The following interview has been conducted by myself and will appear in its German translation in the coming Krautzone-magazine.
KRZ: I think it is fair to assume that not all of our German readers will be familiar with your work, so let's start with a little game to introduce you: I will name ten things and you will have to condense your feelings towards those things in no more than one word. Number one: Egalitarianism.
TDT: Dystopian.
KRZ: Secession.
TDT: LIBERAL.
KRZ: Multiculturalism.
TDT: Catastrophic.
KRZ: Free Trade.
TDT: Circumstantial.
KRZ: Modernity.
TDT: Cancer.
KRZ: Hierarchy.
TDT: Necessity.
KRZ: Nietzsche.
TDT: Foundational.
KRZ: Hoppe.
TDT: Insufficient.
KRZ: Stirner.
TDT: Autism.
KRZ: Machiavelli.
TDT: Essential.
KRZ: You have been gathering a larger and larger audience on Youtube by connecting libertarian theory with strict conservative values. What led you towards this worldview?
TDT: I think Hoppe woke me up to the value of conservatism when he wrote in “Democracy: The God That Failed” that the structure of european, patriarchal, heterosexual society was the bedrock of individualism. This is to say, not all cultures are interchangeable as many in the libertarian community would believe, these types often arguing for a market of culture similar to the multicultural utopia envisioned by liberals in 2018. Instead, the level of social cohesion that allowed humanity to leave behind its collectivist history, to lay down their swords and to trust each other with individually oriented private property, was a process exclusive to Europe.
This is demonstrable from a pragmatist and strategic perspective as well. For instance, many people have constructed a list of countries organised by how individualist they are and consistently, all of the anglo nations are in the top ten most individualist societies and, with the exception of israel, no non-european nation scores above 50. Thus, learning that liberty was conditional was what made me begin to value those conditions more than their consequences i.e. libertarianism.
KRZ: In your videos you often touch upon the meaning of life and how one can find a purpose in the modern world. Could you point out for us how each of those two mentioned value constructs, libertarianism on the one side and traditionalism on the other, can help young people with answering that question?
TDT: Well traditionalism is important because it is through tradition that we pass down the most sacral knowledge of the human experience, knowledge that is undiscoverable by the institutional sciences. A point I have made in my videos is that without that which is sacred (sacred being defined as the which is beyond material consumption), when man loses all external support for his devotions and ceases to look above himself to that which is transcendent, he finds little reason to impose morality upon himself and will be content in cowering down into a formless and reducible lifestyle. One in where, as the great philosopher of nothing announced that the desert grows.
However, libertarianism is deeply insufficient at answering questions on meaning and existentialism, in fact, I doubt that most libertarians would be able to define the word “existentialism”. They are instead preoccupied with constructing their internal, cognitively intraverted models that by their own admission, precede all sociality. There is no urgency for questions of transcendent, meaning or the instruments by which we explore them; culture, ritual, tradition and etc. So nonetheless, to put it briefly, the human brain thrives and learns the most intimate knowledge about itself through stories, symbolism, rituals, traditions and so on. All of which being an upscale of our language, the very tool by which we communicate ideas on these issues in the first place.
So, to libertarians, I won’t tell you what the meaning of life is, but instead, I would ask you to reconsider the notion that man can be reduced to something materialist, to value goods that can be used and consumed when the genealogy of society is one where humanity has instead congregated around sacrality, that which is desired but unable to be consumed.
KRZ: A young person, who comes across your channel for the first time, might be surprised by how harsh you criticize things like hook-up culture, Tinder and porn. It seems that your standpoint reflects Epictetus' dictum that a man has as many masters as he has slaves. Is this a correct description of your beliefs and might values like restraint and farsightedness actually be a necessary condition for achieving a free society?
TDT: Definitely, however, I have said elsewhere that I think a lot of the questions you are asking me are unique to a select portion of society. The masses don’t feel the threat of a creeping nihilism, they aren’t interested in questions of being and so, for the everyman these questions are irrelevant from the point of being. But on a deflationary and materialist note, farsightedness is really synonymous with low time-preference, of which, as man begins to lower, he becomes more and more productive.
To put it simply, lowering one's time preference describes the process by which we delay consumer goods for capital goods which is essential, because if we wish to consume more we must first produce more. While similarly, the benefits of delaying sexual activity include stronger relationships, less cases of divorce and hence a greater division of labour in the parenting process. So these same truths reassert themselves in most other modes of traditional living and hence, the everyman must be incentivised to show restraint, to be farsighted and to be responsible. Which of course, the reduction of the welfare state and other libertarian policies address quite well.
KRZ: Do you see a link between the decay of those values and the fact that we in the West live under democracies?
TDT: 100%. Under liberal democracies, the ruling class is made incoherent, it is decentralised and hence, is made incompetent, consisting of fragments competing with each other for power. So because of which, different segments of society have different loyalties to different institutions and so loyalty to the nation fades immensely & the distinction between friend and foe becomes the weaker than it ever was under traditional society. This also explains why in the era of liberalism, the private sector achieves everything, because the political process is rendered an unviable means of doing things. This is further a problem when this decentralised high in society (the bureaucracy, the intellectuals and so on) convinces the low (minorities, lgbt people and the poor) that the middle exists at its expense. This becomes a strategy for the high to weaponize these groups against competition. Essentially, offering status to those that shouldn't have it & creating a loyal underclass through their dependency. We are constantly seeing minorities, LGBTs & other groups that stand in contradiction to white, patriarchal society being put on a pedestal, reiterating Lenin's killing and replacement of the aristocracy with plebeians who's loyalty is maintained through dependency & backed by the intellectual in their own hatred of the nobility, only much more slow paced.
KRZ: This is a thought experiment dear to many reactionary libertarians. Can you explain why, if personal liberty is what you are aiming for, the governmental system of monarchy is preferable to that of democracy?
TDT: For libertarians, monarchism can be seen as an instrumental good due to the underlying incentives it provides. Hans Hermann-Hoppe is famous for putting forward the notion that monarchic rule is best categorised as private rule and thus, allows for a greater degree of economic planning and a huge disentive for deficit spending, warfare and other state policies that would be at the expense of the monarch’s personal finances. This is of course contrasted by democratic rule, that is best categorised as public governance. Here the democratic politician is not considered to own the capital stock of the nation he governs but instead, is the temporary caretaker of it, having no incentive be conservative with his spending and instead being incentivised not by finances but by the threat of not being reelected. Coursing him to provide welfare states and deficit spend to create a loyal voter base through state depency, something that a monarch would never have any need to do. This is illustrated by the fact that from The Roman Empire until the 19th Century, public spending as a percentage of GDP was roughly 5% consistently, compared to public spending being almost half of GDP today. So from this perspective, monarchy becomes instrumentally valuable to a libertarian.
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