while, is men will say, probably the most common thing is my father wasn't a bad guy, but he was just busy with work and he was quite distant and he provided for me, but I never really connected with him.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: The only place I would connect with him might be at the football.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: And even at the football now, that's very much taken over by, again, the sort of social justice left-wing messaging.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's an inclusive space, quote unquote.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: So those male spaces where they can be rowdy, where they can be a bit rough, would introduce men into something, however imperfectly, that would have been a path towards an identity which allows masculine expression.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: Now, we have, again, especially in the Western world, systematically destroyed that.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: We all know that story, it's been spoken about many times.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the good little boy should sit quietly at school now and be like the girls.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really replicated all the way through till he leaves school and now he's got to be the good, quiet househusband.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: But we've seen what's happened in response to that, which is some men have tried to adopt that and become quite damaged, and other men have rebelled against it, and and that overcorrection is too strong.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's the classic Andrew Tate thing, and like I've always said, in a sense, the Andrew Tate thing is kind of better than where they were, because at least they have some path of exploration, of forcing themselves upon the world, of adventure.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: The only problem is it goes back into quantity, it's women, it's cars, it's money, it's hedonism, it's egocentrism.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's not really anything around a cohesive whole, it's not the gentle maturity of our grandparents.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: But one thing I noticed as well, and and this is talking back to the roadman thing, and why so many um, you know, Western lads adopt that that almost rude boy attitude, and we'll ape black culture a lot, is because masculinity, again, in a very unhealthy form, has been left alone in that world.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: So they'll often adopt the norms of that culture because it is an expression through which they can they can become something which is other than the feminine world.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: And in initiatory language, males naturally crave the move away from the feminine world.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: They just do.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's you get it with young boys, they'll always be going off on adventures and doing things they shouldn't do.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that stays with men because they're craving that journey into the world of the father.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: But if they're not given it in any way, they will find it in unhealthy means.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's this great quote from C.S.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis that if you don't allow young males to look up to um knights and warriors and great leaders, they will start to admire the celebrities, the prostitutes, the pimps, all these sorts of characters, which is exactly what's happened.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say hopefully, in what I'm trying to do, and hopefully with the men who connected with what I'm trying to do, is at least see that there is another path, or there at least was, and their soul yearns for something deeper than modernity is offering.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now I can't pretend I can provide that, and it would be a lie for me to sit here and say that I can.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if anybody can in its fullness right now, because our our culture and our spiritual institutions, in my view, have been have been largely corrupted.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: But there is something to be said for the recognition of the depth of your soul, for the recognition of what's gone wrong in modernity, and for being with other men who understand this stuff and are orienting themselves towards something that our ancestors knew and does give us a sort of transcendent knowledge and ability to deal with the slings and arrows of the modern world.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: For fear of going off on a huge tangent before getting to the next question.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Much of what you just said there maps pretty neatly also onto my own experience growing up.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I did not grow up in a large urban connovation in a multicultural, multi-ethnic environment.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in a uh an abbey town in in Northumberland, and yet that still didn't stop me from um dressing like I was from South Central Los Angeles, um listening to Ice Cube and when we could all drive, playing it loudly out the windows, and also just being belligerent, um, walking around with what you'd call a screw face and trying to be overly uh aggressively masculine, um, and uh, you know, school dropout, all the rest of it, no real qualifications to speak off, no going to university.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: But uh it was interesting because at one point, and this is what this will be a uh a long segue into the next part of the discussion around the disc the discovery of traditionalism, is I uh realized um that this culture I'd inducted myself into, this pop gangster culture in some way, um, as I was growing up, I realized all it had done was instill a bit of a chip on my shoulder and not actually given me any responsibility, and then made me worry about the prospect of doing things like having a family and even learning how to provide for myself, let alone for other people.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought I should probably get one of the chips off my shoulder, which is not being very well educated, and so that set me off on side of the desk whilst working full-time, doing um uh degrees and all the rest of it.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, one thing that led me into traditionalism was learning about virtue ethics, Aristotle, uh, just in one small part of this modulus, this degree that I was doing.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then all of a sudden, I realized I was starting to conform my life in accordance with these principles, and I was getting good feedback from them.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly there was good results on these essays, but then I was applying these things that were in my work, and suddenly work was going well, and then I realised oh, I seem to have stumbled across some kind of a secret here.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then as time went on, and I continued finding myself going deeper and deeper within all of those things, and ultimately the in the in the end um uh being baptized into the church, having not been when I was uh born, is um these things uh totally just uh saw me jettison this bizarre globalized identity and saw me induct myself into my own nation's history, it's uh my own culture, which I had learned nothing of because we're all the children and grandchildren of.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Cultural revolutionaries, so you get it piecemeal and start to feel grounded there, but also through the entry into traditionalism, into the religious life as as much as you can have one in the secular world.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, found myself feeling much more rooted and growing into myself, but in a way that was probably more recognisably uh British and also r recognisably um upstanding, trying to comport myself well and be a decent colleague and family member and friend and all the rest of it.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I suppose that being the segue into traditionalism, so something you advocate for, a return to traditionalism.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose that word can mean many things.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: So perhaps you can tell us what you mean by it and what traditions specifically you think are worth recovering.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, it's a really nice, nice intro there.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know, I think what you're talking to is hopefully a journey that many Western men are starting to discover.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's the silver lining of what's going on that I do touch on in the videos every now and again.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: It is an era of chaos and things are being corroded, but you know, as I like to say, in in that darkness, I think the the flame of that sacred truth, uh that alignment that you were talking to, like discovering a secret, it it beams all the more, and I think it becomes all the more magnetic.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a really lovely story as well, because I think what you've spoken to there is is unfortunately what so many Western men have lacked, which is an introduction into the depth of their own culture beyond the cliches of the mainstream, which which tends to misrepresent it, misread it, not understand it, poo-poo it.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a tragedy because there is real life in there, there is gold in there that can can really align our souls, souls on a level that I don't think we can even intellectually understand.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a natural segue into uh traditionalism and and and my understanding of it in the sense of, you know, I suppose in in classic English terms, uh a way to think about it is is C.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis in The Abolition of Man, speaking about the Tao or the Tao as it's known in Chinese, which is roughly translates as a way or a path or a road.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea being that there is an innate way of living, being itself implies a certain model, sacred central truths that one cannot escape from.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: And in simple terms, you know, we could say that we see this all around the world.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: I speak a bit on the channel about the yin and the yang, the classic masculine and feminine force.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: I remember years ago watching this clip of Ricky Gervais, who's essentially a new atheist, uh, really, saying um to some talk show host, you know, if uh all science was lost um in 10 years, if we rediscovered it all, it would be the same.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we'd have a different language, but it would all be the same.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: But religion wouldn't be like that.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, and the host was like, oh, how clever, and the audience clapped.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, but that's modernity in a nutshell.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: We think only the laws of science are eternal.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: We don't recognise the spiritual truths are also eternal.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, they're different in their expression, different people will uh perhaps riff on different elements and so on, but broadly speaking, we find these fundamentals cross-culturally throughout time, you know, the cosmic masculine and feminine energies, things to do uh with hierarchy, with the idea of the wounding leading to the overcoming, spiritually speaking, Jesus is is prodded in the side, Woden loses his eye, the Buddha has to see hell before he can reach nirvana and so on.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: So these sort of spiritual archetypes played out time and again.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now, m my understanding really, because I I I was going through many ways on my spiritual journey through the east for a long time, and again, that was probably part of modernity itself.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: The church seemed so stale to me and impenetrable, and every time I went to it, it to be honest, it was just sweet old ladies eating cucumber sandwiches and you know wanted to talk about the duck pond.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: And they're all really sweet.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I, you know, I don't want to be mean to them because you know they they are lovely, but I thought, like, I'm a man whose soul is yearning for orientation and direction, and I'm just not finding that level of connection here.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I was very interested in the East, specifically Buddhism, and then non-duality and Aid Valja Vedanta and all these sorts of schools which are getting very popular in the West now, but over time began to see two very important things, which I think is so vital for the modern West.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, I started to realize this just wasn't my tradition, it just wasn't my ancestors were from, it wasn't the culture I was from, and I could see almost in defense of the Eastern traditions, a lot of Westerners implanting a sense of Western individualism on the Eastern practice.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, for instance, you might have something like um, you know, we we might in the West look at um the practice of Saati.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we've heard about Hindu wives jumping on the bonfire and and and the British Empire stopped that, and uh the idea that the caste system and you just take your role in it.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, these all hark back to the fundamental spiritual teaching of the East, which is you don't really exist as an individual, so you're almost aligned with the civilizational flow.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying that's wrong or right, it's their way, it's a beautiful expression.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: It taught me a lot.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: The point I'm making is the Westerner almost wants to have that, you know, the wonderful spiritual enlightenment in Bali while playing on the rock and probably having four or five girlfriends for themselves, you know.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: So it's almost decontextualizing the teaching from the civilizational implications, which led me to think, well, look, this is just another form of modernity through the back door.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: And again, you know, you probably can guess a lot of the people from the West that were involved in this were 40 women who'd, you know, had had a lot of fun in London, slept around.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: Same with the blokes, because I was, you know, from the same from the blokey side.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: So there was that side of just this excess and now trying to find yourself, but almost superimposing the Western approach.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: So that was number one, and number two, which was the really big one for me.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: The Eastern teaching was really wonderful, and I and I really got a lot of raw spirituality from it.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: But number one, uh the second problem was there was an illumination from God directly.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: I won't go too far into that, but that's very specific to Christianity.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: The love of God, I think, is extraordinarily powerful and really underplayed in the West.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it's the most beautiful aspect of the Western Christianity, it's the fatherly love.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it really is mind-blowingly beautiful.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: And the second aspect of that is the more the action of God the Father in practicality, which again is hierarchy, is structure.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: And God, I was a man who craved hierarchy and structure.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'd reject it all my life, and finally, I didn't just have this um mystical understanding which I'd got from the East, but started to find within the Christian tradition in the esotericism, but with it, I started to understand the exoteric practice, you know, the church norms, the how you live a Christian life, how that has interacted with the broader European story, i.e.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: Belloc, Europe is the church and the church is Europe, but also specified in the Germanic world, but then further specified in the English world, to create again the Anglican tradition, which, if I'm honest, I do make many disparaging videos about because of how far it's fallen.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: But I should make it clear, I I love the Anglican tradition in terms of what it is.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: I I have a deep respect for it, a deep love for it, and that's why it pains me to see what's happened to it.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I when I finally started to understand and put all this together, it was that hierarchy and guidance that I think was so, so powerful for me.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I believe men across the West right now are just craving that direction.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: But the the well, I shouldn't say all the church, and certainly not every church, because there are Anglican vicars who reach out to me and say, Look, I agree with what you're saying, and I do need to say that there are many great people in the tradition still, but it's broadly speaking the tradition has been, in my view, corrupted at its heart, and what men are craving, they're no longer well, they can find it in spurts, but it's very difficult for them to get that blend of what you call mystical realization, the illumination of the heart, God in your heart, with the masculine path.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that was once very replete and implicit in our tradition.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: I I personally believe this is why many young men, especially going Orthodox, because they find within orthodoxy that lend.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: The only problem is again, and I say this as someone who's been to the Orthodox Church many times and has great respect for it, you can feel a bit alien in the Orthodox Church because then to be honest, it's not really the tradition that you hark back to.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: The one I go to, half of it's in Slavonic.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, a lot of it you don't know anyone, and these people are basically from Eastern Europe and they don't really speak to you, and they have their own cliques, and Greek Orthodox, even worse.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it's one of these things where you can kind of see it's very hard for for men to fit.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm gonna win there because I've I've thrown a lot at you, but uh but hopefully that won't give us a general point.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it certainly does.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh thinking about the Church of England a little, uh I'm sure there are many different ways that people reach faith uh similar uh to you.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I uh I really enjoyed how you put it, it resonated with me uh an illumination from God.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: I I I didn't really know I was uh fully searching, but there we go.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: And uh basically uh whilst this won't satisfy everyone because people always want a theological choice as to why you chose the church you did, and in some respects it played into it.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: I, in the end, uh whilst I was baptized into the Anglican tradition because I felt like I should do as an Englishman, uh, I actually chose to be confirmed into the Catholic Church at the end after much internal wrangling.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: And there were lots of things that went into that, but I suppose in one respect it was also because I'd seen the Church of England had totally vacated its role as the spiritual leader of the country.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: So whilst having spent much of my time as I was searching, sitting in empty churches, whether or not there was a a service going on, um is uh there was a sense that it had lost its way so much that I felt as though I would be joining something, and as you were saying, something wouldn't be given back to me in some way.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: That it that at least whilst the Catholic Church has also made a whole bunch of mistakes, it it still seems to hold firm on some of its its central tenets and not just fall in with the prevailing attitudes and ideological uh preferences of today's professional managerial elite class, which is effectively what you see happening in the Anglican church.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: And on this road trip I was just talking about, Richard, I mean, I also became uh a whistle stop tour of all of our great cathedrals and churches as I was going in and out of our glorious and inglorious cathedral cities, and and these places are just unbelievable, and they're treated these days ultimately as an as an open-air museum and one that you get charged an admission fee on the door for, it's barely even donations anymore.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it all of it brought home to me things that we miss um about what these things represent, um, and I'll come on to that in a moment, but also just how much of a failure it is that the um that the Church of England um doesn't feel like it even wants to pass it on as an inheritance to people, it's just easier to run it as uh a tourist um activity.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and I suppose what I mean by that is when you walk into them, what you will find is that in some respects the exhibitions that are on suggest it's still living in 2020 in the era of George Floyd.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: So you find lots of uh depictions of uh a black Adam and a white Eve, or an African-American man wearing jeans and trainers in a stained glass.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: These are things that I that I saw, or you'll have um, as we know, uh you'll you'll see um advertisements for an iftar welcoming in an imam from a local uh Islamic institution to run an iftar and uh and and wish people a happy Eid Mubarak for a religion that basically sees all the other previous religions, Christianity and Judaism, as being um just a lead up to the one true religion, and yet the leaders of the church not feeling like there's even any um uh conflict of interest there, that there's anything to be worried about, even though that's just a theological submission, really.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it felt to me like you are the uh stewards of this magnificent inheritance.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that I mean that I'm thinking that we're missing is look at these buildings and what they represent.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: Not only the uh unbelievable nature of the West's relationships with mathematics, look at those gothic structures and those flyovers and that vaulting and how it all works together and how it seems almost impossible, and that people who lived in this country that you're probably related to built that.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and they also did it not just as a glory to God, but we're a powerful people.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, look at those buildings, look at look at the stone that they made of, how impenetrable they are, that the the tombs could literally stand there forever.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose the the final uh thing to add on, or the final observation, was one of the one of the um cathedrals that I went into had been, I think it was Ely, had been bombed in the Second World War, and there was a video in one of the chapels that had been rebuilt, brick by brick as it was, um, showing the dis extent of the damage and what the church leadership was willing to do to be able to rebuild not just that chapel, which was the St.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: James's Chapel, but the St Andrew's Chapel as well, which had this magnificent Reridos um made out of this intricate wood carving, and they wanted it all to be exactly the same.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: So they put it back together like a giant jigsaw puzzle, and they they talked about it being the inheritance of our people and how uh they wanted to put it together for the future.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, wow, they're these people are stewards, and that was only 81 years ago, and they're willing to do that and spend 10-15 years of their lives putting it all back together, and now what we do is we we we see the promotion of other religions, we um don't even try to go and deal with all of the poor and the alcoholics literally just lining the streets outside the churches that I saw.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: So there's no outreach, it's just well, take your 20 quid on the door and uh enjoy your visit and hear a few pamphlets.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: But they're sitting on an unbelievable repository of our history and our national heritage, and all they can do is talk about the things that you're likely to find in just online um clickbait or corporate HR buzzwords.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's so utterly uncompelling, and yet they're sitting atop this spiritual gold mine and they don't know what to do with it.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, no, not quite.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: What well said, and again, I mean I've seen exactly what you're talking about because you know, so towards the end of last year, me and my wife and son took a trip uh to the southwest to see some friends and various things, and we went to uh Wells Cathedral, and and just like you're saying, I mean, it is it is astonishingly beautiful and incredible in terms of its architecture, but but also like you you you're intimating towards it it's otherworldly.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: You you feel like you've been transported somewhere else spiritually, and I know in my own life I think anybody who's at least sympathetic to Christianity has times where they feel a bit stuck in the world, stuck in the fallen physical world, and your soul craves the its own, really.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one of these places where you do think, God, this is as close uh in the physical world I've ever felt to that transcendent realm, which is just not part of this world, it really is that powerful and well worth going in there, even just for a um for a 10-minute you know, sit down in the silence because its energy is is astonishing.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, just like you say, it's it's it's really speaks back to this spiritual corrosion of uh of the age.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I've touched on this i on the channel before in that we do have a new god, and it it of course is a pseudo-god in the modern era, it's the god of universalism, which is not God, you know, the the god of tradition, we could say, and remember tradition is oriented in being, is a god of of hierarchy and distinction, and that doesn't deny universal love.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: God's love is replete in everything, but when we look in the world, when we look in nature, we do see distinction, we see difference, we see hierarchy, and so on.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: So there's that very important distinction to make between the transcendent and the manifest, if you will.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: What we've done in the, in my view at least, in the modern world is flip that upside down and we try and see universality in the manifest.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: Ergo, we break down all tradition.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we think tradition's just well, it's classic left-wing ideology.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's just oppression, it's just needless hierarchy, it's power politics, it's just there to oppress people.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: And if we get rid of it all, we will create heaven on earth.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same communist, Marxist, neo-Marxist promise, or at least what it's teleologically oriented towards.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: And this is why when we think about the wonderful Anglican tradition and how on earth they can have in Islam, which was you know a rival uh civilization, rival religion for hundreds, if not thousands of years, is because it's oriented under the pseudo-god, which basically says, as long as you align with my priors, we'll let you stick around.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: So now the the Anglican Church seems to have, at least institutionally, bought in to the idea that you know, total universalism amongst the peoples of the world.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's no different if you're English or if you're Japanese or whatever.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: And by your very nature, you're going to lose the essence of Anglicanism if there are no Anglicans in it.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's just simple.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the same when it comes to men and women and so on.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: We're just really playing the same scripts as the overarching zeigeist of the era, which is liberal slash post-liberal modernity, really.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's all it is.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: And you can be part of that so long as, again, all of your priors are oriented towards the liberal ultimate teaching, if you will.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: Islam gets a free pass, of course, because they're seen as you know, minority religion, so they're being inclusive.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: But as so many of us have realized, the Muslims are not playing that game.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: They are still harking back to something which is unique and specific and does make claims about its religion which are fundamental, and they're not going to budge on them.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: And if I'm honest, I don't blame them for not budging on them.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, why would they throw away what is sacred to them?
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is why, in my view, we just shouldn't have invited Islam in here en masse.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's always going to be small crossovers of people, but inviting, you know, mass amounts of people with that tradition, of course, it's going to lead to fundamental fractures on the traditional level of who and what we are, which you're not going to solve with endless propaganda from the state.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess the central point I'm making too, and it may be, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but perhaps speaks to your Catholicism and why many men are deepening their faith in that regard, is they they crave something with roots and the eternal that would be won over by the winds of change of the modern world.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think that that that nails it.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think there is um much that remains in Catholicism that is a bulwark against the modern world, and um and I and I recognise that Europe, as you see, is the church, and the church is Europe.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: And whilst I deeply respect the Anglican tradition and indeed love it myself, is I thought, well, I can't join an institution that has lost faith in itself and is peddling something entirely different.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and actually that that takes me on to um Christianity and its place in in uh in our national life.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I appreciate this is probably a little bit of a um a thought experiment rather than something that's going to happen in reality based on all the things we've spoken about, like the rapid advance of moral relativism, the rise of um rival faiths that have been um effectively championed through universalism, and obviously a loss of faith in our own sacred order and having thrown it away, but it is a decision.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's happened in the in the public square where people have uh been arguing about whether Christianity can be enforced or at least um uh used as a civilizational framework uh to embed it in institutions and culture that it's it's almost pushed top down, or whether it has to be a more internal um spiritual transformation.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_00: So for instance, Paul Kingsnorth would say, look, you know, it doesn't it doesn't work to go and throw this at everyone, this has to be something that you find yourself, and in some ways, having found it myself, I I partly agree.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, having again been around the country and seen the products of our current education system as well as their family lives, which are clearly not ordered toward this direction, but as you and I know, having just spoken about the images and the videos you can find from the past, and indeed uh actual anecdotal evidence from the lives of our grandparents who will say, God, hasn't things changed and how people conduct themselves change, and how people dress and how people act with dignity and afford people with dignity, how's that all changed?
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, none of that's happening anymore.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if there's anything about the Christian story, uh, as Ian McGillchrist would say, Dr.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: Ian McGillchrist, that it is the most um compelling, complex, um uh advanced mythos that man has ever known.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I suppose m my question is is why wouldn't we want to integrate that into everything we did as a civilization, even if people can then choose to decide whether they want to agree with it from a um uh a kind of liturgical point of view, from a confessional point of view, but we know that it's affording people a dignity and trying to show them the way of of living uh and a moral sacral order.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that's my question.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_00: Does renewal happen from the top down or from the inside out?
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, a really good question.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: And and I tend to hog back to the broader traditionalist perspective on this in terms of cycles and cycles of history, and the way I see it is there is just a divine element to all of this, and in in heavy religious language, as a civilization, we've sinned against God, and that sin in a karmic sense has to play out.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: And if we think about you know, let's just say after this call, I go and neck a bottle of whiskey or whatever, I'm going to have a hangover tomorrow, and I can't get away from it.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's just a karmic lore to that.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it might be two, three days, it gets worse as you get older, as many people know.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: But uh, the point I'm making in there is I I'm edging a lot towards what Kings North is saying because you see this a lot in the populist movement, the reawakening of Christian symbols, and it's nice in one sense, but in another sense, I feel like look, this is just display, this is show.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's not really the transformative power of the spirit.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: And the other thing about it, of course, as well, is this is there's a tricky balance to be made here with regards to how we understand the divine and transcendent driving force of life.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: And there could be something to be said for those of us who may well be aligned with it or feel it.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_01: You wish to allow that energy to flow, but there's something to be said for that energy flows by its own means in its own way and dictates how things will play out via its own creative, spontaneous, uh, momentarious flow and so on.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what I mean by that in simple terms is I genuinely believe that what we are witnessing now with regards to the corrosion in the West and England and so on is almost divine in some sense.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I say this a lot because of personal experiences in my life.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: When I was really lost in my late 20s and I couldn't make sense of things, and I had everything on paper, you know, with a girlfriend, a flat in London, a half-decent job, could look the part and all that.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_01: I still was like spiritually destitute and I didn't know why.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I almost had to go through this journey of painful realization to figure out the spiritual priors.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: A bit like you're talking to with people who have made that realization.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: I just think that needs to be made on a grander uh civilizational context.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: So we almost experience the realities of what happens when we turn away from this.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that process is well underway at this point.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: The shift from only 10, 20 years ago to now, where you will even get people who may well still be secular or atheistic in belief, who've changed their line from this kind of Dawkinian Hitchin style cutting critique of everything Christian to actually I don't believe myself, but I really don't want to see it disappear.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: I really see the value in it, and we really need it, is massive.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that again is just symbolic of us losing the essence of what sustained us as a people.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: But it seems to me there's almost a justness at this point to us going through what we have to go through to recognize what happens.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: Those of us who are aware, I think we can do so with confidence and a sense of, okay, this will be hard, it will be rough, but we have to do it with a sense of a calm mind, an aligned heart, a trust in one another, a trust in the faith, a trust in the tradition, and we will make it through because as things corrode and fall apart, that's where people do turn to what actually is a solution on the fundamental level, not the intellectual level.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's not going to be about endless arguments which we're stuck in today.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's the instinctive level of okay, I'm getting it now.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: My soul must be oriented around divine truth.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: And not everybody needs to make that realization.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: As always, in my view at least, within civilizations and within traditionalist formations, there's always a vanguard.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_01: There's always a vanguard.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: And they're almost like the priestly class, the spiritual hierarchy.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now they pass down the truth, which becomes um, well, it it sort of flows out amongst every level of the hierarchy and amongst different people.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: And a bit like our grandparents, like I was saying in the top of the call, both sets of my grandparents were nominally religious, but neither sets were really churchgoers.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: They had those very strong values completely imbued within them, you know.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: So it's something like that.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_01: Not everybody has to be really alive with the the the fire of the spirit.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's more can that really flow through those people who have that calling into the flock, if you will, and unify it all.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that would be my my take, really.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I I I I live in hope.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: I I I don't uh I certainly um I'm not in a black pill mode about where we're headed because I think you're right, I think you can see that uh that bubbling up of transformation um within individuals and also people within um various parts of the public square.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: So you'll notice there's a subset of Zoomer men who or Gen Zdders who dress incredibly well um and who try to live uprightly, who try not to overindulge, you don't get caught up with uh intense passions and all the rest of it, and are thinking civilizationally.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I do think there is more and more of that going on, and as you say, the um uh the reality of those who were Dawkinsian and Hitchenites going, Oh, actually, you don't particularly want this stuff to disappear, including, of course, Richard Dawkins.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh and and you know, I used to read his stuff uh um uh voraciously, Christopher Hitchens, and was just one of those typical people saying, What a load of tosh this all is.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it is fascinating that you can have these discussions now in a way that just wouldn't have happened before unless it was uh you know a South Park style parody of it.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um starting to think then about models um of the the good life.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we we've spoken a little bit about the state of our cultural and leadership elites, at least we we spoke about it in the context of the Church of England, but I think you can more broadly extend the disappointment with um the model presented by these people um amongst the normal professional managerial classes of of which I'm also a part.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I say this because if if you go and look at those who are, I don't know, uh quite good in his uh decent education, what you tend to find is that um, and this is borne out by a very recent telegraph poll on class in Britain, is actually one of the the the groups of people that read the least.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: So considering there are people in the liberal elite like James Marriott, and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, he's genuinely liberal and of the elite from an educational perspective, who believe that we live in a post-literate society and that is a civilizationally ending thing, having the smartphone and all the other things going on, is we need to get people back to to reading and understanding our culture because that is going to be the way that we can live with some kind of uh dignity.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_00: The things that we've been speaking about today is that those who are in elite positions basically don't steward anything from the civilization, are typically really into the quantity stuff, um uh kind of dress in a athle leisury kind of way, uh, and also barely barely read.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I suppose um with the work that you do, Richard, and the people that come to you to work with you and to work through how to improve their lives, what do you think an upright, well-ordered man would actually look like today?
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: And uh maybe you might even have an example of that person um in the in the public square of good role model.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean again, this is something that you know I I would say I very much see my role as someone who helps them with the foundations, and then in many senses is between God and them to to form or how they would understand these things uh to form who and what they are.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um in terms of being upstanding, I I think it's very, very hard actually to do that in an effective way because everything in the externals is so against you.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_01: There's uh differing schools of thought on this, and and one is this kind of Evolian idea of the differentiated man who is in the ruins of modernity but still harks back to these traditional truths and lives quietly, almost ascetically, studies, prays, you know, and um engages in in really uh the fulfilment of his soul despite the collapse of the world.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: I find that a bit much, and I think that that probably is a little OTT and it speaks to perhaps a bit of a dark soul.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think the soul craves connection and it craves life.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: Again, that's that's very much replete in Christianity in the Christian tradition.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: So it's almost the way that that I would see the development of these things, in my view, that the development of the virtue of a man never really changes.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's always the same, it's replete in our tradition.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think we all have an intuitive understanding of what that is because let's just say you're chatting to a friend and that friend says to you, you're not acting like a man.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: We all know what that means.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_01: It cuts deep, it hurts a little bit, and you're like, ooh, because there's a sense of morality in there, and there's a sense of being what you are that that speaks to.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we all have that very intuitive understanding in that sense.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_01: But the way I've tried to explore this and contextualize it to the modern era is that, yeah, it's we're undeniably on a decline right now.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: But it seems to me the best way we can orient ourselves is the healthy soil, if you will, that can give birth to the seed in which the new plant can grow from.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that has seemed to my mind to be very appealing to men because it gives them a role where there aren't any spiritual roles, where their soul has any meaning.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: And there is a passage in the New Testament, I forget it exactly, where Christ is speaking about seeds that drop onto the ground, and some seeds will come up and hit rock, and some will get snagged in thorns and so on.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a metaphor for the challenges of the world and so on.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: So it's all about how we do that inner gardening, but also that external gardening of what we're facing uh in our day-to-day lives.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: So it's that that blend of the two, in my view.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: And as always, I think we have to align ourselves uh with a tradition in the sense of being able to hark back to something that that nudges us in the right direction, if that makes sense.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_01: So if we're left on our own, we will start to get wacky and wild.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where you get the spiritual woo-woo types.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm a bit of a spiritual woo-woo type, but I have to be pulled back down to earth by the tradition, you know, go and read the saints, go and read the greats, discover what they're saying, make sure you're on the right track, and of course, share with with fellow men, um, you know, within your local community or church community, spiritual community.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to plug my own community, but there are others out there like that as well.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: So anything that you can find that that will speak to you in that regard, and I think that will stand you in good stead.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_01: With regards to who's living that today, I wouldn't really be able to say.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think I'd have to think a little bit longer about it.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think there are many folks who probably embody different parts of uh, you know, qualities we could admire in the man, but a sort of a unifying figure, I don't think I'd be able to say one person.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I that's understandable.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_00: I almost think that no matter who you would have put forward, I can almost imagine the comment section exploding with he's a total mark.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean?
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_00: Or no, it'd definitely be this person.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well, Richard, uh, thank you very much for joining me to talk about uh the things that we've lost in modernity, the things that we can regain, things that are right in front of us, uh if should we choose to discover them or rediscover them?
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I suppose what we might actually do about it, uh, but before I let you go, I have a question that I ask all of my guests, and that is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps it was something that seems like an absolute, a moral absolute, or maybe it was something more day-to-day, and what was it that made you think differently?
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, really good question.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um there are many things I've changed my mind on, especially in that turbulent era in my twenties, from you know, left-wing ideas to more right-wing ideas to right-wing to what you call metapolitical ideas.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um but but the one that was easily the most seismic was the I don't even like the phrase belief in God.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to get too Jordan Peterson about it, but it wasn't a belief because belief implies, you know, you you're almost um having this sort of blind um faith in in this unbelievable thing, you know.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas for me it wasn't like that.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like I believe my football team can win or whatever.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_01: It was a realization that something is real, and and that was something that took me over at a time in my life where I was quite flawed and it was easily the most beautiful moment.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: It still resonates to this day.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: The sheer beauty of it has quiet and down, whether that's me getting used to it or whether it's just time passing.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: But that was the one thing that really flipped me from being quite a black pill depressive soul to someone who had light in his heart and and and was home.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose it related to my later thinking because that it was that that flipped the modernist to the traditionalist understanding of it being matter first to spirit first, and once that flip had been made, I was always just charting everything back to that understanding, so that would be easily the biggest, and in terms of what led to that, there were there were certain things that I was reading before uh I really made that change.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: I did have an interest in spirituality, although I couldn't really align with it.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: I was reading lots of the new age types, like Eckhart, Tole, and Muji and people like that, but also even Peter Hitchens speaking about before the call, uh, was reading some of his stuff and found that quite interesting.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_01: But it what really made me change my mind was life itself.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it was the harsh realities of life itself and that I was oriented the wrong way.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's that that gives me this direction about our culture and civilization.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_01: Because on a personal level, I I know what it's like to be it's proved wrong, he's putting it the wrong way.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's more shown the light.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's more what it was.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why I I have this um strong conviction that uh that we are, despite the corrosion around us, uh on the on track to make some very, very powerful realizations at a very difficult time.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_01: And if we can, it's on to a new era uh with the ancient wisdom in tow, as I often say.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_01: So that would be my answer.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh genuinely thank you for taking the time and the plunge to share something deeply personal.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um and hopefully um people can find something within that uh and and maybe it can provide a source of um inspiration or or hope toward uh a finding, a discovery in their own lives.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_00: But I did I do uh if there's one thing that's going to stick with me from this uh discussion, and it's something that I've fleetingly thought about but never really placed total focus on, is this idea that uh the civilizational cycles, which I I I do agree with, um, that we effectively what we are suffering through is having fallen so far, and we have to deal we have to live with those repercussions, but the cycle will churn back again, and we will end up living more uprightly and aligning ourselves with something beyond our more quotidian material concerns that we've been so concerned with for so long.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: So um, yeah, that is a a very good and poignant note to finish on.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_00: It it uh uh keeps us well clear of the black pill.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_00: And um and and just before I let you go, we've we've referenced a few of uh the your channels and substacks.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_00: Where can people find you in the dark corners of the internet if they want to look you up, Richard?
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_01: They can find me uh Richard IV on YouTube.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: I also have a spiritual channel called The Sacred Way, which focuses here more on spiritual themes, and a very new channel actually called By Lamplight, where I review the great art of Western culture or the famous cultural figures through a traditionalist lens.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Substack community as well, various other things, coaching and courses, you can find that in the descriptions and so on.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_00: So thanks for having me on.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_00: I hope to speak again.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_00: Keep fighting the good fight.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_01: Pleasure to come on.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_01: All the best.