Bennett's Phylactery

#2: The Frontier Was Always Closed (To You)

Some thoughts about Albion’s Seed [https://amzn.to/3yJb0t8] for the Fourth of July, and why this incredibly fractious group of (by modern standards) patriarchal authoritarian illiberals all got together to design a system of government with freedom of speech, religious toleration, due process, separation of powers, etc. Also why, if they could see our current situation, they would be grossed out, but would not be remotely “blackpilled”, and if you explained the meaning of that word to them would laugh at you and tell you to nut up.

#1: The Lord Jesus

I’ve been chewing on five or six different essays for the last several months, and they’ve never come out quite right, and I’ve realized that they’re all aiming in roughly the same direction. Progressives and Nietzschean/post-Christian rightists understand the message of Jesus in roughly the same way — both view the gospel of Jesus Christ as a radical abolition of human hierarchy — they just disagree about whether that’s a good thing. It’s completely at odds with everything I believe about who he was and what he taught, but it is an easy conclusion to draw from the four or five verses that ordinary people have memorized. And however facile and incoherent it may be, this understanding of what Christ was Really All About clearly has broad social currency, which is why Christendom has been absolutely helpless in the face of progressivism for the last century or more. Most casual Christians are already progressives, they just don’t know it yet — so when it is introduced to them explicitly, the transition is completely natural, almost automatic. So this episode is just an initial attack on that problem. I’ve never done a solo podcast before, so it’s a stream of consciousness, but I wasn’t having much success writing all this stuff down, and I needed to get it out of my head.