The Real Reason Our Culture Is Falling Apart – Rudyard Lynch on Impact Theory Podcast (Transcript)

And it’s really interesting when he frames the Age of the Last Men, that all these things which we see as moral are actually profoundly immoral. Because there are lots of things where not doing something is immoral. And we’re a society where we’re not doing a lot of things. And so I think we’re a profoundly sick and endangered culture.

TOM BILYEU: So what are the things that we’re not doing that we should be doing?

The Loss of Coherent Culture

RUDYARD LYNCH: Traditional human societies. And I want to sort of set a frame for this where our cultural frame as a society is like 30 years. We can pull music from the 80s and we’re still running out of 80s music. And we can’t go back further, the furthest we can imagine sort of World War II.

But at the same time, the scale of human history is thousands of years around the world. And if you’re only looking at us, you’re going to think we’re less than we are. Less than 1% of the human race and every other society in history had vastly different social norms than us on a variety of things.

So we’ve gotten rid of having a coherent culture, which is a really big deal that no one thinks about. When you pass on things through generations, the nation is a generational inheritance and we’ve thrown that away. And that includes the religion, the social structure, codes of politeness, a national identity, a source, a sense of honor.

And there’s a series of beliefs that practically every pre-industrial society has that we don’t. And we sort of, I mean, this is a huge topic. I’d be happy to unpack it. We’ve got several hours, but we don’t realize that this is not the end point of humanity. We’re an insane aberration of a bunch of variables thrown together.

The Collapse of Shared Myths

TOM BILYEU: I think it’s worth going in so that people can have landmarks as to what exactly is going on. So writing about what a shared myth is, something I’ve been focused on recently. Getting people to understand that we all live inside of a frame of reference, that we tell ourselves a story, and that we can’t even agree anymore on what America was founded on.

Like whether we are a profoundly racist culture that is just about colonialism and slavery, or whether we have created the most prosperous nation that the world has ever known. We have both of those stories being told at the same time. And the fact that we don’t have anything to share, I think has profoundly problematic consequences from a divide the nation up standpoint.

So I’d love to hear what are some of the landmarks that you see? What are the things that specifically are dissolving that you think are problematic? And the line of questioning started with what are we not doing? So what are the things that we’re not doing that are problematic that have led to those things?

Maps of Meaning and Cultural Identity

RUDYARD LYNCH: You gave me a lot of interesting conversational threads, and so I’ll pull out a few of them, but I don’t think I’ll have to get to all of them. One of them is, so people know Jordan Peterson for his pundit career, which has gotten quite popular. But I think Peterson’s most important work is something no one noticed, which is Maps of Meaning.

TOM BILYEU: Yeah, fantastic book.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yeah, it was such a hard read. It took me two years, but I finally completed it. And it’s so intelligent because he’s looking at human neurology and biology and all these different things and saying how come countries will die fighting over their religion? How come two countries are willing to go to nuclear war over something? How could anything be important enough for that?

And the thesis is that humans have to sort of build frameworks of how we interact with the world or maps of meaning. And these exist inside our neurology where we have to interface with good, evil, higher, lower forms, a variety of things just to function as an actual human being. And that’s very important.

And another thread I want to pull at is there have been multiple myths about what America is over its history. The first one, which came about after the Revolution, early 19th century, was America was a republic. Then with the mid to late 19th century, America was an Anglo-Saxon British nation. Early 20th century is America was a frontier culture built off sort of the shared challenge of entering a new land.

Then the theory from World War II until the mid to late 20th century was America was a nation built off sort of diversity, mixing peoples together. But back then it was seen more as like Italians, Irish, Jews with the local Anglo-Saxon population. And then the theory in the 21st century has been that America is built off oppression and colonialism and racism. And for all of those questions, do you want me to unpack which of those?

TOM BILYEU: I believe it’ll be helpful to understand what you believe, but with a specific eye towards why does it matter? Does it provide stability? Because when I look at your work, one of the things that I feel like you’re trying to do is understand the different ingredients that have made this moment dangerous.

And that gives me a sense of I can follow cause and effect in your thinking. And so I’d love to hear those narratives through the lens of, well, if you believe this, this is sort of the knock on effect. And you can see it in society today.

The Marxist Destruction of Identity

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yeah, life without identity is very difficult because difficulty has no meaning without identity and life has a lot of difficulty. So if you have no framework for who you are and what you stand for, you’re kind of just going to float around and the world’s going to feel empty. And I think that’s a huge issue that the entire society has today. And every single attempt to build identity has been destroyed.

And this sounds, this is going to sound like it’s a conservative talking point, but if this was a murder, we have the gun, the guy who did it claimed he committed the murder, you see the body and I don’t know, you have witnesses. And that’s that the Marxists explicitly set out to destroy the unified culture.

And that’s what thinkers like Marx and Gramsci and Marcuse, Yuri Bezmenov, all these Marxist thinkers had a legitimate process of social disorientation which they planned out each step and we’ve seen all the steps happen in reality. But the only reason that worked, because in a normal society you just brush that off, is that with the rate of change, with the Industrial Revolution and we talked about Mouse Utopia last time, there wasn’t that unified cultural anchoring.

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so we’ve got explicit attempts on the part of the Marxist to go in, to leverage essentially the rapid rate of change, to know that people are going to just try to make sense of that world. And while they’re doing that, we’re going to slip in all these confusing, conflicting notions.

So it’s going to be hard for them, now I’m using my language, but it’s going to be hard for them to even leverage a heuristic of just mapping to somebody else’s thinking to say, oh, at least if I just follow them I have clarity. Now you’re following somebody who’s very eloquent, very erudite, and yet they intentionally have woven in these beliefs that are contradictory. And so now you are parroting something back, but you don’t necessarily understand it.

The Flawed Assumptions of Modern Thinkers

RUDYARD LYNCH: That speaks to a point I made in the video I just recently wrote and I’m about to record today. And so the issue we have is that modern thinkers are pulling people from the last 200 years. They’re very bad at big deal, big detail in context and sort of understanding how the world works.

Take Marx as an example, who’s had an enormous impact on the entire world today, even though people paper that over. But even right wing people are hugely impacted by Marx. I mean, I am. I’ve done class analysis, I’ve looked at, I have my own sort of dialectic of history. Marx built the idea of sort of splitting history and society into different principles and jostling them together.

But Marxism is built off all these assumptions, like if everyone is the same, which is not true, if history has a direction, which is not true, if the state can socially engineer people, which are not true, if there has to be a rebellion of the proletariat, which doesn’t actually have a government system, which will result in utopia where you’ve added together 10 logical assumptions. And if you do that in coding, your code’s going to crash. And so that’s what happened with society.

So last 200 years we’re really bad at understanding how things interconnect, where we can understand things that we can prove with science very easily. Sort of material shifts like how the weather occurs or genetics or whatever. But we’re very bad using sort of wisdom to figure out what it actually means.

Meanwhile, the thinkers before then from the ancient world, the medieval world, they often have pretty good sort of total world human experience wisdom. It’s why religions like Christianity still work today or why people still read Marcus Aurelius. But the way their wisdom works is often in such a differently coded way than modern people, that modern people don’t really understand it or they just think of it as a silly story.

When you look at these ancient myths, you have to compare what part of this was a silly story and what part of this is symbolic wisdom? And that’s a very thin line. But so we’re stuck with this gap where we can’t find the ancients identifiable, but then the moderns don’t really know what they’re talking about in a lot of cases.

The Economic Roots of Social Breakdown

TOM BILYEU: One thing that I want to see if I can get to understand is I have a really, it’s overly simplified to be sure, but it is so directionally accurate that I repeat it often. And it’s my hypothesis about why exactly society is broken right now and then that predicts exactly what we would need to do to fix it.

It goes like this. All of the problems that we’re facing as a society right now are economically, they’re born from bad economics. What we’ve done is in 1913 when we went onto a fiat currency by establishing the Federal Bank, the Federal Reserve, we went into a system where we could print money.

By printing money, we were able to steal from people through inflation. By being able to steal from them via inflation, we created hyper inequality, which, I mean it took 100 years to manifest, but it’s manifesting pretty horrifically right now.

And so we had an American dream where it was like there is a truth to be faced that there’s one asset class that humans understand intuitively and that’s the house. The only way to protect yourself from the devastation that is inflation is an asset. And so now you have the situation. This is a literal statistic. 10% of Americans own 93% of the assets.

And people wonder why we’re getting just ever increasing inequality. Put that together with the fact that we have an evolutionary algorithm placed in our minds that makes us absolutely go ballistic when we see something as unfair. The Gini coefficient, which says basically if somebody looks around and sees somebody else has more than they have, they’re going to go bananas if it gets too big.

RUDYARD LYNCH: And…

The Economic and Cultural Crisis

TOM BILYEU: And so the Federal Reserve made it possible for wealth inequality to just spiral completely out of control once houses became unaffordable. Then you get this hollowing out of the middle class. And so now the wealth inequality is going like French Revolution levels because of all those things.

I think we actually are headed towards a French Revolution. But it’s economic in nature. Everything else that’s manifesting is simply because the economics broke. And if you fix the economics, there’s enough prosperity that people sort of fall back into comfortable patterns and they can overlook all the schizophrenia that something like a Marxist philosophy might bring.

And so that encapsulates my core thesis as to what is going wrong and therefore what we would have to do to fix it. As you pull all these threads of history, do you have a similar thesis that you can lay out? Is it tied to Marxism? Is it tied to leftists in general, or is it something else completely?

RUDYARD LYNCH: So we’re in a really awkward position because I have a joke that hundreds of years from now, for the population number, they’ll have line go up, line go down. Where 20th century is line go up in demographics, 21st century is line go down. And we’re at the point where line go up is starting to go into line go down.

And this would be very psychologically disorienting for people because I think if you fixed the economic issue, you’d put a bandaid in a lot of these underlying things. But I think we do have a pretty severe cultural issue which is sort of working with the economic one. And we didn’t have the cultural issue until recently because money could paper it over.

TOM BILYEU: And can you define what the cultural issue is?

The Death of Unified Culture

RUDYARD LYNCH: So you look at the baby boomers, they got rid of a unified culture where it’s the shared story we talk about. It’s that people have lots of things people don’t think matter, in fact do. Where one of the great things that living in Texas is there’s sort of a fluid degree of social trust that makes doing things easier.

You can trust that, I forgot my debit card at a restaurant yesterday. I just went back and got it and they just noticed me, oh, yeah, you can have it. We know who you are. That’s possible in certain cultures, but then not in others.

Or if you have an employee, if it’s a high trust society, you don’t have to watch over them every second and you don’t have to micromanage or always check in where culture affects absolutely everything. But what happened was that we had centuries of increasing wealth where we thought we could get rid of culture. The boomers were at the peak of that.

Then the death of culture, also chicken and egg, a lot of variables. But once you no longer have a culture with things like the federal government’s responsible to the public, you shouldn’t print infinite money because that’s bad form and it’s going to hurt people. Now they’re just so greedy that they’re going to do it anyway.

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

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yes. So anthropologically, culture, sort of a net sum of how a society operates, it includes a government system, is dependent on culture. The religion is the manners, the accent, how child rearing occurs, how they cook. The culture is just the sum total of the human interactions.

And what happened is that modernity had lots of implicit issues which we used money to paper over. And then once most people slid into misery, money didn’t do that anymore. I mean, as an example, we don’t have, we have lots of very sort of sloppy social rules in our culture. Equality is one. Equality is just not an accurate depiction of reality.

And you can believe in it as long as your society is wealthy enough that you don’t deal with these conflicts. But then once you get to a place where one person gets to make their bills and the other person doesn’t, all the pleasant notions sort of become very costly.

For example, globalization worked in a world where the pie was growing for everyone. But in a world where that isn’t true, you then realize other countries aren’t on your side. Does that make sense?

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

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

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so this moment brought to you by economics problem number one. And then culture begins to be problem number two. Now, if we start getting specific about culture, you were talking in the beginning about Marx, that Marx has had a huge influence on the right and the left, whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

So far, what you’ve put forward about Marxism is it offers these conflicting ideas with the expressed intent of destroying culture. What I want to know, assuming that I’ve gotten all that correct, what is Marxism hoping to accomplish by destroying culture? And why is it so influential?

The Marxist Playbook for Cultural Destruction

RUDYARD LYNCH: Those who lack wisdom lack wisdom. You don’t know what you don’t know, and a lot of people don’t know a lot. In fact, we all don’t. In fact, we’re all infinitely weighed down by the things we don’t know. And Marxists have a tendency to sort of see half truths. I could talk about the neurology of that, there is a neurological scientific argument.

But I’ve read most of the Marxist thinkers who did this. Yuri Bezmenov, Saul Alinsky, Gramsci, and none of them see the world or society as a living thing. So when you look at Marxist economics, they’re like, this is the pie. We can just divide up the piece.

What they don’t see is that this pie was in at least a fairly significant portion brought to you by the corporations and the rich people and the kulaks that you want to kill. So if you kill the revolution, if you kill off the most sort of economically productive people, this isn’t your pie. This is your pie. And Marxists really have an issue with that.

Where Yuri Bezmenov, and this just shows how deep and insidious it was, the Soviets literally had a department built around this where they had set procedures. And there’s a certain degree of kind of funny horror about it where you can watch, again, you can read this stuff. You can read Gramsci wrote for free online, Rules for Radicals. You break it at the library, if they still exist. Or, I mean, Yuri Bezmenov has videos on YouTube you can watch.

And the Soviets came to the conclusion, if we kill the religion, we can kill the rest of the culture. And they had a, I can go through each step of the process, but they had a multi-step process on how to kill a society. And they’ll literally say stuff like, make sure neighbors don’t trust each other, make sure parents don’t trust their children, put a bureaucrat into everything.

And then the end point they came to was that the functioning of a healthy society was dependent on religion. But the Soviet Union itself was an atheist state. And so Yuri Bezmenov was studying India because he was supposed to destroy Indian society. And he thought, wait, I actually like Hinduism, I’m going to leave for America.

And so it’s a very sort of, when you see half of the equation, it makes sense.

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

The Left Hemisphere Worldview

RUDYARD LYNCH: That’s true. The argument I’m making is from Ian McGilchrist, “The Master and His Emissary,” which is a book on neurobiology. And the thesis he has is there’s two halves of the brain, the left and the right.

And the thing, the parallel that I love so much from the book or the example is the left hemisphere can only draw half of an image. If there’s a human, it can only draw half of it. And it can only see the world through money and power and measurable things.

And the right hemisphere can see the world through context, flowing over time, immeasurable variables, all these different things. And modern ideologies really wire people to the left hemisphere. Marxism is probably the most left hemisphere worldview, where from their desire for just power and destruction, then it totally makes sense because they’re not thinking of all the stuff it took to build that world, they just want to take from it.

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

RUDYARD LYNCH: I mean, where’s the line between malice and mental illness?

TOM BILYEU: You can make that a T-shirt, malice and mental illness. But, well, I can actually answer that. So I’ll be interested to see if they still overlap for you, if they’re separate.

So the difference between malice and mental illness for me is if you’re mentally ill, you are no longer mapped to what is real, whereas you can have malice and still be mapped to what is real. So Genghis Khan had malice, but he was mapped to what is real.

And so as much as I would not have wanted to live anywhere near Genghis Khan, he did give us a Silk Road, he did unify things. He was very shrewd at leading, conquering all of that. So he clearly understood cause and effect quite deeply, but he had a lot of malice.

Then you take somebody who’s mentally ill and they may be legitimately confused about how the world works. They may hear voices, they may be unable to process certain data points. And so to your point, they literally can’t see or experience a fundamental piece of what’s actually happening and therefore are always, even if they have good intentions, they’re always going to misplay the world because they are blinded to some of it or they hear things that aren’t there.

Religious Fanaticism and Modern Anxiety

RUDYARD LYNCH: Jordan Peterson has this four-sided sort of matrix of you deal with a different difficult situation. You can either fall to hedonism, nihilism, totalitarianism, or rise to heroism. And the people closest to Marxists in history are religious fanatics.

You could make a pretty good argument that Marxism is a descendant of sort of radical Christian sects in the medieval or early modern or ancient world where at Münster in Germany, radical Protestants seized control of a city, went crazy, started practicing communism, forced sexual communism. They had multiple leaders who would murder each other, claiming to be prophets.

And so there is this tradition here and the Marxists fit into that and they’re very deluded. I mean that’s just kind of obvious if you take off the ideological goggles and modernity creates lots of mental illnesses though.

I read this book from World War I era, where he was going through all of these different things. It’s interesting to see an author even a century ago state it because when I was growing up, lots of moms were scared to let their kids play outside or they’d walk their kids several blocks to school until the end of high school.

And that’s not something that we would process as mental illness in our society. But you look at that and you think you have an anxiety issue.

TOM BILYEU: Yeah, I was going to say I—

RUDYARD LYNCH: But you’re reasonable. Most of you are.

The Economic Roots of Cultural Collapse

TOM BILYEU: As a feral Gen Xer, I guess we definitely see the world very differently. Okay, I want to keep putting these pieces together so we have the starting. My goal is to understand what’s wrong with society because I for one find it incredibly meaningful in my life to try to help people right the ship.

So we’ve got culture transmits these incredibly useful ideas. Culture has ceased to transmit these incredibly useful ideas partly because modernity is helping people form certain types of mental illness. The one that you focused on so far, and I obviously first called it the mental illness, don’t mean to put words into your mouth, but Marxism, where what’s happening is they’re only seeing half the picture because they are so left brain dominant using McGilchrist’s breakdown of that.

And so they are obsessed with envy, power, money. And so their worldview naturally springs forward from that. They exacerbated the death of culture itself by intentionally, and documenting it, shockingly enough, intentionally going in and creating an ideology that is confusing. Leverage the rate of change happening at the Industrial Revolution to take advantage of the fact that people would be more or less distracted and having a hard time categorizing things as a way to slip that in.

And so now you accelerate the death of these traditional things that were being passed on, that were in some ways holding society together by transmitting these ideas. Now, this is now me totally leaping forward with the prediction that your statements have made so far would be that now, given the rapid state of change due to technology and especially AI, we’re going to go through another revolution of sorts. Third Industrial revolution, fourth industrial, whatever you’re going to clock it as.

But AI is going to usher in a rate of change that’s absolutely unparalleled. And already seeing people like Mandani rise up and see how much energy is going over to that, that seems to fit in with what you’re predicting, especially given that you said economics is the most foundational.

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

TOM BILYEU: You don’t think there’s any causality between what we’ve been talking about in the Civil War?

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

TOM BILYEU: Right.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Where this chain of causality doesn’t continue. And that’s deeply concerning. But I don’t want to lie to you, it’s interesting as well to see it just manifest on both the right and the left and to see it also around the entire world where I think our foreign news is really bad. Now, I don’t think Americans know what go on in the rest of the world.

But if you look at Germany or France or Britain or South Africa or Brazil or South Korea or China or Malaysia, I have hobbies where I watch documentaries from different countries or look at travel guides. Different countries in all, the issues we have in America are occurring in all of those countries. It’s really remarkable to see how unstable so many global governments are.

TOM BILYEU: Do you see connective tissue?

RUDYARD LYNCH: Of course. I mean, we spoke about this last time on the podcast. There’s various historic cycles that predict that the world goes through these sort of cyclical patterns where the mid 17th century, nearly every country on Earth was having a civil war and an external war, often with plague thrown in. Same thing as the mid 14th century. So these things happen.

Or the Roman Empire fell at the same, the Roman Empire’s crisis of the third century occurred at the same time as the fall of the Han Dynasty. So these global trends are sort of synced up. And I predicted that it would be a global crisis a few years ago because these trends are, I mean, it’s the same causal variables in each region of the world.

The Debasement of Currency and the Breaking of Social Contract

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so I’ll give you the breakdown that I think is happening right now. I’ll tell you why I think that it’s connected to the other places. Let me know if you see something I don’t. To me, this is purely about the economy.

And whenever a currency is debased, whether the Roman denarius and you’re just chipping away at the silver, or whether the US dollar and your money printing ad infinitum, what you end up doing is the average person cannot save. And I think it’s an immoral decision that people make because the people that are doing it know the average person doesn’t understand investing. They don’t understand how to escape this.

And it puts them into a mechanistic situation where they will get poorer over time. And so anytime you put people in a position where they cannot save their way to success, they cannot pass their wealth onto their children, you break an unspoken promise that, hey, work hard, be disciplined, don’t eat the marshmallow now, put it off till tomorrow. All the things that basically religions have been telling us forever, this is how you win in this survival crafting game that we call life.

And it’s once you mess with the underlying economics and you can no longer go mine the ore, find the gold, whatever, and build your stable society, pass things on and feel you have been justly rewarded for your efforts, you stop putting forward effort. And once you stop putting forward effort, then things begin to break back down.

And so if you have, we do right now, where people are, oh, Tom, what are you talking about? It’s no big deal that we, money printing. All the countries are money printing. Yes, motherfucker. And that’s why we have problems in all the countries, because you are breaking the physics of the way that this game works.

And the second you break the physics, people are not being honest about the fact that we have algorithms that run in our brain and they are evolutionarily placed. And when you build the game, you have to build the game around the algorithms that are going to run in the human mind.

And so we get into these delusional periods largely on the back of success. And I would be very interested to see if most of these repeating cycles happen just on the back of big debt. And big debt is the answer to, hey, things are going great, print a little bit more money. And then you just get caught in this needing to print to keep it going. All of your economy becomes a Ponzi scheme.

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

RUDYARD LYNCH: Or the best history of economics books I’ve ever read is “The Great Wave” by David Hackett Fisher. You should read it. It’s 100 pages and it goes through correlating the history of inflation over Western history with the history of political crises. It’s really good and it says exactly what you say.

Where over these rhythmic periods of political crises in western and the Turchin data says global history, inflation’s correlated with political disturbances. And you don’t see this kind of inflation not have political issues. We talked about last time, French Revolution, 30 years war, Black Death. I would connect the cultural issue with mouse utopia. I think the political and revolutionary whatever crisis is of economic origin. I think mouse utopia is of cultural origin.

Mouse Utopia and the Crisis of Abundance

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so mouse utopia speedrun for people that don’t know it. If you create a situation where the mice have everything they need, plenty of space, plenty of food, they end up imploding, they end up stopping having children, they end up killing each other. It’s wild.

If you had to shorthand that, would it be something this? When there is no adversity that you have to face, you turn inward. When you turn inward and become self obsessed, that you’re no longer thinking about the group, what’s good for the group. You’re no longer disciplined, disciplining yourself. You’re no longer reining in our worse impulses.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yeah. What you said earlier is true that a lot of these previous cycles, because empires come and go. There have been lots of times the world has ended over history. It’s just the world was the world they knew. And that’s a lot of cases. You can either be hurt by wealth or you can be hurt by poverty.

Crises of wealth or, I mean the ones we spoke of before where, because inflation is an overabundance of wealth, where it stops having value. Crises of poverty are situations in Africa in the 19th century, where you have mass famine and migration. Or the Huns, the barbarians coming out of the grasslands because they need to conquer outwards.

As I to say, you’re going to die anyway. So it’s better to die rich than poor, where you’re going to have problems no matter what you do. But it’s better to have more interesting problems. And that’s kind of what’s happening here.

TOM BILYEU: Things have been too good for too long.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yeah, okay.

TOM BILYEU: Yes, I very much agree with that. My whole thing is I think some people need to be chased by a lion. And by that I mean really, we all need to be chased by a lion. There needs to be some adversity, adversities. That thing that’s going to keep us disciplined, it’s going to keep us focused, it’s going to keep us cooperating. All the things that as a species we were meant to do.

Okay, so help me understand how this ties specifically to the left. You did a video called “WTF is going on with the Left.” What is happening? What do you see there? Why was that worth a video? And why is it one of your highest performing videos?

RUDYARD LYNCH: It’s one of the highest performing videos because it’s politics content. And politics content is always the one that does best because, and I get it, it’s perfectly reasonable to care more about the things that affect your daily life than…

TOM BILYEU: Interesting, though I didn’t take that video to be overtly political. It certainly is talking about a political class, but you weren’t talking about policy or anything that. Yeah, you were talking about a mindset. It felt more culturally to me. Did that one feel overtly political to you?

RUDYARD LYNCH: The reason I say political is that when I make these videos with Yumet Marek and my editor and whatever, I subdivide the videos by subtopic. So I’ll have the political subtopic, all of the anthropology subtopic. I’ll have the history one. So I jump between them. So in my internal mental, I put all modern things in the political category.

TOM BILYEU: Got it?

The Fragmentation of the Left

RUDYARD LYNCH: So I put everything like Incel Revolution or that video or Will America have a Civil War in the political box. So that’s why I say it. You could move the categories around and I wouldn’t care much. But the thing with the left is they’re in a weird place. One of the things people don’t notice is that the different sub-coalitions of the left are fraying.

Where, for example, the TikTok viewers don’t trust the NBC CNN viewers, where there’s been a generational rift on the left, where the Zoomer Left really does not like the Boomer left because they see the Boomer Left as the capitalist oppressors. So they’ve stopped listening to their paymasters of DNC and then instead they follow accounts on TikTok and Instagram that have no factual basis.

So they are the people who are turning up the throttle for violence. And it seems nearly every day, at least in my feed, leftists are calling for violence in one form or another. And I think the NBC, CNN left don’t really know what to do with this, because on top of it, they’ve built out their ideology and coalition in a certain way that they can’t back down.

They fired all the reasonable people like a decade ago. If you’ve made it this far into the left, you cannot be reasonable. They’ve removed any way they’d change their ideology. But the American people have sort of seen through it enough and they’ve lost all of their flexibility.

Look at the presidential candidates. I don’t think anyone who the left is pushing as leadership either for that or for a variety of things. They’re so lacking because the left has pushed this culture of inauthenticity for so long. That’s their core issue.

TOM BILYEU: So if their core issue is pushing an agenda of inauthenticity, would becoming authentic solve the problem? This feels, I don’t know how to make that…

RUDYARD LYNCH: As I said that I thought I should take that back. They have lots of core issues. I shouldn’t say that they have one. They have several that are eating them alive.

Envy, Control, and the Anti-Movement

TOM BILYEU: But I mean, doesn’t this really go back to if you were right in the beginning that this is a Marxist thing? That was the first thing you went to when I asked my first question. And then I said, okay, this all makes sense if and only if that group is driven by envy and a desire for control and you added power and money to the equation.

It’s like, okay, yes, that all makes sense to me. When I look at the far left, there are plenty of people that I wouldn’t put into this box that would self-identify as left. But when I look at the far left, they don’t make sense to me until I clock envy. Once I clock envy and control, like, oh, they just want to be in control.

And they want to be in control in a spiteful way of I want to tear this down, I want to stop people. They don’t have a clear vision of what they want to build. And it’s like anti, against movement instead of a for or a building. If you were saying that was a problem, I’d be like, ah, yes, that maps to what I see in the world. Does that seem accurate or is that a misread from where you’re at?

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

TOM BILYEU: They’ve made, and they’re in an artificial world because they’re telling each other a story about what’s happening that isn’t accurate.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Because their way of life is in direct opposition to what humans would normally do. Where if you’re in an environment where men have certain biological urges, women have other certain biological urges, if you’re in a society which doesn’t let you think about them, you’re going to constantly be feeling a sort of internal jostling between your social performance or your internal self.

Or in the left, they have enormous amounts of aggression and hatred, but they say that hatred is the worst possible trait. So on top of that they’ve cut out any sort of new ideas or even aesthetics. There’s no good new left wing art because they’ve sort of cut themselves off from everything that’s not ideology.

So at this point they’re just so deep into the cult and the cult has so much programming that they can’t program themselves out of the cult, out of curiosity.

Natural Law and Human Nature

TOM BILYEU: So I like this idea of biological urges. I think that one of the things, as somebody who came to politics very, very late, I felt like I was the kid saying the emperor had no clothes. Seeing people say that men and women are the same, I was like, you guys haven’t been married. There’s no way you’ve been married and think men and women are the same.

So on this I take a very nonchalant approach of that. If you’re building a worldview in a way that’s detached from things that are self-evident, you’ve got a problem. So are the urges that you’re referring to largely sexual in nature? Are they about aggression? What would be the clear distinctions that a sane, grounded person would make that the left is failing at?

RUDYARD LYNCH: In the pre-modern world, you had a concept called natural law. And America was built off the concept of natural law, where it was sort of lost in the American and the French Revolution. The idea behind natural law, and it stems back originally to the Greeks, but it was codified in Christianity, is the structure of society and the legal code should be a representation of the real world.

And so when they were doing various things like setting up the American Constitution, they were saying, we’re going to build this system working with human nature. And their idea was, we’re going to work with God’s reality because if you lie against it, you’re going to get punished.

And so when they set up the checks and balances, their idea was that humans are naturally greedy and selfish. So let’s make a system where if humans are greedy and selfish, it works for the society in general. And that same with capitalism, with science, you’re working with an accurate understanding of human nature.

And the reason that basically every other society besides us had sexual norms is because of natural law. But it’s not just that, that would be a simplification. Where social class is to a degree natural law. Same thing as a legal structure, same thing as how a society wages war.

Where St. Augustine had the principle of just war, which was there are certain conditions under which war is okay and others where it isn’t. Because they had a sense that there’s human nature, and it’s best to work inside the sort of range of human nature, because you’ll actually get the result.

And so what the left does is they just shot natural law and then laughed at its corpse, where they just have no concept that there is human nature to work with. Where do they really believe that?

TOM BILYEU: Or is that one of the bullshit ones that they throw in to confuse people?

Stalin and the Blank Slate Ideology

RUDYARD LYNCH: So I think they actually believe it because they would make so many better decisions if they did believe it. I’m reading a really brilliant book now called “Modern Times” by Paul Johnson, and it’s a history of the 20th century, and it’s talking about the Soviet Union, where they kept on making all of these staggeringly terrible decisions.

And partly, Stalin was literally a criminal before he got power. So he is sort of that backdrop. But at the same time, Stalin shot all of his officers right before the war with Hitler. Eighty percent of his officer corps before the war with Hitler, because the Soviets thought hierarchy doesn’t matter. You can replace the officers with sort of privates.

But in reality, the most important variable for a successful military is a strong officer corps. And so he shot all the people with experience, and they didn’t think about, how are we going to pass on the human knowledge between these two?

TOM BILYEU: And he shot them because he thought they weren’t loyal.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yes, because Stalin went through phases of paranoia where he’d just kill people. He killed off a dozen different groups in Russia, and each time he thought they were going to be his rivals. But in the process, he killed Russian society because he killed off everyone who could have been productive or helped Russia.

Where they went through a, they killed off the rich first, then they killed off the kulaks or the independent farmers. And keep in mind, this is just a generation after the end of serfdom. So all of these people were new money. They would have a few more cows or a tiled roof. Stalin killed all of them.

TOM BILYEU: It’s one of the most horrifying stories.

RUDYARD LYNCH: In all of history. Yeah, because you’re just imagining, I’m from rural Pennsylvania. It’s like, imagine going into a town and just killing off all of the most respected members of that town. And most of the time, the other people in the town don’t dislike them and you’re just destroying the society.

And it speaks to your mental illness point that if you were in the Middle Ages and you had an understanding of human nature and you wanted to wield power that brutally, you’d be like Machiavelli, where Machiavelli has this highly structured, in a logical sense of when he’s going to be brutal and Stalin is just like kill them all.

And that betrays they actually believe it. Or same thing as importing immigrants who if you know enough anthropology and even left wing anthropologists agree with that.

TOM BILYEU: Hold on, let’s go back to that because that’s a really interesting point and it’s hitting me weird. Okay, so what I just heard you say was, hey, Tom, as proof that these guys really do believe, believe that it’s all blank slates, generals, the same as a private, doesn’t matter, kill them. If they’re not going to be loyal, just promote the next guy. Do you think that the first order of what drove him to do that is paranoia or a belief that everybody’s the same?

Culture Runs Deep

RUDYARD LYNCH: What anthropology has found is that culture varies a lot and it’s very deep and it’s sort of lots of implicit stuff where there’s still a significant amount of cultural differences between different sort of ethnic, different sub-regions of British Americans from hundreds of years ago, as well as different groups of white American.

So generations later there’s still, you can still see if someone’s culturally Italian or Irish American from a variety of things. And so culture is very deep and the vast majority of it’s unconscious. And so when the left does a lot of things, they’re acting out sort of very complex subconscious beliefs which have sort of been transmitted to people unconsciously.

Where children pick up all the elements of their society’s worldview without being taught it sort of directly. Where a child will know, for example, that their society values equality a lot because people in that society just won’t brag or they’ll be uncomfortable with stating one group is more successful than another group.

So people act out very complex psychological principles that they don’t understand the full implications of. And so Stalin’s first motive was paranoia. But then inside his sort of deck of logic was everyone’s interchangeable.

TOM BILYEU: Okay, yeah, it feels like mental illness is a key ingredient, but that is very fascinating. I never saw Stalin through that lens. Stalin being one of the most terrifying figures of the 20th century. Okay, so we’ve got the left. They believe that everybody is an interchangeable cog. This is one of the things that they actually believe and that is certainly creating the problems. Why do you think that this is gaining so much steam right now?

Bad Times Bring Radicalization

RUDYARD LYNCH: It’s gaining steam for the economic issues you describe.

TOM BILYEU: But why does that push people to the left?

RUDYARD LYNCH: So bad times bring radicalization. That’s just a consistent principle. And that could be religious fundamentalism, it could be radical nationalism, leftism. I read this really fascinating book called “The Psychology of Socialism” by Gustave Le Bon and it was written in the 1880s and it’s absolutely insane.

He totally nailed the left psychology back in the 19th century and it’s one of the most prophetic books I’ve read in my life where I wrote all of the predictions he got right and it filled two pages. And he said that the core demographic of the left is sort of maleducated people where our education system overproduces midwits where we teach people non-useful skills and then the economy doesn’t have jobs to pick up for that.

So there’s this huge lag in sort of over-educated people who are taught to believe they’re more important in the world than their services are. And they are the people who drive the left. What happened in the last 40 years, and Turchin talks very cogently about this is we had a huge cadre both over and under-educated people.

And due to the economic issues, they could not sort of integrate into society. So they became radicalized and they used the radical left virtue signaling game as a way to short circuit not having to deal with merit because they resent merit. So they use ideological purity spirals for status selecting.

And so among young people there’s lots of dissatisfied elite aspirants. And the college educated ones tend to go left. Like I spent a semester in college, the non-college educated ones tend to go right.

The Left’s Disconnect and Ideological Extremism

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so we’ve got this spiraling up of what’s happening on the left, overvaluing what they’ve achieved and what they’re going to offer to society. At a time where we’re having economic woes, how is that manifesting politically?

Like when I look at the left, what I see are people that are using, I’ll say is empathy, the right word, compassion. Closer. That’s not what they would call it. So I don’t think maybe you see something I don’t. But I see them as fighting for the oppressed all the time. Like these people are legitimately having a bad time. Somebody’s got to stand up for them. We’ve got so much, you know, to whom so much has been given, so much is expected, and they’re going in there trying to help people.

But it does not appear to be birthing a better world that seems to be creating this, what Gadsad calls suicidal empathy. And for me, zooming in on the things that worry me about the Left are authoritarianism and unchecked immigration. What do you see manifesting in your understanding of the left and all of these predictions about the Left? What does it have to say about those two things specifically?

RUDYARD LYNCH: So the west was built off Christianity, and the core emotion of Christianity is love. Envy is the shadow of love. So they think they’re doing Christian love, but they’re actually doing its opposite. Because when you love someone, you accept their issues for what they are as a person. And when you envy someone, you look for issues to tear them down. So they’ve created a mask of Christian love to show its opposite.

And the thing we’re seeing is just, so you watch the woke commercials, like the Jaguar one or whatever one they’re doing now, and you think a group of people greenlit this. You could put 10 people in a single room who did not think there was a problem here. And that speaks to a real disconnect between them and the rest of the world, that they have these highly enclosed places where they constantly ratchet up ideological extremism and they don’t.

One of the core issues the Left has is they don’t have self regulation mechanisms. Christianity as an example, has a series of rules, and if you break the rules, you’ll get kicked out. Even like fascism has a better rule structure than the Left does. If you follow the rules, you’re fine. If you don’t, the Left hates rules. So they just have vague vibes, but then they have no mechanism to turn off the bloodlust.

So that’s what happened in the French Revolution, which was five years of just mobs in France eating each other and it was the snake eating its own tail. So the Left is stuck in these where if you don’t show your purity, you’re kicked out.

TOM BILYEU: But purity to vague rules, because you’re saying they don’t have like the specific.

RUDYARD LYNCH: It is purity to vague rules. Like none of it makes sense. It’s all contradictory. And they’re using the contradictory to prove their loyalty, where every single thing the Left says, they also believe of the opposite. And George Orwell articulates it very well.

And so they don’t really have rules and their standards get more and more extreme. But in the process, they purge anyone who had realigned them. So they’re just getting crazier and crazier. And anyone who would have told them no was kicking out five to 10 years ago.

The Feminization of Culture

TOM BILYEU: Okay, one thing I’ve heard you talk about with the left and my earliest step into what’s going on politically, what’s going on culture war was I was interviewing Heather Heying, this was like five years ago. And I said this sounds like basically a female mode of living, pathologizing.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yeah.

TOM BILYEU: And I’ve heard you say something similar things about there’s the feminization of culture. Is that being driven by the left? And if so, what’s the mechanism?

RUDYARD LYNCH: One of the things I like to do to figure out how the world works is I look at what predictions of the future work because you can see what’s retroactively. Making a predictive model is important because it means you’re understanding the world’s accurate. That’s what the scientific method is. So when I look at old predictions and they did something right, I try to figure out what they did right.

TOM BILYEU: What was the core logic? What cause and effect were they doing right?

RUDYARD LYNCH: So there was an ancient Greek play, I believe, written in the 4th century BC by Aristophanes. And it’s a society where only women could vote. And it’s a society where they get rid of capitalism and institute communism. They destroy the family, Senators sit in the central senate, and then they complain about how the room’s too cold and they use sex to control the men.

They constantly, they can’t form a coherent plan of argument and they just stay stuck arguing over the details. And so you have this author in the ancient world who said that feminization of society will produce communism, the breakdown of the family and culture, because there’s an innate biological self interest.

TOM BILYEU: Say more because I think a lot of people would look at women and say that’s who wants to have children.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Life’s complicated, man. So women want to have children under certain contexts and they don’t under other contexts. And there are different biological switches for both that societies can press. This is really a sign of archetypes being real because the easiest way to explain this is the Jungian division between Mother Earth and the devouring feminine, where women tend to not like social barriers, clear principles or rules.

And you can either say that side of some evolutionary self interest, or you could say it’s just there’s the whole argument of the yin and the yang and each sex has their own innate character that propels them. But the core logic is that because women are so biologically secure, they don’t get any benefit from taking risks. So it’s all risk mitigation.

And so when you’re removing all of these social structures, you’re removing potential sources of risk and you try to make a society where to differentiate yourself is a risk where everything is as undifferentiated as possible. So that’s how you end up with communism from it. Did I explain that?

TOM BILYEU: Well, you’ve got the first brick laid down, but I think there’s more bricks to lay. So things that I’ve heard you talk about which are very much along these lines are when women say all women are a 10, that there’s a thing that they are actively trying to pull off that female hairdressers will cut the hair of women that they believe are more attractive than them by a couple inches more than you would to maximize their attractiveness.

So they’re actively trying to hurt their chances on the sexual market. So it gets to this idea that women are playing a very different game from a masculine perspective. I recognize that, I see what you’re talking about, I see that in women, but I don’t even now talking with you, I don’t know that I fully understand the end game that they’re playing for.

Toxic Femininity and the Abdication of Responsibility

RUDYARD LYNCH: There’s a great book on the topic called “Warriors and Worriers” by Joyce Benenson.

TOM BILYEU: “Warriors and Worriers.”

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yes, it’s on audible, it’s very good and it talks about the negatives of female psychology. And it’s funny seeing this middle aged, I would guess later left this woman writes such a cutting and good critique of toxic femininity. And it goes through a lot of evolutionary psychology.

Whereas an example, unhappy women attack their family the most and then are polite to the outside society. Look at the modern west attacking our family, polite to the outside society. Or there’s in female friend groups and this is all backed by statistical evidence, you can look it up. Most women are scared to succeed lest their friends like them less. Where that’s a very toxic dynamic or intersexual competition which we spoke about of hairdressers will cut the hair of women that are more attractive than them, a few inches shorter than women who are beneath them in attractiveness.

Or it’s the, there’s in female social settings not having the implication of equality is considered socially very dangerous. And you look at modern society, what’s happening is that the bureaucratic machine of industrial civilization likes this feminine equality mechanism because it stops anyone from rising up and challenging it. It’s a highly useful mechanism to keep the public in conformity.

So that’s why they’re pushing men bad, because only men could rise out of this. And there’s toxic femininity and there’s positive femininity. And I want to state that because for every, like, for example, if we said you look at the murders of various dictators and genocides, you say that’s men. That’s true. But it’s also a specific subtype of men who are doing a specifically male pathology. And it’s comparable with pathological femininity.

And the core issue of that is the abdication of responsibility. Where because the cost of child rearing is so hard that you have an incentive to abdicate responsibility, to let go of costs associated with basically having this little person attached to you for 20 years where you’re physically incapacitated for months. And so if you look at the left, it’s all the abdication of responsibility. If you want a single place where the left does something that doesn’t make sense, it’s because of the abdication of responsibility.

TOM BILYEU: And you’re saying, just to make sure I understood that, that because women have so much responsibility with child rearing, they need to get it off of them in other ways.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yeah.

TOM BILYEU: Okay. I’ve also heard you say that, you know, women just need to be honest. They’re not going to be attracted to a man that can’t dominate them.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yeah.

TOM BILYEU: So how do I reconcile that? Women both want to be dominated by a man in controlled circumstances. All of that’s got to be somebody that they want, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that with.

RUDYARD LYNCH: And I want no rules, man, I know the answer to that. But this has been such a complex journey of learning all these things. As I stare at it in retrospect, I’m like, man, that’s complicated. So it’s two different biological switches based off context. Where are there rules being enforced on me or are there not being rules enforced on me?

And until there are rules enforced on me, I’ll do, I’ll push these low trust strategies until there is a social structure. Because men have always been the people that have built social structures. That’s true for governments, religious institutions, corporations, militaries. And so women have been dependent on the patriarchy or the structures men build.

So in the absence of a patriarchy, you’ll do these low trust strategies until the context switches and then you switch behaviors. Where it’s one of those things. Where it’s Schrodinger’s feminist. A feminist is either empowered or she’s a victim. And it depends on contact. Whichever one you choose.

TOM BILYEU: Whichever one they choose for themselves.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yes, by context.

TOM BILYEU: And would that context be whatever, whichever one of these gets me more, gives me more control, gets me more.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Whichever one I can avoid conflict with. Where if there’s a conflict, because the incentive structure is that women cannot win fights against men. So a lot of female behavior is offsetting their physical weakness against men. Because if you’re not going to win, go with the flow. So if I’m in a context where I can get away with, I’m going to get away with it. If I can’t get away with it, I won’t get away with it.

TOM BILYEU: Okay.

RUDYARD LYNCH: It doesn’t make sense to, it doesn’t make sense to people like us where you and I are both very entrepreneurial and we want to enter in a situation, figure it out. It makes significantly more sense if you’re like a Russian peasant or a Chinese peasant, where you have these huge governments that are utterly exploitive. And so when you can hide a little bit of grain from the tax collector, you do so.

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so you’re saying that is one of the strategies that women employ.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yes.

Consequences of Feminized Social Structures

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so as we feminize the societal structures that have traditionally been created by men and at least in this moment are being co-opted by women, what are the consequences for men?

RUDYARD LYNCH: A lot. I mean, there’s no birth rate. That’s a pretty big consequence.

TOM BILYEU: What is the actual mechanism that’s driving that down?

The Industrial Revolution and Social Breakdown

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yes. So it’s a holistic system. So one of the core issues with modernity in the left hemisphere is you can’t see the entire equation which all fits together. So if you have a sexual breakdown, that’s going to have consequences on your society’s political structure, on its religious structure. If the birth rate decreases, that’s going to affect your society’s economy. Everything’s connected.

And so as an example, the Industrial Revolution was a huge causal variable here because you removed women’s reliance on men’s physical labor and you also remove the threat of starvation. But so the consequences for men are most men get hypergamied out of the pool and hypergamy is the principle that women will naturally be attracted to the most powerful man.

And again, that makes sense if you use the analogy of if I am a peasant in a war zone, I will pick the most powerful warlord to protect me because he is the one who is most likely to stop wandering vagrants, wandering mercenary bands from stealing my grain. Keep in mind, this is operating out of an idea of fundamental weakness in a very brutal Darwinistic evolutionary world. So it makes total sense from the sort of logic they’re coming from.

And when you hypergamy most men out of the pool, you end up with these sort of a huge amount of dissatisfied men. And then no one has children because there’s, of course, the mismatch between a few men who get a lot of selection and then most men who don’t. And then these men don’t have an incentive to get married and have kids because their life is pretty, it’s fairly satisfying. And so you don’t start families in this.

And it also breeds mass social distrust. And for every loss in sort of like if you raise taxes, you’ll have exponential economic decreases, same thing as social life. If you make social interactions 20% more difficult, you’re going to see an exponential decrease in social interactions. And that’s why I think politeness is important to societies.

TOM BILYEU: Because you’re trying to alleviate some of that friction.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yes.

Wealth Inequality and the Feminization of Culture

TOM BILYEU: Okay, so that feels like an example of wealth inequality. Wealth in this example being not the hypergamy becomes possible because of literal wealth inequality. But then in terms of sexual mate selection opportunities, there’s also a sort of wealth inequality of that as well.

Okay, so that came from, I’m trying to figure out what happens when you feminize a culture. What’s the pathology that we’re going to start to see in men? If I just started rattling off things that I can already see right now, obviously making men and their natural proclivities problematic. So telling men not to be aggressive, telling men not to be dominant, telling men that they need to step back and let others speak. Specifically women telling men that their ambition is in and of itself problematic.

And one stat that I’ve come across recently is since I think the mid-90s, the number of patents that China has filed compared to America. China went from like less than 1% globally now to like 43% globally. I mean, it’s insane. And America has gone from like 18% to 16% or 25 to 20. Whatever, it was a drop.

And that’s where I’m like, these things matter. China believes in itself. China is encouraging its people to be aggressive, to be dominant, to be as ambitious as humanly possible to grind, to train. And it really manifests. It manifests in GDP, it manifests in innovation, it manifests in progress.

And so when I start looking at the problems in the US, like just looking at US versus China, when I look at that and I say, whoa, some percentage of this is due to the feminization of society. That’s where I’ve started beating the drum recently, where I’m like, no, men should not make space for anybody. Men should compete as hard as they can. You should always want an equal playing field. You should never sabotage somebody or try to hold them back. But if somebody can’t out compete you, tough shit. So it’s like you should be going all in.

RUDYARD LYNCH: I agree. I very much agree. Yeah, it’s funny to talk about China because first of all, you’re assuming they’re telling the truth. And they normally lie about 20%. Statistically they amassed the Communist Party lying by each province and it’s about 20% of stats or it’s about 20% of total GDP.

I think China in some ways is a more feminized society than America because they’ve just totally let themselves get walked over by the government, in the school system and like the factory system, where I follow a lot of Chinese news. And it’s crazy. They have like 50% youth unemployment now.

TOM BILYEU: Whoa.

China’s Hidden Crisis

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yeah. They have a litany of issues. They’ve had lots of failures of major corporations. There have been protests across the country. Xi Jinping has said a lot of just like you should literally prepare for war. And they like having really sort of like explicit, exploitive, explosive rhetoric. And people like to say that.

But at the same time, the book I’m reading about the 20th century, people said that about Hitler and Stalin. And it’s totally insane to speak back to your earlier point that people tried to appease Hitler. The British gave back a quarter of their fleet to Hitler to appease him. And you don’t get Hitler to compromise by giving him stuff. These people have no comprehension of how predatory actors operate.

Or the Western media was just writing glowing reviews of Stalin and Mao, who are even worse than Hitler. They killed like twice as many people at least. And so we just are so naive. And the only way to fight players like that is to sort of bring out our own masculinity because appeasing monsters is not going to work. And that’s just, it’s just a dangerous worldview. And I think it’s, there’s an element of just, there’s just there’s lots of very insidious, dark, I think, instincts in there. And yeah, I think it’s more dangerous than people think.

TOM BILYEU: It’s more dangerous from a future Thucydides trap perspective. It’s more dangerous from a look at, even China can collapse if you allow that kind of thing. What do you mean by that?

RUDYARD LYNCH: It’s dangerous on a lot of levels, I think, because we’re developing a lot of godlike technology now between AI, genetic engineering, the space technology, new forms of weaponry, sort of like predator drones. I’m probably forgetting a bunch. And this technology would require a lot of masculinity to master because we’ve let the genie out of the bottle, we can’t go back.

And so we have to sort of grab, we have to sort of grab Jormungandr by its tongue, but we don’t have the will or the energy for it because we’ve destroyed the same masculine impulses that would allow that to happen. Or there’s all of these external threats. So when you destroy masculinity, you’re destroying the very thing that would allow your society to reset.

I just also think China is very dangerous because I think they are significantly worse than we believe. I think we’re going to look back on the things going on in China now and realize that it was like, it was like the other totalitarian regimes we slept on. I think they’re probably doing very dark things that we don’t know about.

The Shift from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping

TOM BILYEU: Would not surprise me at all. I think the big thing that’s going to come out about China is that we don’t understand there’s a very big difference between Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping. And when Mao finally died, and I don’t think people realize, you know, you’ve talked a lot about only having lived in the 21st century. I was alive when Mao was alive, so I’m like, yo, this was recent and he was killing people by the tens of millions.

And when he died, finally the CCP woke up and was like, okay, hold on, this is horrific. We don’t want to keep going through this. And so Deng Xiaoping makes his famous quote, “It doesn’t matter if the cat’s black or white, as long as it catches mice.” And “Being rich is glorious” or wonderful, whatever he said.

And so the thing I try to always remind people is, hey, capitalism is so dope that when the communists decided that they wanted to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, they turned to capitalism, literally brought over Americans to teach them how to capital and that was what brought them out.

But then when Xi Jinping came into power, they didn’t realize he ended their, they had term limits, like, because they didn’t want to have happen what happened with Mao to happen again. And yet Xi Jinping was able to reclaim the Communist Party, make himself supreme leader.

But I am hearing, I can’t validate this yet, but I am hearing rumblings coming out of China that Xi Jinping may be losing his grip on power, that he may not be meeting with Trump, partly because he’s afraid he can’t leave China because that they wouldn’t let him back in. Now, that is wild.

Now, you normally hear stuff like that and ends up being whatever. People said all kinds of crazy shit about Putin five years ago and none of it has come to pass. So take it with a huge grain of salt. But the part that I do think we’re missing is so many of us are clocking what was going on in China in the late 90s and early 2000s as what’s happening now. And it’s been a very different picture since Xi Jinping took over.

RUDYARD LYNCH: I’ve gone through sort of multiple phases of obsessive study on China. I’ve done it several times or for a few months. I’ll just look at everything coming out of China. And it’s weird to look at the trajectory they’ve been on where back in, again in the 70s, they were hardcore Maoist. It was like the Taliban. We would perceive them the way that we perceive the Taliban now.

Then they went through this liberal phase where they’re like, we’re going to bring in Western companies. Our major cities can be places that Western expats can comfortably live in. We’ll pretend to care about stuff like the UN or free rights.

Then they went through this phase in the 2000 and tens where, like I remember Fareed Zakaria made this, he made this whole thing like “The Rise of the West” and he was championing the decline of America against the rest of the world. And there was this whole cultural moment of China’s going to surpass the west and China’s doing this empire building with the Belt and Road Initiative.

And I was kind of horrified at how complacent the American elite were that so many of the American elite were totally happy with letting a Marxist state that hates us sort of rise to global predominance.

Then after 2020, we saw a totally different phase of China. And I believe Peter Zeihan is fundamentally correct, although it’s going to take longer where they have really high youth unemployment. Their, the cities are getting empty, at least from the several different sources I’m looking at, because they have such high unemployment. People are moving back to their hometowns. Because in China there was this huge migration from the countryside to the cities.

And the communist party is killing a lot of people. There were 2 million unaccounted for deaths for Covid where there were 2 million deaths for unstated reasons with coffins and a lot. They’re teaching children how to do military sort of training. They openly say that America is the enemy in their propaganda. They’ve closed their borders for years.

So China is in a very totalitarian place and they’re cracking down on their own population. And it’s just, it’s scary because I see the potential in China for what America could be.

TOM BILYEU: If we keep going in a totalitarian direction.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yeah. Because keep in mind, we didn’t know at the Holocaust at the time. We didn’t know it Stalin or Mao at the time. These totalitarian governments have been very good at insulating the world from what’s going on. The Uyghurs too. I mean, they’ve experienced horrible things.

Free Speech and the Path Forward

TOM BILYEU: Yeah, yeah. There’s plenty of malice in the world. There’s no doubt about that. This is why I bang on about free speech. If you’re not willing to let people say what they say, if you’re not willing to be voted out of office, then the guns come out and there is no other way. And I don’t know why people can’t see that, but they really can’t.

All right, I want to ask you about Gen Z. You’re a Gen Zer. I want to know about what is sex like for Gen Zers. What does that tell us about either the feminization of culture, where we’re headed as a society? I know you’re close with the guy behind homath. Yeah. So what are some of the most important homath equations?

RUDYARD LYNCH: The core variable, I’d say is just lack of social trust. And that operates across the entire pyramid.

TOM BILYEU: Between men and women.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yes, just in the entire equation. And so you have the hypergamy system, where I always forget your audience is probably a different demographic than, because for the spaces I’m in, we’ve had this discourse for a while and everyone’s seen the homath chart. And I realize a lot of your audience might not have seen the homath chart.

TOM BILYEU: Yeah, my audience is older than yours.

The Dating Market Crisis and Gen Z

RUDYARD LYNCH: So 80% of women go to 20% of men and that’s due to the structure of the dating apps where a majority of relationships among Gen Z are formed online. And it’s an important thing to realize Gen Z doesn’t really leave the house partly because they’re not wealthy enough and partly because they have social anxiety or everyone’s on their phone.

So most relationships are formed online and that’s fairly, how do I explain this? That’s very shallow and dehumanizing. And with the way it works as well with the inequality is you have a lot of incentives for low social trust either between the Chad guys who have lots of options and then that brings down the value of the individual women who they’re cycling through.

So you have a large disenfranchised population, you have a loss of social trust due to the incentive structure. And because there’s no community with the way social media works and dating apps work. And then you just have mouse utopia eating at the equation where you have a significant portion of Gen Z women, I think some men too who have basically just checked out who are radical left or lesbian or something like that. And no, I’m not making this up. So that’s why young people don’t have children.

Unwinding the Crisis: The Return of Masculinity

TOM BILYEU: That is, that’s wild. Okay, so if you were going to try to unwind some of this, like if, I don’t know, if you just are black pilled and it’s like there’s nowhere we can go or if you feel like is this weird? Got to re-champion religion. Is this, obviously we’ve already talked about economics. I’ll assume you’ll say we got to resolve some of those issues. But other than the economics, like how would we unwind this? If you gave us a generation or two generations, what are the things that would need to be true for us to renormalize?

RUDYARD LYNCH: I agree in the economic. After that I’d say just a return of masculinity. Because the issue with a lot of religious conservatives is they want to bring back a rule structure for religion without really reference to God or the masculine enforcement. Because the way, if you study conservative authors of a century ago or ancient wisdom would say that the first step in this is to increase masculinity and then that has a frame for femininity because masculinity is based off respect.

TOM BILYEU: Masculinity will create a frame for the feminine to basically live inside of.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yes, exactly.

TOM BILYEU: Okay, sorry, you were about to, I think you’re about to go into more detail on that. Please explain.

RUDYARD LYNCH: So the masculine sets the frame. It’s like iron, and the feminine’s like water. It flows through the frame the masculine sets. And so this is why women don’t build social institutions or why they don’t drive the course of human history directly in the way men do. But they do drive it indirectly. And there are exceptions like Joan of Arc or Catherine of Russia.

And so just trying to enforce religious rules without masculinity means no one will respect them. But I’d say two things. First, increase masculinity, because—

TOM BILYEU: How do we do that? Like, eat more f*ing Brazil nuts? Like, what are we doing here?

The Masculine and Feminine Dynamic

RUDYARD LYNCH: Yeah, it’s a difficult question because industrial civilization solves so many of our problems, but we’re going to have a lot of problems very soon. And the masculine is doing and the feminine is being. And so when men do things that garner respect, because the masculine is formed by respect and the feminine is garnered by love. So women will love men they respect.

But the issue is that in our current society, we make it nigh impossible to produce men that women respect because the feminine group, herd mentality, is envious that other women may get men they respect. And this is my mate suppression video. So they stop men from rising to positions of respect.

TOM BILYEU: That’s wild. Give people a quick primer on mate suppression. It’s a great video.

Mate Suppression: A Twisted Biological Impulse

RUDYARD LYNCH: Thank you. So this is one of the very twisted parts of human nature. And one of the things I’ve learned in the last few years is that we think evolution’s simple and we think that life is everything. It’s rational, it fits in a spreadsheet. But life can periodically be very twisted, where you’ve got the fungi that go into an ant’s brain and eat it and take control of the ant. You have horrible diseases that spread through, like syphilis is pretty twisted.

And mate suppression is one of the most twisted biological impulses where it exists across sex, both sexes, but it’s more heavily a part of toxic femininity. And it’s the impulse to hurt other people who are potentially doing better than me by lessening their fertility.

And examples of it include, I mean, there was so much of this stuff when I was growing up. I mean, the second point I’d say for fixing the sexual duality is you have to stop dehumanizing men and you have to stop dehumanizing children as well. Because when I was growing up, there were people who had pressure put their kids in after school programs. And if you didn’t watch your kids play all the time, you can have the police called on you.

Or there was the whole thing like the government passed a bill. You had to put in a certain type of car seat to have children. And it saved an amount of lives I could count on one hand. And it stopped like 200,000 births because the cost of having the car or the seat, people couldn’t afford it.

And if you want other examples, socialism is taking from others putting it in the central pot. Or trying to make silly rules about like silly dating rules or like when people make silly rules, they’re normally for mate suppression. Because if the rule doesn’t serve an actual purpose, the purpose is to hurt you.

Closing Thoughts

TOM BILYEU: That is a very dark place to end this interview, Rudyard. Where can people follow along with you?

RUDYARD LYNCH: Check out my two channels, WhatifAltHist and History 102. And thank you. This was a wonderful episode.

TOM BILYEU: Dude, you are a fascinating mind. Every time I have to recheck your age because I am aghast each and every time I was like, yeah, he really has only lived in the 21st century. It is wild. I cannot wait to see where you’re at in 10 years, 15 years. Your ability to sponge up knowledge, historical context, frameworks is really incredible, man. So I love being on the timeline with you.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Thank you. I’m honored.

TOM BILYEU: My pleasure. All right, everybody, if you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.

RUDYARD LYNCH: Peace.

TOM BILYEU: If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. I’m looking at America and I’m saying that we’re really going through something. We are in decline. I would use even more dramatic words than that, but I want to get trapped in a linguistic game. Okay, so I’ll just ask, do you think America is declining on any meaningful measurements? I would push back.

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