Great Houses

Okay, everybody, welcome to the Great Houses Forum.

Uh, we are here to talk about what we always talk about, we're, we're on a quest.

Uh, our quest is to leverage eternal principles to build great houses in the modern context.

So that's, I I think that, that having the, the recognition that there are long-term, eternal principles that, uh, that apply in every case, but that there are also local, local rules.

Local rules of court, local rules of a jurisdiction, and those things are, uh, are different from one another, but the local rules can be changed.

Local, local things can be changed.

The eternal principles don't change, obviously, and that's important to remember.

But, um.

I, I, I look forward to the discussions and I'm, and I gotta tell you everybody that I'm, I'm just so enjoying the community that has, has grown up around this and the, the conversations that, uh, that, that are happening.

And, uh, um, you know, please go to my substack, the Avalon Circle Substack, and I've, I've got a, a number of people that I've recommended their substack as, as they're participating in this great conversation.

We just had a, a great piece in the American Tribune, uh, by Will Tanner, uh, called How to Survive as a Yeoman in an Oligarchs World.

And I just find that, uh, that stuff incredibly, incredibly important.

So, so today we're gonna talk about, um, the fact that chivalry is dead.

So, uh, remember we're, we're going through, uh, a kind of a number of episodes.

We're gonna, we're talking about the fact that our society suffers from the problems of atomization.

Atomization is the fact that, you know, we, we used to have kind of very large social molecules.

You would, you would form, uh, a network of people with whom you had relationship.

And tho those networks were usually set or at least heavily influenced by your families and their families.

This was not just true for like, arranged marriages.

There were, you know, friendship groups.

There was fostering arrangements where you had the people that were kind of in a semi-permanent cohort, um, that, that you came up with and people.

Stayed together for a long period of time, usually for their whole lives.

And then the, the plan was, we'll, we'll raise up our children and try to restart this cohort.

Right?

So the idea would be if, uh, if, uh, Joshua Rash sheets and Andy Higginbotham and Oliver and I all have sons that we would want our sons to have, remember, we'd want our relationship to last for the, the rest of our lives.

And we want our sons to come up and step into kind of pre-ordained or predestined preset relationships, uh, with those people, with those high quality people from high quality houses.

But for the last 400 years, the smart play has consistently been to move towards atomization.

So that's as, as we move through the industrial age.

The ideal social molecule got smaller and smaller in the length of time that any kind of working functional relationships happened, got shorter and shorter until we
kind of got to the, the, the, what we might call the stable democratic, uh, consensus, which is probably, uh, relationships break and reform in, in two years or less.

And we don't really have anything beyond like the, the, the core working group.

Um, if you might belong to a corporation for a longer period of time than that, but for everyone else, it's just you gotta be able to be moved around, otherwise you're leaving money on the table.

That's what atomization is.

So, you know, and, and, and this is not just like some social problem, this is a, a way to maximize, monetize, implement new technologies, right?

As the firearm comes online, as, as the printing press, as the industrial textile mill, as all of these things, as the, as the windmill comes online, as various, you know, grain, grain, uh, reducing things comes online that.

That was not a, a, like, just a, a lack of virtue among the people.

People were interacting with those technologies and saying, what is the best way to make money and have success?

And the best way was break the social molecule down, have, have more and more kind of frictionless bucky balls able to, to dance about.

So.

Last week we talked about, uh, the, the unhelpful views of the, the, the idea of agency.

And I think there's a, there's a problem with, uh, kind of a universalizing or a totalizing definition of agency.

Uh, there's this concept that a agency is all you need that, that all you need to do to be successful in any domain is to kind of reach out into
the ether and ask the right questions and just keep asking questions until you get the right answers and the answer will be delivered to you.

Right?

Um, and that's true in, in spiritual domains, right?

Uh, that's, that's kind of the promise of the, the Christian Bible.

And it's also true in an economic sense for software engineers doing.

We want 'em to call regular software development where all the questions have been answered in some form before.

So what they need to do is get their search terms correct and go out there into the universe and get a, uh, get access to a library and then, you know, they'll be able to, to, to implement or adapt solutions that people have already used.

So it's true for them and it's true for them in that economic domain, which is great.

And it's, it's a wonderful thing that our culture has had access to that for the past, you know, 30 years, probably for the last 10, 15 years.

That's, that's the bulk of what's kept our economy going as uh, at least according to, according to many, uh, many people who've studied the, the issue.

But.

The question is, is it true in every domain, um, or even most domains, is it true in the core domains of what it means to be human?

Is it true in perhaps leadership domains?

You know, how do you persuade people to trust you and, and, and place their lives in, in your hands, and kind of enter into long-term intimate relationships like say marriage.

Um, is, is it true in those domains?

And, and the answer is, it's, it's, it's complicated.

So.

Uh, one of the reasons why I am having this discussion is, uh, I, I, I talk about great houses day in, day out, and I've had a number of discussions that derailed around a particular word, and that word was aristocracy.

And, uh, I've, I've had this, you know, with, I've had the, the discussion with, you know, Aons on the internet in chat rooms, and I've had this discussion with, you know, very successful people, uh, in, in boardrooms and at conferences.

And what I, what I've, what's become clear to me is that there is a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of, of what we are talking about when we say aristocracy
and what, you know, if it's true that AI and some of the new developing technologies that are entering in our world might make our world quote more aristocratic.

Uh, what does that mean?

And, and what would we be moving toward?

Because I think everyone, everyone sees aristocracy.

What they know about aristocracy is what the movies show them and what the movies show them is the last 10 minutes before the French Revolution.

Okay.

Um, aristocracy is this kind of bugaboo in, in leftist circles.

It's, it, it's the, one of the great moral justifications for a lot of things that leftists want to do is they're rebelling against hierarchy.

They're rebelling against aristocracy.

And aristocracy is evil.

Let me show you some anecdote that's drawn from, you know, the, um.

The, the, the last 10 minutes before the French Revolution.

And, and, and the point of that is, is that the last 10 minutes before the French Revolution is not a stable example of what an aristocracy is.

Okay?

Um, it's, it's what's, it's what's happening.

It's, you know, the behavior that, that aristocracy is engaging in is in some important way responsible for the, the, the, the revolution and for its success, right?

So, and this, you know, leads to one of the, kinda the core tenets of, of liberalism, right?

Uh, you know, uh, a popular revolt against tyranny or dictatorship is right and deserves approval.

And, uh, hopefully, hopefully most of you know where, where that comes from.

That comes from, uh, statement six, that statement six of the core statements of liberalism as articulated by James Burnham and Suicide of the West.

And broadly speaking, folks, if you haven't read Suicide of the West, you, you really should.

It's, it's, uh, incredibly current for something that was written, uh, almost 80 years ago now, or, or, sorry, excuse me, almost 60 years ago now.

Um.

You know, suicide of the West as, as I often remark is, is basically undefeated in terms of, uh, intellectual terms, right?

Um, so again, the, the behavior of the French aristocracy right before the revolution is constantly used as the, the ultimate example of this tyranny against which it is always, you know, per se, righteous
in a liberal mindset to rebel against, um, you know, this, this, this, uh, sort of blanket acceptance of revolution sits oddly with, uh, certain, uh, Christian texts like the book of Romans and one Peter.

But, you know, I mean, this is, this is what we're doing here, okay?

So what we've been doing, and, and 'cause a lot of people have gotten and made money, um, I'm, you know, you, you see, uh, when I'm talking to people from, of Spanish or Portuguese descent, you,
you see a kind of a more sophisticated version of this with, uh, the, the baby behavior of the Spanish nobility and the runup before the, the Spanish Civil War, which is the same kind of thing.

There was a ton of bad behavior, a ton of self-destructive behavior and, you know.

I'm not saying it's justified what they did to their nobles.

Exactly.

Some, some of those people, you know, certainly deserved an, a adjust system to die.

Uh, but, uh, but it's certainly e even, even if you question the justice of it, it's um, it's certainly understandable what was done.

Okay.

And you'll still meet, I mean, I've, I've met members of, of sort of the historical aristocracy and, you know, they're, they're frequently be portrayed as decadent, privileged, completely unwilling to work.

Um, and that's true, right?

That's a stereotype.

That stereotype is in, in my experience, when you meet somebody from those old bloodlines that has this, this, uh, no bless oblig and this, this being a gentleman of leisure and cultivating yourself, they don't wanna work.

They don't, they they are, they are very opposed to, you know, uh, the, the quote, the Protestant work ethic.

Um, so.

Uh, you know, one of the, and it, it can actually be an incredibly irritating thing.

It's, it's, uh, when you, when you talk to them, they, they just exude this arrogance and this certainty that, that, that as just a, a, a matter of, of the laws of the universe that working is bad.

And they shouldn't have to think about that.

They shouldn't have to do that.

And the world is, is mean and bad for, for making them work.

Okay.

This, you know, I'm a Protestant basically.

Um, and so that, that runs contrary to my core culture.

And, and, and I, uh, I don't find it very, very useful or productive.

Um, and, and many people have had that experience.

So, so I'm not, I'm not here sort of to defend the old nobility, but I, I think, you know, talking about, referencing our conversation
last week about agency and domain mastery, I think we need to understand that, that the behaviors they're exhibiting were developed.

Um, in a very particular domain, and the domain that they were optimized for no longer exists.

Okay.

Um, it just no longer exists.

So, and, and I think one of the questions that we have to ask is, you know, how, how did this happen?

How do you have a class of nobility that's insanely dominant and successful for a thousand years?

How do they become weak?

How do they become so ridiculous in a short period of time?

You know, the last, um, the last of the aristocrats would drive an ambition were largely killed off in the trenches of the world wars and taxes and nationalization, finish the rest.

How, how does that happen?

And I would say actually that happens hundreds of years after they had largely become ridiculous.

Right.

Um.

So you, you see kind of the transition from el seed to donkey hte, right?

You have this historical, you know, aristocracy that was, that, that understood its own purpose that was virtuous by its own lights and by the, by everyone who interacted with 'em thought of them as virtuous.

Um, and then you, you know, you get to donkey hte.

You, you went from leading thousands of men to foolishly tilting at windmills, though I, I got, I got a story for you with that, with donkey ote, we'll come back to that, right?

I'm not sure it's quite as foolish as it as it first appears.

Okay?

So I believe that the answer lies in the death of chivalry, which I would argue is at least as relevant as the death of God, and likely more so.

Now, to be clear.

The actual death of God would be wildly more important than the death of chivalry, than the death of, of any particular culture or nation or civilization.

Um, but you know, the whole, the whole magic trick of Christianity is, is that the, the, the death of the crucified God and rumors of the death of the crucified God are, are, uh, overstated as they say.

Right?

He, he comes back.

That's like, you know, that's part of the story, right guys?

Um, he, and, and I'll note he and his church come back and they keep coming back and they, you know, you know, Christianity as a, as, uh, Bruce Willis says
about John Malkovich, uh, character in, uh, in the, the movie RED, you know, he, Christianity has died many times and, and it always seems to come back, okay?

Chivalry, however, I believe is truly dead.

And I maintain that it is not ever coming back.

And I, I think that the, the, um.

Main, one of the main things that we need to understand is the, the, the central, the, the, the hole in the middle of Western civilization that we're responding to is, is not actually, I believe, the death of God in, in the nietzschean sense.

What he's responding to is the death of chivalry.

And as I, as I go through chivalry, some, those of you who are familiar with Nietzche, uh, will, uh, will understand what, what, what I
mean, because I think it gets to the central critique that he makes about, about modern western culture and, and modernism as a project.

But that's, this is not actually about Christianity.

So, but of course we gotta say what do, what do I mean by, uh, by Shiri?

Right?

And so, uh, you know, to use the, the, we are not the same meme.

Your chivalry is about opening doors for women.

My chivalry is about persuading a horse, a quarter ton horse, perhaps even to carry me into battle in full played armor.

And we friends are not the same.

Okay.

So modern culture falsely equivalate chivalry with opening doors and being polite to women and, and cultivating a gentlemanly mindset and all of these things.

There's a gentleman on the internet named, uh.

Uh, gentleman might be stretching the term here, but Peter Wright, uh, who famously claims that that chivalry is proto feminism.

Um, and what I wanna say is, hey, the, the social behaviors that we're talking about here, those are merely what chivalry was alleged to produce, or occasionally.

Uh, they were sort of secondary behaviors that are, that are put on chivalry, uh, in order to, to restrain people, uh, because that's not what chivalry is.

The, the, the term chivalry comes from the French noun shevalier, which simply means cavalryman or horsemen, the French ese, you know, from which you get the chivalry.

The suffix means moving from a thing that does, or, or an a, a, a subject, right?

Uh, uh, uh, you're describing the thing that does a noun for, for a thing that, that exists to a, a, the erie sub, uh, suffix means the quality that makes a thing good or worthwhile, or a good example of, of the underlying noun form.

Okay?

So chivalry represents the specific set of qualities that made a man excellent at being a cavalry man, which is to say excellent at efficiently killing other men from the back of a horse.

Okay?

Now there's kind of a paradox here, which is surviving medieval combat required building a deep emotional relationship of trust with a powerful skittish horse, right?

And once you built that strong, intimate relationship of trust.

You then took that horse into a brutal battlefield, right?

With, with enormous amounts of chaos, blood, and guts.

And, and, and the horse had to, to be a good des trade, to be a good war horse, the horse had to fight with you.

Right?

Uh, you know, famously trained warn horses, uh, would, would probably actually kill more people if they're moving through unarmed peasants than, uh, than the night riding on top of them.

So, and, uh, and you've all, you've all seen this because we, we, uh, one of the things that, that, that I've noticed as I've been preparing for this is we have held on to chivalry, right?

We, we have decided we can't let chivalry die.

And so we have just clung to so many of these things.

Now in the American, and kinda the Australian context, the, uh, the, the, the cowboy, right, is the, uh, is the modern analog.

We try to preserve the, some of the core ideals.

And so, um, you, you've seen this in movies, in, in cowboy movies, if nothing else.

And this dynamic is often dramatized in movies where a man proves his inner worth.

By taming a wild horse.

You, you have seen that in some movie.

And taming a wild horse, uh, involves kind of a pure, magical moment where the internal character of a man becomes evident.

Okay?

So, um, you know when, when, what it looks like in the movies is you'll have a guy and he's, he's, he's down in the dumps.

He's lost everything.

Sometimes he may have, so he's lost usually all of his money, maybe some of his weapons.

He may, uh, some, some movies he's actually like, or some stories.

He's actually stripped naked, like he has no, no ability to impact the world.

He's lost all symbols of status.

Okay.

And a horse, he encounters this wild horse and he kinda slowly walks up to the horse and he puts his hand on the horse's cheek and he meets its eyes and he blows in its nostrils.

And then the horse does this thing where it, it blows back and kind of dips its head and then he can, he can ride the horse magical.

Right?

And, and the thing that I, I should mention to you like that, that actually happens now, it doesn't happen like it happens in the movies.

Okay.

At least not that I've ever heard.

There's, you gotta kinda work up to it.

It's more of like a two or three hour process.

Um, you know, I, I, you, you can, you can make, there's, there's a, there's a similar shortening in terms of the time and attention and effort required between how you, how you treat a, a woman properly and how you treat a horse properly.

Which, which is an important point to chivalry.

As I'll as, as I'll, I'll note in a bit, right?

But you have that magical moment, and then the guy can ride the horse and he jumps on the horse and they ride off and they're able to do something that the, the, the man couldn't do beforehand.

That is a core feature of a ton of stories in Western culture, literally going back to, to ancient Persia, right?

Like this, which is in some ways the, the birth of, uh, of this, this strand of history, okay?

And that strain of the west.

So a long time ago, the Greeks, there was a Greek historian named Tis, um, who, uh, was, was familiar with a number of Persians.

Uh, he was a warrior and he, he writes in histories, the Persian way of raising a boy into a man.

And the Persian way is very succinct.

And they, they, they knew this and they thought about it and they talked about it.

It is to teach a boy the horse and bow, and to teach him to despise all lies.

Okay?

And that's what's what's interesting is the despise all lies.

That character element that's probably related, at least many of the horse cultures, every horse culture that I've ever interacted with believes fundamentally that, that your word is your bond.

And that if you don't, if you don't have this sense of honor, if you, I don't have this internal sense of rightness, then you will lose your ability to connect with the horse.

You will lose, uh, the ability to inspire the greatest performance in these animals.

And, and what, what I wanna say, what I want the mindset shift that I want to, I want to give people is even before the Cowboys, right, for, for roughly 2000 years chivalry, which is to say
broadly the, the, the, the horse culture, the horsemanship culture in your nation determined it was the fundamental determining fact in your nation's ability to win wars and conquer enemies.

It was as objectively related to a nation's success as nuclear missiles and now missile defense are, are to ours.

Okay.

And, and this goes to one of the key differences between infantry and calvary.

So.

Infantry could defend very effectively, and they could even break other armies on the field of battle.

But the way that you conquer territory, the way that you make war pay for itself, the way that you go out and you actually, you know, accomplish stuff and,
and take in land and take in goods and, and, and come back with enough money from having gone to war that you can afford to do it again, is with pursuit.

And what you need for pursuit is cavalry.

Uh, what you need for, for pursuit is, is elites, um, you know, because cavalry men are always elites.

Uh, and that's, it's one of those, it's one of those quintessential things.

So, so cavalry men could pursue enemies and they could turn victory on the field of battle into loot properties and social acc claim.

Okay?

Now, one of the problems that we're going through is, is that, that in English we have, we have a dilution of terms, and so I'm going to.

Um, I'm going to quote an extended quote from mere Christianity.

Some of you will will be familiar with this one.

Um, but it's, it's on the, uh, and, and CS Lewis was a, was a linguist and, and a professor of English and very paid, very close attention to shifts and meaning of, of words.

And so he, he, this was, this was a subject in which he was an acknowledged expert.

So, uh, the word gentleman originally meant something recognizable.

One who had a coat of arms and some landed property.

When you called someone a gentleman, you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact.

If you said he was not a gentleman, you were not insulting him, but giving information.

There was not a contradiction in saying that John was a liar in a gentleman anymore than there was in saying that John was a fool in a gentleman.

But then there came people who said so rightly charitably spiritually, spiritually sensitively.

So anything but usefully.

Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behavior.

Surely he is a true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman, should thus good old English sense has been betrayed.

When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of approval, it no longer tells you about the object.

It only tells you about the speaker's attitude to that object.

A gentleman for my liberal friends means a man who shares my opinions.

For my conservative friends, it means a man who is educated at the same school I was, as a result, gentlemen, is now a useless word.

We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use.

On the other hand, if no one except school boys about their pals accepted it as a term of description, then it had better be scrapped altogether.

Okay.

CS Lewis Mere Christianity, which is a great.

Great quote, right?

And note the, and note the use of M dashes.

All right.

Probably would get a, you know, high score for having been written by AI if you ran it through an AI checker.

But, uh, but that's a quote from from CS Lewis.

So I believe that this same process happened with chivalry and likely before the process that Lewis is noting with chivalry.

I think gentlemen, and we'll go into this more next week, gentlemen, was, was an attempt by British society to kind of reboot the, the, the, some of the key goods of chivalry in, in an economic sense.

And, and, and to some extent a leadership sense, even though chivalry was not what it was.

And again, the point that I wanna drive home for you guys, there was a time, a, a long period of time, 2000 years at at least, where the skill of horsemanship, the skill of chivalry was an actual practical path to immense wealth and power.

It was a high earning profession, it was a higher earning profession.

Then software engineers is in our, in our culture.

It was, it was in fact probably the same kind of high earning profession that, you know, we see AI engineers getting very, very large signing bonuses and salaries as they, they hop from, from a ai company to AI company.

That is the kind of, of earning capacity that a trained knight had.

If you were a trained knight, um, you, you now, you'd have to go into debt if you didn't own a horse or your armor or your lance.

But the skill of being a trained knight was so valuable that you would be given generational wealth if you, if you mastered that domain.

Okay.

So, um, yeah, famously in, uh, in, in, in Britain, there was a point in time where one, one nightly family who was not that old, okay.

They weren't an old family, they were a relatively young family, so they, they grew very fast.

There was one nightly family that paid three and a half percent of British tax revenues, as I, as I recall, in one in, in a co for a couple of years.

And then he wised up and sort of, you know, divided the loop between him and his friends.

Um, but, uh, you know, but yeah, by, by, by contrast, I think Elon and the most, the, the, the most, the highest taxes Elon has ever paid, he still was only paying like two tenths of 1% of, of us tax revenues.

Okay.

So it, the, the earning capacity of the night was, was.

Profound.

It, it literally would create generational wealth.

Now obviously, you're also risking your life, so it's not for nothing.

Okay.

Uh, but, but, and it's not just the skill, it's also the risk that the personal risks that you're taking on the field of battle.

Okay.

But, um, back to chivalry, the core skills of chivalry involved getting a horse to trust you enough that you can ride it into battle and mastery of that skill.

We talked about related masteries, closely related masteries, um, and the things that you can, if you develop skill in one area, you can kind of directly apply it to another area.

Chivalry was an immensely, enormously useful domain for certain other core tasks of what it means to be human.

Namely, to persuade at least one woman, and ideally a whole group of men to follow you into battle in a new, uh, strange place, and to trust you along the way.

Okay.

So this means that mastery of the dominant military technology, right?

Again, for 2000 years, and, and, and, you know, things vary, but the dominant military technology still involved riding a horse.

It always involved riding a horse.

And that technology mastery of that technology directly made you better at being a husband, a father, a leader.

Okay?

And, and again, we're not, I don't have time to get into this this week.

We'll probably talk about it next week.

This has not been the case for the past 400 years.

That is one of the key before and after distinctions is in our world, mastery of the dominant technology, the dominant military
technologies or the dominant economic technologies, does not make you a good husband, a better husband, a better father, a better leader.

Um, all roads lead to atomization and breaking down the, again, as I, as I said, breaking down the human social molecule to smaller and
smaller and more short-lived, you know, arrangements, uh, was, was the, the, the dominant, the, the way of using these dominant technologies.

Okay?

Um, so.

One of the things about this is, you know, there, there's modern science tells us that, that oxytocin is the trust chemical, right?

So, uh, when you produce oxytocin, any mammal that's around you, uh, can smell roughly speaking, uh, well, maybe, I don't know.

You know, if you're, if you're, uh, if you have modern allergies and you're, you're mouth breathing, you can't breathe through your nose, um, then, then perhaps you can't smell.

And maybe that's contributing to the breakdown of human civilization.

I don't know.

Uh, but if, if you are around people who can smell, if you're around horses, if you're around other, other humans, uh, they can tell
with a, with an incredibly high degree of accuracy what your oxytocin levels are, and therefore that affects how they trust you.

Okay?

Um, so they can literally smell not just fear, but uncertainty or lack of trustworthiness.

And by the way, people, um.

People go all in on the, uh, on the, on the, you know, sense of smell thing.

Human sense of smell is not very good.

No, no.

Human sense of smell is not very well understood.

A human can actually smell.

There's, there's a particular smell, I, I'm blanking on the name for it.

Um, but the smell of, of rain on fresh earth.

You know, that, that, that fresh rain smell you as a human being, if you're in decent health, can smell that from farther away than a, a, a shark can smell blood.

Your nose is more sensitive to the smell of freshly rained on earth than, than almost anything in the animal kingdom, which is wild.

Um, it's not necessarily as, as as sharp as, you know, a, a, a tracking hound or something like that.

But, uh, but it's pretty sharp.

Okay.

And so there's this overlap between the, the skill of encouraging, uh, the, the, this great nervous horse, this great nervous mammal to trust you.

And again, your skill with women.

You see this in a whole bunch of art, right?

Uh, so Toto, Andana, Caria, they have a horse named Fru that, uh, poor Fru.

Uh, there's, there's a horse named Fru that is, uh, that is used as a metaphor for, uh, for what's, what's going on with, uh, the, the female leads life in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis.

Again, there's a, there's a bunch of somewhat explicit horse metaphors, uh, for, for what's going on there.

Um, and oh, yes, Petro Core is the name of the, the Smell.

So thank, thank, thank you to the chat.

Um, and then, and then, uh, you know, ride or die culture, and I'll, I'll, I'll talk about a little bit more in the next, here, here in the next couple slides.

But ride or Die culture comes to us most immediately from the motorcycle.

Um.

The motorcycle culture, but it was originally a horsemanship term.

Um, it was from the horse culture.

So women, as it turns out, are mammals.

And, and again, human human sense of smell is not understood.

We don't, we don't, we don't know how to use this.

We don't, we don't have good ways and that we just kind of call it lump it all as intuition.

That's probably not the most helpful way of interacting with these things that, that your body and brain really can tell you.

Uh, if you're, if you're healthy.

Um, so, so, but ride or die.

Okay, so I wanna, I wanna again, give you my understanding of, of of where this, this myth comes from.

Um, so you have a, you have a medieval battlefield and local women have gathered to cheer on the victors.

The leader of the riders covered in blood, mostly others, and sweat rides over to the crowd of peasants.

And he slows his horse.

Various women meet his eyes and in classic female fashion, kinda look away and then look back.

He selects one and he and his horse gonna walk towards her slowly, slowly, right?

Same, same as he did when he was taming the horse that he's riding.

So as not to spook the human Philly in front of him.

Um, and then all at once, she kind of reaches up and he reaches out and they swing her on the back of his saddle and they ride off into the sunset.

And they likely do not know each other's names.

She may not even speak his language, but those relationships were romanticized across Europe for most of the medieval period.

And, and kind of we, we continue to seek the ride or die woman.

The, the, the hard thing of course is, is that in the initial medieval culture, those women, they, they had just experienced a massive status league, right?

They had attached themselves to a guy with crazy high earning power, and he just won a battle.

Winning one battle was enough.

That was like a, that was like a software exit for you.

You know, you, you, you had just had a $20 million exit.

You, you, you, if you could stick with him, if she stuck with him, she would never have to worry about eating ever again, right?

She would never, you know, have to work in the same way.

And so those women were very loyal.

Many of them remained attached to that man who had boosted them enormously in status for the rest of their lives.

Um, then they frequently would not be able without the resources of that guy to return.

And, and after a couple years of living in the kind of the, the, the noble lifestyle, it would be almost unthinkable for that woman to return to where she came.

Um, so, so that, I mean, that was a good thing.

Like the ride or die women, those women really were, they existed and, and they existed.

Uh, I mean, it's hard to know how much they existed and how much they were kind of spoken into existence by the popular culture of the medieval period.

But, but this was a real thing.

Um, and, and people are still, still looking for it because again, we can't let go of chivalry.

We, we, we, we, we just need it.

We want it, all of our social relationships are so tied to this, this thing that used to work incredibly well from an economic perspective.

Okay.

And, and of course, you know, chivalry has this paradox, right?

This, this, this, this conflict in that, you know, you gotta genuinely love the men to qualify to lead them, but what you're gonna lead them into is deadly battle, right?

And almost always a, a shevalier was acting on behalf of a higher noble.

Who also loved his night.

That's why the knight was loyal to him.

But the, the whole thing that we're doing here is I'm sending you into battle to, to fight and die.

And, and this is, again, this is where the codes of chivalry come from.

It's, it's an attempt to, to reconcile this paradox.

Okay?

So that's, that's what chivalry is.

And, and so when we talk about aristocracy and, and, and, and that's the mastery of the horse.

So there's six domains that I, I wanna suggest to you constitute European aristocracy for the, let's say from, from Charlemagne until the, the, the beginning of the, the reformation, the invention of the firearm.

So there's three animal husbandry domains, the horse, the hound, the hawk, and there's three weapons domains.

The sword, the bow, the lance.

That is what the, the European aristocracy had.

That was their toolkit.

That was the thing that they had all mastered those domains.

Okay.

And so they would solve problems and they could solve problems in a, a whole bunch of things.

They were the leadership class for their, for their culture.

But almost all of the ways when they're successful is when they can either use directly those, those six domains or, or have a, a simple practical, sensible analogy to what they're doing in those domains.

So you see a lot of, you know, archery stuff for, for long range kind of economic things, because that's the way that they're used to thinking about stuff that's far away and kind of delayed in time.

And I'll also say that, you know, there were subtle differences between the nations of Europe as the weapons and tactics that they used shifted.

You know, when you had the age of exploration and more and more men were parts of, you know, spent time on a, uh, on a ship, a similar thing.

There, there, there, there's, there's shifts that happens there.

Um.

And, and one of the other points to make is, is that these, these things were reflected in the bodies and the minds, these changes, like the, the very specific details of,
um, of which technology set, which, which domain mastery, which type of noble that you were, affected you and followed you for your whole lives and, and even beyond, right?

Because of course, the people that were the most successful, the people that reproduced this were the folks that were the best at using these objective technologies.

Okay.

There, it was not a, a, a, a game of judging.

Right?

You know, famously, uh, you know, uh, figure skating, right?

Is, is it's just all, it's all the artistic thoughts of the judges, right?

There's it, I mean, there's some objective things, you know, did they pull off these different jumps?

But it's really, really hard to pin down what exactly the judge or, or the, you know, certain gymnastics, uh, events.

Similar, similar kind of a thing.

This was not that, this was not gymnastics, all right?

If you were really good at riding a horse or piloting a ship or fighting right from the back of a horse or from, from the deck of a ship, then you would be given an opportunity to prove that in battle at some point in your life.

And then you were a man, you were a blooded warrior, and, and what you had learned was good enough, eh?

Um, and so, and, and this contributes to, to a form of virtue.

And I, I, I think I may have said this on, on the podcast at some point or, or earlier, but, uh, you know, one of the factoid that I know from my misspent use is that every French
noble, uh, was, was expected to have a minimum of three sons, and four or five would be better to have a chance at having one of them live long enough to, to inherit from him.

Okay?

And these sons would drill and work out like to be a, a knight.

You had to be working out 20 to 30 hours a week.

All right?

And, and you would have to develop, you know, what the kinda, the modern Jim Bros would call an extreme physique.

You, you, you, you could not, you could not survive on the field of battle.

It would be exceedingly dangerous and, and, and a just a dumb thing to do to, um,

to try to, um, to do that.

So,

uh, yeah, so they, they, the, these people were, had to work really hard.

They had to spend an incredible amount of time.

They had a high pain tolerance.

Um, they, they, and they had to frankly have some pretty distinct physical chops in order to be a, a noble, you know, one of the things we talk about in domain mastery, and, uh, I had someone ask me, oh, does a q effect domain mastery?

And, and it affects it in this sense.

In order to achieve domain mastery in any domain, you have to be capable of, of quote, doing the rep, right?

You have to be capable of getting your reps in.

So if you can't get your reps in at, at, at a basic level, if you're, if you're not smart enough to do so, so for instance, most people don't know how to, uh, don't, don't get good at multiplying four digit numbers in their head.

And the reason for that is most people can't add four digit numbers in their head, right?

They have to break the problem down and, and, and into essentially two digit multiplication or one digit multiplication, right?

That's how people proceed through those problems.

They don't actually multiply one number by another number and get the answer.

Okay?

Um, if you could do that one time, then you could practice it and get better at it, and get faster at it, and get to the point where it's automatic and you're, you're, you're learning and growing.

Um.

And this is essentially one of the things that's going on in like the common core of the modern math curriculum is, is that there's a
difference in if what you're doing is trying to teach 99% of people math and how to do practical math quickly in a way that they can master.

Or if you're trying to search out and, and advantage the geniuses who can do the, the, the reps of the big numbers in their head and then get good at, at, at later things.

Okay?

But, but these guys, they had to be able to do the rep and then they had to put the work in the talent was not enough to carry you in, in medieval Europe.

Okay?

And so this meant that these nobles were, to an extraordinary degree, highly virtuous people, right?

You know, they talk about the French Paladins, Charlemagne's Paladins who, uh, were, were, were granted the right to make law.

They, they could, they could speak their words were law at the same as if the king had said it.

That's a crazy thing to give people.

All right?

And what I want, want you to know is for 200 years, that it took 200 years for that system to break down the French Paladin system.

That is astonishing to have generations after generation guys that are so aligned with their king that when they make a decree that when
they solve an individual case, when they're judging an individual case and the, the rules that they articulate as the laws of France, right.

That those don't conflict with each other, or, I mean, they, they'll, they'll slightly, but they, but that, that conflict was so small that we could work around it.

We didn't have to reboot the system for that to last 200 years.

That's crazy.

That is, that is an incredible intellectual accomplishment.

You know, and, and, and all of those guys were not selected primarily for their intellect.

They were selected primarily for the, their ability to, to, to pick fights and win them.

Okay.

So, um, so, so these, that, that rigorous thing, if, if you slacked off, if you were not virtuous, if you didn't develop that extreme physique, you were going to die.

You were not going to make it.

Um, and, and, and then you wouldn't be around to, um, to, to pass on your genes or to, to have your kids be contending for the next generation.

So over time, what this produced was a bunch of people who worked really hard in, in these domains and were incredibly good at that.

Okay.

Now, what happened?

And, and we'll return to, to donkey Hoti as as, as we're, as I'm wrapping up here because I want to, I want to get to the q and a before, uh, before people have to leave.

So what happened with Donte?

What's going on?

Donte, I had this, um, I had this, uh, economics professor who, uh, who was convinced that Donkey Hote was a, was about macroeconomics.

And, you know, it was sort of interesting, but the, the point that he made was the.

Throughout the book, up to the point where Donte tilts at windmills, there's a bunch of people that have come to him with their problems.

The peasants are suffering, the land is suffering, and donkey OTI is like, I'm a knight and I'm supposed to do something about the suffering of the people.

That's my job.

That's my role.

Which it certainly was.

That's what a, that's what a shevalier would do.

Okay?

That's what chival chivalry requires.

Um, and so if you kind of add up all of those problems that people have been complaining to him about, um, and analyze it from an economic
perspective, then what was going on was cheap mechanical power as exemplified by the windmills, was destroying the medieval economy.

Or to put it another way, the windmills really were giants eating the peasant's children.

Okay.

If you can, if you, if you can accept that at, at a meta metaphorical level.

And, and so what does a giant do?

How does a giant respond, or, sorry, see, what does a knight do?

How does a knight respond to giants?

Okay.

What is, what is, what toolkit does a knight have to deal with something that's eating the peasant's children?

And now you understand why Don CTE does what he does, right?

Because his tools are of course mastery of the horse, the hound and the hawk, mastery of the sword, the bow and the lance.

And so he gets his lance and he and he, you know, levels it and he rides at the giants trying to tear them down.

Because, because that's the only thing he knows what to do.

And this, you know, this is one of those incredibly important pieces of human psychology, which is most of the time we will choose to use a tool or a solution that we are familiar and comfortable with, rather than the best solution.

And sometimes that's, that's still good, right?

'cause you, you, you're gonna do better if you're, if you've mastered something than you would if, if you're, you know, kind of fumbling around and you can't, you're not competent with the tool.

So there's a minimum of competence.

Um.

But we will, we, we, we look at things through the framework of our toolkits.

And you know, this, the, the AI guys have really the, I think the cognitive science people already kind of knew this, but the AI folks have really just incredibly supported this notion that you see the world through the frameworks of your toolkits.

Like literally, that's what your brain is doing.

The way that your brain, the way that all brains, uh, have to have to process the complexity of our reality is to say, I've got these toolkits, right?

And these are the, these are the solutions that I can bring to the table.

And so that's what, that's what I'm going to, to use for things.

So, um, uh, another, uh, kind of the final concept that I'll, that I'll work us through and then, and then we'll, we'll jump into the q and a is, is, uh.

The idea of cut flowers, civilization, or cut flowers, culture.

So that comes from, actually, it originally comes from a guy named d Elton Trueblood, who's a, just a fascinating character, but it's popularized, uh, by, by Oz Guinness.

And so he, he talks about cut flowers culture or cut flowers, ideas where a cultural practice, uh, is cut away.

From the roots, right?

The underlying environment that made it, you know, successful, that gave it power, meaning, and ultimately life.

And Oz Guinness is constantly doing, dealing with this in reference to Christian morality, right?

So we have a culture, we have a legal framework for instance, that basically runs on Christian Mor moral principles.

But we don't know where those principles come from.

We have disconnected them from their actual kind of philosophical grounding.

And we have just sort of asserted these are the right conclusions, don't do the analysis 'cause we can't do the analysis.

'cause in order to do the analysis, we would need to appeal to a higher power.

And we have decided we don't wanna do that.

So that's, that's how Oz Guinness uses the term.

And, and, and I think it's helpful to think about chivalry in this way.

So, you know, as with a flower, if you cut a flower, like it doesn't immediately wither, it still looks beautiful, sometimes it still smells beautiful.

You can bring it in and put it in a, in a vase and it'll, it'll do well, but eventually it will die.

And unless you're, you know, able to do some kind of remarkable.

You know, transplanting things, uh, it's, it's not gonna, it's not gonna grow.

It's not gonna give fruit.

You, you would need to, um, you need to understand that, that, that a cut flower cannot, without being planted, without, you know, deliberate intervention to return it to a state where it could grow.

Uh, cut flowers cannot reproduce.

They, they, you can't grow, you don't, you don't get a Rose Bush from a a a a rose in a, in a vase.

So.

What I wanna suggest to you is that chivalry as a system, as a, as a, a pragmatic thing, that, that, that worked well was cut off by the invention of the firearm, right?

So in short and in conclusion, the, the, the version of chivalry and aristocracy as a whole, that the French revolution opposed and that gets trotted out for propaganda purposes, was the cut flowers version of chivalry, right?

And, and it was, it was the, this was no longer a flower that looked alive, it looked dead, it smelled bad.

It was causing problems.

Mold was growing.

All right?

This was a, this was a bad thing that was not, not, not producing what we wanted.

Um, now, and we'll, we will talk about this more in, in the future.

Mastery of that toolkit was still the basis for our leadership class, but it was less and less grounded in, uh, the actual military or economic realities.

So.

And there's, there's this concept, so you think about like a, like a peacock, right?

Uh, peacock has a, has its feathers and they're very beautiful.

Uh, it's, it's a mating display, right?

Um, but the, the peacock, the, the feathers of the peacock do not give it any practical advantages.

It's just purely mating display.

It doesn't help it run.

I mean, peacocks, male peacocks can't fly.

Uh, at least not when they're, when they're in that, that, you know, that display season, uh, they, they have focused everything on this ability to, uh, to, to display the, these beautiful feathers, which is what attracts them.

Amazing.

So it's a successful strategy.

It reproduces, but uh, it reproduces basically when, when you have humans, like peacocks have gone so far to the point where they kind of have to be protected by a human.

Uh, peacocks don't exist.

There are no, they're really not that many wild peacocks and, and wild peacocks are not as beautiful.

They're not as vibrant because if they're in the wild and they have to run from things, then.

The, the, the, the kind, the pe the birds that we think of as peacocks don't make it very well.

Um, and that's kind of what happened with chivalry is, is it became disconnected.

There was no longer any contact with reality.

Uh, and, and, you know, having, having frequent contact with reality is, is what you, is what you need.

Uh, you know, that's when, when you see bubble behavior, right before a stock market crash, uh, bubble behavior is a classic thing that happens when no one is actually interacting.

No one is grounding these transactions in an, in an underlying economic reality.

And so you spiral up and then the bubble pops and, and, and there's a crash, right?

And that's when, when chivalry became the, the basis for leadership, but it was no longer an objective skill that you were using to make money and win battles and do all those things.

Okay.

Um.

That, that became problematic.

That became problematic.

And, and then again, it led to these abuses in, in France and Spain and, and really throughout Europe and, and led to, you know, all of the, the, the negative propaganda.

But I think, I think the point that I wanna make here in, in conclusion is chivalry really is dead.

Right?

We, we are not going to get back to like whatever AI does, whatever it means.

And I, and I, I, and I articulate this and I think this is, this is where it's going.

When, when, when I say and when others people talk about how we're becoming more aristocratic, right?

Uh, will Tanner's, as I mentioned in the beginning, will Tanner's great article about, you know, being a yeoman in an oligarchs world when he's talking about that, that
doesn't mean that, that the, the character of the nobility is going to be similar to the, um, to the, the, the, the European nobility of, of the, the last millennia.

Right.

The, there's a ton of like very specific things about the way that Noble's interacted with reality that are very much based on horse culture, right?

They're very much based on the fact that these guys spent their formative years interacting with horses, interacting with bloodshed training very hard in a
physically demanding environment, um, to, to accomplish with like that, that was the core of their personality and that was the basis of their shared culture.

Okay.

I mean, maybe that could come back right, but it, it doesn't look like that to me.

Like when, when we talk about AI creating a more aristocratic culture, it's, it's, it's it's goods.

It's virtues will be different from the chivalric virtues.

It's, um, it's vices will be different from the chivalric vices.

Okay.

And, and so the, the the, the more that we can, we can disconnect from that, from, from the romantic idea of the horsemanship culture and the things that it produced.

You know, these, these particular, I mean even things like the ride or die stuff, like, I mean, maybe, maybe some aspects of that can be recaptured.

Maybe some aspects of that can be even designed into certain AI systems.

That would be great.

We should think about that.

And I plan to talk about that, but that won't happen by accident.

And so I think a lot of the, a lot of the concern, a lot of the pushback that people give to the idea of aristocracy is really based on this bogeyman, it's based on a snapshot of a wilted
mold covered bad smelling cut flower 200 years plus after it was cut away from its original economic and military justification that, I mean, that flower lasted a long, long time, you know.

I'm, I'm very impressed.

We should, we should give mad props to the people that kept it going as long as it's, as it kept going.

And, and I, and again, I'll note, we still, we don't have like an alternative, right?

We still want our leadership class to, to be based on chivalry.

We still want those qualities and, and we do want those qualities, and I'm not, I'm not, I'm not criticizing that, but we have to recognize that, um, just like, you know, with the Olympic games, right?

When people think about like the discus and the, and the javelin throw, like those, those were at one point military technologies, right?

Um, sort of, sort of, you know, the Olympic games at ancient Greece were equivalent to a modern, you know, war games.

Where, where, you know, we have different fleets of, of people who are friends but might also be enemies at some point.

And we're showing off how much we can blow stuff up.

That's what the original Olympic games were, right?

Do you wanna go fight a city that's got a guy that can throw a javelin that far that hard?

Well, maybe, maybe we should make peace or maybe we should assassinate that guy before we attack.

Who knows?

Right?

Uh, but it was a way of, of communicating, of, of, of demonstrating your capacity for deterrence purposes.

And now in the modern day, the Olympic Games is not that, like, that's, I mean, there, and I'm not saying that the Olympic games are bad and that
there aren't many good and wonderful things that you get from, from doing that, but that's not what the Olympic games are in the modern context.

Um, so we have to reckon and, and they will never be that again.

That there will never be a point in time.

I cannot imagine a world in which participation in the classical track and field events in an, in the Olympic games becomes militarily relevant.

Okay.

And, and, and that is, I, I see a lot of that kind of anachronism in these discussions of what does it mean to be a aristocratic?

And so when, when I talk about aristocracy, I, I'm talking about long-term, stable social molecules that are larger, not, not just, you know, larger than the, than than an individual, but actually larger than the married pair.

You're talking about groups of 10 to 20, maybe up to 50, that, that have long-term, usually lifelong relationships or even multi-generational relationships.

There's a number of different ways that you can achieve that effect.

And I think that is something that is universally, uh, valuable and important and that we should recover.

Okay.

It's good for, I think it's good for marriage, it's good for leadership, it's good for cultivating those things, but it's not, um.

That's not the same thing as saying that the horse is gonna make a comeback as, as a military technology, right?

So chivalry is dead and there's, there's great things about that.

There's terrible things about that.

We need to recognize that, learn what we can from that culture.

'cause we studied that culture intensely and we learned a lot.

Um, but we need to not, uh, not get stuck on the fact that, oh my goodness, you know, we are, are, are we going back to, uh, to the, the chivalry of years past?

Or are we even go, you know, the, the worst version of this is, are we going back to the chivalry, you know, of of, of the nobility right before the French Revolution?

The an, the answer is just no.

Like, that's not the, even if that would be a good thing, that can't happen.

So, alright, that, uh, that concludes my prepared remarks.

So, we'll, we'll transition.

Thank you everybody for listening to the, the public version of, of this talk.