Latest / Thinking Class / #030 - Connor Tomlinson - 'The Right Of Gen-Z Will Make Sure We Have A Healthy Civilisation Again'

Transcript

#030 - Connor Tomlinson - 'The Right Of Gen-Z Will Make Sure We Have A Healthy Civilisation Again' · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, classmates, and welcome back to the show.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Connor Tomlinson.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Connor is a writer and presenter at Lotuseators.com and co-host of the D Programme podcast by the New Culture Forum.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Connor has also frequently contributed to Talk TV and GB News and writes for the European Conservative and the Critic.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, Connor and I talk about why Gen Z and not so much being anti-civilizational, insofar as they didn't receive a cultural inheritance at all, the impact of the internet and the post-1960s education system on cultural identity, why not all of Gen Z is woke, why individualism and consumer capitalism has made everyone miserable, why the top-down erosion of Christianity has inflicted great harm on individuals, families, and communities, what the loss of train etiquette tells us about the state of things, why the West needs to abandon liberalism and rediscover an unapologetic faith in its heritage, how finding faith made life immeasurably better, the importance of looking to the past for wisdom to act prudently now and in the future, and why those on the right wing in Gen Z are so straight talking.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: This was a heck of a ride and one of the most clinical yet heartfelt podcasts yet.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Connor is a deeply impressive young man.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: He's articulate, passionate, and straight to the point, and there's definitely something I can learn from him on that front.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: For those of us who look closely enough, we might see that Gen Z is not exactly as we've come to expect it, and that perhaps us older generations need to take responsibility for any of its shortcomings.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Connor, in my view, is a really positive young voice, and he's smartly dressed to boot.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Before we dive in, you'd be really helping me out if you click subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to or watching on.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because the more subscribers we have, the more guests we can attract, and the faster Thinking Class grows.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much for the invitation, my friend.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I felt compelled to invite you because you're a young voice who's started to make a name for yourself, I suppose.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you're making a name for yourself as I see it because you're cutting against the grain of how people view most young people.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: So the picture most people have in their minds of young people of Gen Z is one of typically going against the grain of their cultural inheritance.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: They set themselves up as in opposition to that because that thing is not good.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas you've made a name for yourself as a young voice who cares about the health of British culture, champions some of its unique qualities and of Western civilization.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so within that context, Connor, I guess there's been lots of talk about civilizational decline and collapse, and as well as civilizational moments in response to October 7th and what we've seen on unfold on Britain's streets and in its institutions.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that we are suffering civilizational decline?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: And if you do, why?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, there's a there's a lot to pull that through it.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'll I'll start with a sort of connection to the autobiographical and generational.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: The reason why I've been in defense tepidly of some, if not all, of my generation are because to quote a line that I said in trigonometry, well, for the older people who don't like us, you made us.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, they're not necessarily going against the cultural grain.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's that they didn't have much of a cultural inheritance to start with.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I do think October the 7th has been a fissure moment in realizing this, because now all of politics is revolving around the gravity well of the Second World War.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we we do live in a post-war paradigm, the post-war consensus of international cooperation, and of course, never again, because nobody wants to see a second Holocaust except for some insane Islamists who happen to be in my country now.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um everything seems to be revolving around those ideas.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the longer you get from the inciting incident, actually, the more diverse you make a generation with different cultural inheritances, the less they feel wedded to that paradigm, even though the education system has essentially made that the only thing that we're really salient of.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: But when I studied history, blime, 10 to 15 years ago now, I do feel old.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, at secondary school, the only things we learned about were the civil rights era in America, which is absurd because I'm English, and it wasn't even a very well-detailed version, slavery, the first and second world wars, and the Cold War.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the Cold War did not go into detail about the Holodomor or Mal's Great Famine either.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: So we had no other genocides with which to compare the Holocaust to.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: So the main salience we had was essentially the Second World War as what the European Union call a negative foundation myth for the post-war order.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so now you've got Gen Z, as soon as October 7th has happened, bringing to bear their relative disconnectivity and their general resentments against the existing world that they don't feel as paid forward opportunities and a sense of belonging to them onto this event.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so now you've got them polarized among the camps of some on the more reactionary wing who are sort of following Nick Fuento's types, who are thinking that uh if you're in the States, American First means unrelenting and nearly deranged criticism of Israel.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: I have my critiques of Israel as well, but it's not the only thing I want to talk about, some people it is.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Or you're camping out on the Cambridge Green, stumping for a terror government that's been a dictatorship for the last couple of decades, who would sooner throw gay people off roofs than listen to quivers for Palestine.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so this sort of contradiction, or this breaking from what is perceived to be the cultural inheritance of the Anglosphere in Europe, has been instigated by an education system which has been appallingly myopic from everything since, let's say, 1911 to the 1960s.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, a opportunity ceiling for owning homes, having families earlier, having meaningful and gainful employment because wages have been depreciated by mass migration and a degree of automation, which might get worse in the coming years, with no proper answers to that, except more state dependency, and a deracination of culture because the boomers and to some extent Gen X have failed to pass on values, but also a combination of we have inherited the internet, we have been grown up as digital natives, nobody except us who grew up with this technology like a cyborg class understood how to wield it, and now we're using a less centrally controlled cultural dissemination mechanism to find our own cultures.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why some people have gone down the algorithmically derived gay race communism woke route, where again, they're stumping for Palestine despite never having actually been there.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or some of us are more tr traditionalist revivalists.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Some of us are looking to the history, the culture, the philosophy of the past, and try to bring it to bear on our otherwise barren and kind of confusing lives.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that's Gen Z, the woke constituent and the traditionalist constituent, the sort of reactionary right, which is slowly emerging and very few people are actually talking about or writing about, they're symptoms of the same cause, which is being bereft of opportunities, being economic and being bereft of a cultural inheritance, but having this amazing tool of the internet, for good or for ill, in our hands since we were infants.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: The pressures on Gen Z, then, with regards to how they come to view the world, is downstream of multiple anti-civilisational factors.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the internet, by its very nature and the way that we are plugged into a network that is ethereal and, as you mentioned, comes from many different angles and people can choose their own cultures, is it's immediately the thread is cut between the user and wherever it is that they're situated in place and time and amongst people.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then we've had the ideological transformation or formation within the education system over the years, which has left those of us inhabiting the here and now with very little to hold on to.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: So it'd be really interesting to hear about why you think there has been a movement toward the anti-civilisational movements and ideas, uh, instead of, for example, taking the route that you and others on the reactionary right, as you've described them, have chosen, which is plumbing the past for its wisdom and the things that we can learn and the cultures that we can build.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: What what what represents those anti-civilizational ideas and and how can we define them?
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think the cultural safety net has been snipped in the name of unmitigated freedom, but all that's happened is people that would have fallen and not had the capacity to catch themselves and would have been otherwise caught by the safety net of wholesome cultural incentives have just smacked and hit the bottom.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: And anyone lurking around the sort of resentful goblins at the at the abyss have been picking them up and saying it's okay, dwell down here with us, you know.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so it takes a lot more deliberateness and a degree of self-consciousness when you do have that moment of betrayal or pain, or for example, if if your d if your dad's not in the home, how do you learn the value of masculinity?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you go and seek out different advice online.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: You might go and read a book, you might go watch Joko Willink or Jordan Peterson or Chris Williamson or God for the Andrew Tate.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so you're developing a critical consciousness of something that wasn't imparted onto you.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And for the people who just follow algorithms, who follow incentives, who aren't super conscious of things, who just regurgitate rote-learned talking points because per luxury beliefs it gets them access to exclusive clubs or job opportunities or resources or friendship circles, they are following the most perverse of civilizational incentives.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: So when you said a civilization on the decline, yes, because what are the cultural incentives?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Cultural incentives are to indefinitely defer when you have your family until the point at which many people, even though they report wanting children, we've reached 50% in the UK of women over 30 having no children, 25, sorry, 25% of all women, therefore, and 50% of those women will never have kids, despite many of them wanting them.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you're going to be bereft of a family for the 40 years after 40.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great tragedy, and that's very, very painful.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lie told to people.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: We put out the myth that you are going to have more value in your life indefinitely filling in spreadsheets than surrounded by said loving family.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that a found family of grievance-based activists or online satellite communities is as good as a local community, a congregation, a fealty to people also invested in the future health and prosperity of your nation.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so we are atomizing people and giving people these surrogate relationships, which aren't morally nourishing, on the auspice of, oh, any vice you want to constantly indulge in, actually, that's just the freedom of your will.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone who gives you advice is imposing on your will, and everyone around you should be affirming you at all times that your conscience never does one of those pesky flare-ups and reminds you to actually have obligations to other people if you want a meaningful life.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what's being given to people who don't self-consciously curate an ethic against those perverse cultural incentives.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why civilization is on the decline, because we have all of those people doing all of those things in private, being encouraged by the most perverse and creepy people, either online or in their immediate orbit.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: They don't filter those people out of their lives.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: They never claw their way up out of the crabs that are snipping at their heels in the bucket.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then the default thing is whenever someone like me comes along for the last how many years and has been saying, guys, I don't think this is a good idea.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Young men, I think maybe you should not watch pornography until your eyes turn square.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Young women, I don't think that you should hate men in your life just because you've had an encounter with one or two terrible men.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, some of them want to protect and provide and take care for you, and both of you should stop being in each other's throats and form a family.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: They go, Well, what two consenting or three consenting or four consenting adults and a horse do behind closed doors isn't any business of mine.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if suddenly nobody's business is nobody's other business, then everyone in civilization is just, I don't know, gooning their way into oblivion and nobody cares for each other.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, no, I am interested in other people's business.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: I do care about people, and I think it's high time we started forming communities to shelter ourselves like a little Russian nesting doll against perverse cultural incentives.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: The communities you talked about there, that sounds to me like something Rod Dreyer has spoken about and written about in his book, The Benedict Option, where he talks about how there's much that those of us who may be despairing at the direction of civilization could do to make sure that whenever the opportunity arises to recreate or rebuild civilization on sturdier routes, uh, we could go and create communities of people who are like-minded and focused on the things that you've spoken about which are important, like the wisdom of the past and family and all of these things which we know work within our nature rather than against it and provide flourishing and is not just focused purely on the individual, which is I suppose where we've gotten to, right?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: As we are these atoms who can do whatever it is that we want to do because don't judge me and it's my choice, and that's the thing that is most important in this world.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose looking around, the economy is set up to whether it's digital or or physical, the economy is set up to create um lots of consumers and individual atomistic lives.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so I suppose the tidal wave um uh is is pretty strong at this point against civilizational ideas and trends.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: What prospect do you think that there is of the pendulum swinging back?
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: And what would need to happen, do you think?
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you need both personal resilience and structural reform.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I think personal resilience you can ensure independently, structural reform you just have to push for collectively in different avenues and hope politicians are listening.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think they will listen in the next five years.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: But but on that point, I mean, the economy is set up in such a way where we are classified as universal unisex consumer units rather than inextricable embodied constituents of a household.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we used to consider ourselves household, and we'd move from belonging to one household to the next.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: That was the sort of fulcrum on which movement from childhood to adulthood came about until very recently, really.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: The Industrial Revolution set this off, then the sexual revolution, the digital revolution.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, technology has dislodged us from time, place, people, and culture to think of ourselves as universal men, the anywhere class, David Goodhart talks about, that can be picked up and dropped off on any soil and not have any cultural, ethnic, historical holdover, and instead just produce goods, consume goods, and then, I don't know, be turned into sustainable carbon neutral mulch when we eventually expire and just go to sleep forever, because there's obviously no spiritual afterlife in the minds of these elites.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: Ivan Illich talked a lot about this in his book Gender.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um he also wrote a book called Shadow Work, but basically his concept is shadow work in that our lives are now reorganized around maximally creating productive work at work and then going home and then maximally recuperating using consumer goods to rest at an optimal level to re-enter the marketplace.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's the Sigma male grindset we we see of the, you know, the online right is as bad for this as anyone else, of lionizing Patrick Bateman because he has a perfect skincare routine, a perfect fitness routine, and he goes to work and he's you know very di very dedicated and formulaic.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't want that.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Filling out spreadsheets at infinitum does not provide worth to your life.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: And especially when in an economy now where, and the TikTok girls that keep making, you know, TikToks in their car complaining about the cost of living and that, are actually right about this, and I will defend them.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Where you make nothing for no one, it cannibalizes your social life and increasing amount of your time for diminishing returns.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: And you have infinite consumer goods that are all transitory, they're all digital, they're all subscription services, you never actually own anything.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: You will own nothing and you will not be happy, it turns out.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: But you don't have the basic essentials that even the grandparents that we have, and you know, God bless them, I love them, but they are at fault for this, which is a home and the possibility of having a family under that roof.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need constant digital distractions, breads, and circuses.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: You can have a little bit of economic hardship so long as life can provide opportunities to create meaning and thick bonds of obligation to one another, which enrich your life even though you are acting in service.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so essentially, like individual consumer capitalism has made everyone miserable.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: We don't need more stuff.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: We need more people with our good intentions in our lives that we can do stuff for.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: As you're speaking there, it strikes me as to where we live now in modernity uh with regards to the don't judge me culture, the individualist culture.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: And and sometimes I wonder when we are able to paint this picture of what it's become, as in the effects of thinking this way, and for example, throwing away the uh the the Christian culture, I suppose, that was the the the country Europe was built upon, which was about um learning to restrain your worst appetites and developing character and obviously having more of a social mindset instead of it being just about you and what you can achieve.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: It it makes me ask the question why are all of these strains of thought so alluring?
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the the the individual atomistic thing.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: We know people are unbelievably unhappy.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: We know that Britain in particular is one of the loneliest places in Europe, but the same could be said that most countries are getting lonelier who have followed this model.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then we have seen typically that people can be drawn to ideas like anything associated with the left, because it feels uh good, I suppose, to be thinking that you are uh communally minded.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's all of these global solidarity ideals that people get drawn to, and as you say, that hollows you out from a connection to the people that you spend your time around in the here and now.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I wonder, and I'm just thinking out loud, Connor, and uh be interesting to hear what you think.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: Is do you think things like Christianity being thrown on the scrap heap to a degree by those running our institutions and many other people making those decisions is because no one wants to be judged.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: You said, you know, you what you actually care about what people are up to.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Is it because it's just hard?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard, and so all of the other options are just easier.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, quite.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I often there's a meme of a very smug-looking man in glasses cartoon that says, ah, but Jesus said exactly this.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm not a Christian, I have nothing but contempt for your religion.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: But if I put it in terms you'll understand, you might agree with me.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you get this all the time with people that say, Well, Jesus said, Don't judge.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, no, he said, don't judge lest you also be judged.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Do not look at the mote in your brother's eye when you have a log in your own.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, don't be a hypocrite, apply consistent moral standards, be a living paragon and exemplar of virtue before you go and espouse virtue out into the world.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, you're praying on a street corner and you're no better than the scribes or Pharisees, which eventually put him to death and the like.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea that we have jettisoned Christianity for something better, when that better just seems to be self-service, distraction by the dangling baubles of unfulfilable, ever-propagated desires, a Faustian pact with technology to generate those desires and displace human relationships and ultimately the role of humanity in creating and existing on the earth.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that that's been better for anyone, that we just instead Satar screaming consciences with shallow compliments from other people who we can't really respect and who are only going to be around for one very selfish generation, I think that's been a deliberate cruelty inflicted upon people.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also been a sort of slow evolved fall from a hierarchical church with apostolic succession.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Max Weber documented this pretty well, in that the exporting of the particular type of Puritan Christianity to the new world of Americas by Britain set in motion the Protestant work ethic and then the secularizing logic of liberal capitalism, which has now devoured Christianity wholesale and did so through things like bookkeeping, but also the belief in grace through works, that you can derive whether or not you're predestined for heaven or hell by how prosperous you are.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: It sets material wealth as the marker of mankind's success.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: It exalts mammonism rather than the kind of virtue that would be displayed through loving one another, willing the good in the other, in the Thomas Aquinas definition.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think this is why, actually, a lot of young men, particularly, are returning to Christianity through that self-selection mechanism of the internet rediscovering tradition.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: But they're returning to the Orthodox Church and Latin Mass going Catholicism.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I've taken my nan to novus order, admittedly, but my my priest watches my show, so he's very traditionalist, um, mass for the last now two years.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: My my girlfriend, soon to be fiancee, um, haven't picked the day yet, but uh will it has been going with me since we basically met, and that has cultivated.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Community around us, and I've met viewers there, and I see dads taking their kids there, and and it raises the salience of the need to have a family because if no one's in your environment in your twenties is having weddings and having kids, then again you indefinitely defer it and you think of yourself as this atomized consumer unit.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: And and so from out from the central principle of you have unique human dignity implanted into you by a deity that loves you, and the first act of love was creation, from there emanates out all the wholesome family values, all the neighborly consideration, all the high trust civilization that has waned away and been deprived from my generation.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: And what's the alternative to that?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: A kind of demonic wedding to technology and having nobody around you when you're elderly to care for you and hold your hand when you pass away?
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: No wonder so many people are rejecting that option.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and so then the question becomes what is each of our responsibility to be able to one live fulfilling lives ourselves, but two, to the society that we are a part of.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I know you would have seen this, I know you're active on social media.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's quite interesting how those pathway videos from the 60s have, despite being just a set of moving images of people going about their daily lives in Britain in the 60s and earlier, that they are meant to be apolitical, but because of their very nature, they come across as political because everyone can immediately realize that what they can see then is not what they can see now.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think part of the issue is day to day, you wake up, you go through your routine, you get pulled into the various to-do lists you you do.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: And over time you might notice things changing in the course of your life, but there's a creeping normalcy to it.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: I guess people call that the boiling frog thing.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: You don't really notice what's changed, but then you see things like the Pathe videos and you go, Blumineck.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: How was that like that?
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: And look how different it is.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: And perhaps you'll have a sympathetic ear to this um this passage from Hilaire Belloc, um, who um I suppose was trying to say that none of us should ought to be bystanders, that each of us has a responsibility.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: And you and I were speaking about this before we pressed record as well.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the quote, Connor, and I'd be interested to hear your your take on this and maybe an exhortation to the listeners, the quote is the barbarian hopes that he can have his cake and eat it too.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: He will consume that what sorry, he will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: The barbarian cannot make.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: He can befog and destroy, but he cannot sustain.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: And of every barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization, exactly that has been true.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: We sit by and watch the barbarian.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: We laugh.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: But as we laugh, we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: I have many thoughts about that.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: So the the pathway videos connects to a segment I did recently essentially about train etiquette, because I'm sure that as you have commuted in and out of a big city before, and I'm sure many of the listeners will as well, we've noticed an a remarkable increase in people shouting on speakerphone, using FaceTime in public, and listening to TikToks aloud.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: And we get irritated at it, but we never correct it because trust has eroded in our civilization so much we don't know if the person we go over and say, Do you mind putting your headphones in, do you mind speaking quieter, please?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Or speak our language or be violent and hostile because they're so solipsistic about their own existence, they don't consider how other people might feel and are impacted by their actions.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: So we just stay quiet and we allow things to erode in front of us.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it reminds us essentially that the English and European and Anglo-Sphere standards of propriety are a global minority.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they've recently been using this term global majority heritage, the National Trust have used it, the Anglican Church have used it, and it's kind of true.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's absurd because it doesn't work no matter where you move it.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you move global majority heritage, but you're standing in China, you're not describing the English, and also the Chinese and Africans don't have the exact same culture, so it's silly, but they don't have the same culture as the English.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it's salient to remember that if you bring people over just by contact with English soil, it doesn't strip them of all their cultural and historical and ethnic priors.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: People tell themselves stories.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: They don't live off numbers, they don't live off pure economic incentives.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: They live off my group, my family, my heritage versus those who would do me harm.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: For example, if Parliament is insistent on importing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians via a similar refugee scheme to the Ukrainian refugee scheme, those Palestinians are not necessarily going to be grateful.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: They're going to think Britain set up the state of Israel, Britain has armed and at least verbally supported Israel since October the 7th.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, Britain is the enemy in my story.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: And now that I'm in Britain, I have to show no neighborly consideration, hell, even outright contempt to the British.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: And at a low level, that contempt, that lack of consideration shown in those pathway videos compared to now, because all those people around them, they had, as my grandparents have said, less than you'll ever had in terms of mysterious prosperity, but more freedom than you'll ever you'll ever know, because you have the opportunity to plant your roots and know those around you.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: You have tangible freedom to make good out of nothing rather than the freedom to just restrict consume without restrictions.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: They showed consideration for one another.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: They wore suits, they dressed properly, they cued, they abided by standards of just common decency when there was little to no state cost of not doing so.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now the state actively incentivizes this with unilateral multiculturalism, but also with rapid consumer goods that mean that fast fashion is uglier but cheaper than ever.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's why our streets don't look the same, people don't act the same towards another, and people don't tell themselves the same stories.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: So civilization becomes completely incommunicable, even though we're in one big landing zone.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the madness of all this is that the government has decided because expedient increases in Vogue Share, because of expedient increases in GDP, because their economic policies have and social policies have decimated the native birth rate, that they want to make the primary constituency of concern the imported barbarians that you spoke about in that passage there, who don't have a deep sentimental attachment to our country and culture, and who, when they have plundered all of its riches, because they tell the native population they deserve to do so because we somehow wrought impoverishment upon their countries, even though all of the prosperity they formally had was in the ground until we showed up.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: When our country is worse off because they have plundered from it, they will simply go home.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I have no other home to go to, and I'd much rather it look like the pathway footage than Oxford Street in 2024.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: Dear classmate John here.
• 29:03
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• 29:06
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• 29:14
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• 29:17
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• 29:30
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• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: So you wrote a piece about civilizational decline being a choice for the European Conservative it came out in the week ahead of us recording this podcast.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: If civilizational decline is a choice, presumably civilizational renaissance is a choice as well.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what prospects, or that's the wrong question, what would need to happen for that civilizational renaissance?
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: What would we expect to see from politicians from our institutions?
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: Where would they need to start drawing lines in the sand?
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you you you nearly included sort of the right uh another right question in that.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: And what do we have any prospects of seeing that decline reverse?
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, not in the near future if the Conservative Party continue committing absolute suicide and continue to be populated by, again, people who think their constituency is a global mass of undifferentiated human matter to be adequately managed by the United Nations and the civil service.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: A great example of this is the aforementioned Palestinian refugee scheme debate, was well attended by politicians of all parties agitating for the scheme.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas Andrea Jenkins, dame and one of the only people courageous enough to put her name to a no-confidence letter in Rishi Sunak, hosted a costs of illegal migration debate saying the exact costs on a particular people in a particular time and place, the English, for a bunch of foreign chancers who they're forced to pay for.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: And four MPs turned up, only two of them because they had to.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: So it shows like their allegiances are not to a particular people.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so, in order to reverse that civilizational decline, you need to change the mindset and those in the political elite.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: Currently, the mindset is universal, non-judgmental social liberalism, which is actually born of, and I'm gonna break many hearts here, the classical liberalism that many people still in the anti-woke coalition cling to, still who revile the sort of traditionalist revivalists and the reactionary right.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's a there's a data-driven Twitter account that Elon Musk likes to reply to.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's IO on Twitter, and the other day he said that attending the Latin mass is founded in racism and anti-Semitism.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this fellow is meant to be in coalition with folks like me, but it's actually often that their liberal priors, the sort of 1990s liberalism, unwilling to reflect on it being the fertile soil from which wokes sprung, actually have more contempt for how tradition weighs like a dead hand on their conscience and is only against the left because they think the left will lead to the rise of the far right, including in nations which fought the Nazis actively.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we don't all have the same traditions.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: But the classical liberals believed in this like pre-civilizational state of nature where human beings are blank slates, we can be infinitely moulded.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's the exact same logic we have that imports barbarians now.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: That logic was bought into, I think, from noble intentions after the Second World War, because, again, they were so afraid of the rise of a Fourth Reich, the repetition of the Holocaust, they wanted to ensure never again, that instead they said, okay, we need to have no particular allegiances to particular cultures, particular peoples, particular histories, because an excess of nationalism, because the Germans tried it twice and failed, might lead to the resurrection spectrally of Adolf Hitler inhabiting another body of some world leader.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem is, what what that's led to is not only the complete deracination of culture, the contempt between generations that we're now seeing between the Boomers and Gen Z, it's led to a lack of loyalty towards their own countries by people that are tasked with administrating it.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: But also, accidentally, it's led to the mass importing of people that don't buy into the post-war story and are now every weekend and Wednesday in Westminster agitating for the genocide of Jews and the interfada against the United Kingdom and the death of the English as well.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: So ironically, it's majorly backfired.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, frankly, we can reverse civilization decline, but also we can kind of address the plenty of the concerns that even sort of centrists and light left people and some people, Jewish people who are buying into the liberal version of the post-war order, not like Yoram Hazoni who said that each nation should have essentially what Israel has, which is, you know, high birth rate, national self-determination, defense spending, and the like, and a religious revival.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: Those people that are more liberal might be able to say, oh, actually for a minute, you know, because our policy has led to undesirable consequences, maybe those on so-called reactionary right that we've been scaremongering about being the second career of Adolf Hitler for all this time, might have some of the answers, and they might extend neighborly concern to us.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I think what we need fundamentally to reverse civilizational decline is to abandon liberalism, root and branch, and go back to Christianity and a defense of our particular national cultures, heritages, and peoples without a fear that we're going to be called racists.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh well, that was that was my my next question was going to be what you finished on there with that paragraph is where do we where do we go from here to be able to form a a sense of culture and and a civilization in which to pass on?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose I saw you speak about or make reference to C.S.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis's abolition of man, and you said on trigonometry, everyone should go and read it.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: And when you said that, I remember having read that a few years ago, and it was one of those moments where the scales start to fall from your eyes, where you realize that actually much of what came downstream of Lewis you could see playing out in the day-to-day.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: So he he makes the case that there are lots of complaints that people aren't conducting themselves properly.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: But what should you expect?
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think he his quote was we we make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: We laugh at honor and a shock to see traitors in our midst.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose this is what we've been talking about today, right?
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: Is all the different strands of thought which have been brought in to replace our original cultural inheritance has led to misconduct on a mass scale, or at least a kind of introspective life instead of, well, not introspective, you know what I mean?
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, uh a self-serving way of life as opposed to one that's connected to everything else.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we're we're we're losing heroes.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: We don't, we don't see them anymore.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: And we complain about bad conduct, but we've stripped away all of the means in which people would have otherwise gotten them, which is here is your um educational curriculum, which is based upon the Greco Hebraic um Christian traditions that has been around for thousands of years and has done us pretty well by building a whole civilization on it.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: So you're actually saying that you think the way we ought to go back is you know, tear up that school curriculum effectively and go and start bringing back the things that built the civilization in the first place.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's the that's the way to stop it disintegrating further.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we need to revitalise an unapologetic faith in ourselves and our heritage, and yeah, of course, talk about the ugly parts, but also talk about how we moved on from some of the most heinous crimes throughout history with the power of the belief in the dignity, the equal dignity, capacity for moral um excellence in a human being, which is the principle of Amago Day, which is solely located in Christianity.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, a perfect example of how self-effacing we are and essentially wedded to the religion of anti-racism, a sort of a belief that we are only defined with our modus operandi as a country and a culture by accommodating the outsider and liquidating our own identity, is Parliament.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, people don't realise the statues in Parliament Square are actually really telling.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what have we got?
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, Winston Churchill, fair enough, you know.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: That that should actually be our Holocaust Memorial.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know why we're building a Holocaust Memorial next to Parliament when we fought and defeated the Nazis and did so.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that that should be good enough.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: But Abraham Lincoln, okay, emancipator of slaves, not in England, though.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: Nelson Mandela, okay, ended apartheid, was also an apologist for terrorists and tyre burnings around the neck, so not a good fellow.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: And Oliver Cromwell, I mean, I know there are dissenting views, particularly among the Anglican Church, um, over which side uh they would have fought in the English Civil War, but again, disrupting the line of apostolic succession and entrenching Henry VIII's permanent divorce court hasn't done well for the strength of Christianity in public life over the centuries.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: Let's put it this way.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: So we should have a broader range of heroes.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: We should have Anglo-Saxon kings there.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that we don't, even if he's a mythic figure, have a statue of King Arthur or Robin Hood around there, for example.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're not telling ourselves the same sort of cultural stories of self-belief and conviction that other, more barbarian civilizations, as in that quote that you read, are telling themselves.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then we're wondering why we're, I mean, we're two blokes here, right?
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk about Rome eventually, why we're on the precipice of being sacked, like the Roman Empire.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yes, we need that.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: We need a revival revitalization of Christian ethos in public life, we need a revitalization of the curriculum.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: We also need to cool the tensions on the battle of the sexes.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're only gonna get this through an individual level of, unless you legislate against the pill, which I doubt is gonna happen.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_00: But walk away from fertility technologies and reproductive methods that are going to neuter you over time.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: Understand that yes, a lot of the non-judgmentalism, a lot of the resentment built up between men and women, and that's on both sides, by the way, Messandric feminism and those who seek to inherit the red pill mantle that say all women are the problem and don't get married to Western women, hey, by the way, convert to Islam, they're also an issue.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about mitigating risk and managing insecurity.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in order to love, you have to be vulnerable, you have to address your own shortcomings, and yes, you can upgrade yourself to such a sufficient extent that you might encounter and attract someone like for like.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: But also there are active commercial incentives discouraging that, for example, dating apps.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're an older person, try and introduce two younger people that are single together because you're probably going to have their better interests at heart than some bureaucratic Silicon Valley company that has an interest in keeping them single and paying for said dating apps.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like we need families, we need faith, and we need a revitalization of a forward-facing, self-believing education system again to properly instruct the next generation so that they don't have to battle upwards to reclaim tradition as Gen Z did.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: Lots in there, lots in there.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: I was thinking about that point you made about it something to instruct the next generations.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: And a recent unheard conversation at their club uh their unheard live club was is the Christian revival really a thing?
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it had Justin Brierly, uh, the author of Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, had Liz Oldfield, the podcast host of The Sacred Podcast, and had Alex O'Connor representing the atheist side of things.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: And Alex had um, I would say, and I I don't know all of his stuff inside out, but I would say he was certainly more conciliatory than he had been.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and I don't know if you noticed this as well, but he made I've got a story there, actually.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, interesting, interesting.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what one of the things he said, and it'll be good to hear your story, but there was a point about civic morality.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: And people were saying, you know, let's why are we why is there this movement away from secular, rational secular humanism?
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Well, the problem is, is it might be able to tell you how things are, but it can't tell you what you should do.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose the pushback people would have against all of this conor with this idea of let's bring back a Christian culture, an education based on that background, is people will go, but hardly anyone believes anymore.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: Look at the stats.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what case would you make that almost regardless of belief, I suppose it is a utilitarian argument that it's going to end up being better for everyone, both individually and society, by giving them that to form on.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think?
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so there's a few things in there.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, so the story with Alex, I've been I know I know Alex, um, we've been out for drinks and that a few times for our mutual friend Chris Williamson.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we were talking about Ariane Hersey Arlee's conversion story in Unheard.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: And he said that even though he's known as an atheist, he is forced to be somewhat agnostic because he acknowledges that the final catalyst to her conversion was some sort of religious experience that was private and that she hasn't detailed, but that she seems to believe.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: And lots of people have had these experiences documented, and uh, he in his humility didn't want to devalue the the power and the potential for that to be true.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: So he himself has said that religious experience relies on a wholly independent but not untrue feeling and relationship with the transcendent and the divine.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: So he's leaving room for it.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we'll get him eventually.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um and on the topic of humility, I mean, to reverse engineer your final question, I don't think we can have utilitarian cultural Christianity.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: You you to take Dennis Prager's analogy, I and Hersey Eiley repeated this at arc, but you can't have a cut flower culture.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's beautiful as you're holding it, but it will wither and die.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: What you can have instead is the seeds of the flower to be replanted in fertile soil, regrown among a subsequent generation.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: You can't have like wily coyote morality.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: You can't have all the things that you like.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: And until it looks down and realizes it's standing on nothing, it then plummets.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you try to have Christianity and you try to secularize it, over subsequent generations, as you diversify the population, because you believe in the sort of liberal egalitarian view of all human beings rather than the Christian view that we are made in the image of God and therefore have the propensity for equal moral dignity, even though we're not identical and didn't come from the same place and the like.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: Christianity, the the the suppositions of Christianity that you think is just secular and self-evident, that you think are liberal and neutral, as Carl Schmidt would have criticized, wane and wither away and die, and that you fall into civilizational collapse and moral degeneracy and a lack of belief in one's own country and an unwillingness to fight for it.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I do think you actually need to believe.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: And and I uh the the greatest one of the greatest arguments for belief came from C.S.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, but it also came from a former friend of mine.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna combine.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: To.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: So C.S.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis's argument for why Christ is probably right is actually an argument from humility.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it is that if you look around you, everywhere Christian principles are enacted, they work in every place and time.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: It is not a liquidating doctrine like liberalism.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: It is a doctrine that seems to recognize something about shared human spirit, and everyone can cooperate and live with peace and prosperity if they practice these principles.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: So either Christ proclaiming himself the Son of God was the world's best liar, because he just so happened to lie a perfect lie, a madman who just so happened to stumble in his delusion upon truth, or he was who he says he was.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that's quite an unsettling thing to think about.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: But if you are unsettled to paraphrase Watchman, don't be alarmed.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: It only means you're still sane.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so my friend just said to me, because I was it's a couple of years ago now, I was reverting back to Catholicism and I was playing with it intellectually, almost like Jordan Peterson does, you know, well, it depends what you mean by believe.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: And he was just like, Well, you could just choose to believe, you idiot, and the rest could come later.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, you know what?
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: You just talked myself out of a really rationalistic spiral there.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think the kind that frankly Alex has been on himself.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because if you just go through the motions of tradition, you will find that there is something outside you that the wisdom of the ages will impart onto you, and it's more likely that thousands of years of peace, prosperity, and moral lower P progress, not the sort of long arc of history liberal stewardship we hear now, is right than your contemporary doubts.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_00: And since I've found that, my life, my relationships, my future has been immeasurably better.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: I agree.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: Being through a similar thing to you, I didn't have any Catholicism to revert back to.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: I uh grew up in a godless household, as it were, came to faith much later on, having been militantly atheist.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was the poster boy around the the parts I grew up in for the Dawkins and Hitchens views of the world, the fundamental atheism.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: And to spare you all the details, because you know, these conversion experiences can take a long time, is ended up being baptized, but then was having uh trouble figuring out where I should go, which church, this, that, and the other.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, turns out that all of the things that I've been drawn to through Catholicism, that there just basically wasn't a choice, but leading up to all of those things is the baptism came off the back of all of that intellectual wrangling, even though it there had been lots of moments which would have been irrational to have looked, overlooked.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so I realized that I was bringing it into this intellectual argument in the end, which is important.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's good to have some intellectual assent to things, but I was placing too much primacy on it over how my life had started to turn out from those moments.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: And ever since the baptism, the confirmation into the Catholic Church, I can say similar to you, that my life is much better.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I'm standing on more solid ground, my relationships are better, I'm able to um look people in the eye and tell them exactly what's going on, and I can see that unfolding in front of me.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I would agree, he's speaking to very sympathetic ears.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: Connie, we've we've talked a little bit about liberalism and how it needs to die.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: People would say it's dead, it's gone, and now it's a fight for supremacy of what's going to take its place as a governing philosophy.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: Is is that a fair summary?
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: And are you effectively making the argument that we, when that goes, we need to bat out the way all of these other ideologies and basically get back to faith and local, national, regional cultures that are specific to the area, the time, the place, the people over trying to come up with some grand narrative ideology which um has not done us any good when we've tried to go down that route.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think liberalism is dead.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's actually the animating philosophy of the age, and I think it's success is why we're all suffering.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Angler Merkel, I think it was 2015, said if we fail on the refugee question, we won't create the kind of Europe we dream into being.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, right, okay, so we're all suffering for your utopian nightmare.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's what's happening right now.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_00: The utopian nightmare is founded in the liberal anthropology of the blank slate and state of nature.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't rationally organise civilization.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a compromise made, a kind of fall from grace from material plentitude and perfect freedom and perfect equality, which is a lock quote, even the more moderate of the three liberals that often is talking, spoken about, believed in this stuff.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, if you So what what they're trying to do, this is why wokeness is essentially the eager child of the liberal utopia.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: What they're trying to do through intersectionality is say, well, we've noticed differences between groups.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because of the liberal anthropology that says we're all the same, somewhere along the way, civilization has imposed oppression that has stopped these groups from being free and equal.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, we must discriminate in favor of these groups to get us all back to the same place and therefore carry us into the egalitarian liberal utopia where we'll have plentiful material resources and little to no reliance on one another.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_00: And if it sounds a lot like Marxism, it's because it's it basically is.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like they have the same anthropology and they just have different means of getting there.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if tomorrow a button were pressed to institute the communist utopia where you could do anything you want at any time, still have material plentitude, and not have anyone imposing upon you with cultural norms or resource scarcity, then the liberal could not put up an argument against it.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so essentially, liberalism either actively facilitates or gives birth to the worst mutant strains of Marxism and intersectionality.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's not dead, it's very much alive, but it absolutely needs to be killed in the hearts and minds of men who are carrying out its edicts either eagerly or unthinkingly.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what you're seeing is multiple strands branching off now of what it what could come after it.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: There's a sort of Nietzschean pagan revitalism that you're seeing that some on the dissident right are flirting with, uh, we're all thinking of Bronze Age Perva and the like.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's the Islamism that the Manosphere seems to be veering off into, where you can only address your wife via whiteboard.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then there are just kind of the healthy, suited young people that are trying to have families, communities, and congregations that are going, yeah, I'm just gonna go to church on Sunday and take my nan.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think judging by the pure aesthetics, judging by who is speaking about this in a happy and grateful way, despite how poor politics is right now, which crowd are you gonna go towards?
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_00: Are you gonna go towards the kind of gay Greco-Romanism?
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_00: Are you gonna go towards Islamism, which has not rendered any civilization peaceful or prosperous, or are you gonna go back to the wisdom of our forefathers and try and have what they had, even and especially when material conditions worsen and things start getting a bit like what they were before the prosperity of the post-war era?
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: Connor, what I really appreciate about you is you cut right to the chase.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: You cover lots of ground, you say it how you think, and you come with lots of receipts.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: But one thing that I've noticed is that this is uh becoming increasingly common amongst people who are in Gen Z and that would classify themselves as being on the right.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: What why do you think younger people on the right don't have time, it seems, for beating around the bush when they're talking about issues that their generation's facing?
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because we have nothing to lose, and because we don't really want to be liked by the people that we perceive as having screwed it up.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like we don't share any paradigm priors with the boomers.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_00: The amount of times I've been on telly with a 50 or six-year-old, and they're staring at me like some upstart when they have so many unexamined suppositions baked into everything they've said, and they don't realise how they have deprived me of the same familial structure, or at least others around me of the same familial structure that they themselves benefited on when they arrogantly went forth and said, You need freedom from all of that.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there are there are young men who have never known their father.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like, do you know what that does to a guy?
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: How do you expect him to appreciate hard work or masculinity or the value of family?
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: He's struggling upward through the cultural mud to reclaim that.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then you pour scorn on him and call him a resentful incel and a misogynist.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, screw you.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_00: No, we just don't care anymore.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: You've subjected us to lectures about gay race communism and feminism and how oppressed minorities are for how many years and then legally discriminate against us.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_00: You deprive us of the opportunity to have homes and families and jobs where we actually make things for people we care about.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, I don't want to be liked by you.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_00: If I was liked by you, if you thought I was acceptable or sensible or an adult in the room, I'd feel like I was failing on my job.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, no, actually, we will up-end the entire paradigm.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: We will treat you as Christ treated the money changers in the temple.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_00: We will drive you out of politics with a whip, and we will have a selfie, healthy civilization again, even if it kills you guys.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I I'll be interested to see this unfold.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: And as you brought up earlier on, there are typically two paths that appear to be followed.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's either you go towards the left or you go towards the right, and the left being um uh represented by progressivism in all of its forms, and the right uh in many different ways, but you're putting forward the the traditionalist reactionary way, I suppose.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: So let's try and imagine that the people listening to this show they might be parents of children, they might be people around your age wondering, and perhaps triggered throughout the whole of this conversation because you have been talking about things that just step all over how they see the world.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: How would you give them a positive view as to why to follow you and your path as opposed to go down the one that people have come to think Gen Z follow of progressivism?
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not even it's not even follow me.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm I'm following the same path set forward by the wisdom of tradition, and I am suspending my incessant need to rationalise everything to think there must be something in a more morally healthy civilization that we're lacking and that I can I can follow the incentives of rather than what's given to me right now.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_00: But also I'd encourage them just to sort of follow their instincts.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, of course, habit is the kind of digested and uh unexamined wisdom that we've consciously learned.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_00: So your instincts can be misaligned.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_00: But lots of people, and this is why there's so much energy put in from everything from pride parades to fat acceptance to encourage you to suppress that little voice in your gut and your head that says this isn't good for you.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: You could be doing better, you're actually uncomfortable.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is why so many women are handed birth control pills or SSRIs as a substitute for meaningful connections in their lives and and listening to their disgust sensitivity reflex and listening to their emotions as the amount the amount of women I've spoken to in my personal life friends and girlfriend and that who say who will vent anger at the current corporate and social environment and then go, but I'm probably just hormonal and I'm probably just angry for no reason.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, no, you you your instincts are probably right.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you're sitting there thinking to yourself no, I actually am quite lonely.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_00: No, the friends around me may not have my best intentions at heart.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_00: No, my job is kind of meaningless, actually.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_00: No, civilization isn't set up in such a way where I feel that I've met the right person and I have the family I would want yet.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_00: You should probably listen to that instinct.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then you should be appropriately sad.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: You should use that as a reminder that you don't want to be in that situation again and improve yourself sufficiently, surround yourself to people who are willing the good in you, who love you.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then you should also hold on to that anger.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because again, civilizational decline, the position you're in, is a choice.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's a choice that's been made for you, probably because before you were born.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_00: For me, 1997, when we were promised things will only get better, and they didn't.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_00: So direct the anger appropriately and enact political change from the local level, and I will attempt to do so uh while shouting from outside of parliament, never inside it, uh, on the national level, until such a time where all the problems are fixed and I can go back to digging gardens for a living quite quietly.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Connor, I'm very glad you decided to get involved in whatever it is that we're involved in right now, because it's quite hard to pull on the threads of where we're at and where we're going.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_01: But clearly we need someone who's able to try to make sense of things that we've learned throughout the human history, what's working, what isn't, and it's great to have someone who is making such waves, I suppose, within your generation.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: Before I let you go, I want to ask you a question which I've started to ask all guests, which is what have you changed your mind about recently or ever during the course of your m life when you thought you were so set on that thing, and what was it that made you change?
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose there's two small things.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: One is definitely Catholicism.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I was baptized, but I didn't go to church regularly.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then in 2008, my my uncle committed suicide and it broke the family apart.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_00: And and my mum started taking me to church to find a bit of community.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_00: And as a kid, you know, you're impatient, you'd rather get home and play Xbox.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I've found the found the wisdom in the tradition, and just seeing the people that go and the virtue that they self-evidently emanate, I wanted to be like those people actually, rather than everyone else on the outside world.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other thing was was kids.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um I was in I was in a relationship when I basically first got involved in politics during my university years, where my then girlfriend didn't want children.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I was I had a rough time at secondary school and various reasons, and I was a bit depressed and down on myself.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I couldn't conceive of myself as an adult yet, therefore I didn't think I could take proper responsibility for my own kids.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was a sort of distant idea.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_00: But then when I was asked at a dinner last year with a bunch of far more successful people than me, including future guest on your channel, Mary Harrington, my my good friend, um, what we want to do in five years.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_00: They all said, Oh, write a book and influence politics, things like that.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Oh yeah, I'd love to write a book, of course.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_00: But first and foremost is be a dad.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because the men in my life that I admire most, and my grandfather, both sets of grandfathers, one's a borderline adventurer, the other one uh built every brick wall from age 15 to 70 in my local area.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um my dad, who sacrificed for 15 years doing nine shifts a week just to ensure that I could have a house and be the first person in my immediate family, my sort of my chain to go to university and do something which wasn't just um even though I greatly respect and enjoy manual labour, actually, it wasn't just purely manual, you know, like I could pursue a path that I really cared about.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the main thing I want to do is pay that forward to my own sons with a with a wife that loves me and a and a house that's nice and secure.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I'll I'll keep fighting for the conditions to to enable that for me and everyone else who wants it.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Connor, I hope you keep fighting up the good fight.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: You sound committed to it, and thank you for sharing uh something that's deeply personal, but also for painting such a positive picture of masculinity, uh, if if uh thought about correctly.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that is something we don't hear enough about.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I've really appreciated this conversation.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_01: I've enjoyed it greatly.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_01: Keep fighting the good fight, and uh I hope to have you on in the future.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: But before I let you go, where can people find you?
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_01: You're on multiple different places, um, and what can we expect from you next?
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you, John.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_00: That was uh really meaningful.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_00: This has actually been one of my one of my favourite ones I've done.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um it was really lovely, so thank you for s facilitating this.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you can find me over on x slash twitter, whatever Elon's calling it these days, at at con underscore tomlinson, where I'll put clips out and articles out from European Conservative and the Critic who I write for whenever I pop up on UK TV or some podcast like trigonometry or Timcast.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_00: The main place you can find me is over at Lotuseas.com where I host a show called Tomlinson Talks, which I do exactly what I've just been doing here, cheering all your ears off for quite a while, um, from 3 pm Wednesday UK time every week live.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then if you subscribe for five pounds a month, you'll get all of that, plus all of my other colleagues, fantastic content over there, and they're a good bunch of lads, so uh we appreciate your support.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_01: Good, Connor.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm sure people will go and check you out.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_01: You've given people many thoughts to follow.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: I know he was trying to say food for thought, but tripped over my words right at the penultimate moment.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, it's been an absolute pleasure, Connor.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_01: Take good care of yourself and speak to you next time.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_01: You too, sir.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: Here, I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_01: Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.