Latest / The Bad Roman: Christian Politics for Modern Times / Is the State Losing Its Grip? Finding the White Pill with Mark Maresca

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Is the State Losing Its Grip? Finding the White Pill with Mark Maresca · The Bad Roman: Christian Politics for Modern Times

that belief, is comparable to the Santa Claus belief for children.
The children believe in Santa, so psycho- logically, Santa is real.
We stop believing in Santa, and all of a sudden, Santa disappears as a belief.
Doesn't disappear from the mall, he doesn't disappear from the cartoon shows, but he disappears as a reality to them.
That's the state.
The outward physical apparatus of the state, the people, the courthouses, the flags, the aircraft carrier, the bullets, they're real all right, but they only take form, they can only be possible if the people first believe that they ought to.
But they do believe it.
So the state results from that.
Hey folks, we often talk about being red pilled, blue pilled, and even black pilled, but what about being white pilled? I met Mark Mareska while in Sedona at the Approaching Humanity event and came away very impressed with his talks and how he explains being white pilled and why he considers himself to be white pilled.
So I invited him to come tell us all about it and his podcast A White Pill Box.
Mark Mareska, welcome to the Batteroman Podcast for the very first time.
Thank you so much, Craig.
Great to s to be here and great to see you again.
Yeah, that was, uh, such a fun event, getting to meet some...
I was unfamiliar with you or your show until Larkin laid all this Mark Mareska, welcome to the Batteroman Podcast for the very first time.
Thank you so much, Craig.
Great to s to be here and great to see you again.
Yeah, that was, uh, such a fun event, getting to meet some...
I was unfamiliar with you or your show until Larkin laid all this out and was a- announcing the guest, so I looked you up beforehand and listened to you and, uh, Patrick Smith, who was also one of the speakers, listened to y'all talk about the upcoming event.
And so I've been listening to some more of your stuff because this whole topic of the white pill, uh, is I think something we need to talk about more because Yep.
you can, like we were just talking about before we started recording, I, you can open up your, your phone and just see all this devastation going on with, you know, wars and, you know, and all this other stuff and people are just struggling to pay, buy groceries and put gas in their vehicles and stuff.
And it's, then, but then you see something really cool happen, you're like, maybe we're not too far off, you know, maybe we, maybe we are heading in the right direction.
Just all the, all the bad stuff seems to get all the attention, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah.
And think about it.
the topic we're interested in, right, freedom, liberty, the whole philosophy, necessarily the one thing we're gonna talk about a lot is gonna be stadism and the evils of the state.
It, it's what we wanna see go away, which means it's gonna dominate our conversation.
If it dominates our conversation as the messengers, it's gonna dominate our mind a lot.
We're gonna be thinking about it a lot.
and as good as it is that we're communicating this out, for us personally, as human beings, this could be tough psychologically.
And I felt that there is room in this space for maybe also looking for the positives out there.
And that's kind of how I kind of entered this space.
Yeah.
That's, that's a great point.
But what I'd like to do before we get too far into it, is to get some background, give us a little background of yourself, maybe where you came from to where you are now, whatever you want folks to know about you.
Then we'll just get into this topic.
You sent me a, a YouTube video, one of your episodes about, I think it's 30 minutes or so, e- episode about how you break down white pilling and stuff.
It was fascinating.
A lot of information in 30 minutes, by the way.
You just cram all this into 30 minutes was very impressive to me as well.
So tell us a little bit about yourself and then we'll get into the topic.
Sure, sure.
Well, I've been in NCAP, uh, literally like 50 years.
Like, I, I got, I got, fortunately, I got, uh, exposed to these ideas really young and, and, uh, it didn't take me too long because I did not have much of a prior history with, with, uh, politics.
It wasn't that much of an interest to me.
So I did, I was lucky.
I didn't have as much indoctrination to get over as maybe the typical, you know, grown adult would be.
So it clicked for me right away, but we're talking back in 1975.
So obviously the movement was very, very different back then.
Pre-internet, not many of us out there.
So communication, getting the word out was extremely difficult today.
We could do practically anything we want, as evidenced by this very podcast.
Um, so, uh, I've kind of seen this movement along its entire path.
And one thing that was common, is the fact that we, um, we, we tend to focus on the state and the negative and that's fine, but, uh, it did look like there was room for, for, uh, looking for the white pills out there, looking for the positive, if for another, if for no other reason, just to keep ourselves sane.
Uh, so it was about maybe three, four years ago, I, um, decided, "You know what? I'm gonna jump in myself," because I really wasn't that active.
I was an observer, but not really active.
And so I started my Substack essays, uh, The White Pill Box.
And, uh, from there, I just kept observing what was going on.
I observed what, what I, what I could as far as the white pills.
When I could find one, I would, you know, write about it.
And at some point, it made sense to kind of switch that over to a podcast form, uh, and, a, which was audio only.
And then eventually I got to thinking, "Well, maybe I could interview some people."
It was that point that I realized I would like to embark on a bit of a project where I really drill into the psychology of stadism, get right down to the molecular level so that I could share that with fellow travelers and maybe help them understand how the belief in political authority really is at the very root of stadism.
And once I realized just how much the myth really is at the root, I though, yeah, this needs a deep dive.
And that's what led to my 23-part Myth of Authority podcast series.
I didn't intend it to be 23 parts at the time, but, but it, as I dug in and as, as I drilled down, I was finding more and more insights, discovering more and more nuggets that really I had never thought of in all those many decades.
So I though, "All right, I gotta drill down even more."
And that's really what led to the whole thing.
Um, so anyway, that's what led to it.
And since then, I've been just interviewing people and kind of making that my focus.
So that's kind of a long and short of it.
Well, I love it.
I love it.
Um, this video that you sent me that we're gonna, we're gonna largely play off of this one video that you sent me, and I en- encourage the listeners to go to your YouTube channel and watch it because in the video you have some graphs that you're not gonna see just, you know, if you just listen to his show on, uh, audio.
So go check out his YouTube channel, watch this video because I, this, we're gonna start here.
The, you, you said something to me, not to me, but in the, in that video that I thought was fascinating and that I think we, is a good starting point for this conversation.
And you really kind of started out the whole, uh, that episode with this as well, is that statism is rooted in a psychological phenomenon.
Right.
And I don't think people think about that enough.
I, they think, because when you think about wh- when we're, where we're at right now with, with our free thinker type mentality, you know, we're, we don't really think about what caused us statism.
Like you did, you, like you said, you were lucky.
You, you know, you've been an anarchist for 50 years, voluntaries for 50 years.
No, I, I wasn't, you know, for 16 years of my life, I was heavily involved in politics and, and voting and all that stuff.
So I, it was, it took me a while to break away from that, to understand this philosophy that we're talking about.
But can you kind of expound on statism as a, as rooted in psychological phenomenon? Because I think we, we'll, we'll, we'll say something, try to be snarky where statism is a mental dis- disorder or I said something already statism is, will short circuit the brain, but I'm kind of curious what you, when you talk about it being a psychological phenomenon, can you, can you expound on that a little bit and then we'll get into, into the rest of it.
Something as, uh, profoundly evil and, uh, destructive as the state really couldn't function purely on its own or grow purely on its own.
It has to have the vast majority of people in some sort of condition where they permit it.
And not only permit it, they want it.
And that's where the psychology begins.
The people, the overwhelming majority of the population have to have a belief in their mind that it is legitimate and moral for a smaller group of people to dominate them.
Consent or not, they have to believe it.
The they here is the absolute overwhelming majority of people have to believe in the moral legitimacy of a group of people dominating them.
That's what I refer to as the myth of political authority.
Sometimes I shorten it to the myth of authority, but you gotta be careful there because it's only political authority.
Authority in terms of an authority in science or an authority in, you know, office management.
That's fine.
Those are consensual consent-based relationships, but political authority is different.
A certain group of people, a ruling class, government, however you wanna say it, they have the authority to essentially control or dominate the rest of the population, but that's only possible because the overwhelming majority believe it.
So that's the myth of authority.
That belief, which is in the minds of our mi o- of our, of our, you know, vast majority of people is comparable to the Santa Claus belief for children.
The children believe in Santa, so psycho logically Santa is real.
He is as real as this computer or this table to them because they believe it.
And then all of us, somewhere in the nine, 10, 11, 12-year-old, somewhere in there and we stop believing in Santa, and all of a sudden, Santa disappears as a belief, doesn't disappear from the mall, he doesn't do, disappear from the cartoon shows, but he disappears as a reality to them.
But all it takes for that to happen is for the belief to go away.
Nobody has to go blow up the mall, Santa, you see? So the outward physical instantiation of Santa is really not as psychologically relevant as the belief in the mind of the child.
That's the state.
The outward physical apparatus of the state, the people, the, the courthouses, the flags, the aircraft carrier, the bullets, they're real all right, but they only take form.
They can only be possible if the people first believe that they ought to be in, be in a position of dominance.
Otherwise, people would not willingly fund it.
They wouldn't call for more laws.
They wouldn't vote.
But they do believe it.
So the state results from that.
It is as tightly coupled as any causal law you can imagine.
If a billiard ball goes into another billiard ball, that second billiard ball is moving forward.
That's causal.
It is just as causal that the myth of authority in the overwhelming majority of people will yield the state, but it's also just as causal that absent that dominant belief, the state actually cannot persist.
It cannot take form.
So one of my missions in essence is to al to try to emphasize to our fellow travelers, our fellow communicators, that that is a root cause.
And therefore, there may be a better place for that concept in our communication to focus more on the root rather than the actual, you know, physical, uh, instantiation of the state.
That's it in a nutshell.
Yeah, I love that.
That is, that's a great explanation.
Listening to you talk, explain that, lis reminds me of, of listening to Lark and Rose kind of explain it too, because he, I, the first time I had him on the show, we talked about a some of this stuff and he said at this point blank, he said that what's, what's the belief that authority goes away, they're just people.
That's all they are, you know, the, the people still exist, but the belief and the authority, when that goes away, they don't, it, it doesn't matter anymore.
There, there's, there's, there's nothing to support that.
I got, I was listening to him talk about it a little bit and I told him, I was just kind of jokingly, I said, "I waffle between black and white pill."
You know, I was red pilled and then I went to black pill and I never really heard about white pill.
And then, so when I walk, I called myself a gray pillar you know, because I want to be white pill.
I mean, and, and I think listening to your show is gonna help me get there.
And I, I think I'm closer to white pill than I am black pill now.
It's just the, the stuff that you see going on, especially as a Christian and, and having to go over and over with this stuff that the, the Bible teaches, explain it to Christians again like they haven't ever read the Bible before, you know? So I, I, it's hard for me to go full white pill because they're just have, they just seem to...
Christians could be some of the most stubborn, evil people out there when it comes to the state.
They'll celebrate some of the most awful stuff that you see out, out there.
And trying to get there, and I don't know if it's because, it's not that I believe in the authority of the state, it's just that I know that they're still there and there's too many people still supporting it.
And let's start with this as well, because you said something else in that episode that I thought was a brilliant example when you were talking about a friend comforting hi uh, someone whose child is ill, just, uh, they just got diagnosed with it and, and you were talking about how the, the friend wanted to, wanted to comfort him and, and basically say it's all, it's all gonna work out and this and that, but it's not really helpful to the person because he just found out that his child is ill.
Can you talk about that a little bit? Because I think that's, when we're looking at real world problems, like a child being sick, you know, my, my niece right now is, is going through treatment for cancer, you know, so watching this, uh, unfold, people can say, you know, hugs and prayers or whatever and, and, and try to console you or console my brother and, and my sister-in-law, but that's not really helpful to what...
I mean, it's helpful, don't get me wrong, but it's not, it's not changing the fact that my ca my, my niece has cancer, you know what I'm saying? So can you talk about that a little bit and, and then we'll just, we'll move on to the rest of it.
Oh, sure, sure, sure.
Uh, this is a really good question because it's very hard for people in our space to stay white pilled, let alone get white pilled because of that very reason, you can't not see what's in front of your face.
And what's in front of your face is terrible, terrible, destructive things that the state does, whether it's war or whether it's poor education or the, the economy, you can't not see that, but why? Because it's literally in front of your face.
So I like to distinguish, uh, sort of at a high level, black pill from white pill by sort of the simple explanation of saying black pills are most typically short term.
They're most typically in your face.
They're immediate.
White pills are almost always long-term.
They're trends.
They're signs that look good for the long run, but a white pill is almost never going to demolish a black pill because the black pill is immediate.
So in a sense, getting and and staying white pilled is truly a exercise of habit of making sure that you combine your awareness of the long-term trends and the long-term signs that are positive with the reality that's right in front of you so that you can say, "Well, this is hard.
Going through this is hard, but there's light at the end of the tunnel and here's why.
Not just there's light over the end of the tunnel, but remember seeing, you know, just remember that light."
No, it's important that for a white pill, at least in my opinion, not to be merely a positive view on life.
This was the analogy of that, uh, ER that with the father and the child, if you're gonna look at the long run and you're gonna try to focus on white pills, there better be a tangible, understandable, logical, maybe even empirical reason for it so that your mind can focus on it.
You're never gonna eliminate those black pills because they are immediate.
They are in your face.
You do have to get through that and we all have to figure out how to get through those.
But assuming we can make it through that as human beings, the light at the end of the tunnel is definitely there.
The white pills are absolutely there.
So it's a matter of just combining, uh, the psychology of that and making it through as best you can.
Yeah, for sure.
Okay, so like, as I mentioned earlier in the show, this video that we're playing off of, you had some graphs on there and we'll get, we're gonna move on to that a little bit now.
And you said that propaganda has fell in the state, but before we get to that, I, because I think that's a great point.
I'm, I'm, I'm loving to see what we're seeing some, right now when it comes to some of the propaganda, because you could go back to 2020 when everybody remembers going on in 2020, and now you see, you could, you could open up Facebook or Instagram or anything and see, and just read the comment section under like a breaking news I, I, like they, they try to bring back COVID or something or they try to bring back...
And people aren't buying it.
They're not buying into this stuff.
If you read the comment section, I'm loving every bit of it.
And you see, we're seeing it a lot now with like the flock cameras and stuff that everybody are, people are tearing down and, and so they're not, the propaganda's not working.
Before we get to that, this graph, it was kind of, it was, it was arrows going in a circle on, on your, on this video that you shared.
And at the bottom you had propaganda in the top left corner it was, uh, this, the myth of authority and then the right, top right corner was this, was a state.
And talk about this a little bit because it's fascinating because without all three of these working together, it all kind of goes away.
It's, it's just, there's nothing there.
So talk about that a little bit because I love, I loved how you did all that with that crap because once you take one away, it all kind of just falls apart.
That's exactly right.
Basically, three elements on this circular, uh, graph of causality, let's say.
Up there at 10 o'clock is the myth of political authority.
Up there at about two o'clock is the state, and down here at six o'clock is propaganda.
Each one of those is the essential persistent cause of the next thing.
So the myth of authority, take that.
All right, that is the root of the state, as I said before.
Without that, you can't have the state.
Good.
We've identified the cause of the state.
Then you move on to the state.
The state is utterly, completely, always incentivized to engage in propaganda.
Why is that? Well, because it's built on a myth, the myth of authority.
That's a lie.
That's a deception.
A deception, the only way a deception persists is that a lie has to be continued and, and, and, and ubiquitous and, and never ending.
Well, that's within then the incentive structure of the state to keep propaganda going, and that's that propaganda piece at six o'clock.
And what does propaganda do? It is the direct cause of the myth persisting.
You have to have propaganda for the myth to persist.
Without it, the myth dies.
So what we have is a very solid circle of causality that has obviously persisted through 5,000 years of human history, maybe longer that we know of, which means something must have been very solid about that.
And it's really the propaganda that has been solid, meaning every government, every state across the globe, through all of history has always managed to have some way of keeping people more or less fogged up regarding the reality of the state.
It's made them believe, and I believe religion was probably most of man's history as to what it was that the state managed to couple up with in order to keep the propaganda going, the belief in its authority going.
But regardless of the cause, because today it's not religion, at least not much in the West.
It's, it's just the relentless media propaganda, the educational propaganda, all that keeps that myth going.
But in any case, in the end, what we have is a very solid loop or, you know, a circle of causality.
I call it a toxic, toxic loop because it's not healthy.
It's not a good thing at all.
So, um, and then finally, I may not have made this s- strictly clear in that particular episode, if as a, a person who loves liberty, who wants to see people free, if you were to look at each of those pieces and say, "Where's the vulnerable point? What can I work to attack or what can I undermine or what would undermine it?" You can't undermine the myth because that's already in people's heads.
There's already indoctrinated.
You can't wipe it like you would wipe a hard disc.
You can't do it.
That's the whole population.
The state, well, you can't just erase the state.
The anarchists of the 19 early 1900s tried that with bombs and with violence.
No, it doesn't work.
Why doesn't it work? Because if you kill or, you know, wreck a particular building or a person, the myth of authority ensures there will be somebody to replace them because you didn't get rid of the myth.
So it turns out that for purposes of undermining this toxic loop, the only thing that possibly work would be if somehow propaganda were made not to be able to have the influence it does on the myth of authority, because propaganda is the oxygen supply for that myth.
That's the only thing that could possibly undermine it.
And that really was and is the libertarian, uh, activist messaging intuition.
Even though they might, might not state it with this graph or might not state it in those words, you'll notice that the libertarians, we all have tried to attack it in terms of making people immune from the propaganda so that when you wake up, when you get red pilled, you're 100% grade A, not vulnerable to propaganda anymore.
Propaganda keeps coming at us, but we, the red pilled, are utterly immune from it.
So we've kind of got it at that place along, you know, that curve for us, for the ones who are red pilled.
So anyway, that's sort of a brief description of how that causality works.
No, that's brilliant.
The, uh, the, the, like you were talking about the ear the, the anarchists of the early 1900s trying to bomb their, bomb the state away.
It's not, it's not gonna work.
I heard somebody say this a long time ago and it stuck with me that I'll, I'll, and I'll repeat it sometimes on other shows or on this one, but when, when you, like if, when you hear people kinda calling for a revolution to change things, it's, you tend to forget, you just pointed it out, that at the end of the day, even if you are successful in getting rid of that one regime, somebody's still standing there with, holding a sword.
Right.
So you didn't really change anything.
You just changed the actor.
The state still, the state is still there.
And so you didn't, and you didn't get rid of, rid of the myth- myth of authority.
Now, the propaganda thing is so interesting to me too, because like you said, we're immune to it because we see it and we just kinda laugh it off, you know, we know what they're doing.
But there's still so many people who buy into it.
And it could be the same propaganda that they used 20 years ago to start like, like when after nine eleven and all the propaganda they were using to get us into forever wars that haven't completely ended.
And they're, that we, we see it now with Iran, that they're using the same type of propaganda.
I had somebody tell me the other day, "Well, they wanna destroy America or death to America or something."
I said, "How is that any different than Trump coming out and said he's gonna obliterate an entire ci- civilization?" You're, you're worried about Iran.
I mean, they haven't never attacked us.
They've never attacked the United States.
So the, the, the, the fact that people can still buy into the same propaganda over and over is strange to me.
And I wonder sometimes if these folks can actually be reached or are they too far gone or too dug in or, or if their belief and authority is so strong that they won't ever fi get to where we are, you know what I'm saying? And this is what, what, what concerned me because you, you mentioned this video too, and I love, I love that your optimism on this too because you think we're already transitioning into a stateless society.
Now, what, what about the folks who still believe in this type of authority? Or do you think that they can be reached, that they'll eventually work their way out of it? Like some of us have, you know, not so much you because you weren't ever involved with all that stuff, like, but like folks like me and other people are kind of waking up to it.
What about the people that aren't waking up to it, even though it seems so glaringly obvious to us that what the state's doing? That, that is exactly, uh, a description of exactly why this 50 year movement, --more than 50 years actually, has been so frustrating for so many people because once you're red pilled, the first thing you think of is, I mean, certainly for me, because it was I was like 19 years old.
So immediately, I think most of us have this idealistic image because we just got red pilled.
So it's a new insight for us, right? So we're excited.
And we think, "Well, this should be easy.
All we have to do is tell everybody."
And pretty soon, they'll get it because it is so gla- glaringly obvious, like you said.
And it's not long before we realize, no, actually that doesn't happen.
And that's what causes so many of us to get frustrated along the way.
We'll go up and down in our frustration.
what we probably never realized was that if we have a superpower as communicators, it's a constrained superpower.
We've read the books, we know the philosophy, right? We've, we, we can communicate it really well.
The problem is, there's only ever so many people in the world that are ever going to be interested in any particular field of study, field of interest, hobby.
It's simply not realistic to expect any particular field of interest to dominate the planet or to everyone be interested.
It's like a chess club.
We're a little bit like a chess club.
We're very enthusiastic about it.
And we probably wish the whole world liked chess, but the truth is, pretty narrow slice of humanity is ever going to like chess.
That's true for libertarianism and just as true for auto repair and sewing and astrophysics and everything else.
Only so many people will ever be reachable for our superpower, which is getting someone fully red pilled, 100% skeptical of statism, consciously, uh, skeptical of stadism.
So if if we were really honest with ourselves, we probably would have realized this is an uphill, this is not an uphill struggle, this is a vertical struggle.
Like this, this almost is impossible.
What would would have been nice would have been sort of the flip side superpower to that, the f meaning the complimentary, meaning rather than than worrying about getting people fully red pilled, fully skeptical, it it would have been cool to have a technology that gets people a thimble full more skeptical, just a little, unconsciously, just tiny, tiny, nitty bitty bit.
But being able to have a superpower we don't have, we can't scale it.
A technology that could scale it, that could make virtually the whole planet slightly more skeptical.
So they wouldn't even know.
There would, it wouldn't be more end caps.
It would just people incrementally getting a little bit, tiny bit more con uh, unconsciously skeptical.
Then over time, that would be scalable and that would show results.
Fortunately, we we have that tech.
That tech exists.
And it was, and it's been deployed and it's operational.
It's called the internet.
And the particular aspect of that is the internet's, um, unintentional byproduct of decentralizing the the consumption of information.
It has created an ocean of information far beyond anything any of us could have imagined in pre-internet.
And every single person with access to the internet on the planet, virtually everybody, decides what they want to consume and how much of it and when.
Propaganda is is still in that mix, but it is so diluted by this monstrosity ocean of, of, uh, information that the internet has given us that propaganda simply can no longer do its job.
It will be issued by the state.
It will continue to be issued by the media, but it's lost now in this ocean and it is diluted.
And I will tell you that if propaganda is like whiskey, which really fogs up our mind super, you know, super fogged up, I think we all know that diluted whiskey, watered down whiskey, kind of fogs the mind a lot less.
This is exactly what's happening with propaganda now.
It's being watered down.
It's less of an effect.
On the entirety of humanity, a group we could never have gotten to individually as liberty messengers.
And so now over a course of decades, and we're already seeing the results, people will incrementally get more skeptical.
And with that growth and skepticism, it's really only a matter of decades now before the myth of authority, remember that wheel now, propaganda being eroded, that myth of authority itself will erode in kind.
It already is, not as visibly, but it is.
And eventually that leads to the state not being able to persist because remember, all of these are causally connected.
So that's sort of the long view of how that looks.
Do you think, speaking of propaganda, do you think that the state is aware that their own propaganda is screwing up their, their plans? I mean, because I remember saying this back in 2020 when all that stuff started and watching everything go down, I was thinking, they're screwing this up.
This is not gonna end well for them because their people are gonna wake up from, not everybody has, don't get me wrong, but people are gonna get so sick of this that they're not gonna believe anything that these people say in the future.
Do you think that they're aware of how the damage they're doing to themselves with their own propaganda? 'Cause I, but, but, but then again, when you think about the people that seek power, they're not the smartest individuals in the world anyway.
So maybe they aren't aware that they're doing this to themselves.
I can, I can almost prove to you they're not aware.
Uh, I, I've had this podcast for a couple of year, my podcast for a couple of years now, but it's only in the last year that this particular specific insight sort of came out and kind of hit me like a, you know, like a fire truck.
And I've been talking to fellow travelers like yourself and others for over a year on, on this very topic of that we are transitioning to a free society right now.
We're at the early stages of it, but we are transitioning.
And And I have found it very difficult for that message to land for intelligent, well-read libertarians.
I'm not saying they're dumb or anything like that.
They're very well read.
But But there's been no intellectual pushback.
There's been no one who's been able to find any kind of flaw in that reasoning.
Libertarians can't seem to grasp this.
I think it's really unlikely politicians are gonna grasp it because they are even that much more removed from this whole idea.
For For a politician to understand this whole idea, they would have to consider themselves as speaking on behalf of all of statism.
But no politician, no statist, no administrator, no cop, nobody looks at themselves as the spokesman for all of stadism.
They look at themselves as people with a job and that job is what they're doing.
A cop is doing his job.
A politician is doing his job.
Even a propagandist for the state who's gotta make his politician look good is only doing that job.
The task I'm talking about would be a job where someone would have to realize globally, not even nationally, globally, that propaganda is being diluted thanks to the internet.
I don't really know what they can do about that except what they are doing sort of instinctively, which is get desperate.
And that we do see.
We do see them getting a little more desperate.
Any politician you see is a lot less impressive as a person.
Their, their, their, their character is more corrupted than the, than the characters we remember from, you know, the, the Nixon or Reagan eras.
And I'm not saying they're, they were people of good character, but at least they put on the face of being people who were dignified and above us and all that.
Today, they don't even bother.
They're just mean-spirited.
They're mean to each other.
They are eating themselves in many respects.
Uh, cops are not the kind of respectful kind of people that we kind of remember when we grew up.
They, they, they would at least try to be friendly and nice.
Many are still, of course, but you see a lot more belligerence and bullying.
So to me, what that reflects is simply the quality of the person declining as the, as the propaganda fails.
They know that people just aren't as ready to go in lockstep.
And as you mentioned, COVID was a perfect example of that because although they did go along in lockstep for a year, year and a half, whatever it was, it fizzled real fast.
And the little disobedience we did see during those, you know, that 2021, 2022 period, that was enough for the state to back off, and they did.
We don't have those mandates anymore.
Why? Because it it wasn't sustainable.
They had to back off.
So I think that is pretty good evidence that the propaganda is failing them.
Have, I love this because when you, you mentioned Reagan, that was my first exposure to politics.
I was a kid.
I was not, I wasn't old enough to vote, but I, that was my first time, and I've mentioned this on the show.
I was watching, he was on TV and I was sitting at my grandmother's house and me and her were watching him and I'm assuming everybody else was there too, but I remember specifically talking to her and I was like, "I just wish this guy could be president forever because he just seems like, you know, he just seemed like the, the right person."
But it seems like they've, they've just gotten worse over time.
And when you say they're getting desperate, like they're just willing to put anybody up there, no matter how stupid they are or how mean they are, it just, it doesn't matter.
It just, is a, is that a sign of desperation because like good people don't wanna seek power over you and I? Or is it...
I I don't know because it seems, I can't imagine it getting worse than what it is right now, but it feels, it feels like it just gets worse when it comes to the politicians they're putting up.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would find it hard to believe that it's any kind of conscious, um, thinking where they would, there, a good person doesn't want to do that.
I think that's, uh, not likely.
I think it's as simple as the fact that, like the rest of us, their options in life are, uh, varied and, and, and, and, uh, there's many options that they have in life.
I'm talking not only, by the way, about politicians, but also law enforcers, which are the key players in the state, right? The lawmakers and the law enforcers.
They have other options in life.
And traditionally, the options in life of politics for a politician type and law enforcement for that type of person came with far more benefits than their other options in life, which would have been an accountant or a lawyer or a teacher or a greeter at Walmart or a bank security guard.
Lots of options, but they always would choose, they always do choose politics or law enforcement.
This is what the economists call praxiology or demonstrated preference.
It's a person chooses the option that's to them seems to bring with it the most likelihood that they'll be satisfied.
That's what a choice is when we make a choice.
What's happening is because the myth of authority is starting to erode, it's at the beginning steps, but it is eroding across the whole population.
And I don't mean end caps, I just mean that notch up of skepticism I mentioned before, that thimble full, but multiplied by an entire population, that alone changes the environment of politics and the environment of law enforcement.
So the option of choosing those two, uh, fields, more law enforcement now, but you see it in both, it becomes a little less attractive, just slightly less attractive.
So all those other options that they have, the accountant and the teacher and all the other options that a person can possibly go into are suddenly slightly outranking the choice to go into politics or, uh, law enforcement.
It isn't dramatic right now, but it is enough so that on the margins, that's an expression the economists use, on the margins meaning on the edges, people are in fact making those choices.
So the people who would have made quality cops or quality politicians, the ones who were good at it, good at being a Reagan-like politician or good at being a honorable cop, let's say, they are the ones who are finding that other options in life are marginally more attractive now.
So their ranks are, are thinning out.
So if law enforcement's gonna meet recruitment goals or politics is gonna get people running, it's gonna attract people who are less qualified or less, less honorable, less nice, more bullying types.
And that's exactly what we see.
We see more bullying types in politics.
Trump is like the primo bully.
Uh, the, the cops tend to be more bullying now than they were in the past.
So I think that's the psychology of why we're seeing a change, which is all good because it's all the result of the myth of authority eroding.
It's a sign, it's a white pill, uh, evidence for a white pill that that myth is eroding.
So we would only hope, and I think it's likely that that trend will just, just continue.
Yeah.
I think too, and I, I, I don't know if this is still the case, but here a while back, we saw it too with like the enlistment numbers in the military were way down.
And I think that's, uh, that's a, that's good news.
You know, people might not understand that to be good news because I think we have to, you know, have all the, the military might that we have.
And that's, I, I think it's wonderful.
And I, I never really looked at that as being a, like a white pill or evidence of a white pill because that, and that's what you just described.
I'm getting closer and closer to being full of white pill, I think, because just getting to sit and talk with you about this.
And, and speaking of propaganda as well, do you, did you notice the similarities in like when, when, dur- during the, during the COVID stuff with the propaganda they used internet that and the propaganda they're using now with flock cameras.
Are you seeing any similarities? To me, it looks very similar, like, because you can, during COVID you could see something on one new site and then to go to another new site and it says exactly the same thing.
You go to one police department's Facebook page and they're saying the exact same thing as another police department say.
It's like they're reading from a script.
Are you noticing this as well or is it just me? Oh, that's, believe me, I keep an eye on that stuff and that's a really great, uh, contrast that you just brought up.
You mentioned COVID and you mentioned Flock.
Recently, I was using COVID and ICE, but FLOC is even better because it's totally contemporary, you know, it's happening right now.
I want you to notice something.
Both of these start off the same way, right? In COVID, it's essentially, "Hey, this will help you, right? Our measures are gonna help you.
It's for your health.
It's good for you.
This is great.
Flock, what's the idea there? It's gonna help you.
It'll be, you know, it'll be good for law enforcement.
We'll catch those bad guys even easier, et cetera, et cetera."
Now, this is a great contrast because 2020 is now a good six years ago, six and a half years ago.
And this will show you the trend line of the propaganda failing.
How long did it take for COVID to more or less fizzle? It took about a year and a half, two years tops before it was over.
And by by over, I don't mean the virus.
What I mean is the mandates, the masking, this and that, all of the cheerleading for Fauci and on the whole thing.
And by the way, you'll also notice when it ended, it ended with no fanfare.
Yeah.
Now, to me, if, uh, remember, you were there for it, it was touted as a worldwide threat to humanity.
I mean, we were gonna lose 10% of the world population.
These are the numbers that were thrown out.
This was a catastrophe that was unlike anything in the world that we were told.
Two Two years in, let's say, it's over.
I can promise you, if the state could have pointed to itself as the cause of COVID being cured, they would have declared a national holiday.
We would be celebrating national holidays.
There would have been ticker tape parades and fireworks celebrating the end of COVID.
None of that happened.
Why? Because they were in the process of backing off.
They knew they couldn't go further and they had to sort of say, "Nobody look here anymore.
We're done and leave it go because of the resistance that was starting to, only starting, by the way, to increase at that time.
That was enough for them to back off.
In any case, it took two years.
Flock, it it got real, like, on the news maybe, what, six months ago, I'm guessing, five, six months ago is when we really started hearing about this.
I I don't remember too much of an overwhelming majority of people going along with it.
Yes, a lot of people were in favor of it, but it wasn't like COVID where you felt like the world was on board.
No.
So it didn't even start off with the same enthusiasm.
And here we are six months in, people are are covering the cameras, they're finding ways to, to do whatever they can do to make them stop.
The resistance to this apparently has taken less than six months to really get going.
COVID took two years.
Flock is only taking a couple of months to become, to some extent, unpopular.
That's propaganda failing.
Otherwise, Flock would be with us, you know, permanently and enthusiastically for at least two years.
so you can see that trend line of them not being able to keep crises going.
Ever since COVID, it's been less and less and less.
So to me, that's evidence for the White Bill.
I love it.
I love it.
Yeah, uh, that's, that's another one of those things too.
With, with Flock, I had heard people talking about it a little bit.
Didn't really know what it was.
I didn't, I never knew what a Flock camera even looked like.
Now I can see 'em all around the town that I live in.
Um, but the more people were talking about it and then all the, it's, it's like it just ramped up all of a sudden with, with, with the, with the propaganda and, and also people pushing back against the propaganda.
Like it was just all of a sudden exploded, which I think is fascinating to watch because like you said, it's six months in and people are out there cutting these things down, covering them with some kind of anything where it won't work.
And, and they're very difficult to...
They're having a hard time finding these people that are doing it too.
Like they've arrested a couple people, but the vast majority of these people that are doing it are getting away with it.
And I think it's, I think it's a beautiful thing.
I mean, you're not really, you're not harming anybody else by doing it, you're actually doing somebody a favor.
The only thing you're doing is harming, uh, harming, uh, the state.
But it, I saw this too.
This was such a silly point that somebody made.
Well, your tax dollars were spent to, to put those up.
I said, "We weren't asked about that though.
If they're gonna take our money, should we have some kind of say in what they're doing with it instead of putting surveillance cameras up all over the town we live in?" You know? That, that's one of those things where the, the propaganda does work on some people still.
But I think that, that, that the proof that, that it's kinda...
There, there's so much pushback so fast with it.
That was such a beautiful thing.
It's been a beautiful thing to watch and I'm enjoying every bit of it.
Where there's discussions going around in, in our town about it now.
Like in a local, uh, Facebook group I'm in for the town I live in.
There are people are talking about it.
There's discussions going on.
There's a, there's a small minority of people that are in favor of them, but the vast majority of people are like, "No, this is not...
This will be misused somehow."
We've already seen it too, uh, with the lady that got pulled over twice by, because the, the, the flock camera misread her, her, her license plate, you know? It's not...
It's being misused.
There, the cops are spying on their old girlfriends and stuff and people are seeing it and they're pushing back and I love it.
I think this is further proof that we are, we are heading towards a stateless society.
Now I don't know if I'll see it in my lifetime.
I'd love to, but I think w the way you're describing it too, we'll, we'll end on this because I think this is...
You, you have mentioned it some throughout the show where we're in the early stages of a state, of a stateless society.
Do you think that...
Now, if, if it's moving slow now, do you think it gets to a point where it picks up steam, kinda like this flock thing has with people where like, we're not doing this? Do you think, all right, we're slowly going right now, but five, 10, 15 years from now, is it gonna ramp up where people are like, "Yeah, we're sick of all of this going on.
We don't need them anymore.
We don't want them in our lives anymore."
Yeah.
All, all major social changes tend to happen in exponential curves, not linear, perfect, you know, diagonal curves.
Uh, and the fall of the Soviet Union is such a perfect example of that.
It persisted for like 70 years.
So if you were just looking at the line of Soviet Union legitimacy across those decades of the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, you know, you just see this flat line and you'd say, as we did back then, Soviet Union's here to stay.
It's never going away.
I can't imagine it going away until it it flopped over and went away.
And it did that in less than a year, I think it was.
That one year compared to 70 years, that's an exponential curve.
Why? Because somewhere early in the, or in the late 80s, its legitimacy started to be eroding.
The myth of authority of the Soviet Union government was eroding.
The propaganda was failing.
And it didn't have to reach the majority people.
It was enough for just a small minority to start actually being able to be brave enough to say, "Gee, that not, that, that, that government might not be exactly right.
They may not be the best government for us."
To, to literally say that gives permission for everyone else to start thinking it.
Someone says it, someone else hears it.
Oh, you can actually think that thought.
And thinking that thought opens the way to actually pondering the though.
That's how skepticism grows.
And any exponential curve is gonna go up, is gonna inflict real fast, and that's exactly what happened in the real world with the Soviet Union.
So in our transition to a free society, the, the actual graph you might say of its path is not the state disassembling or fire departments getting sold or roads getting sold.
That'll happen, but that'll be an outward result of the underlying root cause, which is the myth of authority eroding.
The path of the transition to a free society will be characterized by the erosion of the myth.
That's what a psychologist or a sociologist would focus on, what's happening to the myth.
And now we can say definitively, the myth is eroding tangibly and sustainably.
How can we say that? Because its root cause, propaganda, is tangibly and sustainably and permanently eroding.
How can we say that? Because the internet exists and the internet ain't going anywhere.
I mean, yes, an asteroid can hit the earth or the government can do something so boneheaded that it sends us back to the stone age.
I realize those outcomes are possible, but setting those aside and hopefully assuming those terrible things don't happen, as long as we have the internet, propaganda is is gonna continue to erode and that means the myth of authority will continue to erode.
So I would say, this is just a guess, but I think it's a reasonable guess, 10 years from now, we won't be having discussions like this.
There will be a debate as to whether we're in the transition.
We're all gonna know it.
We won't be in a free society, but we'll know that the trend is so empirically obvious that that's the trend we're on.
And then my guess is we'll need one generation to kind of age out, namely Boomer Gen Xs are gonna need to, saying it nicely, age out because that's where the most solid indoctrination and frankly influence is.
And the erosion of propaganda that's happening today, thanks to the internet, is the least influence on them.
They're, they're too indoctrinated.
So as they age out, that population is simply, let's say, replaced by a less indoctrinated population, the people in their 30s and 40s, even younger, who are like pretty much not buying into any of that.
As they, as they become adults, as they raise their generation, it, it's a done deal.
So I would say 50 years from now, the planet will be free because that's about two generations.
It, it can't not be, uh, because of the psychology and the causal relationships there.
So that's basically my conclusion with, with how that would play out.
Yeah, uh, that's, that's such a great point because we've, that discussion's been brought up a lot lately about...
And, and to say it nicely, like you said, the age, the boomers need to age out, will age out and this, that will change because I've said it over and over for years now that the younger generation, I got a lot of faith in them because they're, they're...
I heard a point made on the Free Though Project and they had Joe Kent on and, uh, from, who used to work the Trump administration and he, he said they were basically born with a phone in their hand.
And so they, they know how this stuff works.
They understand, you know, they unders- understand way more than I do about it.
I mean, I got a niece and a nephew that are buried in their phone all the time and they get, they, the, the stuff that they can do with it is amazing to me.
I'm not that smart.
So they, they were born with the phone in their hand, so they, they're seeing everything going, going on right now.
They're just not buying it.
And that's why I have a lot of faith in the younger generation to s to help push this along.
Uh, and that's such a great point.
If you...
I, I know, you know, a lot of people complain about the younger generation.
They complain about the internet's influence.
And yes, there's, there can be a lot of negatives that go along with, with, you know, watching your video all day and I get all that.
But the wonderfully good fortune that the young generation has is that they are not constrained by the propaganda that we were when we grew up.
When we grow up, at least me, because I am, I am a boomer, there were three TV stations.
They did the nightly news at 7:30 or 8:00, whatever it was.
You were spoonfed this propaganda every day at the same time, and all the TV shows were more or less, you know, cookie cutter.
Look what the young people today have, like I said, an ocean of information.
So for us, just putting some ridiculous number on it so I have a percentage, for us growing up, you might say that maybe propaganda was 20% of everything we consumed was in there somehow.
Young people today, that's absurd.
You, you cannot claim that 20% of all their, uh, media consumption is propaganda.
No way.
It's probably five, six, 7%.
They are being less propagandized.
They cannot have the level of myth of political authority that we had.
It doesn't mean they're handcaps.
It doesn't mean they're suddenly freedom thinkers.
It would be great if they are.
I'm not saying that's bad, but it is un almost unnecessary as long as they aren't propagandized as much and they're not.
And it's an entire generation that's growing up that way.
It's so white pilling to me that it often does, thankfully, crowd out the black pill stuff so that when I hear the flock stuff or the ice stuff, I hate it, but at least I know, yeah, but we're, we're on the way.
This is happening.
This is a done deal.
Yeah.
I love it.
I love it.
Can you imagine what would happen? The, the uproar if they'd tried to shut down the internet? Can you imagine? I mean, that could have been the, that'd be the, one of the, that probably the dumbest thing that they could try.
right.
That Yeah.
it it would be ridiculous.
Yeah.
And I, I think it's too late for that anyway because they themselves now rely on it, you know, just, just for their own stock trades or whatever else they do.
So shutting it down would be like beyond belief.
It, you'd have a, you'd have a revolution, which won't happen.
They're not gonna try that.
Uh, they benefit from it too.
And in that sense, since, since the internet is not gonna get shut down or assuming it doesn't, it's like, okay, there's not many timelines that, that are negative in that sense because like I say, these causal connections are in play.
Like the psychology is inescapable.
So it really does white pill me and like I've said before earlier, a lot of my mission is really to communicate this to our fellow travelers because I want them to continue to feel more white pilled than black pill because they more than anyone else really deserve it.
They really do because they've, they've been depressed about a Yeah, it's, it's frustrating.
to be.
It gets rough out there sometimes, you know, and you know that as well.
So, I mean, I don't know what we're gonna do with ourself if we do finally end this, or the state does finally end itself.
And, uh, what, what are we gonna talk about on podcast after that, after that You'll find something.
You know, and that, and that's another thing that I like to use the analogy Larkin Rose gave me this idea of, uh, because he did, --he cuts like trees down.
Uh, he's able to cut down like these huge monstrous trees.
And the analogy is you have a big redwood and the, the, the, um, lumberjack is gonna take it down.
And what does he do? He mades, he makes what's called a wedge cut at the bottom, this wedge cut.
And And Larkin would say that, uh, he would do that.
He would make the wedge cut and then he might have a trainee or someone else with him and he'd walk away and he'd sit down and crack open a cold one.
and And the tree would still be up.
And the, the inexperienced person would say, "You, you didn't cut it down.
Well, what happened?" And Larkin would say, "Just wait.
It's, it's gonna happen."
The factors that are necessary to bring that tree down have already been put in place.
The end result is just a matter of time.
And sure enough, within 10 minutes, 20 minutes, the tree falls down.
That's the erosion of the myth of authority that's underway now.
It is inescapable.
It's going to happen.
But like the tree, if you were a statist and you said, "Yeah, but I'm gonna make sure that tree doesn't fall," and they walk over to the wedge side and they push really super hard, it's it's not gonna matter.
It's coming down.
But But you know what, Craig, by the same token, if Larkin were to step on the other side of that tree and said, "You know what? Now I'm gonna help the tree fall down.
I'm gonna push really super hard."
You You could do that and maybe at the molecular level, you'll cause it to fall down a nanosecond earlier, but you also could take a break, rest, deal is done.
It's coming down.
And so f uh, I, and I say this because a lot of, a lot of our Liberty communicators have actually sacrificed a lot of passions or interests in life that have nothing to do with liberty because they feel so compelled to message.
And if they continue to feel that way, have at it, get more end caps out there, but also feel like the internet is our partner now.
And I, one of my speeches at the, uh, event was on this subject.
The internet is our partner and it's kind of doing the heavy lifting.
So if you wanna follow another passion, you technically could because this is inescapable.
We are not necessarily the causal effect now to the, to free societies.
I love it, man.
That was, th- this has been a fascinating conversation.
I think you've got me to where I need to be with this, with this topic.
I've, I've been, I've been trending towards white pilling, but getting to speak with you and getting to hear you at the, at the Sedona event was, was a lot of fun too.
I can't wait till they release the, uh, the vers you know, the video of it so other people can listen to what was going on there.
And I wanna see it again myself because I missed a lot that I didn't, you know, I didn't get to hear all the talks because I was either backstage or...
When I get done with my talk, I'd go backstage, I'd go outside, catch my breath and then come back in, so I was missing some of it.
So I'm looking forward to when they get that release and I wanna hear your talks again as well.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about White Pill Box and where we can find your stuff? Are you still writing Substacking or do you, is it strictly now podcasting now? It's strictly podcasting, but I make sure that every podcast I do is converted to audio and then is, uh, posted on my Substack page.
But my Substack page you can get at through my YouTube channel, which is the white pillbox, all one word, @thewhitepillbox, and you'll find me there and all my content.
Awesome.
Yeah, anybody listening to this, go check it out, go check his stuff out.
He's a, a brilliant man.
He's, he's a brilliant thinker and I, Larkin was raving about you and I couldn't, you know, so I, if you get that kind of praise from Larkin Rose, he knows.
He, he said, because he's thinks like you do when it comes to this stuff.
And I, and I think that's more and more people are kind of getting that, heading that way, I think.
I hope.
Um, this has been very helpful for me and I'm, I'm gonna continue to listen to your show as well and maybe push me over the edge a little bit more.
But I think I'm there.
This has been a fun conversation, No, great.
And it was so fun to meet you.
And by the way, I, I can't wait till those speeches are out because I love yours, especially your first one.
Just moved me.
It really did.
And so, uh, yes, everyone, when they're posted, make sure you check out Craig's speeches at the Sedona was awesome.
And That was so insane to me because I was so, I was nervous as a kitten, you know? And, um, I think people knew it.
Well, I don't, they said everybody was so gracious and kind and, and complimentary.
I met a couple out there that has been listening to the Bad Roman podcast for years and they, they, they come up to me, I think when we were breaking for lunch and they came up to me and said, "Well, we were just so tickled to find out you were gonna be here."
And just the encouragement from people.
And I had people message me requesting my speeches and stuff and I, that just blew me away.
I mean, it was, I didn't talk about anything that I don't talk about on the show, so maybe it brought more people to the show.
I don't know.
But it's the, the, the amount of people that were so complimentary, it was, I don't even remember what I said.
I don't even remember any of my talks.
I've got them on my phone, but, and we released them all in blog form as well.
You can find them at the badroman.com
if anybody's interested in finding them.
But, um, I wanna do this again sometime, man.
This is, this is a fascinating conversation.
If you were down to come back on the show at some point, I'd love to.
to have you.
Yeah, I'd love to.
Uh, thanks so much for having me.
Great meeting you again.
Uh, you know, and, uh, yeah, anytime.
Yes, sir.
I, will talk to you soon.