10k YouTube Subs Q&A

Can a man find peace when he knows his society will decline?

What channels would you recommend on YouTube, and will you be using your channel to invite more speakers for discussions (possibly have a debate)?

I’ll be inviting more speakers for discussions, but people tend not to want to debate me. People who disagree with me usually don’t believe in truth and therefore don’t value debate; instead, they use slurs to stifle debate.

Although I am not confident about the future of YouTube (judging by the channels that have been banned, I think it’s riding the rainbow to a woke wasteland), there are still some worthwhile channels:

• Coroneus Phocis on how mythology and biology interrelate on masculinity and femininity.

• The Thomistic Institute on the virtues and misconceptions about Christianity. If - like most atheists - you became an atheist as a teenager, never considered the philosophical arguments for God again and therefore retained a teenager’s understanding of the topic, this channel is for you. As T. S. Eliot in his introduction to Pascal’s Pensees:

  The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.

• Wranglerstar on self-reliance. Eventually - and especially under totalitarian systems - ‘don’t comply’ requires ‘don’t rely’.

• Barbell Medicine on exercise.

Bio and career prior to Eton?

I was educated in the state system until I got a scholarship (part academic, part athletic) to an independent school. I studied English Literature, Classics, History and Economics at A Level then read English Language and Literature at University College London.  While at university, I mentored young offenders. Afterwards, I worked as a manual labourer (earning the nickname Rambo because I never do things by halves) then taught in a state school and at Highgate School before moving to Eton.

I had my first child when I was twenty.

How do you assure your wife and keep her comfortable while doing what you do?

What do you mean by ‘comfortable’? And why do you think being ‘comfortable’ is so important? Humans aren’t built for comfort. That it’s bad for us physically is obvious. But it’s also bad mentally and spiritually - even though you might have to wait longer and look harder to see that.

My wife supports and respects what I do, and it gives her confidence in me. She knows I am not a shimmying hollow man. What about men who go to work staying silent about things they disagree with? Things that are going to make society worse in the future for their children? How do they keep their wives comfortable?

Most of them, I bet, expect their wives to earn an income. But one of my priorities in life is making sure my wife doesn’t have to do that. Giving a woman the choice to be with her children full-time is one of the greatest gifts you can give her.

And you should support her in that. The purpose of a man’s work is to support his family financially while making a valuable contribution to society. But his real job starts at home after his work finishes.

He doesn’t stay late at the office

What advice or rules of thumb can you give someone in an organisation that is at some stage of being taken over by woke? Tread lightly and try to stay to change it from inside over time or push hard because the longer you leave it the more power they will have?

Keep up daily resistance. Never appease. If you push hard enough to be effective, you will probably lose your position. People staying and thinking they’re being subtly effective while things deteriorate around them should realise that’s proof they’re not being effective.

And their position in any meaningful sense will be lost while they’re still in it anyway - along with their integrity. As Plato has Socrates say in Book II of The Republic, we should hate a lie in the soul:

No one wants to lie about the most serious things… To lie and to have lied to the soul about the things that are… and to have a lie there is what everyone would least accept…everyone hates a lie in that place [his own soul] most of all.

How can a man find peace when he knows it is inevitable his society will decline?

Society has no existence of its own separate from the individuals who compose it: ultimately, it comprises relations between individuals. It is not inevitable that you will decline if you take steps to avoid it.

And you should put present worries about cultural decline into context by realising that these patterns recur throughout human history. Luxury breeds complacency, and degeneracy follows. Monogamy then returns, and social energy is restored.

Once mature, should males generally be dominant over females?

Dominance occurs only within the male sex, not between males and females. It doesn’t even occur within the female sex. Men in fact naturally defer to women, refusing to engage in dominance-submission patterns of behaviour.

Men should lead women. That is what women have shaped them to do via sexual selection, and women find it attractive. But leading is not dominating.

Essential reading for young men?

I’m not sure any reading is strictly essential. ‘Which of you, by taking thought, can add one cubit to his stature?’ Jesus didn’t write anything.

True, Aristotle said that the man who devotes himself to a life of learning has chosen wisely among the good things of this world, and he will probably be happier than most men. But if he expects from it full satisfaction, he is chasing a phantom.

Any knowledge attainable in human life can be acquired only with much toil. It is also never perfectly clear. And neither is it completed, even in the longest life.  What is known is also often disappointing and unsatisfactory. Much learning has also been devoted to the service of evil: it is therefore not a necessarily good end but a means that can be abused.

With those caveats, however, studying human nature is still useful, especially as young men have grown up swamped by indoctrination that human nature doesn’t exist.

There’s some recommended reading on my Substack.

What branch of history or philosophy do you think is most overlooked/under appreciated?

Military history and metaphysics.

Human history is war punctuated by brief periods of peace, whereas the woke worldview is that one day peace will reign uninterrupted. Heaven will be brought down to earth. But history shows all attempts at this have instead ended in raising Hell.  That is why military history has fallen out of fashion in today’s academic climate.

Metaphysics is neglected because positivism, which has cast its spell over science, eliminates all metaphysics from philosophy and restricts scientific knowledge to facts and relations between facts. It defines the scientific method as exact mathematical measurement. If virtue and vice can’t be measured like this, they don’t exist. It also says the scientific method proceeds by prediction based on hypothesis and followed by experimental verification. But human conduct, especially if regarded as free, is too unpredictable. And so on.

This view of science is too narrow and ultimately self-refuting anyway. What’s the scientific proof of it?

Should everyone get punched in the face at least once?

No. You can die from it. And if you don’t the pain doesn’t last long enough for it to be a genuine test of fortitude anyway. You shouldn’t go around seeking out or starting fights either. That isn’t masculine.

Who is your favourite Islamic conqueror?

Tamerlaine the Great because his lifetime achievements are a reminder of the importance of war. I made a video on him.

Hobbes or Rousseau?

Both were wrong, but Hobbes was less disastrously wrong. By contrast, most of the errors rampant in our time have their roots in Rousseau.

For people unfamiliar with these thinkers, here’s a brief overview.

Aristotle said ‘man is by nature a political animal’. Both Hobbes and Rousseau challenged this view. They imagined a primitive condition called the state of nature: society was not yet formed.

But here they differed. Hobbes saw the state of nature as constant predatory warfare. Man by nature is actually antisocial. "Man was a wolf to man," and there was a "war of all against all.”

Rousseau, however,  saw it as blithe, carefree innocence. There was peace, and people just played the forests. Hobbes is closer to the truth, hence bloodless political philosophies like Rousseau’s have always created the bloodiest realities.

Both believe that man’s intellect allowed him to see the benefit of cooperation. The social contract was then created, and with it society.  Although this has advantages, it involves giving up liberties. Hobbes advises total submission; Rousseau, the recovery of some of the lost liberties, hence the importance of his thought to the ‘back to nature’ movement.

If you’re wondering why people in Rousseau’s state of nature, frolicking in the forests, ever needed to enter into the social contract, here’s why: private property. Man's natural inventiveness created it, but Rousseau imagined it brought fraud, dispute, and conflict. According to him, the state was required to keep the peace. But private property has always existed.

Both believed there was no morality prior to the state, and both see morality as consisting in obedience or disobedience to the civil laws. That is nonsense. Yes, the state can say things like we must drive on the left side of the road, but there are acts every state must command and other acts every state must forbid. These acts, then, were moral or immoral before the creation of the state.

Another big point of difference between them is that, for Hobbes, we have no rights except those granted back to us by the sovereign of the all-powerful state. For Rousseau, however, the individual will becomes part of the general will, the individual person part of this general personality, and the right of the state the accumulation of all individual rights. The individual wills that the general will shall be his will. It is always sovereign. Even if it appoints representatives, it cannot transfer sovereignty to them - unlike in Hobbes’s thought. For Hobbes, then, we have no natural rights; for Rousseau, all a man ultimately ever obeys is himself as part of the general will.

In the Catholic tradition, by contrast, authority - the right of direction and compulsion - is given to a natural society directly by God through the natural law.  God wills the end of the society, i.e., the common good, and authority as the means necessary to achieve it.

There are a few different theories about exactly how the bearer of this authority is designated:

1. The divine right of kings: the ruler is directly appointed by God.

2. The popular consent theory: God directly gives authority to the whole people civilly united, and - according to the form of government they approve - they transfer its exercise to an individual or group. This doesn’t establish political society itself. It only establishes the form of government and the ruler; government exists by the consent of the governed.

3. The patriarchal theory: an outstanding man or group receives a grant of authority directly from God without the people's consent; authority dwells only in the ruler, not even basically in the people.

Are you familiar with Edmund Burke?

Yes. He barely discussed family structure and sexual morality. But he still had good insights. Fundamentally, he saw that revolutionaries leave nothing ‘which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth.’

‘There ought to be a system of manners in every nation, which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish.  To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.’

He also defended prejudices: 

‘Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them.  If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence.  Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency…[it] renders a man’s virtue his habit…’

And he saw what the destruction of manners and prejudices would result in:

‘All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and…incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.  All the superadded ideas…which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.’

Although I prefer Joseph de Maistre, Burke believed just as he did that the French Revolution was a Satanic assault on the divine and natural order. It couldn’t be appeased. And neither can its ideological descendants.

Racial differences in IQ facts and myths?

I already answered this, and the video got banned on YouTube. Race isn’t a social construct. But thinkers on the right often fall into the same false materialistic view of human beings that Marxists do. It’s just racial rather than economic.

What can the faithful do to help purge rampant homosexuality from the ranks of Catholic clergy?

People shouldn’t be surprised that there are corrupt elements within the Catholic Church. Anything involving fallen human beings is going to involve corruption. But believing in the Church means believing in its roots being in touch with the divine even though some branches of it might have been infected. Alone among Christian denominations it has refused to concede ground to contraception. If that is conceded, homosexuality follows, as Elizabeth Anscombe explained:

If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery, when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)' It can't be the mere pattern of bodily behaviour in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference! But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example.

Since the stance on contraception hasn’t been changed, the takeover isn’t complete. Ann Muggeridge’s book The Desolate City explains that the two main fronts of the revolutionary assault on the Church have been the liturgy and sexual morality.

So I think the liturgy and sexual morality are the areas that need to be fought for to regain lost ground. Since the attack probably involved more than merely human forces, the counterattack will need to as well.

How to make the family unit work effectively?

Whole books have been written on this; Timothy Gordon’s The Case for Patriarchy is a good recent one. But a couple of points are worth stressing here.

Everyone today, male and female, has grown up on feminist indoctrination. This has encouraged women to offer sex freely in the name of ‘liberation’. But feminism liberated men more than it did women. Studies show women are bitter about this: they regret the Sexual Revolution. It’s not surprising, then, that there’s resentment towards men. Does your behaviour deserve respect? If not, don’t expect it. Women want men who will lead them, not use them for sex then leave them.

The first step towards making the family unit work effectively is  regaining trust through benevolent male leadership. Your job is to create a space for your wife and children to thrive. The male protector role in the family also involves protecting the private sphere from the public. Your wife shouldn’t have to work, and your job should stay as a means to an end. It’s for supporting your family, not pursuing for its own sake. Your most important work is at home.

The search for meaning and a productive life is a special topic of import today, especially as regards young men, obviously, but what of those middle aged? How do they preserve Kipling’s will to ‘hold on’, on the downward slope, with maybe half their life remaining? We greatly ignore this demographic, those left on the scrapheap by divorce, perhaps quite unable to see their offspring, paralysed by disappointment, often facing a work environment too, where, if not their skills then their “identity” is increasingly being regarded as surplus to requirements.

This is ultimately a spiritual problem. If by the ‘hold on’ you mean stay alive, then the implication is that suffering makes life meaningless. That is the logical conclusion of the philosophies of hedonism (pleasure for the individual) or utilitarianism (pleasure for the group).

But no major philosophy or religion that has stood the test of time has said that the point of life is pleasure.

In fact, although suffering has been seen as having no earthly value, it has been seen as one of the most powerful sources of merit for the next life offered to man. A heroic man facing it with courage and patience inspires others and honours himself and God.

How do Europeans, who have a strong sense of individualism and tend to act and make decisions as individuals, co-exist successfully with people who have a strong sense of racial/cultural/religious identity, and demonstrate strong in-group preference? Especially when some of these groups actively try and inhibit Europeans from having a sense of their own group identity, while simultaneously declaring their own strong in-group preference is both righteous and "a good thing"?

The strong sense of individualism you mention is a consequence of liberalism. For modern liberals, the problem of politics is how to maximise autonomy, whereas for classical liberals it was to find a way of constraining power.

Rather than autonomy, however, the basic fact of social life is dependency. Man is born into the society of the family, in which children depend on their parents, and the elderly depend on their children. Companionship with our fellow man then extends beyond the family with others on whom we depend to supply our needs and develop our abilities.

Human nature orients us not only towards social organisations - families, extended families, villages and so on - but also towards setting up authoritative institutions to govern these. This authority preexists any contract because it derives from natural law. 

And since our social organisation participates in our rationality, it isn’t reducible to herd behaviour. It manifests in culture, which in humans beings has to be transmitted. Baby crocodiles are ready to roll from the egg: their genes give them everything they need. Lacking rationality, they have no culture to acquire. But humans have language, religion, science and all the others elements of culture.

These traditions are a trust we are charged with handing down. From our dependencies derive not only rights but duties.

Wokeness, a logical consequence of liberalism, is the dereliction of these duties.