The recurring themes we kept coming back on over the show were:
- Have we entered a climate where a French Revolution style megapolitical shift is looming?
- The pesky phenomenon of the ole coup-within-a-coup, a.k.a the “Power Play” as per the 1978 Peter O’Toole political thriller of that name.
- The difference between “objective reality” that everybody thinks exists and “authoritative reality”, which for all intents and purposes, is what actually matters.
I’ve been re-reading The Sovereign Individual and it seems to have held up since it was written over 20 years ago, and we discussed how entrenched elites always desire to control and manage societal phase changes in a way that ensures they get to remain in charge after the shift, but as Davidson and Rees-Mogg point out (and we tend to emphasize ourselves) that isn’t how things typically work out.
The old models will fail, and the command and control structures will not remain intact under the new configurations of power, whatever those may turn out to be. We of course hit on our recurring ruminations that if the nation state as we know it is on the way out, what takes its place and please let it not be Google and Facebook. Or Amazon.
Did you know some guy once wrote a step-by-step how-to manual on overthrowing a government? Charles brought up Edward Luttwak’s “Coup D’État: A Practical Manual”, which I also own and have read in its entirety. He also talked about Luttwak’s book on grand strategy as it relates to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Jesse’s concept of “authoritative reality” is interesting, because “authoritative” invokes the idea of an authoritative nameserver, the one from which all others must load a given set of data and treat as “the one true data”. I never managed to make that point on the show, but Jesse does make it when it comes to narrative.
He also brought in our worship of complexity, even though we can’t control it.
After some recurring skirmishes over whether the elites are a monolithic cabal (a la The Deep State) or rival factions engaged in internecine battles for control, I started ranting about Cantillon Effects again which got us talking about Bitcoin, and Charles’ idea for CLIME, a community based crypto currency that he first outlined in A Radically Beneficial World.
Bitcoin seems to come up a lot – is it Jesse that is obsessed? I see several objections to Bitcoin as an alternative currency:
1. Huge holdings of bitcoin are in the vaults of a few people – do we want another set of otherwise clueless gazillionaires in the mix?
2. Bitcoin blockchain transactions are grossly energy inefficient.
3. Bitcoin blockchain transactions are executed on server farms operated by a handful of unsavory organizations.
4. Bitcoin does not support government investments in society.
Hi,
I have tried and failed to subscribe to all 3 of you.
It may be a problem with my hotmail preferences.
PS.
Today,I discovered a link to an essay with many links
to a debate started by Mark Andrressen that may interest the 3 of you.
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2020/06/19/on-cultures-that-build/
It starts out with “I tire of the Andreessen spurred discussion of “cultures that build.” I agree with the sentiment; I do miss the America that could make stuff”.