Transcript: Downton Abbey, and the State's Big Power Grab - with Jeff Tucker
Here is a transcript of our conversation - it’s a new feature from Alitu, and I can’t vouch 100% for its accuracy!
Speaker A: Welcome to the podcast that's all about solutions. If you get that the coercive state is the problem, but you're tired of complaining about it, this is the place for you. Join us as we ask, what then must we do?
I'm here today with Jeff Tucker. Jeff is president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, which I hope all of you are familiar with. Brownstone is really one of the only and one of the best institutes or publishers on the scene these days, really taking on the COVID tyranny head on when a lot of even nominally libertarian organizations and individuals haven't. So big kudos to you and to Brownstone and congratulations on everything that you've accomplished. Jeff had a fantastic article the other day on a topic that's been in my head for a while. I've been sort of rattling this around and kind of thinking about how to present this. It's my guilty pleasure, which is rewatching episodes of Downton Abbey. I've probably seen the whole thing like three times now.
Speaker B: Okay.
Speaker A: And to me, well, first of all, it's a fantastic show, but when you look at what it's chronicling and the times that it goes through one of the threads, there is really the tale of the wealth transfer and the power transfer from private hands to state hands. And you addressed a particular clip, which I'll play in a minute, but do you want to just say a little bit about what inspired you to write this?
Speaker B: Well, the big problem for the show, from an American point of view, is that we don't understand where the social structure came from or why it exists, why these people have this birthright to this title, which then in turn grants them the big property ownership. And then they get to have servants dodi on them all the time with various funny names like Footman and Dormant and Bellman and butler and valet and so on. And we can't figure it out why these systems came to be. And then the scrambles on for the heir, that puts a lot of pressure on the men to find wives and the wives to bear children and for the children to be sons and so on it goes. And the show is just replete with this stuff and Americans just don't know anything about this. I was intrigued to find that it takes all the way to season seven and season six, episode four, before you're given up something like a plausible rationale for this whole thing. And it comes in the form of the dowager accountist, who's the sort of mother of the earl of whatever that is, the manager of the house, the caretaker of the house. And she's fighting over the ownership of a local hospital which has always been owned, been part of the estate and populated by local doctors to serve the local community.
Speaker A: And if I can just point out, was built by, I think it was the grandfather of the Earl of Grantham.
Speaker B: The Earl of Grantham.
Speaker A: Yeah. But it was built by someone in their family.
Speaker B: It was established by them, right. And had traditional methods of healing and obviously house calls and highly personalized service and that sort of thing. And a municipality outside, I guess it was in New York, was planning sort of a takeover of the hospital to modernize it and give it new technologies, give it more resources and make it more efficient and so on. And the dowager, having lived over a very long time and seen the decline that entered after World War I and the rise of the estate taxes that were gradually unraveling, the ownerships of these great families finally just draws the line, and we can't figure out why. But she's absolutely inadimately opposed to the transfer of ownership of this hospital. And we're led to believe that this is due entirely to the fact that she was the president of the hospital and just wanted to continue to exercise her power. And so the show sort of plays with you in the sense of you don't know why she's fighting this. And it even involves fighting the Crawley, because Cora is her daughter in law, and fighting her over this and really fighting everybody over it. And she seems to be willing to give up everything. And finally, at one cocktail party, she just reveals why, and she says, look, it's not really about my power. It's about our freedoms. The role of the great family, she says, dating back to the Magna Carta, is to protect the people's freedoms against the state. That's why they forced King John to sign that's why the barons forced King John to sign that document. And she said, My whole life, we've seen nothing but the decline of freedom and the advance of the state. And every single time, it's always in the name of fewer costs and more efficiency, but in the end, it always just ends up as the people have fewer freedoms and the state has more power. And she said, that's why I don't want to let this happen this time. And so this is at a cocktail party, and they're all a little bit, first of all, impressed by her sort of high mindedness here. Oh, so she has a theory behind this whole thing, and it explains a lot about her. And it's amazing you have to go six seasons before getting this, but I thought it was such a powerful rationale for the system, where it came from and what it achieved, that I wanted to isolate it as a sort of a paradigmatic case. First of all, it's a great history lesson since it's 100% accurate. So the Magna Carta is often criticized, and you hear the same thing about the US. Constitution. This was just a document that was pushed by the ruling families, by the landed aristocracy, and it really didn't have anything to do with the people. It was just the ruling class that created this document just to benefits themselves. So the same critique of the Magna Carta applies also to the US. Constitution. The Magna Carta was in fact the baron saying to King John, there are limits to your power and we're all ganging up on you and forcing you to sign this. He was very reluctant, but he did. And if you've ever read the Magic Card, it's long and involved and complex and hard to understand. There's no real takeaway involving human rights. There's nothing about human rights, universal rights or anything like that against. It's entirely about the limits of the king's power. And so the critique of that is, oh, they were just interested in themselves. Well, that's not quite right, since the limits of the power of the state, by implication, suggest that there are certain rights that belong to the people, not just to the aristocracy, but to everybody whom the king rules that they possess certain rights towards freedom that the king is simply not legally, morally or otherwise justified to trample on. And that is really the birth of freedom that Magna Carta did eventually, over time, lead to all the unfolding of the Enlightenment and liberalism, the idea of universal rights, the end of slavery, even advances in women's rights and so on, and democratic forms of government all flow out of that experience. So she's exactly right about this. A very similar criticism was made about the American Revolution in the US. Constitution. This is just Atlantic aristocracy and so on. But the thing is that what you learn from reading the Great Historians of Liberty and I'm quitting here, Bertrand de Juvenile and Lord Acton, is that in the real workings out of the progress of liberty over 800 years, it has been, in fact the great families, the great lineages, the large owners of the land of the states, the big property owners that have been in a position to be the prime movers in the limitations that have been imposed upon government. And those limitations on government is what created the modern world. There's a reason why it all unfolds after the 13th century gradually and every country it's because the government was being restrained and liberty was then allowed to build and create civilization out of that. So I wanted to highlight that as an explanation, as a sort of lens through which you should see the entire series that despite all the honorifics and feudal forms and strange arguments about wrangling around, about successions and all these kind of things, there is an underlying rationale for the aristocracy. And then that leads to the second part of my argument that completes the article.
Speaker A: If I could back up just a little bit. The other piece of that which I think is also alluded to in this fight over the hospital is that these families were also instrumental in providing for the welfare of sort of the people who were not in their class. I mean, the hospital is an example of that. I had Joyce Brand on the show recently talking about the Menoral system and I don't know if you're familiar with that. I had never really heard of it before, but apparently it predates feudalism. And it's similar to feudalism in that there is a great family. There's sort of a central locus. I don't want to say power because they didn't have the kind of power that feudal lords had over serfs. It wasn't like that. It was more of a voluntary thing. But these manners really took responsibility for the social welfare of the people who sort of formed the village around them or the community around them and worked with them and all that. And it seems to me that this is sort of a vestige of that, that the great houses sort of took it upon themselves, or it was just a tradition that, yeah, you build the hospitals, you build the schools, you take care of the people who need caring for, and then that later just became subsumed by the state.
Speaker B: Yeah, that's true. In fact, there's a scene very early on in the series where the Earl Grantham is being encouraged that maybe we need to start cutting the staff. And he recoils with that. The job of this estate is to provide jobs. We are a major employer in this community. That's what they saw as their job. So, yeah, it was a kind of private system. And in fact, one of the things that's very interesting, that happens to viewers throughout this is the character of Daisy, who is just a sort of a prep chef very early on in the show and then has sort of professional ambitions to be considered assistant chef. So she gets very good at her job and she really likes living in the house, she likes all of her colleagues and she becomes very sort of professionally skilled at what she does. And eventually she's granted the title assistant chef, title she had been working for for years. And you'd think at that moment she would then suddenly be very happy. But actually what happens it's a very interesting overlap after World War I. Labor government comes to power partially because of the resentment against the aristocracy for having supported the war. And the labor government is pushing out all sorts of ridiculous lies that if you give us the power, we are going to up into the social order and give new rights to workers. And that man whom you call my lord is no better than you. And in fact he should be calling you my lord. You're right. So she learns to read and she falls for this sort of socialist propaganda from the labor government and begins to a couple of things happen to her. One is she's no longer satisfied with her normal professional ambitions to become a better chef. Suddenly she's dreaming of social revolution, which an impossible social revolution, by the way. It's always been a lie. It's always ridiculous. The socialists have always promised power to the workers. They never actually do it.
Speaker A: But at least back then you could make the argument that they hadn't seen what happened with the Soviet Union. They didn't have any.
Speaker B: No, I think you're right. But socialist ideology has always been utopian and it's also been about making people envious of people with more privilege and more wealth than them. So that inspires that envy. And envy is a very destructive it's a sin. Yeah. It's very destructive of the human personality. Especially because it caused you to turn on your benefactors, which Daisy kind of did. She started describing the upstairs of the house as them and the downstairs as us. Right. So that's a new kind of language. It used to be a cooperative relationship, but now, because of this socialist propaganda, she's thinking, them, they're the exploiters, were they exploited? So she's no longer happy in her life. She's a ****** off person all the time and kind of grungy and gritty and brittle and said woke. Right. Early version of woke.
Speaker A: Woke. Daisy yeah.
Speaker B: She loses this ridiculous thing. Well, it's not long into the series when she becomes how do you say, sort of loses the faith. So at the very time she gets this advance to assistant chef, suddenly she doesn't care about it anymore.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker B: And then she gets disgruntled because the labor government loses power and they didn't do anything. She still just got a normal job. So the illusion sort of disappears and then she has to get involved in the muck of normal day to day life and eventually becomes a good person again once she loses her ideological attachments. Anyway, the series is great because it tells a whole, like many little small stories.
Speaker A: And what surprised me about it was how many times the sort of I'll just call them the woke characters, because there are some sort of woke characters who step in from time to time and they're portrayed as pretty ugly and vindictive. There's one this is a spoiler for anyone who hasn't seen it, but probably the people watching this have seen it. Thomas I loved his arc because he goes from being this bitter, vindictive, nasty person who goes out of his way to undermine the people he works with and just a horrible person. And he goes through this whole on different levels character shift to where he gets to the point where he sort of rids himself of that of the envy, the bitterness, all that stuff. And it's just it's a beautiful story.
Speaker B: It's yeah. He realizes he's he's a great he's got great talents as a man.
Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. And he actually gets that appreciation for it, which he couldn't have even gotten at the beginning because he was so insisted on being at war.
Speaker B: He didn't realize how much he loved his job until he began to get another job now. So that is a very interesting one, because there's a way in which Downton Abbey itself is a kind of a bubble, of an experiential bubble, and he didn't entirely know that until he started looking at ads for valids and butlers and things at other houses. And he went around and started visiting them and to his shock, discovered that Downton is one of the few actually that have survived. Everything else is like a museum. There's one house he goes to that seems for all the world to be populated by just one old deranged guy, right? Entire house is gutted, I guess, various family members having stolen all the furniture and paintings and everything. So they're walking through empty rooms and he's looking for a driver, cook, a butler, valet. And the man is clearly insane.
Speaker A: Well, and he's talking about it as if it's all coming back. This is a temporary blip and it's all.
Speaker B: Completely delusionary. And they're in a huge room talking alone. It's all echoey and empty. And the man only has one question what are his sympathies with Republicanism? And Thomas says, Well, I can't say I have strong opinions either way, really, but I'm not dedicated against it. And the man says, well, it's good we found this out. Now you can excuse yourself. So all he really wanted was a man to hang around and talk about the glories of the king with him, right. And this keeps happening. And then the final house that he serves is just a man and his wife, and he's just standing there while they don't speak to him. And it's just dreadfully. He doesn't have any friends. So the community of the downstairs at Downton was actually rich and fulfilling and sometimes full of gossip.
Speaker A: There was a community. It was a whole life. As opposed to just these other yeah, the contrast there was incredible.
Speaker B: And then you have the other case, and I presume we don't want this whole podcast to be talking about Downton, but the other case of the middle daughter who marries sort of an Irish revolutionary. So out of Ireland comes this sort of deep resentment of monarchical forms from the late 19th century potato famine, the absentee managers system, the sort of imperious treatment of Ireland by London, of course, that just created the conditions, not just the IRA's resentment against the colonialism coming from London, but also, of course, preparing the way for socialist ideology. So when he meets the daughter of the earl, he's as the driver, but he's really attached to socialist theory. And eventually they moved to Ireland and at some point was involved in a conspiracy to burn down one of the old states, which did, in fact, burn. And he looked at it burning and realized, wow, these are human beings. And even though I knew of this plan, I didn't really participate in it, but I don't really like this. So now he's of two minds, right? So then he eventually moves back into Downton, but he can't sort of let go of his socialistic ideals, but he hasn't really warmed to the feudal forms of the Tory class either. So he finally decides, look, I've got to get out of this country. So his wife dies, takes his daughter to Boston, where they live for I don't know how long. Maybe it's six months, maybe it's three months, six months, something like that. Comes back to Downton, and they say, wow, you've really changed a lot. He said, Well, I had to go to Boston to find out my true home is here. And somebody says, Why have you let go of your socialism? And he said, Well, I will say this. I have a completely different attitude towards capitalism than I used to have. I'm especially impressed with the American form of capitalism which enables anyone in one lifetime to go from the desperately poor to the richest man in the country. That kind of class mobility is exactly what I'm drawn to. So he really does go through the shift from socialist laborite, IRA, kind of resentful Irish revolutionary, to becoming traditional classical American style classical liberal. Yeah, with a great deal of respect for constitutional forms and even older aristocratic forms, too. So his transition was really gradual and.
Speaker A: Takes a lot of but again, it's a great story, and just on a human level, just watching him start out with sort of the socialist resentment, but then it's his humanity that takes him away from that, and then in the end, he becomes an entrepreneur, too. So he comes full circle. Right?
Speaker B: Well, I know you want to ask another question. We can, but I don't know when the right time to tell the story is. But after that article appeared, and you notice in the article I said whether the Dowager Countess is correct or incorrect about the hospital, I don't really know. And I just kind of left that question aside. She does make a great point about the role of the aristocracy in defending the people's freedoms. Just before I tell you this quick story, it is interesting to watch following COVID, during which time we discovered modern medicine doesn't, in fact, have all the answers. I mean, just because it's the new and the prevailing industrialized mechanized system doesn't necessarily mean it's better than the traditionalized and centralized. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's better than the traditional way. So if you watch the series, if you watch it before COVID particularly the drama over the hospital, watch it afterwards, because you will see the dowagers more trusting of the localized, embedded knowledge of the community and its expertise built up over centuries than she is of the exogenous sort of modernity with the tools, techniques, and textbooks. And in that she might be right. But the thing that I wanted to tell you, Brittany, was the most interesting thing, because I was driving to the grocery store, my phone lit up with a call from Spain. I thought that's interesting. I think I'll get it. So I get it. And it's this man with this sort of King's English style noble accent in his voice and he says, oh, that was a wonderful article and appreciate it so much. I just need you to talk to you very quickly, because my great grandmother was actually the president was like the dowager, the president of a local hospital that was connected to the estate of my family.
Speaker A: Wow.
Speaker B: I can just tell you. And she held onto it and the family held onto it and held onto it for generations. Generations. So when the NIH came along and started nationalizing all the centralized hospitals that had been taken over by the municipalities and so on, there were very few of these very small hospitals attached to family estates that survived that and never went along with it.
Speaker A: But there were some that's amazing.
Speaker B: There were some and I'm sorry, my geography of London is very bad. He was talking very quickly, but he explained, he identified the exact hospital and the exact wow. And all the names of everybody involved. They were brilliant. There was a kind of a very small resistance movement exactly in the 1920s against these attempts. And then when the 40s came and everything became socialized, all the healthcare and bridging became centralized and nationalized, these small hospitals in these estates were exempt and continued to maintain.
Speaker A: So do they still exist?
Speaker B: They still exist.
Speaker A: Oh, my God.
Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, obviously the aristocracy doesn't use the NIH, of course, so that's the one thing you would say about, and this is true throughout all the Commonwealth countries, their socialist health care has never been full scale nationalization. They've always allowed a public layer and a private and a private layer private layer is far freer than any medical services in the United States.
Speaker A: Wow.
Speaker B: So this is one of the dangers of socialized medicine in the United States. It will never allow this. It will never allow an unregulated, deregulated, non status form of medical provision. It never will. If we ever get socialist medical care, it's going to look a lot more like Soviet Union than it's going to look like anything else.
Speaker A: Right. Because we don't have that distinction.
Speaker B: We don't have that distinction. We don't have a robust deep history of these smaller hospitals using homeopathic methods.
Speaker A: Although I think this is getting off on a little bit of a tangent, but because this is something I'm very interested in after COVID especially, there's more of an awareness of sort of the dysfunctionality of modern medicine and of the healthcare system. There are a lot of people who are starting to set up, like, private membership, association medical services, and so I hope to see more of that into.
Speaker B: The future, and you can count me among those. I mean, you know, that four years ago was not involved in this area.
Speaker A: Right.
Speaker B: A lot of life.
Speaker A: Yeah. And it's actually that's related to what I wanted to ask you about was there's been this tremendous takeover, not only in medicine, but really in all of social services, I would argue, in our whole lives. I see it starting and this is why I like Downton Abbey so much. I see it. Starting with World War I.
Speaker B: Yes.
Speaker A: Does that make sense to you?
Speaker B: Of course. No, I mean downton shows this. Right. I mean, World War I was, as Misa says, the first total war. Meaning in the old days, as John Locke would describe it, wars were always soldiers wars. It was soldiers killing soldiers, and they left the people alone. People never paid any attention to them. But they are not John Locke. As Voltaire said this. People never paid any attention to. World War I was the socialization of war. That's what it was, a total war. US entry prolonged it. It was the first war of global level wealth, us and Europe conscription, and it was a disaster for the ruling class because they were blamed for it. Since nobody was happy after the war, there was a widespread sense in fact, you see this in Downton, too. There's an argument over the dinner table about this. Yes. And you see their old grandson saying, no, that was a great war. We were patriotic people and people yeah.
Speaker A: What did it accomplish exactly?
Speaker B: It was devastating for the reputational capital of the nobility to have acquiesced to this thing. And I said this in my article. It's always been sort of the Achilles heel of the Tory class, or in the United States, what we call the conservatives or whatever, is their acquiescence to war. Right. So they've traditionally been good on issues of commercial freedom and frugal government, constitutional forms of government. But then there's this issue of war that somehow they're always the big exception. Yeah, the cold war is great. Oh, Vietnam is wonderful. These draft resistors are Communists or whatever. So the same was true in World War I, where all the old families supported the world, so that led to their discrediting. But World War I was a catastrophe. This man on the phone whom he wants me to come to Spain and visit him, and I might.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker B: But he said he was really good friends with Gary Bauer, who is one of the great development economists of the middle point of the 20th century, and also FA Hayek.
Speaker A: Oh, wow.
Speaker B: And he said, I'm going to tell I'll tell you that Hayek was better than a socialist, but not much better. He was always giving in too much to the people who wanted to wreck traditional freedoms and rights. Always had some scheme. Oh, we can tolerate socialist health care. In fact, we need it. We need an active state to do this, to do this to this. And why? To keep even worse, to forestall even worse consequences than the totalitarians. He said, I'm telling you, that guy's influence within Britain was to get people further entrenched in this aquarium. And I said, what do you mean, the aquarium? He said, the aquarium of statism. Once people are in it, they can't see out of it. They don't even imagine what real freedom is like. So after World War I, there are multiple, many generations of Britons who were raised without any sense of what genuine freedom looks and feels like. So they just began to acquiesce to these status measures. They said, that is the entire world today. People cannot even imagine right anymore.
Speaker A: It's the same in America. I was fortunate enough that my grandmother was a member of a PEO, which was an old style mutual aid society. And one of the arrangements with that PEO was when you become old enough that you don't want to live alone anymore, you want some kind of care. You can come and live in a PEO home, and they will care as long as you can somewhat get around and take care of yourself. The day you come in, they will take care of you for the rest of your life. You could have a debilitating stroke the next day, and they would still take care of you the rest of your life. She spent the last eight years of her life in this wonderful home like environment. It wasn't institutional at all. Excellent care. They had nursing staff. Just wonderful. And this is how things used to be done. It was mutual aid societies. It was private organizations taking care of their group, and then multiple organizations like this. In the 19th century, this was everywhere.
Speaker B: It was everywhere. Was it religious?
Speaker A: It was in the sense that they all just because that everyone was religious back then. But it was not set up as a church. It wasn't a religious organization. It was a private membership association. It was set up originally as an alternative to the sororities at was it Wesleyan? Iowa Wesleyan. Some of the girls weren't invited to the sorority, and so this group of them got together and said, well, we'll start our own sorority. And it turned into this what it turned into was an organization to support education of women. And they actually built their own college. They have a college that's still going strong. They did scholarships for women, and they had these homes. Now. I think the home that my grandmother was in may be the last one that's still operational. And the state came in and imposed a lot. It's not running the way it used to.
Speaker B: Yeah. So this is an extraordinary reality that hardly anybody actually talks about, about the development of freedom over the centuries is that a lot of the large institutional structures that took care of educational services widows, orphanages, and so on were all founded by private organizations, particularly religious orders. I mean, the late 19th century. It's actually a fascinating thing because we had capitalism making huge advances in this country and around the world, but especially in the United States. So what that meant was a growing population and we had huge waves of immigration. The cities became ever more productive and attractive and really very crowded.
Speaker A: Disease ridden.
Speaker B: Disease ridden. And with people living ever longer lives, so ever more ill health. I mean, it's interesting because like a century earlier, the same London was just all white tied tails and top hats by the time Krawl Marks visited, there were orphans running all over the place and men walking around with peg legs. And it seemed like poverty was making great advances, actually was paradoxically a sign of growing wealth because these kids would.
Speaker A: Have been dead right previously they were starving to death in the countryside.
Speaker B: So New York becomes filled with widows and orphans everywhere and immigrants that needed education and so on and so on. But the governments didn't step in to somehow solve these problems. That was entirely the religious orders. And one of the largest was run by Mother Cabrini, a very small Italian nun with a ferocious business mind, who started an order of nuns specifically to serve in the Americas and built a chain of orphanages and widows. Homes up and down the east coast and then moving all the way to the west coast, all the way to Oregon and Washington State and then kept moving down further south. And this is her order of Our Sisters of Mercy, something like that. Sisters of Mercy, something like that. That order was as big as and influential and had as big an imprint on American culture as Microsoft does today.
Speaker A: Wow.
Speaker B: So it was an immense structure. Here's this other thing, Britain, that's really important for you and I to think about. Yes, they were private, but they were not profit making the way we think of it today. Of course, they had accounting, they had to deal with double entry bookkeeping, they had to face economic reality. But the thing was not driven by purely sort of benefit the stockholders, maximize profit sort of thing. The essential fuel that ran those institutions was burning passion for the mission. That's what drove it. And I have to say I'm not unconvinced that you need both that sort of hard driving profit motivation, but you need also this charitable, mission based, I want to be part of something big and important and meaningful in society kind of sector. Also to build a really robust civilization. Both are really essential. And what happened after World War I, of course, was that the state sort of nationalized gradually at first and then all at once after World War II, all of these private efforts. And as Lady Grant, as the Dowager Countess says, always in the name of fewer costs and more efficiencies. But the result is always the same. Less personal treatment, centralization loss of freedom, and more power to the state. That is the tragedy.
Speaker A: Yeah. And to me, what she's pointing out when I watch that scene, it's funny because in the whole show, there's all kinds of tragedy. There are scenes that are hard to watch, there's horrible things happen. But this is one of the hardest things for me to watch, because I know where it's go, I know what happens after. But to me, what she's pointing at is when you have a private system, when you have something that's operated privately, it's accountable. It can't get away with not being accountable to the people it's serving. There's some mechanism by which it's kind of like the difference between private business and government entities. Today a government school can get by providing awful education, not serving the customers at all. But if a private enterprise did that, it would go under. And to me, that's what she's pointing at is when you hand something over to the state, it's not just a question of who has the better resources and what. They've got this technology and more money. Where's that mechanism for accountability?
Speaker B: There's also the breakage in the knowledge chain. There are certain things about private institutions that have a long history, hundreds of years dating back through family life, through experience, where there's a knowledge embedded in the routines that people can't even articulate, they just go through them. The system itself absorbs the wisdom of many generations, and the new children are taught in the old ways and the new doctors are taught in the ways of their this well of capital in the form of information and rituals, informs the traditional private institutions. And if you just have an exogenous shock to the system and it's like, okay, here's some new bureaucrats. Graduates of London School of Economics are going to come in with new medical techniques and some fancy finance and make it even better than ever. The DORGER Countess intuitions was that this was not going to happen because you're throwing away a lot of knowledge that.
Speaker A: You may not even understand why it's important. I want to get to the part of your article where you talk about the present day shift. You call it the corruption of the great families, and sort of you're talking about present day what we might consider great families, the Gates Foundation. I mean, it's hard for me to look at them as a great family. But your point being that the big, powerful private movers and shakers, something's changed.
Speaker B: They're no longer the barons that forced King John to sign the Magna Carta. They're not the landed aristocracy that gave us the Declaration and the Constitution. They're not even the 19th century style robberyance who themselves felt a great sense of community mindedness and a desire to protect the freedoms of the people contrary to the reputation. They really were very broad minded. I'm just look all the libraries all over this country. Instead, they have linked up with the state. So it's a serious and major problem. So the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation is the main funder of the World Health Organization, which is an impressive organization that gave us Lockdowns and all these families. And by the way, this includes tragically, the Cook Foundation too, which funded major, very important realms. They funded the study that shot down Ivamectin.
Speaker A: They funded oh really?
Speaker B: They gave a grant, an award to Neil Ferguson at the oh my God, Neuro College, and they were the main funders of the COVID Wars Commission that just came out the other day that said the only problem with Lockdowns didn't lock down hard enough soon enough. And that's basically so the Koch Foundation too, which started as office, this great libertarian thing that even gave financial support to the likes of Murray Rothbard, Leonard ligio and Ralph Raco in the old days, is now funding the the Lock as a reliable funding source for all the worst of statist globalist power.
Speaker A: How does that happen?
Speaker B: Yeah, well, yeah, well, that's an interesting question, but the fact is it has happened. We need to recognize this, that we have lost the great families. And this is a very serious problem for the cause of liberty, because whether we want to recognize it or not, for 800 years, we've generally relied on these pockets of principal, wealth and charitable impulses and also sort of a broad minded sort of vision of the common good in both the UK and the US. To serve as a guarantor of our freedoms. Now they've sold us out. I mean, it was coming very gradually, but of course the 20th century, particularly after World War II, but in the 21st century, it's done, it's completely gone. So what does freedom do in that new kind of world? We've never faced this problem before. I mean, maybe some countries somewhere have faced this problem. I'm not sure what went down in Malaysia and India or whatever, but certainly in Commonwealth countries and the US. We've never seen anything like this. And so my thought was that this is a major challenge that may explain all the political realignments that are taking place right now. So now you've got the major controlling interests for all the largest corporations are completely working with the regulatory state, the administrative state, which is embed with the national security state, which is embedded very deeply in all the big tech companies and they're also controlling the medical system and the media. So what do you do in this case? Well, this is why the idea of freedom in the 21st century, where we are right now, post COVID, is going to come down to a sort of a bourgeois movement of small businesses and workers. That's the only hope we really have. And that's why we're seeing such a change and a realignment in people's loyalties. It's why you and I can talk about subjects that interest us with people we never imagined we could right past and the allies we thought we had have abandoned us completely.
Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting what you're talking about sort of happens on so many levels. There's the intellectual level. There's clearly been this split. You now have, like, right and left over here and freedom minded over here.
Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. And that freedom minded group comes from all over the place. I mean, most providers around have a long history on the left and it's fascinating to me and none of us really care or talk about that because there's too much to talk about. Now. The problem of censorship and surveillance and statism, all those things were 100% aligned on and I don't know what their attitudes are towards the industrial revolution or labor union movements of the 1920s or women's suffrage or anything else. And interestingly, none of us care enough to even talk about that because it's.
Speaker A: Not very that's faded into the background so much that who cares?
Speaker B: Yeah, these ideological structures are just sort of boring. What we're cared about right now is the practical issue of the basic rights of human volition, the rights of speech. Can you hold a wedding? Can you attend a funeral? Can you travel when you want to? Can you go to the doctor without being stuck with an experimental shot? And so on. I mean, these are the kinds of issues that are really driving the new movement for freedom. And the new movement for freedom in 2023 looks nothing like what it did and say five years ago. Five years ago to say nothing 1990 or whatever. It's a completely different and exciting world. And those people that are generally claimed to be concerned about human liberty, for example, the people who call themselves libertarians need to get hip to this and realize that this is what's happening. This is a real action that's out there and it takes strange forms, unexpected forms, and sometimes really symbolic forms. For example, this boycott of Bud Light really is not that's interesting.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker B: Not about trans rights. It's just not. It's about the capture of major corporations by, by interest groups that that don't care anything about the the customer or, or the average person or the way we live. They're living in their bubbles and they are testing us and experimenting on us, whether it's through shots or beer cans or propaganda for some cause about which we care nothing.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker B: The alienation of the ruling class from the real experience of average people has become suppressant.
Speaker A: It's jarring. It's really jarring.
Speaker B: That's what we're looking for ways that we can safely remind the rulers that we're here and that we matter and our preferences and our likes or dislikes can make a difference. And we can't go to public protests anymore because facial recognition and the way the media is allied with the national security state, any one of us could be snapped up and thrown in solitary without an attorney for six months, as has happened. So we're looking for safe ways to exercise our rights and to remind the ruling class that we're here and we really do matter. So taking down Bud Light, which worked, and then the whole company anheuser Bush, which seems like that could be working too, and God knows what's next. It's Target, it's North Face, it could actually take down Chickfila as a result of latest revelation. So this is a real people's power, and it's pedantic to say, well, but I support Pride Month. Okay, fine. He supports Pride Month. These protests are really about the people's freedoms and their voices and the question of whether or not average people can really have an impact in the shape of the kind of world we want to live in. That's what's really going on here.
Speaker A: Yeah, this is a whole other topic. I don't want to dive all into it, but we're also watching financially the ruling class or the ruling structure kind of in a state of collapse. I mean, we're at a point where it can't sustain. And so what do you think we have to look forward to as far as if the dollar collapses, if this empire is dying? The US Empire is dying. So what happens on the way up and on the way down?
Speaker B: Well, the major thing we're living through right now is major upheavals in industrial structures as a result of essentially 20 years of artificially low interest rates, which subsidized high end right side of the yield curve, the high end capital and speculative ventures. And so it sucked away resources, big media, big tech, big government, all sucked away resources from the lower levels of the production structure and small shops and retail and hospitality and so on to build their empire. Lockdowns was definitely just part of that. Part of that sort of like the killing blow. Yeah. Attempt to sort of codify and primitize. But what was not entirely understood until recently is just how dependent these higher end of the production structures are and debt financing and how bloated they had become in a managerial sense. So when the inflation hit and then the high interest hit, high interest rates hit, they faced a cost crunch on both ends, both paying huge amount for financing that they had had for free, better part for 20 years, and then also unable to adapt to the inflationary pressures because their labor costs are so high due to these bloated management structures. So we start to see these dramatic cuts across the board. And now people who graduated with fancy degrees, who were able to pull down six figures working from home by going to zoom meetings for the better part of three years, suddenly find out that they're completely worthless. It's like the last ten minutes of succession where the three kids all just suddenly realize that they're useless.
Speaker A: I haven't seen it, but I'll take your word for it.
Speaker B: Yeah, okay. They're useless, they're officious, they're just puppets. They're not really workers, they're not really valuable, they don't have any actual skills. And this applies to pertains to millions of people across the industrialized world now, right? Yeah. The managerial class, they're going to discover that they're going to have to change and this is going to lead to a massive cultural upheaval. Joseph Schumpeter says in his I think it's 1942 book, capitalism, Socialism, democracy, that the thing that people hate most in life. The most difficult challenge that anybody will ever face is the downgrading of their social class. That's the hardest thing when you think of yourself as a fancy privileged person.
Speaker A: To have to step down.
Speaker B: Yeah. And to suddenly be tossed out of that realm and suddenly realize you're just like it's just by luck that you're not homeless and unemployed, you're not changing lives with that bomb outside of Penn Station in New York. So that's a terrifying prospect. So a lot of people are going to have changed professions and by the way, this is entirely possible to do and live a happy life. So it's not the grimmest thing ever. I had a delivery from Amazon yesterday and the person who delivered, I said, I was just curious, how long have you been delivering for Amazon? Because she was confused about the door or something and she said, just for about four months. But you know, I tell you what, I just love it. It's just an adventure every day and the pay is great, the benefits are good, and I'm just so happy in my life. And I said, well what did you do before? She goes, well, before I was a dog walker. I said, how did you end up being a dog walker? She goes, Well, I was graduated from college and saddled with vast amounts of debt. Got a pretty good job, but a lot of my paycheck was going to paying that debt and taxes and I hated my colleagues and I hated my life. And I realized I could quit that job, stop paying on my student debt and just walk dogs for cash and actually have an advantage, financial advantage. It was a little shocking to me from a social cultural point of view because I wasted four years in school getting this degree that nobody cares. Oh, that's the other thing. When she got to her fancy job after college, the very first thing you wanted to do was get some credentials, meeting private kid credentialing, you have to pass this exam, pass it. So suddenly she's back hitting the book, right. So she's like, I hate this. And so she left the dog walking to go to work for Amazon. Now she said, I am never going to by the way, she said all of her fellow dog walkers all had college degrees. So there you are. And so now she's driving for Amazon. So she successfully made this shift on the other hand, she's like 26 years old. Right. So what do you do when you're.
Speaker A: You can do anything when you're 26. Yeah, I think there's something healthy about being able to make those shifts early on in life, because then if you have to do it later, it's like, well, I've done this before. That's right.
Speaker B: She's very lucky. But there's millions of people who are not going to be, so yeah, well.
Speaker A: And I feel like there are millions of people who grew up believing that a college degree is some kind of guarantee of a certain lifestyle. My family bugged me for years for not I never graduated college.
Speaker B: Oh, is that right?
Speaker A: I took off and went and lived in Asia and stuff. It was the right thing for me. But it's but I never I don't think I ever had in my head that this is something you have to have in order to be a success. But I feel like even maybe it's changing now, but so many people believe that that's your ticket. That's the thing that's going to bring you a successful job and a certain level of income and all this stuff. And it's becoming so clear that it's.
Speaker B: Not surprising that college enrollment is collapsed after lockdowns. They locked everybody in the dorms and you force them to take the jabs, and then they graduate with a huge debt and no marketability whatsoever in the new economy. So people are not going to college, they're just declining to. And that, in fact, will give people a great advantage of life. That's four years that you can use. Developing an actual skill.
Speaker A: Yeah, well and focus on an actual skill as opposed to believing in this sort of fairy dust that's supposed to.
Speaker B: Make everything that's falling apart, it's all falling apart. So these are the kind of practical changes we're going to be facing. And I'm pretty sure we're just at the beginning of this.
Speaker A: I think so, too. I think so too. And I think I would like to see a rising up of a new set of great families. Maybe not in the same form necessarily, but someone taking on that role. I would like to see, and I and I think there are a lot of people out there motivated to do that.
Speaker B: Well, it could come from the small business, local business class, really. And I'm seeing this where I am all over the place. The businesses that have survived the inflationary times and the rise of high interest rates, the businesses that have survived this are those that didn't have huge cost structures in the form of blood management. They were much more adaptable, and they're not levered up. They're not settled with debt.
Speaker A: Right.
Speaker B: So they were able to serve their customers much better. I mean, it's fascinating to me that little locally owned grocery stores where I am are able to sell much better a cheaper product than Whole Foods is or Kroger any of the wow. Yeah. They can't compete, so they're growing like crazy.
Speaker A: Nice.
Speaker B: The other thing that's interesting about these small businesses is they tend to have more reliable supply chains.
Speaker A: Interesting.
Speaker B: Built by friends, friends of friends, cousins, people that maybe speak a similar language or have the same religious attachments or whatever. There's different ways that they're connected to their supply chains.
Speaker A: Oh, that's so interesting.
Speaker B: That's different from, say, Walmart, which is just using these gargantuan industrial supply chains, all of which broke during the pandemic, but these smaller supply chains all oh, that's so interesting. They survived it.
Speaker A: Well, that's great. That's great news. This has been really great.
Speaker B: Thank you, Brittany. It's been a fun conversation. You're one of the few actually, I'll just put it this way. You're one of the few people I know with whom I can have this kind of in depth, subtle sort of conversations about important issues.
Speaker A: So thank you for taking yeah, well, thank you. Thank you for taking your time, and I'll get this up soon and yeah, this has been really great.
Speaker B: Okay, good to talk to you.
Speaker A: Great to talk to you. Okay, bye bye bye. You've been listening to What Then must we do the podcast? For those who understand the state is the problem and are seeking solutions. For more episodes, go to bretigne.substack.com. That's breigne. Substack.com and subscribe.