Leadership

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Woe. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the subject of leadership. Before we get into the meat of today's episode, just a brief bit of housekeeping. First and the challenge coins we will let you know as soon as there's anything. Those are currently being manufactured, probably be at least couple of weeks. And then once Corey gets 'em, he's got the massive task of getting all those pre-orders packaged and shipped. We'll keep you posted. Second piece of information for folks, we know we have a ton of listeners on Spotify. If you're a Spotify listener, you should know one, unless you've been listening from the beginning, you've already missed at least one episode that

1:19 Spotify censored. The episode called The Big Lie was part four in the series we did about the Jews. That was deleted after about a month. And last week we had a number of reports from people saying that the new episode didn't show up for them and it showed up, but like they couldn't there was something screwy about it. And I don't know whether that was some form of shadow banning or whether it was the beginning of them turning the screws are just you know a bug. It's software, it's buggy. But for everyone who's listening, want to reiterate something we've said before. There is an RSS feed that is on the website on stonehifeenquire.com. It's on virtually every page. You can copy that into a regular podcast player and you will

2:01 never miss an episode. So you don't need to go to the website to listen. You can use the RSS feed that's on there. It's rss.podfor.com and some decorations. That That will always have the latest episode. That's uncensorable. From the very beginning, we knew that people would be messing with us and we may eventually get deplatformed, and we will eventually we'll get banned from all the services. So I'm only mentioning it now because we know that when that inevitably happens, we'll lose some people just through inertia and laziness. I we'd prefer not to have to happen for your sake as much as ours. I noticed that the stats were down a little bit last week and it was almost certainly because of that, because it didn't make

2:40 it was a weird blip in the stats that I think was probably tied to that temporary outage on Spotify. So if you're a Spotify listener, you can keep listening on Spotify, just set up a real podcast player and be ready to use it if we ever vanish. You can always find us on the website, but you don't have to listen on the website. So if you're looking for another podcast player, if you're on iOS, there's only one choice. That's Overcast. You can find it at Overcast.fm. If you're an Android user, okay. You can use AntennaPod and Podbean are two of the most popular people s really seem to like. Whatever service you're on, please leave a five star review. It helps people discover the show. So that's it for housekeeping.

3:21 Just we don't want you to lose track of us if you actually care about staying on top of things As we talk about leadership today, it's kind of a natural evolution from what we talked about last week where we were discussing the context of when things are, you know, church business and things are just the business of Christian men and of all men, because even if man's not a Christian, he has the same duties as a Christian man. It's just that the man who is also a Christian has the framing from God, from scripture, to understand what his duties are, what his obligations are. And one of the points we made was that we should not be looking to people like clerics as leaders. That's not their job.

4:00 And it's not an insult. It's just they're not supposed to be leaders. Leaders occur in other contexts. And for all of us, there's some sort of leader somewhere in the hierarchy. And so today there are a few different things we're going to cover, but principally we want to get across Get across the point that egalitarianism is fake and gay. It's completely stupid. It's unnatural. It's unchristian. It's just freakish and dumb. And I think instinctively everyone knows that. And yet we've all been conditioned through our entire lifetimes of egalitarian brainwashing to think, well, no, yeah, everybody's the same and we're all interchangeable. We need to hear everybody's voices. We are ironically today making a populist argument for that being complete

4:45 nonsense. So we are appealing to you as a completely unknown audience to us with men of all different abilities. We're trying to convince all of you that not all of you should be making decisions. And it's inherently ironic to make that case to just a group of people, but it's what has to happen. As we are in the end stages of what seems to be Christendom Going poof, you know, civilization itself not having a trajectory into the future without things changing. One of the things that it's important for everyone to think about is how do we fix this? How do we build something that isn't going to have these problems? And so the only way for us to undo the damage that we're all currently living in is to figure out how far back

5:34 we wind the clock, not in the sense of you know historical pinpointing, but just what were the principles that former generations that didn't have these problems, what were they doing? What did they get right that we are now getting wrong because of egalitarian priors? And how can we make sure that we can begin to write the ship? And principle among those we won't just get out of the way up front because everything else that we say in this episode is going to exclude them entirely is girls can have no place in leadership, period. When we did the episode earlier on on the ontological and scriptural nature of what a woman is, a woman is not a head inherently. And there's a scriptural basis for that.

6:18 There's a created basis for that. And it's completely obvious in all of human history that that's true. And so, you know, the point that we made then, when we arrate now, that's not insulting. There are plenty of girls who listen, plenty of them are very intelligent. I'm certain that some of our female listeners are significantly smarter than some of our male listeners. That's good. That's fine. That doesn't mean that someone who has greater aptitude, if she's a woman, she shouldn't be in certain positions. And what has happened to us in the last couple centuries is we've completely not lost the notion of there's a place for men to do things where girls simply aren't present because it fundamentally changes

7:01 the nature of the discussion. It changes the nature of all conversation, all interaction, whether you have a strict, rigid hierarchy, or you have some sort of more open consensus-based system, if it's a bunch of men, the hierarchy will naturally emerge even when you're seeking consensus. That will absolutely never be the case when girls are involved. Never. A single girl being present in the room and in the conversation fundamentally changes things because that's how we're built. And so when we talk about all the rest of the stuff in this episode, it's exclusively going to be about men. Frequently, we make a point of addressing the men in the audience, frankly, because it's not our place to be telling someone else's wife

7:43 or mother what to think or what to do. If we're serious about headship, we can't be running around telling your wives and girlfriends what they should think. That's screwed up. That's the problem we're trying to solve. And so we acknowledge that by principally addressing men. We know girls are listening. We want the men to be solving the problems that men can solve. And these are the table stakes for everything else in this episode, and they're the table stakes for the future of civilization. Because if we can't fix that one thing, nothing else is gonna matter. It's just not. All the problems that we have. We're not pinning this on girls to be explicit, not saying, oh, girls have screwed everything up.

8:20 100% of the people that voted in the United States for women's suffrage were men, because girls couldn't vote. It was men who screwed things up. Along the way, we let someone else take over our duties. And that's what leadership is about. It's about recognizing that there's duty, there's hierarchy, and somebody has to be responsible. As soon as you diffuse responsibility, it's lost completely. And so we can't let that happen. The reason we're putting this at the very beginning is that in our communities, in our churches, in some of our homes, certainly in our businesses, everywhere you see the men and women are treated completely equally, have an equal voice and everyone has to feel good about

9:05 everything before you can proceed. That is the death of civilization. Full stop. And if we don't fix that one particular problem, which has to begin by actually acknowledging like it is bad. It's harmful. And the people who scream that it's not harmful also have all the other bad opinions as we're evaluating statements and things that you know that we make today and we talk about how you can evaluate our statements and other men's statements. You don't always have all the information, but sometimes you can just tell. I'm not sure if this guy's right about this one thing, but I know he has a lot of terrible opinions about a lot of other things. Sometimes that's all you have to gauge whether he's right about one

9:46 thing. The people who scream the most that this is a bad thing, that we no one should ever say girls should be excluded, they have terrible opinions about everything else too. it's not like we're in complete agreement with that type of person. I won't call them men because they're not. We're diametrically opposed. It's really one or the other. And that's why putting it up front is crucial because that's how it breaks down. If you don't exclude women from these conversations, we're addressing women as well here. If you're a woman, you're listening and you're a wife, mother, a daughter, you need to be supportive emotionally and socially with the men in your life to not make it hard for them to do

10:25 the things that they have to do. That's the the soft accountability that the female involves in any interaction. Men have to have the hard responsibility, have to get these things right every time or things start to break. We also want to be clear at the outset that the point of this episode is not is not to talk about the great man as it were, so you can think of the great men theory of history. That man is not the focus because that isn't really the focus of what needs to be done. That man may come along or he may not, God will provide him or he will not. The day to day necessity of leadership is on a smaller scale. Because most of our interactions on a day-to-day basis will be on a smaller scale.

11:21 They will be as well mentioned in church or at work, and yes, also in your family. Because of course, first and foremost, every husband and father is to be a leader in his household. He is the house father. That is his role. That is a leadership role, that is a role of headship. And so that is sort of the beginning of all of this. It all flows from that. That is one of the sources of authority. I'm not going to read through the chapter, but I do recommend that you go and read Exodus eighteen. You can pause the podcast and do it, or you can read it after listening to the episode. That's entirely up to you, of course. But in Exodus eighteen, Moses' father in law Jethro observes what Moses is doing with the people of Israel, and he is acting at

12:15 this point as essentially the soul judge and the soul leader. So So the people stand around him from morning till evening, and he is the one making all of the decisions. And his father-in-law says, This isn't right. This is a terrible way to do things. Why are you doing this? And so instead he advises, and Moses agrees, because it is the correct thing to do. He appoints men to be the chiefs of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and of tens Now you may think that tens sounds kind of small, but this is probably referring to the heads of households or at least just to men, and so tens would actually be quite a few more than ten. You're probably approaching that number of a hundred and fifty people you

12:57 can actually know and with whom you can have a proper relationship. And so that is what he does. Because that's the sort of hierarchy that you see. There are leaders at different levels In every organization, in every endeavor in life. And again, first and foremost, it is the father of the household, the husband and father. He is the leader in his house, and then you will have going from that foundational level upward, various other leaders until you get to whatever man is the role of Moses in this particular organization, whether it happens to be the state or a church, or a corporation, whatever it happens to be. There'll be that man sitting at the top, but then there are levels below him.

13:46 Those levels below him Below him are absolutely essential to assure that things continue to run. And that's what we've lost in our society. We've lost any sort of hierarchy whatsoever. There's been this great leveling due to egalitarianism and other false priors that we inherited from the Enlightenment. And so we have this idea that everyone is equal and that there are no leaders, and yet at the same time we still have leaders because of course democracy props people up and pretends they're leaders. But we don't really have true leaders anymore because the men who would be leaders who should be leaders have either stepped back or been hounded into silence in some cases, now they probably shouldn't

14:33 allow themselves to be hounded into silence, but it is one of the realities of our current system. And so that leads into another aspect of this. If you are not a man who is going to be a leader, who is going to serve in that role of leadership, one of your duties is to support the man who does. For instance, as a concrete example related to the church, if a pastor comes into a congregation that has a number of problems, and he tries to address those, he's a faithful pastor, he's a good pastor, he tries to fix the problems. If he is on his own and the men of the congregation do not support him, he will not get anywhere. It will be a miserable experience for him. He will probably not achieve the goals, and he'll probably leave or

15:21 be driven out. You need to have, as a leader, you need to have other men supporting you. Because otherwise, are you even really a leader at that point if you have no one following you? If you have no one supporting you? Now if that pastor comes in and even just two or three men in the congregation stand up and staunchly support him, something can actually be achieved. That's part of how we start to turn around our congregations and our other parts of our society that have gone astray. If you have a man who has the qualities necessary for a leader in that field, it is It is important that other men support him so that he can actually get done what needs to be done. One of the fundamental problems that we have, and this is particularly

16:08 an issue on the political right in the US, is we have a lack of leadership at almost every level. And when a man stands up who actually has the capacity to be a leader, we have all sorts of other men who attack him, or fight about trivial things, instead of falling in line, and so nothing gets done, because that man has no support. And this happens almost every time we see someone stand up and try to actually fix something. This is not how we get things done that need to be done. This is not how we move forward. If you are a leader, if you have the qualities necessary to be a leader, you have a duty to pursue that. If you do not have those qualities, then you have a duty to support the man who does.

17:02 Because that is how men are supposed to interact with each other, and as Woe said, much of this is going to shake out naturally, just in the way that men interact, and every man in the audience knows this. If you're out with other men, there's going to naturally be someone who takes on the role, even if it's not explicit or it's not, you know, a full leadership role, there'll be a man who takes on the role of leader. And it doesn't even matter what sort of group it is. It could be Six men out drinking beers, there's someone in that group who is the leader of that group. That is just how men interact, that is how God designed the system, because there are hierarchies. Someone will naturally be the leader in any given group.

17:45 And when it's men only in a particular setting, those things will form organically. As Will mentioned, if women are present, that doesn't happen, because it fundamentally changes the dynamics. And so when we're talking about these things, to reiterate and to echo what Woe said, we are talking about men, and men only spaces, as it were. Because this is not a place for women. For instance, women should not be involved in politics. Most men shouldn't either, but women should certainly not be involved in politics. That is a space for men, because it is a duty of men. Because everything involved in politics is within the realm of the things assigned to men by God. Not least of all war, because of course war is going to

18:35 be a political decision, a political discussion, and men are the ones who will have to go and fight that war. And so that should be a discussion in which women are not present. That is a discussion for men and only men, and there are many other places with that. For instance, in the church, any role of leadership in the church must be occupied by a man, any decision made in the church, and I'm not talking about minor decisions. If you're talking about planning a potluck, by all means women are permitted to be involved in that. I'm talking about decisions with regard to the church proper So the organization of the church, electing officials for the church, appointing men to do things in the church, etc., all of those things must be

19:21 done by men without women present. The nature of group dynamics is really one of the most important parts of this conversation. As Corey was saying, there's always what the term of art is the alpha male of the group. You may have heard the term amog. And a lot of times it's, you know, when people say alpha, we're you're thinking something over the top, something comical. It's really just what Corey described. There's always someone who is the dominant man. And again, it may not be over dominance, but you know, it's usually the guy who's one of the tallest. All other things being equal, the man who is taller, who is handsomer, who has more charisma and a greater presence is going to be the one who's dominant.

20:06 That's how it works. And the difference between men and women fundamentally is if men are okay with that. I said all along, I'm five nine. I don't get put in charge of groups because I'm not going to be the tallest guy. And one of the things that weak men, fragile men will seethe about is that when there's someone who's stronger, better looking, whatever, someone who is in some way superior to them, they will burn inside with envy and disgust because they want the status that the other guy has just naturally. That's not Christian. It's not even human. If If you're the short guy in the group and the tall guy in the group is in charge, and you want to compete, compete on some other grounds. Be stronger, be funnier, whatever.

20:54 Like it's not always the biggest, the most handsome guy who's in charge. That's just naturally what usually happens. And I think one of the things that because we've lost to egalitarianism, the sense that these abilities are developed culturally over time is that that sort of process that happens from the playground from the time we're all little kids, little boys just running around chasing each other, chasing girls on the playground, as these dynamics form naturally in every group of boys and men, what will naturally occur is that boys who become men who tend to be the leaders just naturally, because they're falling into those positions, maybe without earning it, like it's just, you know, the one kid's two inches taller than everybody else.

21:40 They look up to him, literally and figuratively. Rather than seething at the fact that someone has something that you don't the appropriate correct strategic response for anyone in that position is to realize that the guy who's always getting put in charge has more experience being in charge. So the young man who is the Amog and his little group of friends, who becomes an adult, who really has that presence, he's doing well, he's successful by all the secular means that we would consider. What happens with that sort of man that some would see then and think, oh, I don't like I don't like him because he's he's got this stuff that I don't have and he doesn't deserve any of it. That guy, because of the fact that he's always been in charge,

22:26 he's always the one that people are looking up to, he naturally develops leadership abilities just by the fact that people look to him. And I think this is something that's completely missing from how we think about leadership and responsibilities and roles and anything else is that sometimes it doesn't even matter if you pick the guy at random, which is effectively what that is. If one guy's short and the other guy's tall and the tall guy is always in charge, that's functionally random, like superficially it's not, but statistically it kind of is. It could have been one or the other. The bottom line is that the guy who's always going to be looked to as the leader is going to develop the skills that

23:04 someone who isn't looked to as a leader just won't. And so as a result, when you get into adulthood, when you know you're that guy at 15 and you're still that guy at 25 or 35, suddenly you have decades of experience of being the man that other men look to. And that naturally develops leadership experience. It counts. Even when it starts as something completely disorganized and superficial as a young man, simply always being the man that other men look to is going to force you, if you're a good man, to try to figure it out. Like if other men are looking to you to have the answer or whatever, you know, it could be big or small, if other men see you as the leader and you're a good, responsible man,

23:46 you're going to try to live up to those expectations. And so what egalitarianism is doing to us today is the spiteful, bitter, envious view of those men. You know, when I worked at Apple, my second level manager for a time, was he's now a senior VP and he was shortly thereafter. Very tall, very handsome, brilliant, and charismatic. He was naturally going to be in charge from the time. I'm sure he was a teenager. I don't know his backstory, but I'm sure that that was his trajectory. And that's a good thing, because he lived up to it. He lived up to the expectations and he delivered according to his abilities. That is something to be celebrated. Not to look at him and say, I don't like that he's

24:27 better looking than me. Like whatever. If it's envious, if you're acting like a crab in a bucket, you're being a girl. Because that is the natural social structure of girl groups. They're crabs in a bucket. If someone gets a little bit higher, they pull them back down. The only way the girls can get along well is when there's equality. They need, you know, no one can be too pretty, no one can be too skinny or whatever measure. Anything that is going to set one of them far outside the scope or the abilities of the other girls in a group is going to create infighting. And it's not going to be competitions in the sense of, well, you know, maybe if one girl is fit and the other girls are a little out of shape, they don't think I want to

25:11 get in better shape. They're going to say nasty things about her to try to tear her down. Men have the opposite instinct, good men, men who are actually masculine. If they see a guy who's smarter, taller, better looking, whatever, they aspire to it. Like I want to try to be as good and competitive as that guy is. And it's not to displace the man who's the amog. It's not necessarily to say, well, I want to be number one. It's understanding that a guy who's five'9 is never going to be better than number two or number three, most of the time. And that's fine. It's completely fine. Whatever it is, I don't care about height. Like I usually because I'm average in height and I'm not average in other areas.

25:51 It's vital to understand that we're good at some things and we're completely immaterial in others. We all have those. Most of the guys who are listening are probably almost completely average intelligence. That's a good thing. This is not a big brain podcast. We try not to be, like we use big words sometimes, but we we try not to make this stuff complicated because it isn't. Every man naturally understands some of these things. You know, it's kind of a boomer joke, but I'm gonna say it because it's also true. If you don't have a strong handshake and the ability to look a man in the eye, you're a crappy man. You need to work on that. Improving that one thing will improve your life. Because I don't trust a man who can't look me in the

26:33 eye and has a weak, limp, moist handshake. It's revolting. It's physically repulsive. It's a small thing. Like is that fair? I don't care. It's real. And so it's become a boomer joke. Like when I got a job, I just had a firm handshake and looked him in the eye and he hired me. There are no jobs anymore. Robots and Air are gonna take all the jobs. So if you're a young guy, like it's not job advice, but you can still get that one thing right, and it will make you a better man. Part of being a man, especially a young man, is figuring out how to be a better version of yourself. And that involves you doing you better. It doesn't involve tearing another man down. It doesn't involve going after someone who's doing something different.

27:14 That's not how we work. That's not how men operate. The first thing we mentioned was that excluding girls is necessary because as soon as there's a girl present in these conversations, suddenly it switches to the consensus building and to the leveling where we can't have anybody who's standing up. And now, you know, there's a natural aversion to having the tall, handsome guy in charge. Like we can't do that. We have to have a minority who's in a wheelchair. That's gonna be better somehow. That's perverse, it's utterly perverse. That person who is meek, like they may be a great person, but are they gonna be the strong leader with no experience? No. The guy who's been doing it his whole life is gonna

27:58 be good at it. And that's part of what like the purpose of this episode is talking about leadership and the qualities and the things that we need to look for is that you don't give it to the guy who's not going to be good at it. You give it to the guy who's going to do the best possible job that he can, and then you hold him accountable. Insofar as like, you know, we're not even talking about democracy here. It's just there's naturally going to be somebody in charge, even if it's a you know dictatorship, there's you still got a guy, but other people have to listen to him. So they're always social dynamics regardless of voting or anything else. But the basic masculine tenet here is that you pick the man

28:37 who's gonna do the best and then you support him, as Corey said. He can't do it by himself. Whether it's at the lowest level, you know, in the military, you have the fire teams of just a a few guys, you have squads where a staff sergeant is running them, maybe ten guys, and then you have a company with a captain, maybe two hundred guys. And you go up to the brigade level, we have a colonel with five thousand guys. Those hierarchies are because they're different levels of ability. The corporal who's running a fire team has a different scope of duties than the brigade colonel. That's the way it's supposed to be. The colonel is capable of stuff that the corporal can't even imagine. They have different jobs.

29:16 And the reason for that hierarchy and those numbers is that they're There are not many colonels in the world. And there are a lot of guys who are either, you know, privates, buck privates, or corporals. That's the best they can be. And the world needs them. In the military, you need it. You need it everywhere. So when we're talking about leadership, it's not about saying, well, these guys are worthless and only a few guys are special. No, the point is that whenever a man is given responsibility, he's accountable for the welfare of everyone beneath him in, you know, we think beneath, we think, oh, that's that's mean. That's you're you're being derisive. No. There's someone above and there's someone below.

29:54 And the man above is accountable for those below him. He has to protect them. He has to look out for them, make sure that they're doing their jobs well. And then he's accountable to the man above him. And when you have you know hierarchy like a monarchy, the only man above the monarch is God. Jesus Christ Almighty is the one man to whom a king answers. And that's okay. That system works too, because there's accountability. There's always accountability. With egalitarianism, we've completely lost that. We have no notion of inequality and ranking. It's just we all have to agree or nothing can get done. That's absurd. That's not how anything works. In the American context, this is particularly a problem because we have

30:35 done away with basically all of the social hierarchy. with the exception of some people have propped up celebrities and certain sports figures as some sort of terrible knockoff version of an aristocracy. But we no longer have different ranks in society, which bleeds into a lot of other areas, particularly with regard to behavior. There's been a leveling of behavior. We behave the same whether we are in the halls of Congress or our local government or down at the bowling alley, Americans kind of behave the same everywhere. And that's a problem. Because not everywhere is the same. And one of the areas this turns into a real problem, of course is that it bleeds over into church, and we don't have

31:22 that sense of reverence anymore, because we don't have an audience with an earthly king as even a possibility, as even a thought of something that could occur in the American context. And so we don't recognize that when we go to church we're having an audience with the king, and that leads to some certain requirements with regard to decorum and behavior. Sort of a tangential issue, but it is related to this lack of hierarchy to these egalitarian priors that have corrupted everything top to bottom, by of course eliminating even the concept of there being a top and a bottom. And as Woe said, it's not insulting to say that certain men are of a higher rank than others, that's true in absolutely everything

32:10 in life, and we all know it. There are some places in which we can say that and no one will be insulted, and then when it comes to areas like intelligence or certain abilities, everyone gets up in arms when you mention that some men are more intelligent, some men make better leaders, some men are more charismatic, and so many various other things. But then at the other end, if you say, Well that man runs faster, oh well that's fine, that's That ability is just as innate as the leadership ability in many cases, in most cases, because many of these things, of course, flow from one's genetics. They are biologically determined to a certain degree. We won't get back into that subject too deeply in this particular

32:54 episode. But to say that someone runs fast, that he is a very fast runner, isn't fundamentally different from saying someone is highly intelligent. Both are attributes, both are genetically determined, both require some training to use properly, of course, but God is given that ability, and he has given it out unequally among men. I am not a distance runner, most certainly I hate running. I like cycling, I know that'll make some of the audience members a little annoyed at me, but oh well it's great cardio. But at the other end of the spectrum I'm able to understand complex subjects with relative ease because God has given me that ability. To different men God has given different gifts, and that's a good

33:42 thing, because you need that in society, you need that in order for civilization to be able to function, even in not in particularly small groups, but in groups of say twenty, fifty, one hundred men, you need different levels of ability for the group to function if it is going to achieve anything. As well mentioned, the military is a great example. If you had only men who had the aptitude to be generals, you're probably not going to be winning very many wars. If on the other hand you have men who are fit only to be privates, you are probably still not going to win very many wars. You need the hierarchy. The hierarchy is absolutely essential. And this is the case regardless of the endeavor. You need hierarchy with regard to academia, you need hierarchy with regard

34:33 to the military, you need hierarchy with regard to politics, to the civic sphere. That is how God has fundamentally designed reality. There is hierarchy everywhere. And it's not just among men, it's in everything in creation as well. We obviously see it in basically all animals. This is just a fundamental part of creation. It is how God has designed things, it is the order of creation, and it is a good thing. And as Christians we should recognize it and not rebel against it, because fundamentally, what was Satan's rebellion? It was a rebellion against hierarchy. Yes, of course, pride is his key sin, but it was a rebellion against hierarchy, because he was placed in a certain place within the hierarchy, and he was never going to move up or down.

35:27 Because of course things are much more fixed with regard to that realm, the angelic realm, insofar as we're aware. And so he wanted to rebel against that because he did not want to be part of the hierarchy. He wanted to be an individual. He wanted to be supreme in himself. And that is what our society tells us today that we should aspire to be. That causes complete and utter chaos. That is why we see disorder everywhere we look, instead of order. And I will continue to emphasize order not just because I'm German, but because it is a fundamental necessity for life. If you do not have order in the things you pursue, you will not achieve anything. If you have disorder in your family, your family won't function.

36:17 If you have disorder in your marriage, that's a bad thing. Disorder is not good anywhere in life. Order is of fundamental, it is of paramount importance. And with regard to what we've said about leaders and the fact that leaders have duties, we've also mentioned there are privileges that come along with leadership, of course, because the men who are in leadership positions are often going to be afforded certain things other men are not. Moses certainly had greater authority than the men who were commanding, say, tens or fifties. That is the nature of the beast. But those are two sides of the coin. A leader is going to have certain privileges, and that is one of the benefits of being a leader, but he's going to have

37:04 certain duties. And generally speaking, oftentimes the duties are going to be heavier than the privileges as it were. Today we have very many men who do not want to take up the duties, they just want the privileges, which is one of the fundamental problems with democracy, because you have men who don't actually exercise the office appropriately, they don't uphold the duty, but they receive the privileges for various reasons that we won't get into in this episode because it's not the point of the episode. But as men we're not supposed to be envious of leaders just because they have those privileges. It is important to recognize the other side of that coin, to recognize that certain duties come along with the office that they hold.

37:55 Whether it's an official office, a formal office, or it's just an informal thing in a group, there are responsibilities that come along with the position. And as men, we really should have an easier time recognizing and accepting the reality of hierarchy. It is something that is fundamental to men to recognize that and establish it within a group, and we all do it as well mentioned, as children, just naturally, this happens on the playground. And as we age, as we grow up, the current system tries to beat that out of us, tries to propagandize us to the point where we no longer believe what we know to be true what we inherently recognize as a fundamental aspect of reality. There are hierarchies in everything under the sun.

38:48 And that is a good thing because it is God's design. And so we shouldn't rebel against that, we shouldn't try to subvert that, we shouldn't be envious of the man who is higher on the totem pole. We also shouldn't denigrate the man who is lower on the totem pole. It is not the role of the leader to abuse those below him. In fact, one of the marks of a good leader will be that he will, one, surround himself with good men, but two, he also will elevate those men And this is another thing that men recognize. If you have a group with a good leader, that group will be a better group of which to be a member than one that does not have a leader. It doesn't matter if you're the lowest man on the totem pole,

39:31 you'd probably rather be in the group that's well ordered and has a good leader. Because that leader will elevate everyone in the group. You will fundamentally be better off being part of the group with functional leadership than if you were just part of a group that had no leader and everyone's equal. Because of course, everyone is not equal. And so all you can do is drag everyone down to the level of the man who is lowest, or you can just ignore all those differences, and nothing will actually function. Because you don't have the hierarchy, you don't have the order, and you fundamentally don't have what is of absolute necessity, the man at the top of whatever group it happens to be, who can make

40:15 decisions. That is one of the most important aspects of the role of leadership One of the key requirements of the leader, and yes, it's a privilege to some degree as well, but the leader makes decisions. And one of the most salient sort of decisions is the tiebreaker. If you have a group that is split in some way, you have various competing, warring factions disagree with each other, it is the role of the leader to make a decision, and then it is the duty of the other men to follow it. To tie it back into what I said about the political right in the US, this is where things fundamentally fall apart for the political right currently, as things stand today, in the American context. We have the warring factions, but we don't have any leaders, and

41:12 men who stand up and attempt to lead are often attacked, of course, as I mentioned earlier. But they're ignored, and the warring factions continue. If you just have warring factions, you will never get anywhere. You will not get anything done, and often the fights are over stupid things. We were discussing before we began recording today the fact that churches sometimes will have fights over the color of the parents, or the placement of statuary, or any of a number of a hundred other stupid things. And these will be knocked down drag-out fights. And part of the reason for that, of course, is because they're avoiding more important issues and so they're avoiding having actually weighty discussions over things that matter by discussing things that are trivial.

42:01 But it's the absence of leadership that allows that to devolve into chaos, because a leader would simply say we are going to do it this way. And then men recognize the necessity of falling in line and following orders. Because you can't have order if not if no man follows orders. Because a leader who has no one who follows him can't lead. If you have a man in a theatre of war who is leading those under him, and he issues an order and no one listens. There are a lot of problems, of course, that have led up to this, and there are consequences that would flow from it, but he's not a leader. It doesn't matter if he has the position, doesn't matter if he has the rank, whatever it happens to be. He's not a leader because no one is following him.

42:53 This can be a problem on both sides. It can be because the leader has failed in his duties, or it could be because those under him have failed in theirs. And with regard to the political right in the US, it is by and large a function the disorder is a function of that second sort of error. It is the failure of men to follow leadership. Because in the American context, we still have these egalitarian priors. We still have this belief that every man should have an equal say, that everyone should be able to dissent from whatever it happens to be. And that leads to chaos and nothing gets done. One of the big factors in the hierarchy of responsibility is something that because of our egalitarianism, we've

43:41 we've pretty much lost the sense of in a lot of context. You do find it in places that actually have the rigid hierarchy, but it's sort of seen as incidental to the organization and not as being vital to the universe. So as an example, when I was at Apple, I was promoted to manager fairly early on. I was one of the youngest managers at the company. And one of the very valuable things that I was taught in manager training, where most people were almost twice my age, was that because Apple promoted individual contributors is what they were called to management positions. There wasn't professional management. If you were good as an individual contributor, you were then elevated to being a manager of a group or of a team, which

44:30 meant that you were now managing the people that were doing the job that you had been doing. And one of the vital things that they taught us in that management course was that as an individual contributor who's become a manager, you have gone from being the very best person at doing the thing that you were doing, the reason that you were in the promotion, into being the very worst manager that doesn't know anything. You've never done this before. So the very thing you were good at, you're not allowed to do anymore. And your primary task now is to do something that you're gonna be bad at for a while because you don't have experience. And part of the reason that they explicitly warned us about this

45:06 was that The natural tendency of someone who's still in this team like I was, now managing men who had been my peers, the natural tendency in that situation is during crunch time when push comes to shove, for the man who is good as an individual contributor to fall back to doing getting back in the trenches and doing exactly what the other guys were doing because he was really good at it. And they warned us that you can't do that. You have to keep being a manager. You have to do the new thing because you have a duty to do the thing that your other guys can't do. And that's a fundamental difference in hierarchy. The guys who are lower don't have the job of doing the tasks that you have above them.

45:45 There are a bunch of guys who can do what you could do, even if you could do it better than them. It's still their job to do it. You as the manager now have a task to do something that no one else is going to get done. You're the only one that can do it. And so it was a really good lesson for me, knowing nothing yet, to just be reminded not to get lazy and try to hide back in the job that I was good at. I had to do the hard thing that I didn't know how to do. And that's something that's invisible when you're just an individual contributor. You don't think about those things. It's not your job. It's not your problem. And egalitarianism basically collapses that so that no one thinks about that.

46:21 No one thinks about the responsibility of of those who are higher in the hierarchy. It's there. It's real. As Corey said, they're privileges sometimes that are attendant to it. You know, as a manager, I made more than the guys who reported to me, although at the time I was, I was making so little that when I was started hiring guys, my boss gave me a race so I could make as much as the new guys I was hiring. So it goes. What's important is that for us to understand that when someone is in a higher place higher place, whether they deserve it or not, whatever, however they got there, that's their job. And we should expect them to do it. And we should follow them when they're doing it well. And we should even, you know, to a degree follow them when

47:03 they're doing it poorly. Try to support them. Because whether it's on the playground or it's in a workplace or it's in a church, the guy who's in charge of whatever at whatever level of hierarchy, if he's the one who's supposed to be making the decisions, help him make the right decisions and then support him. And that's something that egalitarianism doesn't tolerate. It's gotta be completely consensus-based. Everyone has to have their feelings accommodated before you can move on. And sometimes that's just not possible. Imagine, for example, that you are on a cruise. If you're a young guy, that seems absurd, it's another boomer trope, sorry. But it's a good example because you're on a cruise, you're

47:45 relaxing, it's your vacation, you have no responsibilities, you're just eating and drinking and relaxing for a week or two. So you're in your cabin, and suddenly the alarm goes off. You're this terrible claxon, and you've been told during you know onboarding that if you hear this, you need to get to your evacuation station or whatever. But you're on vacation. You're enjoying yourself, you were relaxed, and now these loud noises are outside the room and people are running and hollering, and you're just annoyed because you wanted to relax. And then someone comes and bangs on the door, and it's a porter. He says, We got to get out of here, get to your boats, get to the lifeboat. We're abandoning the ship.

48:20 We got to evacuate. The egalitarian response in that situation is to argue with the man and say, You need to make me feel better about this. You need to explain to me why I should listen to you when I was doing one thing and you want me to do something else. I'm I've I don't feel good anymore. I was on vacation and now I'm worried you've ruined my mood. I need you to make me feel comfortable before I'm gonna come with you. That's completely absurd, right? Like you don't know what's wrong. Maybe the ship's on fire. Maybe it's sinking. Someone has made the decision for you to get off the boat. And if your response is to argue with the guy who is trying to, you know, grab you and say, Hey, come on, get

48:58 off the boat, you don't argue with that man. You follow orders. You do what you're told. Egalitarianism is the enemy of that. It says no, I need to have my feelings accommodated before I will agree with you. That's absurd. That's why I use that ridiculous example because it would be the stupidest possible response. And the porter's not gonna care. Like he's going, he's trying to get everyone off the ship. He's not gonna stand there and argue with you. He's got another five hundred doors he needs to knock on to make sure that everyone gets off. And if you individually just want to whine about your feelings and about how your vacation is ruined, you can go down with the ship. That's your problem.

49:37 It's not his problem. He's doing what he should have done in his position of authority. If you don't follow along, that's on you. There is a scope of responsibility that I another very valuable thing that I was taught at Apple, I think I saw the paper somewhere. I can't post it because I'm sure they'd sue me, but basically it showed for the individual ranks of individual contributors, they're ranked from one to six, one being the most junior, six the very most senior. And basically what it was, it was a really great way of breaking this down. It showed for the for the ICT one, for the individual contributor, it's what they were called at the time, probably changed now. I hope so. For the individual contributor one, you had an extremely limited scope.

50:22 You had maximum supervision. Your boss was always basically looking over your shoulder to make sure that you were doing whatever. And you had a very limited scope of duties. And the really interesting thing about the way this this was broken down was that it both for each level for one through six, it both showed the responsibilities and it showed the negative case. It showed the failure case for what happens if the individual contributor one does his job wrong. And this is what made it stick in my mind to this day is that for the ICT one, you know, basically the private in the organization and army parlance, if that guy does his job wrong, there's very minimum damage to the product, whatever it is.

51:04 Whatever you're working on, yes, this was an engineering. Basically, if an ICT-1 screwed up his engineering duties, someone else could come along very easily and clean it up. There's as I was describing when I was promoted to manager, I was obviously a very junior manager. I was interchangeable functionally with the guys directly beneath me because I just just been doing the same job At that level, a number of people could do the same job, you know, with training or whatever, but the specific scope of those duties was very limited. And if any one of us failed, it wasn't gonna bring down the whole ship. At the other end of the spectrum, the very most senior engineers, the guys who are architects of actual systems, if they screw up

51:44 their jobs the way this breakdown showed, if the guy who's basically an architect for entire portions of the engineering product fails at his job, if he makes a mistake, it's possible to sync the product. Yeah, you're talking about you know in the case of software and hardware, entire products shipping late, shipping not at all, having that feature yanked out entirely and causing chaos, which did sometimes happen. Like these mistakes were made. You know, you wouldn't hear about this mistakes at the very lowest level because the scope of responsibility was so narrow. At the highest level, when the mistakes occurred because the architects got something wrong, it was mass chaos. It did a huge amount of damage.

52:26 And a lot of the fire drills that we had at the end of product cycles were about failures or misrepresentations at those higher levels, or the managers of those guys. So although the ICT one is not making any money, and the level six is making a lot of money. That's because of the damage that they can do if they get it wrong. And so you have a lot of low-ranking guys who are much more fungible. You have very few guys who can actually do the highest level work. The vast majority of guys never got to level five or six. Like four was typically about as high as most people would ever get. Because I was just reflected abilities. There are only so many guys who can do actual architect level design of things.

53:08 That's just how it works. As Corey was saying earlier, like abilities are distributed unequally. And so the scope of damage is reflected in compensation. It's reflected in you know, to some extent the esteem that's given, but it's also reflective of the damage that's done if they fail. And I think that's an important part is we're looking in our lives, whatever context it is, for evaluating who's going to be a good leader. If the guy gets something wrong, how much damage is it gonna do? You mentioned earlier the the army hierarchy. If you have a corporal who's running a fire team and he gets something wrong, he makes a mistake in a war, he can get the guy next to him killed. That's very bad, but it's not a strategic failure for the military.

53:51 If on the other hand you have a a colonel who's running an entire brigade and he's got three to five thousand men under him him. If a colonel makes a tactical mistake on the battlefield, he can have his entire brigade wiped out. And that could be a strategic failure for the army, because suddenly one man who is tasked with a significant area of operations fails to deliver on whatever his task was in that place, his failure may well turn the tide of a war. Whereas the guy in the trench with a fire team beneath the squad, if he screws something up, he's gonna get men killed, you know, letters home, very sad for them, but it's never gonna make the news. If somebody a much higher level screws up, it can do catastrophic

54:34 damage. And so that's why it's so important to destroy egalitarianism, to reinstitute hierarchy everywhere, because these things are true, whether we institute the hierarchy or not, it's always true that some men are gonna do more damage than others when they get things wrong. And they can do far more good when they get things right. And so whatever level we are beneath those men, if you're involved in selecting them, if you're just simply involved in supporting them and following the leader, figure out which guys can do the most good and are gonna have the you know the aptitude not to make catastrophic failures and put those guys in charge. And again, like there's like I said at the beginning, it's inherently

55:17 ironic that we're making this populist appeal to ending populism, but that's just how these things play out. At some point, particularly when things get screwed up societally, we have to figure out how can we get back to the place where these things used to actually work. You used to find hierarchy everywhere. You know, one of the worst things I think that America did when we broke away from Britain was completely eliminating the class system. Whether it's official or not, I don't care. I've like my family who came here, yeah, they were kings a long time ago. By the time they were coming here, uh only a couple had title. Most some were nothing. That's fine. Don't care. it's not about status in terms of ruling men.

55:59 It's about doing the best you can. And if you have the aptitude to do better than someone else, then you have a duty to God and to your fellow man, to your neighbor, to your family, to your community, to do that well. Not men are given that aptitude, but those who have it should be rewarded. We need to start rewarding them again. They should be recognized and they should be supported. And the guys who are striving for those positions for the sake of power and glory and not with a cognizance of the responsibility involved, don't trust those guys. Somebody who's really eager to be in charge, you should not trust him. That's another part of this conversation. They're warning signs where guys are like, Oh, yeah, put me in

56:37 charge. They're either immature or they're up to no good, because a good man generally doesn't want to be in charge to some degree. Now, if someone has been groomed and is just sort of a natural leader, uh that's fine. That's one thing. The problem is we don't have much of that. It should be that the men who are naturally leaders are naturally slotted into these positions and everyone just knows his positions. When we get back to that point, we won't be having these conversations anymore because it won't be for us. You know, I'll be back at the bottom of the hierarchy like my most of my ancestors in this country. Fine, whatever. What we can't do is pretend that that hierarchy is not important.

57:14 Somebody's got to be in charge. You need to have people who are responsible and apt to deal with things at levels that maybe you aren't. There are two closely related issues that we have discussed so far, and I want to draw sort of a bright line between them. There's leadership and there's expertise. By way of example when it comes to expertise, there's a little bit of leadership involved too, but there's the Venn diagram for these is not two disconnected circles. There's some overlap here. But by way of example, in the legal field, there's what's called a deposition. Basically, it's just a formalized asking and answering of questions leading up to a lawsuit or hopefully a settlement in most cases, and generally

58:09 the case today a settlement in most cases. But a deposition, you'll have a deponent, there is someone who will be asked questions and have to answer those questions. He'll have an attorney present, there'll be an attorney for the other side, or for how many other sides there are. The attorney is serving in the role of an expert. And if you are the man being deposed, you should listen to your attorney. The reason you listen to your attorney is because he is the one who understands the field, the legal field. Now the questions being asked, you may very well understand them far better than your attorney. That doesn't matter, because the expertise that is relevant is the legal expertise. This is a very important point.

58:57 Because oftentimes the leader will not be the man who knows the most about all of the fields involved in the particular question, whatever the issue is, whatever he's deciding The men serving under him will be the subject matter experts. So for instance, the CEO of a company is probably not the best engineer in the company. He's not CEO, at least in a system that functions properly will leave aside the issues with our present system, but theoretically, the man running the company, he's not running it because he's the best engineer. He's running it because he's the best CEO. These are different tasks. These are different ability sets. And so your attorney will be able to tell you when to answer, when not to answer, when to shut up, hopefully

59:48 you have some sort of signal, so he can indicate to you to stop speaking, which is one of the fundamental problems with people being deposed, they talk too much. But your attorney is the expert, and so you listen to him because of that expertise. Now there has to be a certain caveat here, unfortunately, because of present realities. Because of course we have the sort of cult of expertise on the political left, you know, listen to the experts. The problem is that those experts aren't. You have men who are actual experts in a field because they know the field, and then you have those who claim expertise because they are, under our current system at least, credentialed or something similar. Listening to a man who has actual expertise is wise, that's a

1:00:35 matter of wisdom. Listening to a man who claims expertise and has none is also a matter of wisdom, but in that case it's rejecting what he has to say. Of course, this is right back to an issue of wisdom. You are going to have to assess these things to some degree for yourself. There's a bit of a weighing problem here. Is on the one hand, listening to leaders and following orders, quite frankly, knowing your place in the hierarchy is of fundamental importance, but at the same time some things are left up to individual wisdom. Under a better system, organized more properly, we would not have this core of so-called experts who know absolutely nothing except for how to get grants. And so this sort of wisdom call would not be as necessary,

1:01:31 it would not be as difficult at the very least. But as we have mentioned so many times before in so many other episodes, there are so many things in our system that are broken that we have to fix them all at once. And so it makes for very difficult decisions in some cases. So listen to the expert, because the expert knows what he's talking about, and you're going to have a better outcome, quite frankly, if you listen to the expert than try to assess it yourself. But at the same time, you have to make the assessment of who is an expert. That's a challenge. That's a difficult thing. That's a hard question to pose. But just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's something we can avoid. Doesn't mean it's something we do not have to do.

1:02:14 Leadership, in contradistinction, as it were, to expertise, as I mentioned, is a different skill set. It's still you're an expert because, of course, a leader is well, he's just an expert at being a leader. But it's a very specific sort of expertise. Because as mentioned, the leader may not be the best in that particular field. For instance, the king is probably not going to be the best educated with regard to, say, economics, or with regard to warfare, or with regard to any of a thousand other subjects, because he will have men under him who are experts in those fields. His role is to take the advice of those men and to make the ultimate decision. Part of that is because he has, hopefully at least, and under

1:03:10 a proper system, of course, but he has the training to make those sorts of decisions Decisions, but there is also an aspect of it where someone just someone fundamentally has to make the decision. You have to have a man who eventually says yes or no. And part of the reason for that is because then that man is responsible for the outcome. You know, it's the maxim, the buck stops here. That's true. It has to stop somewhere. And this is one of the problems with democracy because who's responsible? There's no one who is responsible. You can say, Oh, it's the president, he's responsible. But what happens to a president when he fails? Well he doesn't get reelected. That's about it. As fundamentally different from a king or someone who actually has real

1:04:03 authority. If that man errs, the consequences are often quite dire. Not just for him, but for his country as well. But there is someone who is fundamentally responsible. When you have proper hierarchy, when you have proper order, when you have leaders who are actually in the positions in which they should be making decisions, you have someone you can say that man is responsible for this good outcome or that man is responsible for this bad outcome. That is one of the things that is lacking in our society. We don't have any real responsibility. Everyone just wants to be part of the mass as it were, the undifferentiated mass, because then no one is responsible. But of course the problem is everyone is responsible at the same

1:04:54 time. But you can't pin it on one man. And so you wind up Wind up with disorder and dysfunction because there's no one to make the decision, and then when things go wrong, there's nowhere to point. It's not just to place blame, it's because if you have a point in the system where you can say here is where the error took place, then you can potentially address it. To continue with the political aspect, if something goes wrong in democracy, where's the problem? Is it everyone? Is it the system? Is it this particular leader? There's no way you can actually assign blame correctly in a democratic system, in a way that will lead to better outcomes in the future. Because it is a fundamentally disordered system.

1:05:46 It is a fundamental rejection of hierarchy and order. That is what lies at the core of democracy. Because it is that assumption, that false assumption of egalitarianism. Because if everyone has, say, an equal vote, what you're asserting is that every individual is equally expert on every topic that will be addressed by vote. And that's fundamentally absurd. One of the best examples of that would be surgery. Would you put a surgical decision to a vote? Would you let a jury make the decision whether or not you have heart surgery? No one would ever say yes, because it would be absolutely insane to have an average person do that, because a surgeon is a very highly skilled, highly trained expert.

1:06:40 He should be the one making that call. You don't want your plumber deciding if you have open heart surgery, and you know what? You don't want your surgeon figuring out your plumbing either. Different men have different abilities, have different skills, have different skill sets, they have been trained to have, they've been educated in different ways, and they serve in different roles. And that is a good thing, because that is how society continues to run smoothly. We don't have that. We have certainly done away with it in the public sphere, in the political sphere. Like Wo said, and as I mentioned earlier, we no longer have classes, we don't have an aristocracy, we don't have a monarch, we don't have any of these levels in society.

1:07:28 And so we've had this great leveling where everyone is equal, except everyone is not equal. And so it is rejecting the reality of what God has created, how God has designed things, and we so that and we reap chaos. And that is one of the reasons, one of the core reasons we have so many problems today, because we have rejected reality itself, because we don't like it. We've been propagandized, we've been trained to believe that it's evil, that you have to believe that all men are equal, that you can't possibly say this man is more intelligent than that man, or this man is more capable in this way than that man, or this man has a higher station or a higher rank, whatever it happens to be. And if you start to reject those things, you eventually reject all

1:08:20 hierarchy, which of course is the goal. Satan knows exactly what he's doing. The trajectory of rejecting hierarchy and order, wherever it starts, the goal is to reject all of it. And if you reject all of it, of course, well then you're rejecting God. Because he is the ultimate hierarchy. He sits atop the entire pyramid. That's Satan's goal. He wants you to reject everything. He wants you to reject the fact that parents are over their children. He wants you to reject the fact that the husband is the head of his wife. He wants you to reject that there might be those of a higher station in society, that some men are more capable in this way or that way. He wants you to reject everything, because then it is easier to

1:09:04 lead you astray. Another key aspect of evaluating who will make a good leader is what are their incentives. One of the most important books that's been written the last 30 odd years, I'm not sure when it was actually published, was by Hans Hermann Hoppe. It's called Democracy, The God That Failed. And one of the crucial points that he makes is that even if for the sake of argument we were to have assumed historically that democracy in the modern sense was a worthwhile experiment, we absolutely must conclude today that it has failed. Whatever promises they had in mind centuries ago, when they said, Hey, this is a good idea, we've conclusively proven they failed. And part of his thesis is one of the reasons that democracy

1:09:53 is inherently going to fail, certainly as opposed to something like monarchy, is the incentive structure. When you have election cycles of two years and four years, it collapses the window of the time horizon for the civilization to look to its Look to its own needs. Because the congressman, the day that he's elected, he's got to start raising money to get re-elected in two years. And that is a perverse incentive. He's always going to necessarily be beholden to those who can get him back into office again. So those with money and influence and connections will always necessarily have a greater voice in his ear than you will as a guy who vote for him or vote against him. In contrast, monarchy, at least when you're looking at particularly hereditary monarchy,

1:10:44 but it doesn't have to be hereditary. In the case of hereditary monarchy, in the worst case, you might get a child who's born who's just a buffoon. They're next in line and they're just kind of a dim wit. Happens sometimes, but as it happened with presidents, yeah. So we're no worse off there, even though we didn't pick him. But when you have a hereditary monarchy, one of the crucial upsides is that the king, when he knows that he's going to be giving the throne to his heir, his own flesh and blood when he dies, you know, thirty, forty, fifty years, his time horizon, his window of looking at what can I do is not in terms of two and four year election cycles. He's looking generationally, which is precisely what we should be doing.

1:11:31 And it's the one thing that has been completely lost from Western civilization with the collapse of monarchy in favor of democracy, by whatever degree. Because suddenly you're not thinking generationally, you're not thinking in terms of centuries. You're thinking in terms of what can this guy make get to maximize his own personal benefit now The king, he wants to leave a better country than he inherited from his father for his son and for his grandson. He's thinking 50, 100 years down the road. It's fundamentally different. One of the most telling things that's happening in today's world is that many of the leaders of the countries in the West are childless. A lot of them are unmarried and they're childless.

1:12:19 Like me. I have no kids. You know what? I would never support a system that let me make decisions for everyone else. That's inherently perverted. Because even if one guy, even if I would do it right, that's not the basis for a system. That's an axalt. The fact that you know a guy who might get it right is no excuse to tolerate a system where childless men are put in charge of something. Because there's a perverse incentive. If a man has no progeny, if it's when he's dead and gone, there's nothing left, inherently there's no expectation that he's gonna have an incentive to look to the next generation. Even if individual does the right thing, and where's he gonna get it from? Really only obedience to God.

1:13:01 I don't think there's another way that a childless man is going to do something that's not perverted with his life unless he feels that he has a duty that is outside of creation. But that's not a basis for a government because the life that I've led is a wicked one, it's an evil one. I did a bunch of stupid stuff, that's how I ended up childless. Don't do that. Don't be like me. And don't tolerate men who are like me in charge. I don't want a system where childless guys are calling the shots. I want the guys with five, eight, ten, twelve kids. They should be in charge. And frankly, I think that in a lot of places, I would retire men out of leadership positions after their kids have left home.

1:13:42 I think that once you have second, third, and fourth generation it's great for a man to be in his eighties and have grandkids and great grandkids. But at some point you're beginning to lose touch with the immediacy of having a small child in your house and seeing what's on the news and seeing what's happening in the world and realizing if I don't do something right now, this little kid who is today helpless is gonna inherit a world that I don't think they're gonna be able to deal with. Once someone gets too old, they become too disconnected from the cycle of life. So personally, like if I were designing a system, not only would there be no childless men, but there would be no men in charge of anything who didn't have kids under their own roof.

1:14:22 There's something fundamentally anchoring about that that is lost once all the kids are gone. Maybe some of this is a backlash against boomers who just, you know, wanted to get the kids out of the house. Now it's Gen Xers doing the same thing. You get the kids out of the house and then you live a completely profligate life and you make sure at the last check bounces. That's really kind of the democratic attitude. It's the egalitarian attitude, because if we're all the same and there's no inheritance and many of the other subjects that we've done entire episodes on, what's gonna happen? Kids are gone. they left home. They're on their own. Not my problem anymore. That's fundamentally perverted.

1:15:01 It's completely perverted. It's just as perverted as not having any kids at all. If you have kids and you're like, well, they're on their own, whatever. I'm I'm done with that stuff. I'm gonna go off on my own thing again. That's messed up too. And so I think that there personally I think that there's a a window of time, you know, if you keep having kids as well in your fifties or whatever, you know, especially if you happen to have a younger wife, great. As long as God is blessing you with kids and the kids are under your roof, you have an incentive right in front of you. Like every parent has an incentive and every good man, even without kids, has some sort of moral incentive to want to see

1:15:35 the right things happen generationally. But when it's no longer right in front of you, it's clear that something is lost. And we see this worldwide where we have all these childless leaders doing wicked things, burning down their own countries here and abroad. Why should they care? They're getting rich, they're getting bribes, they have power, they fly around the world, they have rich friends, they do all manner of unspeakable evil in private. They're in the club. And that's it. It's the ephemeral membership in a moment, not caring what happens later, that is not leadership. It's the worst form of perverted wickedness imaginable. And it's the type of system that's been created by not thinking

1:16:18 generationally, not thinking about leadership in terms of accountability and the scope of damage that can be done. There's a lot of stuff to consider. And it's gonna draw a lot of lines. And one of the things that you know we often say on done choir is don't believe us, don't listen to us. Go read, go do the research yourself, you're gonna come to the same conclusions. I don't wanna train anyone to just listen to what we say and oh, we, you know, we seem clever. So you're just going to believe us. That's a terrible basis for anything. Don't put your trust in men just because you like them. That's no basis for anything, especially leadership. Yes, you need to trust whoever your leader is. not that we're saying we're leaders, but like in I I don't

1:17:02 want anyone to ever have the reinforcement, certainly from us that well that guy's really smart he could be in charge that's the point of what Corey was saying earlier. You don't necessarily want the smartest guys in charge. You want the most faithful guys. You want the most honest guys. You know, early on when I was a hiring manager, at the time it was still possible to ask the question in a in an interview setting, you know, tell me one of your greatest weaknesses. I could occasionally get a good answer to that within a couple years of the internet, everyone, you know, basically the answer to what your weaknesses became, oh man, you know, I just care too much and I work too hard. Like yeah, whatever.

1:17:38 It ceased to have any value. A good answer to that, an answer that actually convinced me is I asked, what's your biggest weakness? If somebody said, I'm an alcoholic. I've been sober for seven years. That's the guy I would want to hire because I wouldn't hear that sort of defect, an actual problem with a man and think, oh man, that's I I judge him harshly, what a terrible thing. I would hear here's a man who's doing something incredibly difficult that requires concentration and devotion and self determination far beyond what most men have. It's easy to have an addiction. It's hard to set it aside and to refuse to give in to your own baser instincts. The sort of leaders that we need are the men who recognize,

1:18:20 yeah, here's what I'm not good at, I'm gonna do my best anyway. Don't trust a man who can't tell you what's wrong with him. That's a big red flag. Whenever discussions of monarchy come up, I like to point out, and so I will do so here, that Lutherans are technically confessionally bound to hold that monarchy are above the law, that monarchs are above the law. That comes from the apology, and it literally just says that regal power is above law. The reason for that, of course, is that there are different kinds of law. This is not saying, of course, that the monarch is above the moral law, that is addressed elsewhere in the confessions and at length, of course, in both scripture and theological writings.

1:19:14 The moral law flows from God's nature, and so the moral law is binding on all men at all times, in all places, equally so. It does not change. And so Genesis nine six, the death penalty is a requirement, all times, all places. The civil law is a different thing entirely. The civil law has to flow from some authority. And wo mentioned Hans Hermann Hoppe, I would mention here perhaps Carl Schmidt. Ultimately someone has to hold sovereignty. Someone has to be able to make a decision. And often that is the case when there may not be a law. Perhaps there's no law addressing this particular issue, or the laws conflict, or the law is at odds with what needs to be done. The sovereign is the man who gets to decide regardless of

1:20:16 what the law says. In this case I mean of course the civil law, the positive law, the enacted law written by men. But that flows from somewhere. There has to be an authority upon which that law is founded. It's not founded upon God's authority, because the law that flows from God's authority is the moral law. Now of course there's also for Old Testament Israel civil and ceremonial law, but that's not relevant to us today, except in so far as the civil law can be a guide. It's not binding on us. But the law has to flow from an authority. And so, for instance, when the king of France said, Le Tasse Moi, I am the state, or the state, it is I, more correctly translated, he was right, because fundamentally he was the source from

1:21:12 which the law flowed. He was the foundation of the civil law in that system. That is the reality of any political system, the authority ultimately rests with someone somewhere. Now in our system we deny that. It's of one of the fundamental problems of democracy, because democracy claims there's some nebulous rights or whatever it happens to be, different systems make different claims. Our system claims they're fundamental rights, inalienable rights, rights that we have by nature, and then our system is somehow founded on that. Well, how does that work? The answer, of course, is that it doesn't. But there's no ultimate source there for any of our laws. And so quite frankly, it all rests on naked force, the threat

1:22:09 of violence, which of course is not entirely wrong because all authority ultimately rests on violence. Even God appeals to that. One of the reasons that God is God is because he can snap his fingers and snuff you out. His authority rests in part on that. Of course, it's more complicated than that, but it's not the point of this episode. But for our system, there's no real sovereign. Because the claim is that the people are sovereign. Well, people can't be sovereign because Sovereign because the people in aggregate can't make a decision. And so you have to have some authority, some individual, some man somewhere who actually exercises the authority. And so in a democratic system it winds up being corrupt, at

1:22:59 various different levels, oftentimes exercised through well, quite frankly, through bribes, but through consultants and through lobbyists, and the various legion of others in our capital city, and those, of course, who are funding them ultimately hold the reins, ultimately hold the power But you can see the issue. Democracy denies that those men exist and says, no, no, no, no. It's the people who are sovereign. The people make the decision. They are the source of authority upon which the system rests and in which our laws are founded. And that's just false. Because it's actually men behind the scenes who don't have to withstand any scrutiny, who don't have any public face, oftentimes, who hold the

1:23:50 real power. That's fundamentally wicked. A king, a sovereign, should always be visible. The people should always be able to point and say, that is the man who made the decision. Part of it is because there should be responsibility for the decisions that are made. Democracy adds a mask. It adds a layer between the decisions that are made, and those making them. And it often does it in such a way, at least if the democracy is well designed, in this case diabolically so, but if the democracy is well designed, it shields the men making the decision from any responsibility. They suffer no consequences regardless of whether the outcome is good or bad. And again, that is fundamentally wicked. Men should suffer the consequences of the decisions they make.

1:24:41 Whether those consequences are good or bad. And so if you are a good leader and you make good decisions you should benefit from that. If you are a bad leader and you make bad decisions, you should suffer for that. Democracy hides men making the decisions so that does not happen. And so as Christians, we should not want that kind of system. Another thing about the confessions that I will point out is that they assume there will be princes, there will be men serving in positions of authority. There will be a godly king hopefully godly, but certainly a king. That is one of the foundational assumptions of the confessions, and not just the Lutheran confessions. This is true for other traditions as well.

1:25:30 Because that is the way that things are designed. That is a proper reflection of the way that God is allocated attributes and abilities and responsibilities as well. When you have this leveling from egalitarianism that eventuates in things like democracy, you are rejecting the way that God has designed things. And one of the ways that that plays out is having no foundation for your laws. Your laws are ultimately, in the sort of system we have, arbitrary. And so you have, for instance, courts making law now. Well why can't they? Why shouldn't they? There's no actual foundation for our system of laws. It's all arbitrary, it's resting on a piece of paper. What does that mean? Ultimately nothing.

1:26:22 Because there has to be a sovereign. Someone has to be able to say yes or no. And our system denies the reality of that while actually investing the real power itself in the worst sort of men. So on the subject of bad leaders, we're going to end on the topic of controlled opposition. As we've been talking about monarchy and kind of hierarchy that is sort of inherent, those are goals, those are end states that are desirable, but we're not going to get there by bootstrapping directly from here. Even if it were possible to, you know, get back to the point that we had those systems, it's gonna take a couple generations. And so our immediate challenge as men today in this world in these circumstances is to avoid as many mistakes as possible as we

1:27:14 try to rectify these problems one by one. One of the problems that we have now is that there will be men who are in some sort of leadership position By whatever means, you know, whether it's in politics or it's in the church, who perhaps at some point in the past they did good work. They earned not only their position, but the respect of those who see them as leaders. The problem that we have today, where we do have some say, and men do have in some cases perverse incentives, is that We cannot let anyone rest on his laurels. What I mean by that is that the fact that a guy did really good work a few years ago or a few decades ago, and he was a leader then, and you said, Yeah, this is my leader.

1:28:08 I'm following him. For you, that is not a permanent moral category, and it cannot be. You need to continuously evaluate the fitness of the men who are in these positions, as long as we have a system where it's up to us to evaluate that fitness. Again, a lot of this is ironic because ultimately we're trying to get to the point where rank and file guys like us aren't making those calls. But until we get there, it's important to police the men who are in positions where they're having influence, where they have leadership. Because if they go off the rails and they're still leaders and no one questions them, it creates more disaster. It does more harm. And even if they got something right a while ago, if they

1:28:49 get something wrong today and people keep following them, it will do tremendous harm. And in some cases, it's just guys who guys who lost their marbles. In some cases it's guys who are controlled opposition, where they're basically erected to be permitted to go so far on one side of the spectrum, but they will always draw a bright line and say, but you can't cross this line. They're there as tone police. They're there as guardians to make sure that the actual God that's being served by the worldly agenda of the day is never threatened. So they'll let you have your little playground where you can do stuff in our context we'll call right wing, even Christian in some cases, but they'll never let you go beyond that.

1:29:34 And so the particular example that I wanted to give here at the end is Unfortunately, Doug Wilson. Whatever good he's done in the past, where he's established himself as a leader, a lot of people look up to him and respect him. I will accept for the sake of argument the year and then the past. The question is, what is he doing today? What he's doing today is being an arch Zionist. He is actively subverting the movement of Christian nationalism, the idea of Christian nationalism by being erected by guys like Tucker and Charlie Kirk, and there's gonna be a whole bunch more, who say, look, Doug Wilson's the face of Christian nationalism. And what is one of the things that Doug will say? Whether or not he says it on their shows, where is he

1:30:16 saying it everywhere else? What's he writing books about? He's saying that anyone who criticizes Jews envies them. The only reason you would ever criticize a Jew is envy. The implicit claim there is that Jews are better than us, in that we would have to resent them in order to say anything negative. Now, this is not only theologically bankrupt, it's not only facially retarded, but it's also utterly mercenary because Doug Wilson failed to prevent his son from marrying a Jewess who has relatives in Israel. And his son runs around saying, I'm a Jew now because my wife's a Jew, and that's how it works, and our kids are Jews. So when Doug Wilson is lecturing Christians in the name of God about how you can't criticize Jews because that's envy and you're

1:31:05 a bad, terrible person, he's doing it because he wants to make sure that his grandchildren are right. And I respect someone doing what it takes to preserve the lives of their grandchildren. That's a good thing. That's kind of the principle of us doing this episode. But he's a liar. The thing The things that he's saying are not true, and he's lying about his motives, and he's doing harm in the very moment where if he were being a faithful leader in the leadership role that he has in his context, he could do some actual good. But the reason that Tucker and Charlie Kirk and these others are gonna pinpoint him is here's the face of Christian nationalism. And he's he's an arch Zionist boomer. And he is drawing that bright line to say, sure, you can

1:31:48 have the Christian stuff, but don't you dare say what a nation is. Nation to him is just a country. It's not a blood. There's no blood and soil notion unless it's Israel, the state of Israel, yeah, they got that. But we don't. We're just we're these generic Americans. And if we could get some more Israeli blood in our families, we'd be better off. That's rubbish. And so I only highlight that as an example. Well, two reasons. One, it's malevolent, it's evil and it's actively destructive. But it's also a prime example in the context of leadership of how a man who was in a position where he could have done good if he begins doing harm, you gotta do something. And as things stand today, what we do is you just walk

1:32:30 away. If you consider Doug Wilson a leader in the past, you need to stop considering him a leader. You can still be grateful for whatever he did for you and your family and your faith in the past. You can't listen to him anymore because he is not only subverted, but he is subverting everything that he touches now. This is his final testament to the world is Zionist pro-Jew propaganda inside the church in the name of Christian nationalism. That's going to do unspeakable harm if he's tolerated by the guys who've seen him as a leader. And so as I said earlier, one of the things that we're adamant about as podcasters, God forgive me, is that don't just believe us. Don't say, oh, these are leaders.

1:33:15 These are these are my guys. I'm going to listen to whatever they say If you listen to anything that we have to teach you, it's don't act like that. You need to think for yourself. You need to think critically. You need to be skeptical of everything that you hear. Evaluate every new claim. You can be rigorous about it, especially if you have the aptitude for it. Some men don't have the aptitude. And if if this is just entertainment for you, and maybe you know some people actually listen to Stonequire just to fall asleep, that's great. Whatever. Doesn't hurt my feelings. It's cool. If you're just going to listen to what we say and believe it, turn it off. Go away. delete it from your feed and never listen again.

1:33:52 I don't want you to be trained to do that with us or with anyone else. You should always check sources. You should always question motives. You should always evaluate whether what is being done right now is consistent with what's been said in the past, if it's consistent with what is right. A good leader, a true leader will meet those tests. And if he fails, if somebody gets something wrong, he'll take correction. Because as Corey was saying, a good leader, whether it's a monarch or in any other context, has people beneath him who are smarter than him and he'll listen to. He has advisors who can straighten him out. So being the guy in charge, being a leader at a whatever level, doesn't mean you always get everything right.

1:34:34 It means that when you get something wrong, you can course correct so that you don't do unspeakable damage because you were just trotting merrily along pursuing your own ends. As we are looking at the world and you know In our communities, our businesses, our churches, our area of operations, don't look to a leader and then just mark him with that and say, okay, he's the guy forever. I'm never going to pay any attention. That's a recipe for failure. Help him, support him, be engaged, and keep an eye on him. Keep an eye on us, keep an eye on Doug. Keep an eye on anyone that you're listening to to make sure that they're still delivering on what it was that convinced you in the first place that they were worth listening to.

1:35:12 And if the circumstances change, if the tune changes, be willing to walk away. Being willing to say, This is not good anymore. I don't know what happened, but I'm no longer going to be a part of it. That's vital for any man, for a Christian, for a human being, the only way not to be led astray is to keep an eye on your leaders. And again, ideally we get to the point where we don't have a say in it anymore because we've built a system where that takes care of itself and it's above all of our pay grade. That's why I like to see, but it's not going to happen in our lifetimes, almost certainly. What we can do is make sure that we're paying attention, we're being diligent, because whatever your aptitude, whatever your context, you can tell

1:35:54 when something's going off the rails. You should be able to. It's a basic animal sense that we all have. And what we need to do is listen to it more. When we look at the history of democracy, we say we see that it blew up. Yeah, it made these promises and it failed. And so now we're just picking and choosing leaders seemingly at random. Whatever guy is you know flashiest or loudest or you know most convincing for a moment. Okay, if he convinces you in a moment, pay attention for a moment. But when you come back in a year and he's changed his tune and he's talking about other stuff, be ready to walk away. You need to for the sake of your soul, for the sake of your family, for the sake of your responsibilities, because you

1:36:36 are a leader as well. Even if it's only a leader of yourself, if you're if you're a young man and you have no one beneath you, you are still effectively making these decisions for yourself, even when you're beneath under the authority of others. You still have to decide every day, I'm gonna follow orders, I'm gonna do what's right, I'm gonna read the Bible, gonna work out, say your prayers, eat your vitamins, do the whole thing. You have to decide to do it because for the most part, no one's gonna make you. And if that betterment causes you to become a better leader, you're gonna be a blessing to others as you do it. But the But the accountability has to run in both directions. One of the criticisms that is often leveled against monarchy or any

1:37:20 sort of autocratic and certainly totalitarian, although we're not advocating a totalitarian system to draw that particular distinction, but an autocratic system, one of the critiques that is leveled against it is that there's no accountability. And that's an absolutely insane critique. Because there is always accountability. There's, of course, the first level, as it were, accountability to God. But on top of that, a king has accountability. Even if we had a system that was properly organized, that had hierarchy restored, there would be nobles of that first rank under the king, to whom the king is more or less responsible. It's not that he has to answer to them in the day to day affairs of the kingdom or anything like that, but because

1:38:12 of the authority they wield, they do have at least the ear of the king. They can influence him, and if he is going off the rails they can do something about it. That is how things are supposed to function. It's not supposed to be every man against every other man, or every one is equal and has an equal duty with regard to every other person in the hierarchy. There are levels. The man at the top, of course, answers only to God, the king is above the law. But the men below him wield sufficient authority to be able to check what he does. And those below them can check what they do, and so on and so forth. The same is true for a man running his own household. The house father is not a despot. He does not wield absolute authority to do whatever he pleases

1:39:08 with everyone in his household. That's not to say that those under him have such a position that they get to question his authority. There's a difference between questioning the authority and recognizing the abuse of it when it happens. Again, these are going to be matters of wisdom, and they are going to be, in some cases, very difficult for some men to assess Assess. But many things in this life are not easy, and we do not get to ignore them simply because they are hard. With the way that things stand today, as Woe mentioned, We have to run this sort of analysis on a great many things that we could ignore if we had a system that was actually properly constructed. The baker is not supposed to have to assess

1:40:01 the performance of the king, and yet the system that we have requires that. In part because we have many faithless men in positions of power at all sorts of levels, but also because our system doesn't even recognize the existence of those levels, despite kind of having them to a certain degree. Once we get back to the point where we have proper hierarchy re-established, where we have this order in society as it is supposed to be, then many of these issues will fade away. But as well mentioned, that will be something for our grandchildren or great grandchildren or great great grandchildren. Systems that take generations to build can be torn down in one or two. That is simply one of the realities of this life.

1:40:52 It takes a lot longer to build than it does to destroy. The systems that upheld Christendom for centuries took about a century to destroy. Almost completely. They're almost entirely gone today. That took fifteen hundred years to build. Not obviously the full fifteen hundred years to get to a certain level, you can build back to a certain degree in two, three, four generations, but to achieve what our ancestors had and what they enjoyed at the height of Christendom takes many generations of faithful men, building little by little. Part of it is because if you grow up in that sort of system, you are inculcated with the right beliefs with regard to the system itself and you pass those on just sort of naturally,

1:41:51 the same way that we pass on language to our children. Children learn language because they're exposed to it. Yes, there's actual proper formal instruction later on, but the majority of your language learning is just by being around those who use the language. Because God has made children to be language sponges, of course, that's part of what plays into that. But that immersion is how you get it. And if you're immersed in a culture of right hierarchy, of right order, of these properly organized relationships, you help to perpetuate that culture simply by existing in it. And this plays into sort of inverted, but plays into what Woe was saying about the necessity of assessing leaders and others under our

1:42:41 current system. Unlike being in a good system that is properly organized, where these things help to perpetuate themselves, which is good, that is a proper design, that is how God has made things, in our system, things continue to get worse because men are not assessing what is happening. Because we have had too many men who have just let things continue because they don't want to be involved. That's not my problem, I'll be dead by then, I don't want to deal with it, whatever it happens to be. Each and every man listening to this podcast has to some degree, certainly if you have been listening from the beginning or you've gone back and listened to the catalogue. But any man listening to this podcast has already to some degree

1:43:35 made the decision to make that assessment of the course of our culture and decide it is going in the wrong direction. And so you've you have already exercised that wisdom, that authority to a certain degree, to make that call. To say, our leaders are faithless, our church leaders are faithless in many cases, things have gone off the rails, and it is getting worse by the day. And so we want to change the direction, because otherwise we won't have anything to pass on to future generations that is worth having. And so each and every one of you has already made that sort of assessment. You've come to the conclusion there are problems they need to be addressed. What Woe was saying, what I am saying, what we are

1:44:29 saying in this episode, is that you need to make that assessment with regard to basically anyone who stands up and acts as a leader or says I'm a leader. Perhaps be a little cautious about the man who says I'm a leader or Although an important nuance on that, it's not always bad if a man seems like he is seeking the position of leadership. The issue is the intent. And as Woe was saying, there are certain things that indicate the underlying intent, but sometimes that's a little difficult to assess, because you can have a man who stands up and says I will fulfill that role, and maybe he doesn't actually want it, but he has made the decision that it is his duty to pursue it. That is fundamentally different from the man who stands up and says,

1:45:16 I'll be the leader, and he's thinking of all the benefits he will get from that position, all of the bribes and other things that he should not want. The second man is the problem. And making a judgment call between the two is part of our task today, because we have a great many grifters who are standing up and saying, Oh, I'll be a leader, and their only goal is money. That's it, that's all they're after. And then you have others who are paid opposition, who are controlled opposition. They exist to subvert. There are a number of ways that you can assess which one a particular man is. With regard to matters in the church, it's actually fairly easy, to some degree, because you can eliminate a great many of the false

1:46:08 so called leaders with the issue of Zionism, with the issue of Israel and the Jews Israel so called. Because the false leaders almost to a man take the wrong position on those issues. And certainly as those listening to this podcast, but just as Christian men who read scripture, it's very easy to come to the correct conclusion on those things. No man who reads scripture without coming to it with false priors is going to think the Jews are chosen and that we have to support the so called State of Israel. No man comes to that conclusion from reading Scripture. He comes to that conclusion outside of Scripture and usually because he's drawing a check. And so some of those things are easy to assess.

1:46:56 Perhaps with regard to political leaders there's a little more challenge. Because sometimes it is difficult to tell the agent provocateur as it may be, or the subverter, from a man who is earnest. But one thing we absolutely cannot do, and this is a problem that I see constantly on social media and elsewhere, we cannot immediately assume that every man who stands up and every group that attempts to start organizing is a funded operation in some way, that they're all subverters. To some degree, you have to give men a chance. You don't have to give them an infinite number of chances, you don't have to give them so much rope that they hang you with the rope, but you do have to have some sort of

1:47:48 space there. You have to have time for these men or these groups to prove or disprove themselves. Because if every time a man stands up and says, We need to do this, I will lead, follow me, or if he stands up and just fulfills the role of a leader, if every time a man does that, he gets attacked as being a fed or or a paid operative, or whatever it happens to be, we will not get anywhere. We will continue to be stuck, we will continue to be mired in these internecine fights, usually over trivial nonsense. And that is exactly what the enemy wants. And in that case, you can choose to have the E uppercase or lowercase as it so happens to be. But that is what the enemy wants. Because if we continue to fight over nonsense and we attack and

1:48:39 backbite and backstab every single man who would attempt to lead or would attempt to achieve anything, then we are a completely inert force, a completely emasculated force. That is not what we need to be as men. As men, we need to start organizing our own groups, our own lives, our own churches, organizations, whatever they happen to be, with right hierarchy. Part of that Part of that starts with just having that hierarchy in your own friend groups. Because of course, things flow from the family first, of course, but for men you have the small group of friends, and then you have your large group of friends. And then you have organizations that flow from that, and eventually things branch out and upward to the nation.

1:49:30 That is right hierarchy. And you have leaders at every level. And if you start to establish that sort of leadership at the smallest level, then it's easier to have that leadership at a higher level, because it's just extrapolating upward. Which is one of the things, as we've said in this episode, that we just do not have in the United States anymore. In the American context, it is fundamentally missing. We don't have anywhere that we can couch this sort of hierarchy, the different levels in society. This may be easier for some of our European listeners, where you still have monarchy. It's easier to envision a hierarchy when there is actually a hierarchy, even if it may be subverted in some cases and it has

1:50:17 its problems. The simple fact that it exists is helpful. In the American context, we have to rebuild that. Because we got rid of it centuries ago, effectively. It's gone. The vestiges really aren't even there anymore. The closest thing you have in some areas is old money. But it doesn't come with the proper understanding in most cases of the role of that in society. Because there is a role for society, like we mentioned in the episode on tithing, if God has given you great material blessings, there are duties that flow from that with regard to the church, with regard to neighbor, the right hand kingdom, but there are also duties in the left hand kingdom. If you are someone who has great wealth, particularly today, you should

1:51:08 be helping to organize and fund these things so that they can make actual progress. Because part of the reality of this is that without funding things don't tend to go anywhere. But there are men whom God has blessed with material prosperity. It is their duty to use that properly, to use that appropriately, in both kingdoms, not just via tithing, but with regard to the left hand kingdom as well. So in discussing the issue of leadership. We need to recognize a handful of fundamental issues. First and foremost, we just have to recognize that there is such a thing as a leader. There are men God has gifted certain abilities that make them fit for the task, and on top of it, as Woe was emphasizing

1:51:59 earlier on in the episode, just the position that they have from childhood onward has trained them for being leaders. And so just recognizing the existence of the thing, of the office, is the starting point for this. On top of that, we need to support leaders. We have to recognize that part of the duty of every man, except of course for the one at the top, the one at the very top of the pyramid, because the king isn't supporting any leader. But everyone else in the hierarchy supports the leader who is above him, and above him all the way to the top. That is the duty of every man in the system Things do not function correctly. Things do not function well if leaders do not have support. And so we need to recognize there are leaders and we need

1:52:52 to recognize our duty to support leaders. And then finally, I would say part of what we have to recognize is the scope and the scale and the nature of the task ahead. We are rebuilding a system, in the American context at least. We are rebuilding a system from basically nothing. Because everything was torn down. Not a stone was left standing on another. We are rebuilding the system from the ground up. That is going to take time, it is going to take a great deal of effort. We need to have the patience and the persistence to get that done. We need to recognize that some of these things will be generational in scope, and that is actually a good thing. Because as Wo mentioned earlier, building on a generational scale, planning on

1:53:49 a generational scale, is important. You cannot have a civilization with men who do not do that. And so, of course, we may think of the proverb that I have quoted before, but I'll quote again: civilizations grow great when old men plant trees in the shade of which they will never rest. That is our position today, even though not all of us are old men yet. We are the ones planting the trees. We are not the ones who will necessarily get to rest in the shade. And that's fine. Just as there are tasks we have to do where we may not always succeed, the duty is not to succeed. The duty is not to complete the task. The duty is to do what has been set before you, what has been given you by God. God has given you attributes, abilities, resources, whatever they happen to be.

1:54:49 He has set these things before you that you need to do, and he has given you the ability to do them. If you are a leader, if you are a man who has the ability to lead, you need to step up and do so. We need leaders. If you are not that man, if you are not the man that has been given the abilities, the talents necessary to be the leader, then you need to help find the man who has that. And if he doesn't want to lead, you need to force him to do it, because oftentimes that is necessary for certain leaders. They may not want the task. Well too bad you have the skills, you need to do it. But in addition, you need to support that man. Whether he stands up on his own or you force him to the front, you need to support him.

1:55:35 Because he needs that support. A leader cannot do it on his own. Just as a father of a household cannot do everything on his own You have a wife for a reason. There are things she does that you cannot do, or that are better off being done by her. The same is true with regard to leaders and those under them in the hierarchy. Every man has his duties, wherever he happens to fall in the hierarchy, whether you're at the top or the bottom, and we are all better off when each man in that hierarchy does his duty, whether it is to lead or to follow, regardless of the duty, when each man does his duty, every man is better off.