What is the illusion of consensus in plain English?

Well, the idea here, and this is not wholly original to me, is that only people who instinctively believe they can fight, which is high testosterone males, are willing to buck social consensus.

And so you have a certain type of person where only that person really kind of has his own opinions.

Everybody else, they say their opinions that you can sort of mentally preface them with, please don't hurt me.

For example, diversity is our greatest strength.

Please don't hurt me.

You know, I don't see race.

What is managerial rule? Why do they hate the civilized man?

So I wonder what your thoughts are, uh, uh, uh, of how Starsh- what, what are some of the lessons that Starship Troopers or I guess Robert Heinlein was trying to teach Americans about rights and responsibilities?

Well, one of the things that he, he, uh, he has some of the characters discuss is this notion that what, what is the meaning of the power of the vote? And this is something where I think that Heinlein noticed a, a flaw in the philosophy of modern liberalism, which is sometimes called ca- uh, classical liberalism.

By classical, we mean sort of the 1700s and so forth, where these modern democracies were established because you had, you had common people wielding more power to do violence, and so they needed to be represented politically.

But I think they were modeled off some of the ancient democracies, but a critical detail was missed, and this is, this is one of the details that Heinlein points out in slightly different words.

He says the, the power to vote is the power to commit violence.

Voting is violence by proxy because voting determines what the policies of the state will be, and the state enforces its edicts by violence.

In fact, that's what the state is for.

Okay.

And I think, Devin, you've put your finger right on it, right? How do we construct a society that solves that problem?

Okay, well, you're characterizing this problem as unique, and it's not.

Because we often hear people making these cavalier statements like America is a nation of immigrants and it is a hybrid culture.

And this is sort of a recency bias, right? Because if you take China or France or England and you go back far enough, you find a merging of compatible tribes.

The English are Anglo-Saxons, right? Okay, that's two tribes.

The Angles...

And the Saxons.

So the age of the armored knight is the age of force.