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Ep. 152 The Coming Darkness and Renaissance

Bob lays out the grim news: there is a coming age of darkness, with economic and political turmoil that leads to large-scale violence. Yet he also explains that after the chaos, out of the rubble will emerge a new class of artists, poets, and creators who will constitute the new renaissance.

Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:

The audio production for this episode was provided by Podsworth Media.

About the author, Robert

Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.

6 Comments

  1. Carl on 10/07/2020 at 2:51 PM

    No Bob, “this IS crazy talk that you are engaging in.” The Twelfth Amendment and Title 3 of the United States Code clearly set forth the procedures and the timeline for electing the president. It also outlines the contingencies if a clear winner isn’t apparent.

    • Robert Murphy on 10/07/2020 at 3:08 PM

      And the 2nd Amendment disproves my crazy talk about gun confiscation.

      • Carl on 10/07/2020 at 8:58 PM

        Your 2A response is changing the subject Bob. I was expecting better.

        My argument is that there is a constitutional mechanism to resolve this election short of a military coup d’état. If the election is close, a real question could be what if elections for Congress are also disputed. What if California and/or New York are still counting ballots after those states Secretary of State are supposed to certify the winner. What if Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat can’t be certified because California ballots are still being counted? Does the California congressional delegation get to be seated? If not then they don’t get to vote when the presidential issue reaches the Congress?

        • Robert Murphy on 10/08/2020 at 11:53 PM

          Hang on a second, Carl: Are you telling me that if the election is still disputed even though–as you confidently told me–the Constitution lays out all of the various protocols, that I still did something wrong by warning people this would happen?

          I.e., your criticism seemed to originally be, “Bob, you are being crazy paranoid about this, no one is disputing the election,” to “You didn’t give me enough details Bob to verify how long you studied the Constitution before recording.”

  2. Marko on 10/08/2020 at 7:13 AM

    Dear Bob,

    Let me try to address all this silver lining and hope talks centered around your sentence ‘what man meant for evil, god turns and uses for good’. You can’t know that and especially you can’t know how long the dark times will last. Just think about the Soviet Union. 72 years of darkness. Yes, you may find the silver lining and hope anywhere, like many, many Russians reading Dostoevsky while waiting for their bus or tram. But that never created any Russian renaissance, instead it was just a small way to escape every day’s brutality. Can you imagine how many Bobs existed there, decade, after decade, after decade, thinking of something that will turn the situation and nothing ever happened. If they did not collapse economically, they would still be there torturing people.

    The World was a grimm and sad place everywhere at the end of the Middle Ages, but only Italians got smarter, braver and more organized than anybody else and invented and exported their renaissance. So, Mozart and Handel composed their music in Italian, instead of Italians composing in English or any other language. And today Italians are bunch of sad, corrupted, lazy, spoiled socialists, because they, not any god, not any god’s plan, abandoned their own ideas.

    America’s bad situation may last for long, long time and it could become incredibly worse than what you live today. So, I am begging you, please, embrace the rational way and change the ‘hope strategy’ with the ‘do strategy’. That means, let us all become anti-Antonio Gramsci, anti-Fabian socalist etc. By doing all what they did, but spreading liberty ideas, instead of socialism ideas. They never hoped, they simply sat down and like Italians in the 15th century decided to act in a certain way. No providence, no celestial plan, everything down to this filthy Earth. Armed with patience, we infiltrate every single thing we can infiltrate and win. And we leave the hope to daydreamers. We do, we act, we produce, we organize, we protect each other, we fire the socialist everywhere we reach some position, we put the politicians in jail.

    I am almost certain that the guards in Auschwitz were not punished. Worms ate their bodies and that’s it. And I think this is a silver lining too. Exactly because we have no evidence that they were punished, we are enormously motivated to act in a way so that none of this happens again. We need to outgrow hope. Adults see this world as it is and they act, not because they are sure of the great celestial ally, not because they are certain they will win, but because by not acting or by acting wrongly, we may be sure that darkness will eat us all. I fear that if we even mention the hope, we lost half of our battle already. Who needs the hope to be motivated to fight the evil is not the worrier we need. We need people that fight against all the odds. We do not need hope, we need brains and bravery.

    And why do we need to mention god/creator/nature so often? He or it did his job, he created the World with freedom of behavior for any form of matter, including the deadliest viruses. With freedom both good and evil can be created. That’s all what we see and all what we need to know from the creator. Everything else is on us. Our job is to fight those that use freedom to produce evil. That’s all. It is painfully obvious that we are alone in this battle. But, we are not alone as people. I have you, and you have me, and we have Woods and Friedman and Caplan and Block and Molyneux and so many others.

  3. Luke on 12/25/2020 at 4:07 AM

    Is there any resource you know of that compiles works of Fabians and the like declaring their strategy publicly? I would sure love a good place to find the ammo to combat the claim it’s just a conspiracy theory.

    I’ve been using this:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_institutions

    And Yuri Bezmenov, although a lot of people discredit Bezmenov (without much cause as far as I can tell).

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