I can barely name any of my representatives anymore or even care. It used to be I could explain the web of state politics in detail but the Democrats are all California progressives at this point and almost all the Republicans are token robots in empty suits with nothing to say or take a stand on. There was no way to stop it with all the Californians moving in.
To be fair, I’d argue that for most people the only real elected official that matters is their sheriff. I know that is the case for me. I’m not registered to vote in my area (I think I’m still registered in Oregon….) but I actually tried to get registered this last election cycle solely for the Sheriff’s office. Sadly, it was past the registration cut off for local elections!
So, know the local laws and what matters.
I’d argue that, for things that aren’t fake and gay, there’s more real politics (the art of determining how to govern a group of people) that can happen in a book club, a pub, or an after church meeting than in voting.
That is, if you have a real community.
If not - you’re just getting fat on coffee and donuts or drinking beer while discussing opinions that don’t matter.
Great podcast, though I object to one thing; all of Europe is absolutely French and should be again, Charlemagne was a thing after all and so everyone over there should just assimilate, darn Brits & Germans thwarting French manifest destiny! ;)
That said, I do think there's much to ethnos here that does indeed make a country what it is. I also think though an ethnos without an ethos is doomed and little more than 'meat robots' if that makes any sense? I view it as though not my place to meddle in others' business. But Ethos is necessary, so that one needs 'ethnos and ethos' so to speak.
It might sound odd on the matter of the rural-urban divide that I get the desire to travel into the cities to see the ancient sites and the like. But more and more, I've less and less desire to live in an urban city, and prefer the countryside and the woods, mountains, stars and rivers. It's hard to even bring oneself to care anymore about what the city is getting up to. Dunno what you guys make of that. I'm content to teach, to write and compose in the countryside, in the woods and go out only on occasion.
I think that, in order to hold together, any Empire must have a sense of itself that it imparts across the Empire. That this must be captivating and draw people to want to belong to it.
However, people really only fight and die for their nations. You look at all Empires, and when the sense of belonging to a nation wears away and withers, Empires have to bribe and pay for a mercenary force. A paid, professional army out of its citizens. You see this in Rome, where it had to pay for the barbarians and then came to be ruled by them. The same for the French citizen armies.
If you hold what I was saying in the podcast, where the true Americans are the British founders and their descendants, and the rest of us are mere citizens similar to the barbarians of Rome - then those of us being paid to join the army and then are leading the country are similar to the barbarians of Rome.
Only now, the country has done such a good job destroying the nations of us "barbarians" that we don't even know what we are! We don't know if we're Irish, Polish, German, Mexican, or anything - and we don't want to fight in the army. We don't want to be politicians because we think that they're evil and untrustworthy. We don't have any sense of magnanimity - greatness of soul that wants to leave behind legacies for our ancestors!
And I would argue that a lot of this is because we don't have a sense of what nation we belong to. What our ancestors are going to be. What cities properly are. That's why I took a minute to "make Aristotle great again" because without doing so, we don't have those proper ideas in mind, and I think they DO make a great difference to the drives and dreams of the people on the ground, Just doing things. They make a difference to the stories we tell, those that we value close to our hearts, and the epic loves that drive us to sacrifice to God and Nation.
For if we don't know what a Nation is, how do we belong to it, let alone sacrifice to it?
Anyways, to bring it back around - Trump is trying to rebuild the Empire. But it's up to us to rebuild hearth and home. We can start there, and see if our successors meet Trump's somewhere in the middle.
Yeah, family history is important, and founding stock is amazing. I have none and my wife’s family isn’t big on history, so no knowledge on that side. But it’s all amazing stuff.
Fascinant. I do mostly agree, what's interesting is that the return to basics with regards to nations seems to be happening. I'm seeing it amongst the French/Quebecois but also the Germans, Japanese etc.
But with an upbeat, positive frame of mind, yes? That was my main takeaway from the entire show. That and how Alex wooed his wife to be. A smooth operator!
Well thanks for the kind words. I have to say - this was my favorite podcast I’ve done. Building communities is a beloved subject of mine, and I hope that you enjoy this one as well.
The way you describe the support system you all enjoy in your community reminds me of the way of life enjoyed here, on the outskirts of town in Cork, Ireland, just a couple of generations ago. Minus rearing the pigs! Fast forward a couple of generations, and that way of life is gone. And not for the better. Really enjoying your take on the empire crumbling.
I’m very blessed, and don’t deserve what I have. The pigs I have are old spots, originally bred in England; those no good red coats!
It makes me sad what the Sons of Aaron have given up under the heels of their own overlords, and then wanting to join that Empire. The propaganda was strong after WW2, and it’s just such an utter travesty and tragedy after all the blood and sorrow over the centuries. One can only hope that they’ll turn around - like one hopes all countries will! - to the beauty of rejecting modernity and embracing themselves.
Im optimistic about the turn around, as you put it, as the institutions that emerged after WW2 are finally dissolving in front of our eyes. The mainstream media is trusted less than the political establishment they report on, and that takes some doing. People have stopped listening to those that are incapable of understanding, never mind actually governing them. Right across Europe. And as has happened in the States. All eyes are on you! Still the most important country in the world. No pressure. Haha. In the meantime, it’s faith, family, and friends to work on. As Phisto remarked upon earlier, it’s the seemingly mundane things, but if done well, consistently, that really matter most. You have to put in the hours. Especially with kids. There is no substitute.
I’ll second what Uncouth was saying about the cost of rural life. It can be very reasonably priced if you go in with the right expectations: you’re not going to become an industrial scale farmer or totally independent of the grid, definitely not overnight and probably not ever. Go in with the mindset of becoming just a little more independent and self-determined, not with some fantasy of being an off-grid prepper.
On a cultural level, if you’re moving to a rural community from somewhere else, you have to be aware that you’re the outsider and probably will be for a long time. Defer to your neighbors and their experience and don’t come in trying to shake things up. I have a 70 year old man on my road who has been living there since he was a young boy. One of my neighbors used to fish in the farm pond on my property when he was a kid. He doesn’t have a mortgage payment because he inherited his modest house from his dad. You might own your land legally and possess it physically, but you probably don’t really OWN it until your family has lived on it for a couple generations.
My favorite part of living out there is the peace and quiet. We’re back in the city right now temporarily until we get our house rebuilt (lost it in a wildfire in March) and one of the biggest changes has been that I forgot how noisy the city was. Traffic noise, police sirens, tweakers walking by your front yard talking to themselves; none of that exists in the country. And nobody trying to trans my kids is a nice plus.
One important thing for me is that I moved to the country after getting married and brought my wife with me. If I had moved out here before getting married or at least meeting my wife, it would have been considerably harder to meet a woman. There just aren’t as many of them around, and my touch of the ‘tism made it a bit of a struggle for me in the first place.
Also Alexandru, you’re spot on about the military not being as conservative as people think. I had the same experience of growing up in an evangelical conservative home, joining the military at 18, and becoming vastly more liberal and degenerate. The bulk of the stuff I had to repent for when I joined the Church happened between about ages 20 and 27. At some point after I joined the military, my parents sold the house I grew up and lived in from ages 5-18. That was super disorienting for me even though I didn’t appreciate it at the time. After that, when I went back to visit I wasn’t really going home even though they lived in a smaller house in the same town.
And, if you have a community to help, it gets even easier. If someone owns a saw mill, it’s great. Specialized tools for working on cars. Heavy equipment. Tractor attachments. All that comes with the whole thing. I’m regularly letting people use my stock trailer, and regularly using other people’s skills or knowledge.
You’re all in it together. Both the day to day, and the journey to calvary. That’s how we look at it - because that’s how it is.
My opinion on the urban-rural difference is that it ultimately is rather reminiscent of the man-woman difference. Both have shockingly little in common in terms of preferences and abilities, yet good bloody luck trying to get any society consisting of only one (or a society in which only one has any power/authority) to not collapse quite shortly.
In terms of the discussion around ~55 minutes in, this urban-rural difference is perhaps most stark in terms of how 'independent-minded' a person is. In general, people raised in rural areas (and especially those who choose to live there) are more independent-minded than people raised in urban areas. IMO this is for the simple reason that in the countryside it is that much easier to 'just do things' without having to consult a landlord, lawyer, building manager, local government, zoning commission, road planner, etc.
Now, being independent-minded can be very useful, but it can also be very dangerous. (I want to say 'problematic' but the bloody leftists have ruined that term). All of the great inventors, statesmen, leaders, generals, etc. in history have been very independent-minded... but so have all of the great criminals, swindlers, murderers, etc. People who are *not* independent-minded tend to be those who on the bad end form the rampaging armies of history or bloodthirsty mobs... but they're also the churchgoing guy who punches a time clock 5 days a week for 40 years and keeps society ticking over without ever making waves.
A society absolutely needs both. Thus, urban and rural areas should be kept as legally and legislatively separate as possible: society needs both types, and letting either one get control over 'what sort of behavior is allowable' will lead to the other type being suppressed and thus depriving society of their contributions.
Right now in the USA as a whole and my neck of the woods in particular (portions of the State of Jefferson currently occupied by California) the urban areas have far too much dominance. That leads to things like laws & law enforcement reaching ever-further out from the hard-Left city centers, regulations making it more difficult to do any work on your house or property without paying hundreds of thousands in building licenses, etc.
To be fair, I can imagine a society where it was the other way around, and rural mindsets were overly dominant. A place where cities had no zoning laws, emissions rules, noise ordnances, or the like. That would certainly make any urban area an absolute mess to live in.
(For the sake of the good point on 'why should I listen to random people online' early in the video, I'll also admit that I've only ever lived in rural/suburban areas all of my life, and I certainly never intend to change that. I'm also very far down the scale towards independent-mindedness. That said, my friends group from back in university included several great people from major urban areas as well as many from rural areas, and that independent-mindedness scale matched exactly 1:1 with their backgrounds. Their level of contribution and drive on group projects also was in line with my prediction based on their backgrounds: the urban students went with the group's flow, while the rural students drove things... both good and bad.)
The independent mindedness was actually a HUGE problem for us out here for a lot of years. No one wanted to cooperate on things or projects. Any issues came up, and people would bail on the project and it'd just get put on the rocks or dwindle down to a much smaller scale.
Some of the big turning points were when someone built a brewery and we started having regular things like book clubs. We have more going on with children's groups as well, coop schools, and there's a production of Midsummer Night's Dream being rehearsed right now for August production. Things where men regularly saw each other and hashed out differences.
Now, we still have independent minded people. They still do a lot of their own things. But they get over it after going home and calming down.
So, it's there - but it shouldn't be. If you think that there's any ability to be 'independent' in the country, I promise you that's simply an illusion of modernity. You absolutely need people of a community, and if you read anything from All Things Great and Small, to Little House on the Prairie, to Tolstoy - you can see people needing things when it comes to rural life. It's still the same, we simply contract it out to Amazon, Walmart, and the city instead of our neighbor. We make it more expensive in doing so, less human, more artificial. And in hiring contractors from outside your neighbors to solve problems, or anything else.
I mean, I didn't get into it much in the podcast, but we're -close- to being able to take care of people from birth to death. We have a retired midwife in the community, lots of young ladies that might be interested in the trade, lots of trade builders, lots of car mechanics, can grow a lot of our own food (not all of it), and bury our dead. It's not everything, but it's a lot. And working towards building our own community center. I'm working on building a slaughter area, we have a smoke house... I mean....
When you get people "just doing things" that are put towards the community, you get people that look towards the needs of each other.
It's gets really humbling, really quick.
Sorry for the wall of text. This is just my passion and life work. I could happily go on about it for hours, literally, and it's over my cup of coffee in the morning.
If anyone ever wants me on a podcast or post for tips for how to physically of spiritually do any of this, I'd gladly do so in a heart beat. I'd love to save people trials, and the man I look up to for how to do this, my neighbor, is actually an ex-Californian contractor from LA, who moved to Montana with his wife after he converted to Catholicism and started on this path learning from the Amish. So he had the same learning curve, just has a 10 year head start on me.
I strongly agree with your entire comment. The independent-mindedness of many rural people is a major (perhaps *the* major) barrier to any sort of community and organization out here. There's a reason the phrase 'herding cats' is so popular!
If I may refine my point from last night, upon further thought I believe that 'independent-mindedness' should be better defined as resistance to *formal* authority, rather than *any* authority. They (might) listen to someone whom they know personally and have been given reason to trust, but will reflexively ignore even a highly-credentialed 'authority' (anything from a university degree to a government badge) who is a stranger to them.
To use a hypothetical example from your excellent-sounding community, if one of the 'trade builders' went to a homestead under construction and said "Hey, this thing isn't up to code" they might just get ignored; but if they said instead "Look Joe, I've been building houses all my life and I see a few problems here. You're using 2x4s for the load-bearing wall studs rather than 2x6s, and that's just not going to last for 30 years. I don't want to see that happen to my neighbor." they might see more success.
Similarly, I imagine that the people in your community who send their children to one of the co-op schools care less whether the instructor(s) are certified by your state's department of education, and care rather a lot more about the perceived moral character and perhaps intelligence of the instructor(s).
So yes, in my opinion the best of both worlds is when the cats do voluntarily form a herd, when the independent-minded rural types voluntarily come together into a community of mutual trust and respect. The challenge there is that that takes a lot of time to build, and it isn't really scalable beyond a village or small-town. And in the modern world of high time preference and one-size-fits-all politics, those two points are a major stumbling block for a lot of people.
But, that's how most of human life is. And why it simply takes time to build things that are human scale, for humans, to human preferences - because it takes time for a group of people to come to agreement on these decisions.
There's a reason that Thomas Aquinas calls the foundation of all Laws to be things like customs and traditions. He's not saying anything about natural or divine law - those things are absolutely law and determine morals. But human laws are what determine what responses are taken when moral laws are broken, and those are determined by traditional responses taken by community opinions formed over time. The same with more trivial things like speeding laws, right of ways, littering fines, education, etc.
This is why, when I said on the podcast, a nation is a group of people that are a race, I really do mean that. Because you have to have people that have grouped together for a long time in one specific location, marrying each other and living together in real human life; to agree on these things. To have a unified culture, unified law, unified race through marriage, etc.
These things take time, and they are specific to a time and place. The dispositions of the people the laws are made for. The education. Small variations in weather, genetics, the food available, resources, building materials, or any number of things can make a lot of changes in traditions, laws, and customs of a people, a city, or a nation when you look at it historically.
So why force it quickly? Just keep it in mind, and let it develop in a gentle, human, and deliberate way.
Good beer helps a lot of things. It’s also a nice place just to hang out. Family friendly. You can bring children of all ages; there are books, a few acres of grass, a swing from a tree, and other stuff. There’s no neighbors you have to worry about, it’s set back from the road. You literally can just go and let them run around without having to worry about any but a troublemaker, if you have one.
So, it really is a nice place to encourage people to get over any disagreements that they have in the village. We run meetings there. We’ve had sheriffs and state reps come there when running for office. Ran classes on first aid and other stuff we want people to know. All kinds of things.
Until we get a real community center going, it’s the stand in.
The pubs, or locals, as we called the ones dotted all over the town, were the hub of our working class communities. Football teams would have a favourite one, and were usually sponsored by the landlords, and breweries. There were music nights, bingo nights, quiz nights, and then the smoking ban came along and was partly responsible for the closure of a quarter of pubs, nationally. Then came COVID, and the pubs that did open up again are a shadow of their former glory days . Laugh too much now and you might be asked to leave. And not child friendly at all. Ridiculous. Uncivilised behaviour!!
So, lucky you and your community, eh? Long may it last.
The pub, or local, as we called the ones dotted all over the town, was the hub of our working class communities. Football teams would have a favourite one, and were usually sponsored by the landlords, and breweries. There were music nights, bingo nights, quiz nights, and then the smoking ban came along and was partly responsible for the closure of a quarter of pubs, nationally. Then came COVID, and the pubs that did open up again are a shadow of their former glory. Laugh too much now and you might be asked to leave. And not child friendly at all. Ridiculous. Uncivilised behaviour!!
So, lucky you and your community, eh? Long may it last.
The pub, or local, as we called the ones dotted all over the town, was the hub of our working class communities. Football teams would have a favourite one, and were usually sponsored by the landlords, and breweries. There were music nights, bingo nights, quiz nights, and then the smoking ban came along and was partly responsible for the closure of a quarter of pubs, nationally. Then came COVID, and the pubs that did open up again are a shadow of their former glory. Laugh too much now and you might be asked to leave. And not child friendly at all. Ridiculous. Uncivilised behaviour!!
So, lucky you and your community, eh? Long may it last.
The pubs,or locals, as we called the ones dotted all over the town, were the hub of our working class communities. Football teams would have a favourite one, and were usually sponsored by the landlords, and breweries. There were music nights, bingo nights, quiz nights, and then the smoking ban came along and was partly responsible for the closure of a quarter of pubs, nationally. Then came COVID, and the pubs that did open up again are a shadow of their former glory. Laugh too much now and you might be asked to leave. And not child friendly at all. Ridiculous. Uncivilised behaviour!!
Great comment. I am very independent minded and chose the rural life. I live in town, so perhaps that is a reflection of my suburban upbringing. Your thoughts make me realize my choice is a return to form. I’m descended from Pilgrim stock that eventually settled Ohio.
I’m fortunate to live a half hour from my town centre, but in the other direction, I’m a 10 minute stroll and I’m into open countryside. I can walk to Blarney Castle from my place. One of my first summer jobs was picking potatoes in a farm that has since been built on, but at the time was a 5 min walk. The older I get, the less I go to town. It’s me, the youngsters, and our Jack Russell pup heading to the streams and rivers that I frequented almost daily as a child. The well worn paths along those streams back then, are almost completely overgrown. Despite children now living even closer than we did.
Guys, this episode was so bloody good. Alex’s description of his feelings around the internet of late mirror my own. For now, at least, it has becomes tiresome. It does feel like talking to demons at times!!😂Truly inspirational stuff from Uncouth Barbarian and yourselves for the first hour or so, and then I just smiled for the rest. Tramp stamps, Metallica, Tinder warnings, finding God in Afghanistan, Phisto basically saying that only a bullet will stop him calling out the bs, liberalism dismissed in a single sentence.. I mean come on.. a year ago there would have been a petition doing the rounds demanding the show be cancelled.. brilliant from start to finish. Thanks guys.
Your point is spot on. I started typing how I'm urban but independent then thought about it and have to agree. While I'm independent on many thing when it comes to living I default to urban politeness, “is that too loud for my neighbors,” and preferring small space.
Thanks, man. God bless you and yours, and keep up that remarkable work you are doing in your community. I see that as an inspirational template for us all, going forward.
I can barely name any of my representatives anymore or even care. It used to be I could explain the web of state politics in detail but the Democrats are all California progressives at this point and almost all the Republicans are token robots in empty suits with nothing to say or take a stand on. There was no way to stop it with all the Californians moving in.
To be fair, I’d argue that for most people the only real elected official that matters is their sheriff. I know that is the case for me. I’m not registered to vote in my area (I think I’m still registered in Oregon….) but I actually tried to get registered this last election cycle solely for the Sheriff’s office. Sadly, it was past the registration cut off for local elections!
So, know the local laws and what matters.
I’d argue that, for things that aren’t fake and gay, there’s more real politics (the art of determining how to govern a group of people) that can happen in a book club, a pub, or an after church meeting than in voting.
That is, if you have a real community.
If not - you’re just getting fat on coffee and donuts or drinking beer while discussing opinions that don’t matter.
Great podcast, though I object to one thing; all of Europe is absolutely French and should be again, Charlemagne was a thing after all and so everyone over there should just assimilate, darn Brits & Germans thwarting French manifest destiny! ;)
That said, I do think there's much to ethnos here that does indeed make a country what it is. I also think though an ethnos without an ethos is doomed and little more than 'meat robots' if that makes any sense? I view it as though not my place to meddle in others' business. But Ethos is necessary, so that one needs 'ethnos and ethos' so to speak.
It might sound odd on the matter of the rural-urban divide that I get the desire to travel into the cities to see the ancient sites and the like. But more and more, I've less and less desire to live in an urban city, and prefer the countryside and the woods, mountains, stars and rivers. It's hard to even bring oneself to care anymore about what the city is getting up to. Dunno what you guys make of that. I'm content to teach, to write and compose in the countryside, in the woods and go out only on occasion.
I think that, in order to hold together, any Empire must have a sense of itself that it imparts across the Empire. That this must be captivating and draw people to want to belong to it.
However, people really only fight and die for their nations. You look at all Empires, and when the sense of belonging to a nation wears away and withers, Empires have to bribe and pay for a mercenary force. A paid, professional army out of its citizens. You see this in Rome, where it had to pay for the barbarians and then came to be ruled by them. The same for the French citizen armies.
If you hold what I was saying in the podcast, where the true Americans are the British founders and their descendants, and the rest of us are mere citizens similar to the barbarians of Rome - then those of us being paid to join the army and then are leading the country are similar to the barbarians of Rome.
Only now, the country has done such a good job destroying the nations of us "barbarians" that we don't even know what we are! We don't know if we're Irish, Polish, German, Mexican, or anything - and we don't want to fight in the army. We don't want to be politicians because we think that they're evil and untrustworthy. We don't have any sense of magnanimity - greatness of soul that wants to leave behind legacies for our ancestors!
And I would argue that a lot of this is because we don't have a sense of what nation we belong to. What our ancestors are going to be. What cities properly are. That's why I took a minute to "make Aristotle great again" because without doing so, we don't have those proper ideas in mind, and I think they DO make a great difference to the drives and dreams of the people on the ground, Just doing things. They make a difference to the stories we tell, those that we value close to our hearts, and the epic loves that drive us to sacrifice to God and Nation.
For if we don't know what a Nation is, how do we belong to it, let alone sacrifice to it?
Anyways, to bring it back around - Trump is trying to rebuild the Empire. But it's up to us to rebuild hearth and home. We can start there, and see if our successors meet Trump's somewhere in the middle.
I need to reflect on this more, but discovering the depth of my family history as American founding stock was revelation.
Yeah, family history is important, and founding stock is amazing. I have none and my wife’s family isn’t big on history, so no knowledge on that side. But it’s all amazing stuff.
Fascinant. I do mostly agree, what's interesting is that the return to basics with regards to nations seems to be happening. I'm seeing it amongst the French/Quebecois but also the Germans, Japanese etc.
Just to add this has given me a lot to think about.
But with an upbeat, positive frame of mind, yes? That was my main takeaway from the entire show. That and how Alex wooed his wife to be. A smooth operator!
Definitely, wish I was that smooth.
Makes it sound effortless!😂
Ditto!
I think, in our decayed times, the return to rural is a sign of regeneration.
Agreed
Absolutely. And inevitable. Global supply chains will not be feasible due to energy extraction costs. Things will be slower. But excellent!👌
Two minutes in and Alex’s dogs are trying desperately for some airtime.. here we go!..
Stars of the show!
Nah, I’ve heard you on the show before, and it was a banger.
Well thanks for the kind words. I have to say - this was my favorite podcast I’ve done. Building communities is a beloved subject of mine, and I hope that you enjoy this one as well.
The way you describe the support system you all enjoy in your community reminds me of the way of life enjoyed here, on the outskirts of town in Cork, Ireland, just a couple of generations ago. Minus rearing the pigs! Fast forward a couple of generations, and that way of life is gone. And not for the better. Really enjoying your take on the empire crumbling.
I’m very blessed, and don’t deserve what I have. The pigs I have are old spots, originally bred in England; those no good red coats!
It makes me sad what the Sons of Aaron have given up under the heels of their own overlords, and then wanting to join that Empire. The propaganda was strong after WW2, and it’s just such an utter travesty and tragedy after all the blood and sorrow over the centuries. One can only hope that they’ll turn around - like one hopes all countries will! - to the beauty of rejecting modernity and embracing themselves.
Im optimistic about the turn around, as you put it, as the institutions that emerged after WW2 are finally dissolving in front of our eyes. The mainstream media is trusted less than the political establishment they report on, and that takes some doing. People have stopped listening to those that are incapable of understanding, never mind actually governing them. Right across Europe. And as has happened in the States. All eyes are on you! Still the most important country in the world. No pressure. Haha. In the meantime, it’s faith, family, and friends to work on. As Phisto remarked upon earlier, it’s the seemingly mundane things, but if done well, consistently, that really matter most. You have to put in the hours. Especially with kids. There is no substitute.
I’ll second what Uncouth was saying about the cost of rural life. It can be very reasonably priced if you go in with the right expectations: you’re not going to become an industrial scale farmer or totally independent of the grid, definitely not overnight and probably not ever. Go in with the mindset of becoming just a little more independent and self-determined, not with some fantasy of being an off-grid prepper.
On a cultural level, if you’re moving to a rural community from somewhere else, you have to be aware that you’re the outsider and probably will be for a long time. Defer to your neighbors and their experience and don’t come in trying to shake things up. I have a 70 year old man on my road who has been living there since he was a young boy. One of my neighbors used to fish in the farm pond on my property when he was a kid. He doesn’t have a mortgage payment because he inherited his modest house from his dad. You might own your land legally and possess it physically, but you probably don’t really OWN it until your family has lived on it for a couple generations.
My favorite part of living out there is the peace and quiet. We’re back in the city right now temporarily until we get our house rebuilt (lost it in a wildfire in March) and one of the biggest changes has been that I forgot how noisy the city was. Traffic noise, police sirens, tweakers walking by your front yard talking to themselves; none of that exists in the country. And nobody trying to trans my kids is a nice plus.
One important thing for me is that I moved to the country after getting married and brought my wife with me. If I had moved out here before getting married or at least meeting my wife, it would have been considerably harder to meet a woman. There just aren’t as many of them around, and my touch of the ‘tism made it a bit of a struggle for me in the first place.
Also Alexandru, you’re spot on about the military not being as conservative as people think. I had the same experience of growing up in an evangelical conservative home, joining the military at 18, and becoming vastly more liberal and degenerate. The bulk of the stuff I had to repent for when I joined the Church happened between about ages 20 and 27. At some point after I joined the military, my parents sold the house I grew up and lived in from ages 5-18. That was super disorienting for me even though I didn’t appreciate it at the time. After that, when I went back to visit I wasn’t really going home even though they lived in a smaller house in the same town.
Absolutely.
And, if you have a community to help, it gets even easier. If someone owns a saw mill, it’s great. Specialized tools for working on cars. Heavy equipment. Tractor attachments. All that comes with the whole thing. I’m regularly letting people use my stock trailer, and regularly using other people’s skills or knowledge.
You’re all in it together. Both the day to day, and the journey to calvary. That’s how we look at it - because that’s how it is.
My opinion on the urban-rural difference is that it ultimately is rather reminiscent of the man-woman difference. Both have shockingly little in common in terms of preferences and abilities, yet good bloody luck trying to get any society consisting of only one (or a society in which only one has any power/authority) to not collapse quite shortly.
In terms of the discussion around ~55 minutes in, this urban-rural difference is perhaps most stark in terms of how 'independent-minded' a person is. In general, people raised in rural areas (and especially those who choose to live there) are more independent-minded than people raised in urban areas. IMO this is for the simple reason that in the countryside it is that much easier to 'just do things' without having to consult a landlord, lawyer, building manager, local government, zoning commission, road planner, etc.
Now, being independent-minded can be very useful, but it can also be very dangerous. (I want to say 'problematic' but the bloody leftists have ruined that term). All of the great inventors, statesmen, leaders, generals, etc. in history have been very independent-minded... but so have all of the great criminals, swindlers, murderers, etc. People who are *not* independent-minded tend to be those who on the bad end form the rampaging armies of history or bloodthirsty mobs... but they're also the churchgoing guy who punches a time clock 5 days a week for 40 years and keeps society ticking over without ever making waves.
A society absolutely needs both. Thus, urban and rural areas should be kept as legally and legislatively separate as possible: society needs both types, and letting either one get control over 'what sort of behavior is allowable' will lead to the other type being suppressed and thus depriving society of their contributions.
Right now in the USA as a whole and my neck of the woods in particular (portions of the State of Jefferson currently occupied by California) the urban areas have far too much dominance. That leads to things like laws & law enforcement reaching ever-further out from the hard-Left city centers, regulations making it more difficult to do any work on your house or property without paying hundreds of thousands in building licenses, etc.
To be fair, I can imagine a society where it was the other way around, and rural mindsets were overly dominant. A place where cities had no zoning laws, emissions rules, noise ordnances, or the like. That would certainly make any urban area an absolute mess to live in.
(For the sake of the good point on 'why should I listen to random people online' early in the video, I'll also admit that I've only ever lived in rural/suburban areas all of my life, and I certainly never intend to change that. I'm also very far down the scale towards independent-mindedness. That said, my friends group from back in university included several great people from major urban areas as well as many from rural areas, and that independent-mindedness scale matched exactly 1:1 with their backgrounds. Their level of contribution and drive on group projects also was in line with my prediction based on their backgrounds: the urban students went with the group's flow, while the rural students drove things... both good and bad.)
The independent mindedness was actually a HUGE problem for us out here for a lot of years. No one wanted to cooperate on things or projects. Any issues came up, and people would bail on the project and it'd just get put on the rocks or dwindle down to a much smaller scale.
Some of the big turning points were when someone built a brewery and we started having regular things like book clubs. We have more going on with children's groups as well, coop schools, and there's a production of Midsummer Night's Dream being rehearsed right now for August production. Things where men regularly saw each other and hashed out differences.
Now, we still have independent minded people. They still do a lot of their own things. But they get over it after going home and calming down.
So, it's there - but it shouldn't be. If you think that there's any ability to be 'independent' in the country, I promise you that's simply an illusion of modernity. You absolutely need people of a community, and if you read anything from All Things Great and Small, to Little House on the Prairie, to Tolstoy - you can see people needing things when it comes to rural life. It's still the same, we simply contract it out to Amazon, Walmart, and the city instead of our neighbor. We make it more expensive in doing so, less human, more artificial. And in hiring contractors from outside your neighbors to solve problems, or anything else.
I mean, I didn't get into it much in the podcast, but we're -close- to being able to take care of people from birth to death. We have a retired midwife in the community, lots of young ladies that might be interested in the trade, lots of trade builders, lots of car mechanics, can grow a lot of our own food (not all of it), and bury our dead. It's not everything, but it's a lot. And working towards building our own community center. I'm working on building a slaughter area, we have a smoke house... I mean....
When you get people "just doing things" that are put towards the community, you get people that look towards the needs of each other.
It's gets really humbling, really quick.
Sorry for the wall of text. This is just my passion and life work. I could happily go on about it for hours, literally, and it's over my cup of coffee in the morning.
If anyone ever wants me on a podcast or post for tips for how to physically of spiritually do any of this, I'd gladly do so in a heart beat. I'd love to save people trials, and the man I look up to for how to do this, my neighbor, is actually an ex-Californian contractor from LA, who moved to Montana with his wife after he converted to Catholicism and started on this path learning from the Amish. So he had the same learning curve, just has a 10 year head start on me.
I strongly agree with your entire comment. The independent-mindedness of many rural people is a major (perhaps *the* major) barrier to any sort of community and organization out here. There's a reason the phrase 'herding cats' is so popular!
If I may refine my point from last night, upon further thought I believe that 'independent-mindedness' should be better defined as resistance to *formal* authority, rather than *any* authority. They (might) listen to someone whom they know personally and have been given reason to trust, but will reflexively ignore even a highly-credentialed 'authority' (anything from a university degree to a government badge) who is a stranger to them.
To use a hypothetical example from your excellent-sounding community, if one of the 'trade builders' went to a homestead under construction and said "Hey, this thing isn't up to code" they might just get ignored; but if they said instead "Look Joe, I've been building houses all my life and I see a few problems here. You're using 2x4s for the load-bearing wall studs rather than 2x6s, and that's just not going to last for 30 years. I don't want to see that happen to my neighbor." they might see more success.
Similarly, I imagine that the people in your community who send their children to one of the co-op schools care less whether the instructor(s) are certified by your state's department of education, and care rather a lot more about the perceived moral character and perhaps intelligence of the instructor(s).
So yes, in my opinion the best of both worlds is when the cats do voluntarily form a herd, when the independent-minded rural types voluntarily come together into a community of mutual trust and respect. The challenge there is that that takes a lot of time to build, and it isn't really scalable beyond a village or small-town. And in the modern world of high time preference and one-size-fits-all politics, those two points are a major stumbling block for a lot of people.
Agreed with a lot of it.
But, that's how most of human life is. And why it simply takes time to build things that are human scale, for humans, to human preferences - because it takes time for a group of people to come to agreement on these decisions.
There's a reason that Thomas Aquinas calls the foundation of all Laws to be things like customs and traditions. He's not saying anything about natural or divine law - those things are absolutely law and determine morals. But human laws are what determine what responses are taken when moral laws are broken, and those are determined by traditional responses taken by community opinions formed over time. The same with more trivial things like speeding laws, right of ways, littering fines, education, etc.
This is why, when I said on the podcast, a nation is a group of people that are a race, I really do mean that. Because you have to have people that have grouped together for a long time in one specific location, marrying each other and living together in real human life; to agree on these things. To have a unified culture, unified law, unified race through marriage, etc.
These things take time, and they are specific to a time and place. The dispositions of the people the laws are made for. The education. Small variations in weather, genetics, the food available, resources, building materials, or any number of things can make a lot of changes in traditions, laws, and customs of a people, a city, or a nation when you look at it historically.
So why force it quickly? Just keep it in mind, and let it develop in a gentle, human, and deliberate way.
Inspiring stuff, and I like how it was the brewery that got the ball rolling! Haha!
Good beer helps a lot of things. It’s also a nice place just to hang out. Family friendly. You can bring children of all ages; there are books, a few acres of grass, a swing from a tree, and other stuff. There’s no neighbors you have to worry about, it’s set back from the road. You literally can just go and let them run around without having to worry about any but a troublemaker, if you have one.
So, it really is a nice place to encourage people to get over any disagreements that they have in the village. We run meetings there. We’ve had sheriffs and state reps come there when running for office. Ran classes on first aid and other stuff we want people to know. All kinds of things.
Until we get a real community center going, it’s the stand in.
The pubs, or locals, as we called the ones dotted all over the town, were the hub of our working class communities. Football teams would have a favourite one, and were usually sponsored by the landlords, and breweries. There were music nights, bingo nights, quiz nights, and then the smoking ban came along and was partly responsible for the closure of a quarter of pubs, nationally. Then came COVID, and the pubs that did open up again are a shadow of their former glory days . Laugh too much now and you might be asked to leave. And not child friendly at all. Ridiculous. Uncivilised behaviour!!
So, lucky you and your community, eh? Long may it last.
The pub, or local, as we called the ones dotted all over the town, was the hub of our working class communities. Football teams would have a favourite one, and were usually sponsored by the landlords, and breweries. There were music nights, bingo nights, quiz nights, and then the smoking ban came along and was partly responsible for the closure of a quarter of pubs, nationally. Then came COVID, and the pubs that did open up again are a shadow of their former glory. Laugh too much now and you might be asked to leave. And not child friendly at all. Ridiculous. Uncivilised behaviour!!
So, lucky you and your community, eh? Long may it last.
The pub, or local, as we called the ones dotted all over the town, was the hub of our working class communities. Football teams would have a favourite one, and were usually sponsored by the landlords, and breweries. There were music nights, bingo nights, quiz nights, and then the smoking ban came along and was partly responsible for the closure of a quarter of pubs, nationally. Then came COVID, and the pubs that did open up again are a shadow of their former glory. Laugh too much now and you might be asked to leave. And not child friendly at all. Ridiculous. Uncivilised behaviour!!
So, lucky you and your community, eh? Long may it last.
The pubs,or locals, as we called the ones dotted all over the town, were the hub of our working class communities. Football teams would have a favourite one, and were usually sponsored by the landlords, and breweries. There were music nights, bingo nights, quiz nights, and then the smoking ban came along and was partly responsible for the closure of a quarter of pubs, nationally. Then came COVID, and the pubs that did open up again are a shadow of their former glory. Laugh too much now and you might be asked to leave. And not child friendly at all. Ridiculous. Uncivilised behaviour!!
Great comment. I am very independent minded and chose the rural life. I live in town, so perhaps that is a reflection of my suburban upbringing. Your thoughts make me realize my choice is a return to form. I’m descended from Pilgrim stock that eventually settled Ohio.
Farmers, soldiers, and craftsmen are my people.
I’m fortunate to live a half hour from my town centre, but in the other direction, I’m a 10 minute stroll and I’m into open countryside. I can walk to Blarney Castle from my place. One of my first summer jobs was picking potatoes in a farm that has since been built on, but at the time was a 5 min walk. The older I get, the less I go to town. It’s me, the youngsters, and our Jack Russell pup heading to the streams and rivers that I frequented almost daily as a child. The well worn paths along those streams back then, are almost completely overgrown. Despite children now living even closer than we did.
Guys, this episode was so bloody good. Alex’s description of his feelings around the internet of late mirror my own. For now, at least, it has becomes tiresome. It does feel like talking to demons at times!!😂Truly inspirational stuff from Uncouth Barbarian and yourselves for the first hour or so, and then I just smiled for the rest. Tramp stamps, Metallica, Tinder warnings, finding God in Afghanistan, Phisto basically saying that only a bullet will stop him calling out the bs, liberalism dismissed in a single sentence.. I mean come on.. a year ago there would have been a petition doing the rounds demanding the show be cancelled.. brilliant from start to finish. Thanks guys.
God bless you all and have a peaceful weekend.
Glad you liked it man. God bless you and keep you on your journeys.
Don’t forget to check out next weeks episode. Phisto will be giving an update on his Starship Trooper academy’s progress. Take it easy man.
Your point is spot on. I started typing how I'm urban but independent then thought about it and have to agree. While I'm independent on many thing when it comes to living I default to urban politeness, “is that too loud for my neighbors,” and preferring small space.
Thanks, man. God bless you and yours, and keep up that remarkable work you are doing in your community. I see that as an inspirational template for us all, going forward.
Tinder is worse than a hook up app. It's a sexless hate desert where good things go to die.
Also, Star Trek, werewolves, I do..!
Hilarious.