I am joined by my friend Kruptos! He is the author of the website Seeking the Hidden Thing, the leader of a powerful group chat called the Christian Ghetto, and an illuminating twitter effort thread poaster. He has been on more podcasts than I can count, but I will link a couple that I particularly enjoyed. It was great to discuss building a parallel polity and the tradeoffs attending technology.
Links to Kruptos’ materials:
Twitter / X: Kruptos
Substack:
Seeking the Hidden ThingPodcast Appearances: With Auron MacIntyre Can the Administrative State be Replaced? (he has many more all over but this was my favorite)
With
Christian Community in the Internet AgeVitalism and Christianity (my appearance on his podcast (with Big Tuna) “The Christian Ghetto” which is on Seeking the Hidden Thing)
Core questions that we discussed:
1. In a tweet that you put out this morning you quoted Elon Musk who said that the Democrats are bringing in illegal immigrants so that in the future they can cement one-party state status. You replied, “Only in America could you believe this. In many places where mass immigration is happening there is effective one party rule already. “Replacement” is not the right word. They hope to create world peace by mixing up the peoples of the world to create one global civilization.”
2. You wrote a wonderful essay entitled, “Building a Parallel Polity: Sketching Out the Road Ahead.” What is a parallel polity?
3. You say at one point in the article, “The key in this is to disentangle ourselves from both the punishments and the rewards of the regime.” Could you expand on this? I think that this is really important and is related to a lot of problems that say, Plato or Jane Austen are concerned with.
4. Okay, so if a parallel polity is going to be a radically different mode of political organization than the state, it would follow that it needs a different relationship with technology. Before we move into the problems of technology, I thought we could discuss a BAP tweet that has really stuck with me where he has a picture of Werner von Braun standing next to model rocket ships next to a picture of a giant world favela that is tightly packed and dirt poor. The image basically says to us: which way Western man? I think you have an alternative in mind that pushes against this dichotomy; could you speak on that?
5. I really enjoyed your article, “The Loss of Arete: Why Technology Makes You Dumber and Less Capable While Making You Feel Powerful.” Could you lay out one of the arguments you make there, namely the problem of process or technique and specifically how it makes particular individuals irrelevant and ultimately worse?
Previous Classical Conversations:
Nobody on the core differences between ancient and modern poets, poetry vs. philosophy, and possibilities for the contemporary poet.
Lance Legion on contemporary military officer education, Romans vs. Greeks, Agamemnon, Julius Caesar, and the relation between Christianity / Vitalism.
Jeremy Carl on Hungary, right wing environmentalism, immigration, and Christian nationalism.
Space Age Maximalist on engineers as aristocrats of the future, technological optimism, and how to merge scientific and humanistic thinking.
William Wheelwright on agriculture preceding culture, a vision for a new school, and Homer’s Iliad.
Phocaean Dionsyius on Aristocratical Christianity (our second conversation on this)
David Azerrad on the American founding, a diagnostic account of the contemporary situation, and thoughts about how to move forward.
Kruptos Interview