Even among smart dissident types, the default explanation for the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan is basically just “grit” and “sticktuitiveness” and “giving 110%” (plus maybe “asabiyyah”, which is a $10 dissident word for “teamwork”).

But if that was the secret sauce, it doesn’t explain why ISIS collapsed under comparatively light military pressure, never to return; or why Al Qaeda is basically a dead meme.

Out of the Mountains doesn’t set out to answer that question — it was published in 2013, when Afghanistan was nearly pacified, al Qaeda was still a going concern, and ISIS was the new hotness in Sunni extremism.

In fact, Kilcullen’s thesis is that urbanized, internet-savvy, transnational guerrilla movements will be able to access power flows, and it’s a pretty persuasive thesis — but with a decade of hindsight, it turned out to be the comparatively rural, isolated, local movement that defeated the empire. So what happened?

The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.

This is also, by the way, exactly how the American diplomatic corps conquered the world — by becoming the broker and underwriter of international agreements that even unaligned (or even unfriendly) countries come to depend on. That authority requires global force projection to be credible, of course, but force projection alone is not enough.

In this episode, I explore how non-state groups hide within, and eventually capture, the power flows that make a state a state, and what we can learn from it.

Some thoughts about Albion’s Seed for the Fourth of July, and why this incredibly fractious group of (by modern standards) patriarchal authoritarian illiberals all got together to design a system of government with freedom of speech, religious toleration, due process, separation of powers, etc.

Also why, if they could see our current situation, they would be grossed out, but would not be remotely “blackpilled”, and if you explained the meaning of that word to them would laugh at you and tell you to nut up.

I’ve been chewing on five or six different essays for the last several months, and they’ve never come out quite right, and I’ve realized that they’re all aiming in roughly the same direction.

Progressives and Nietzschean/post-Christian rightists understand the message of Jesus in roughly the same way — both view the gospel of Jesus Christ as a radical abolition of human hierarchy — they just disagree about whether that’s a good thing.

It’s completely at odds with everything I believe about who he was and what he taught, but it is an easy conclusion to draw from the four or five verses that ordinary people have memorized.

And however facile and incoherent it may be, this understanding of what Christ was Really All About clearly has broad social currency, which is why Christendom has been absolutely helpless in the face of progressivism for the last century or more. Most casual Christians are already progressives, they just don’t know it yet — so when it is introduced to them explicitly, the transition is completely natural, almost automatic.

So this episode is just an initial attack on that problem. I’ve never done a solo podcast before, so it’s a stream of consciousness, but I wasn’t having much success writing all this stuff down, and I needed to get it out of my head.