Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Back to Our Future: Neo-Feudalism is End of Enlightenment (Starts 01:27)

1. 00:02 So here I am in Paris, city of lights, city of love and lovers. It is late evening. I’m in my room and I’m preparing for tomorrow’s lecture. Tomorrow’s lecture is a bit bizarre and interesting. I’m going to discuss identification with the aggressor. When you identify, emulate and
2. 00:36 internalize your aggressors, your abusers, values, beliefs, shared fantasy, anyone? So, this is Paris by night. I’ll shoot another one in the morning. I’ll put the two of them together. and then he will be forced to see my ugly face for which I apologize in advance.
3. 01:29 I I don’t think these are the major threats to the existence of the species. I think for example the estrangement between men and women the gender wars the uni gender is a much bigger threat possibly to some extent climate change although I believe we will learn to
4. 01:49 adapt to climate change. These are real existential threats. But what is happening right now in terms of authoritarianism, reversion to conservative traditionalist views and so on so forth. That has happened dozens of times before in the history of mankind. And we’re here. We
5. 02:15 have uh survived. One way to look at it is um think of it as as two mob families, two mafia families, you know. One is the enlightenment clan and one is the feudalism clan. And I think we are on our way to neofudalism. I’ve been saying it for well over 20 years.
6. 02:41 So what is the enlightenment clan? It emerged in the more or less um 17th century and enlightenment has has had a few offspring. Um first and foremost among them is natural philosophy later came to be known as science. Science is a child of the enlightened.
7. 03:05 Science is not only the vocation the occupation itself. Science is a philosophy of how to get to the truth or how to approximate an asmtotic truth. So science includes the scientific method. And then the second um child is liberal democracy or more precisely liberalism
8. 03:28 with democracy as its political manifestation or or expression. And democracy could be either represent uh represented representational representative democracy. It could be direct democracy. But in principle it is the ability of the common man to have a
9. 03:48 say real or to some extent imaginary in the affairs of state and the general conduct and governance of of uh the community and and the environment. So there’s liberal democracy and then the third child I think is the bureaucracy best described by Weber. Bureaucracy is impersonal
10. 04:13 anti-carismatic everlasting uh inexurable does not depend on on ups and downs and vicissitudes and political changes and winds and and so on so forth. So here’s the enlightenment mafia clan with science, liberal democracy and bureaucracy. And the thing
11. 04:35 is that none of them have worked. None of them have worked. Science gave us a clear understanding of the event horizon of a black hole, which is very nice, but you can’t do much with it in humrum pedestrian life. And at at the same time, science created the most terrifying weapons
12. 05:01 which have killed hundreds of millions of people. For example, science has been discredited not only by its outcomes, but it’s been discre discredited by its association with money and the creation of of essentially a plutoaucracy of science. Science scientists have become
13. 05:23 contemptuous, horty, elitist and grandiose. They got increasingly more detached from the reality of the very taxpayers who were funding science. And so science is has been a failure in
14. 05:42 in terms of enlightening um people. And then liberal democracy has failed because it became a vehicle and an instrument in the hands of elites, intellectual elites mainly who shared very little in terms of beliefs and values with with people who
15. 06:03 were not members of the elites with the masses. So liberal democracy created a situation where the elites confronted the masses and the elites leveraged um and created and then leveraged bureaucracy. Bureaucracy became a way to subjugate the masses to keep them in check to
16. 06:24 pleade them sometimes but always to threaten them. So liberal democracy was a a great promise started maybe in the I would say in the French Revolution. It was a great promise you know fraternity gal and all this and ended up being a standoff
17. 06:49 and it ended up liberal democracy ended up being a state of conflict and intimidation between the elites and the masses. with bureaucracy weaponized against the masses when theoretically and and historically it’s its um purported aim was to help the
18. 07:09 masses to better the lives of the masses to introduce well-being, welfare and health and education to the masses. So here we were at the very end of the enlightenment period on the cusp of a transition from enlightenment to new feudalism which is happening right this
19. 07:26 very minute as we speak and all the children or offspring of enlightenment have are hated, discredited, distrusted and opposed by the constituencies that were supposed to support these things. socience, liberalism, democracy, to some extent some types of capitalism, um
20. 07:53 um of course colonialism, um mercantalism, all these and the bureaucracies that they’ve engendered are now considered to be the enemy. And so in human history, we’ve had only two models. One is enlightenment which is a relatively new model and has never been
21. 08:18 tried before in any meaningful way except in the last 3 400 years and a very ancient old tried andrue model and that is a model of feudalism. Now feudalism includes two main components two main elements. Feudalism is a theocracy. It’s a theocracy. It’s a
22. 08:40 form of religion. It’s an offshoot of religion. It uses the hierarchy of religion and translates it into a terrestrial hierarchy into so whatever is happening on earth is a reflection of what’s happening in heaven. And so it’s a theocracy coupled with an
23. 08:59 oligarchy coupled with a tiny uh group of people who are super rich and they control all the resources. They allocate these resources and using religion or religious beliefs or fa faith they create in effect a theocracy and everyone else is an indentured servant
24. 09:27 not to say a slave vasal it’s a everyone else is subservient to these oligarchs everyone else caters to the needs of these oligarchs and All the structures are um built in a way that ascertains or maintains the superiority of the oligarchs. Um for example, the law, the legal
25. 09:53 system is built to protect the oligarchs, promote their interests at the expense of everybody else and increasing inequality, not reduce it, even with all transfer payments and so on so forth. And so theocracy and oligarchy are the components, the
26. 10:11 ingredients of feudalism. And we see it today all over the world. The oligarchs are the billionaires, the billionaire class. And increasingly rel religion is making a comeback. Not only a comeback comeback in terms of philosophy or worldview or or self soothing technique
27. 10:32 or del mass delusion, but a comeback in terms of political power. And this all this is coupled in feudalism with Renaissance totalitarianism. Renaissance was an extension of feudalism. I know this is this sounds counterintuitive and against everything
28. 10:52 you’ve been taught, but Renaissance definitely was an extension of feudalism. Yes, there was an emphasis on the individual as an organizing principle. But at the same time, uh, Renaissance thinkers such as Maveli promoted a personality cult of the
29. 11:09 chosen, of the prince, of the elites. So, Renaissance thinking upheld and supported the oligarchy. The hallowed individual was the successful oligarch, the successful prince, in other words, the successful dictator. And all this was embedded in highly religious motives.
30. 11:32 The Renaissance did not reject religion. Actually, it transmuted it, but it did not reject it fully. So, Renaissance created totalitarianism. And so we have these two competing worldviews, two competing organizational principles and two clashing explanatory
31. 11:52 systems, hermeneutic systems. One is the enlightenment and one is feudalism. And whereas the enlightenment has failed the individual, has failed the masses by um essentially removing itself from daily life. Science is exalted and inaccessible to most people. Liberal
32. 12:16 democracy is a sham in many ways. It caters to intellectual elites which are completely divorced from humanity. The bureaucracy is impersonal. It’s cold. It’s calculating. It’s cruel. It’s inexurable. It’s a machine. It’s machine-like. So enlightenment failed to
33. 12:36 create a meaningful interface with its alleged ostensible constituents constituencies the the the hoy the great unwashed the people the the people down the street the common Joe and so people have rejected now people are rejecting now enlightenment and all
34. 12:58 its values they’re rejecting science in favor of the occult they’re rejecting liberal democracy in favor of authoritarianism and they are trying to dismantle and destroy the overwinning bureaucracies which are perceived as hateful, antagonistic, conflict prone.
35. 13:19 And this the only other option people have is feudalism, the reestablishment of the of religion as a governing force. um a system that imbuss life with meaning, purpose and direction. So theocracy, the rule of religion and the rule of religion via a handful of
36. 13:44 oligarchs, super rich people who essentially control all the resources which is now known as inequality. So feudalism is theocracy plus oligarchy and the only twist is renaissance. Renaissance and the prince, the cult of personality, totalitarianism,
37. 14:05 egotism, or in other words, narcissism. Now we have um Clash of the Titans, the two mob families um duking it out. The Enlightenment on the one hand with its seat mainly in Europe where it started, the Enlightenment is absolutely European. It’s not Asiatic. It’s not
38. 14:27 American. So we have the enlightenment on the one hand and feudalism and totalitarianism on the other hand and I think feudalism totalitarianism is going to win because enlightenment doesn’t have anything communicable to offer to the masses and
39. 14:48 it is highly perceived as elitist and even contemptuous of the masses. This is where we are. It’s not the end of humanity. It’s just regression. It’s just going back. It’s just adopting a new model, the totalitarian feudalism model um and rejecting the enlightenment and
40. 15:11 everything it had to offer. That includes um intellectuals, science, democracy, liberalism, progressivism, bureaucracy and all this. Um in this sense we are going through a nihilistic period. It’s nihilistic not because there’s a choice of destruction
41. 15:35 as the ultimate value system but because there is a need to destroy first to first destroy institutions belief doxastic systems value systems you know system there’s a need to destroy first the enlightenment to uproot it to to eradicate it to pulverize it and of course the period
42. 15:59 this extended period of reversing the enlightenment is nihilistic in in many ways but in on the horizon there is a vision and it’s a pretty clear vision and it’s a vision of the middle ages and I’m not using the word the phrase middle ages in a derogatory way middle ages
43. 16:20 historically speaking where feudalism ruled the earth added to that is a modern touch not postmodern but modern touch And that would be the renaissance and its totalitarianism the embodiment of feudalism in a single leader and the cader of oligarchs around this leader.
44. 16:43 We have seen a precursor of this in Adolf Hitler and Mussolini and and Stalin and so on so forth. We have been there the the earthquake that is now demolishing the enlightenment started 100 years ago and experiments such as Nazism and fascism and communism were attempts to
45. 17:06 reconcile the enlightenment with Renaissance totalitarianism. Um communism pretended to be an extension of the enlightenment. Um and so it failed and people realized that there is no way there is no possible compromise. One has to choose between these two models.
46. 17:34 And I think people have made their choice in the past 20 years. And I think we are on our way to neudalism coupled with totalitarianism, 20th century totalitarianism, which is a direct extension of renaissance narcissism.
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