Why the West Is Waking Up From a 70 Year Nap (YouTube Content)

Why the West Is Waking Up From a 70 Year Nap was a lecture by Eric Weinstein given in February 2025 at the ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) Conference in London.

Why the West Is Waking Up From a 70 Year Nap
Information
Host(s)	Dave Rubin
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein
Length	00:17:22
Release Date	15 March 2025
Links
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Description

This speech has sparked more discussion than possibly any other speech from ARC 2025.

When we invite speakers to ARC, we don’t write their speeches for them, but nonetheless what Eric shared was not what we were expecting.

Transcript

00:00:00

Eric Weinstein: So, we're going to get to something big at the end, but we're starting from a little bit farther back than I thought, because it turns out I think that many of us don't know what's been going on to build up to this moment. I'm going to try to get through it relatively efficiently. I want to talk about emerging victorious. The culture wars have been very poorly understood. How many of you have ever been in an actual war or seen action in an actual war? Very interesting. I think it's quite a lot more than many of you imagine. I want to begin with going back to the Bible as I am your DEI speaker, as an atheist Jew progressive from the United States. I'm sort of slightly askew.

00:00:43

Eric Weinstein: But what I want to do is go back to the Bible and Isaiah, which is at the end of Bob Dylan's famous "All Along the Watchtower." And if you go to the King James Version where it says, "Go and set a watchman and let him declare what he seeth," it is two riders that are approaching, as the song says. And what did they come with? They come with news of the fall of Babylon. We are in the situation in which the post-World War Two order has fallen. J.D. Vance has announced this. I personally think it's very important that the U.S. treat its friends in Europe very well, and it should be done in a fashion that lets people know that the US will be there for the long haul. I am sure that that is in the cards, but we have to realize that we are waking up from a very long period of time, which I've called The Great Nap.

00:01:36

Eric Weinstein: Now, the question is, is peace linked to gelding, to emasculation, to devitalization? And there's a very famous quote spoken by Orson Welles as Harry Lime in "The Third Man." And I'm sure many of you who know the film know the quote I'm thinking of immediately. In Italy for 30 years, under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. And of course, he goes on to say that in Switzerland there were 500 years of brotherly love. And they came up with the cuckoo clock. Possible moral is that radical creativity, innovation, and vitality are inseparable from violence. Violence is not necessarily a bad thing. And when it comes to masculine traits, people have a very hard time finding any masculine traits that aren't also feminine traits to say a positive thing about, except apparently we are able to pee standing up. I think that another positive trait of men is that they can control their violence, and that violence can be used for protection, and that violence can be used for creativity. But we are about to go back into an era which is perhaps very high vitality.

00:02:46

Eric Weinstein: I want to talk about a very difficult subject, and that is that the concept of actual physical emasculation has a rich history going well into the 20th century and, in fact, into the 21st century. One of the reasons that we've been deranged by the trans discussion is that the trans discussion is about devitalization, and it is a recurrent theme that authoritarian regimes attack the reproductive rights of their citizens.

00:03:17

Eric Weinstein: And whether this is China, in which the last eunuch died in the '90s—rather astounding—whether we have in Italy the last castrato who was actually recorded (and you can listen to him sing, not a very good castrato, I might add), or Sanjay Gandhi, who triggered in part the reaction in India—do we have Indians in the audience? Very disappointing. I would say to them, "Sampoorna Kranti ab naara hai, vyavastha hamari hai"—"Total Revolution is now the slogan"—that is how angry people were and how violent they became because of sterilization camps that were practiced in the 1970s. And I have this quote from Elon Musk, because I think what you have to assume is that when you go to war, one of the great terrors is that you will be disfigured. "The Sun Also Rises" as a famous example. Bouncing Betties were discussed in Vietnam. And the fact is that these people very much came for our children. This is not cute. It's not funny. It's a terrible tragedy, and I don't think that I overspeak when I call it a reproductive holocaust.

00:04:29

Eric Weinstein: I'm not going to read the quote because I don't think I can get through it personally. This child was with my son in high school, and I can tell you that the schools are infested with an orientation that is against the family, against the natural order, and against society itself.

00:04:51

Eric Weinstein: The reason that this talk changed radically at 4 a.m. is that I became aware yesterday that many of you don't know the basic terminology or framework of what you have just been through. You think you have been through the culture wars, which is some sort of cute internet conflict that seems really draining and exhausting. No, no. This is actually something that has recently been termed "Hybrid War".

00:05:13

Eric Weinstein: It's a 2007 concept from Frank Hoffman, and it says that in the current situation, non-shooting wars have no border and no end. Anything that can come through the internet means that there is no frontier. We are all combatants to the people who practice Hybrid Warfare. We can all be manipulated from abroad. Tokyo Rose is everywhere. And as such, you're mistaken. All of those of you who did not raise your hand that you've been through a war, you have no idea where you've been. And this is why the talk has changed. So hopefully I won't go over, but I had to change it a little bit.

00:05:49

Eric Weinstein: Cyber attacks, diplomacy, psychological attacks, information warfare. This has been discussed in the national security community, but it has not been discussed widely. Which is why when we have coffee and I use these words, I see blank stares. It's important that we learn their terminology. Human Terrain System: this is the concept that we can weaponize the social sciences. Cultural anthropologists, economists, psychologists can be used. We are the terrain. It is no longer the mountains of Afghanistan or the Hindu Kush that we have to map, but we have to map the actual aspects of human nature by clicks and how long you stay on a site, what you care about, what's your behavior on Pornhub. We are available as the terrain for these national security people who do not show their faces. They fight over us, and they use our social sciences and our universities to fight us, as if we are simply terrain.

00:06:52

Eric Weinstein: Amazingly, many of you do not know about the Whole-of-Society approach. The Whole-of-Society approach is an innovation that came out of the Asia-Pacific Security Center, named after Daniel Inouye, in the Pacific. And it basically says that the institutions of a society must be aligned to fight Hybrid Wars in the modern era. Now, if you think about that, you will realize that that is a very complicated name for soft fascism.

00:07:20

Eric Weinstein: Literally, the fascia is what binds together these institutions. And if you've ever tried to say, well, if I don't go to the New York Times, can I go to the Washington Post? Can I go to The Times of London, the BBC, NPR? All of these people appear to be in lockstep. This is coordinated through the Whole-of-Society approach, and because they have chosen the name for it, we will call them Wh-o-S.

00:07:45

Eric Weinstein: Now let's talk about these Wh-o-S. Are they truly the Whole-of-Society? That's what they would have us believe. But somehow many of us didn't get the message. Many of us didn't get the call. And none of you got the terminology. So what are we if we are not part of society? I would put to you that we are the Benighted Rest-of-Society.

00:08:15

Eric Weinstein: ARC represents the B-R-o-S, Benighted-Rest-of-Society, fighting Klaus and Davos and the World Economic Forum, who at least know that there's a war when we do not. That gives them a certain advantage. Or at least it did. And I'm hoping that this changes with this talk. The new Culture War Hypothesis is that the Culture War is Domestic Hybrid War.

00:08:41

Eric Weinstein: I've called it the No-Name Revolution since 2017. You are in the middle—sorry, maybe you're at the end, hopefully—of the No-Name Revolution, which was real and kinetic. It burned buildings and gas stations. People died in the streets. Maybe not that many, but it was an actual Hybrid War.

00:09:07

Eric Weinstein: Now, how does it work against us? Every institution that you deal with—for example, how many of you are staying at the Aloft Hotel? Every hotel is a spy agency. It has something called a dossier, which it refers to as a "guest profile." It has cameras that monitor you. If the police come or the government comes and say, "Please turn over your surveillance footage," they do. You can go to your computer. You'll notice that your computer almost certainly does not have a hard lens cover, nor does it have a kill switch, which makes sure that it can't be controlled through software via the internet because it's also a listening device that would cost, according to ChatGPT, 1.5 cents per unit. Yet you can't buy one with an opaque lens cover.

00:09:49

Eric Weinstein: Everything that you deal with has a back-of-house, and that back-of-house is something that the governments believe that they have the right to have access to. And you don't realize that in some sense, you are constantly going from object to object that has a portal in to spy on you.

00:10:10

Eric Weinstein: Now the question is, why are our oppressors doing this? There's got to be a reason. And I asked ChatGPT—the posh kind, for 200 bucks—"Tell me something, what are the longest periods of prolonged peace in Western Europe?" And according to ChatGPT, the period from 1945 until the present is the longest time that we've had in Western Europe without powers coming to blows.

00:10:33

Eric Weinstein: Right now, we treat Europe as if it is a quaint Disneyland, when it is, in fact, the most dangerous place on Earth. And The Great Trade Hypothesis is that most all of Western vitality was traded for one commodity, and a precious one at that. And you have to honor these people. You have to give the devil its due. They did keep us out of thermonuclear war since November of 1952. The trade ended in January of 2025. You can decide that this is a good price to pay or a bad price to pay, but you cannot claim that the trade is continuing. We are back to vitality, and I'm sorry to say that almost certainly we will soon be back to kinetic war. The Great Nap is now over.

00:11:16

Eric Weinstein: So what does this have to do with building? What does this have to do with taking on the greatest challenges? We are now in a sprint for the finish. According to Luke 21, the two figures, the Joker and the Thief, are crucified on each side of Christ. Now, the Joker says, "There's got to be some way out of this." Right now where we are is four light years from the nearest star. There is no way to get to the speed of light or even close. We are marooned in our solar system with only two habitable rocks that aren't the Earth. And that's with a lot of work. We cannot stay with all of us on one planet, with one atmosphere, with people this crazy and tools this powerful. Now the Thief is a Christian because he accepts his fate. But we Jews, we are nothing if not great survivors. So as a Jew, I'm with the Joker on this one. We've got to get out of this if we want an indefinite human future and to build something truly fantastic.

00:12:17

Eric Weinstein: The problem is that the culmination of all human theory about the base reality stagnated abruptly and mysteriously in 1973. Imagine that physics stopped when "Crocodile Rock" was top of the charts. Everything we know about the physical universe at its deepest level is on the slide in front of you. And it hasn't moved.

00:12:38

Eric Weinstein: Now, recently, many of you have seen that Marc Andreessen had a meeting at the White House, and at that meeting, something fantastic was revealed. The Biden White House told him that they had stagnated, deliberately, fields of theoretical physics. Read that quote. It should send chills down your spine. This graph shows the youngest living Nobel laureate in theory, in physics, in theoretical physics theory. That number is always below the age of 50, until this magical point where String Theory enters the game as a theory of Quantum Gravity. And our youngest living Nobel laureate is now over the age of 70 because the field is not producing new results.

00:13:23

Eric Weinstein: This is also terrible, but it turns wonderful because if we can find the problem, we can make progress and reach the stars. Change AI to physics, technology to science, and startups to alternative theories in reading the following quote, and you will see what they did. They took a couple of theories, they cocooned them, String Theory being preeminent among them, and they said, all competitor theories will die. And in the field of physics, it's called The Only Game in Town. You try to do something else, your career comes to an abrupt end.

00:13:56

Eric Weinstein: Now, how do you fool the world's smartest people into a Soft Sunset? A Soft Sunset is one where you decommission something, but you don't tell the people being decommissioned that their careers are coming to an end. You get them to repeat something over and over again: that Quantum Gravity is the Holy Grail. Quantum Gravity is the Holy Grail. All questions center on what is the theory of Quantum Gravity? Quantum Gravity is the Holy Grail of theoretical physics. You perseverate, and if you say something enough times, it becomes as-if true. But if it was the Holy Grail, why is there no mention of it in the corpus of English language books before 1972, right before physics stagnated? It is because there is no theory of Quantum Gravity in the way that they're looking for it. Quantum Gravity is safe. You can invite your Iranian and your North Korean and your Russian and your Chinese students to do Quantum Gravity, and nobody's going to get hurt.

00:14:54

Eric Weinstein: Now, here are my final thoughts. In November of '52—there's an error in this—we learned the Earth is our womb, not our home. We cannot stay here because we have to go. We cannot all share one atmosphere safely. The tools are too powerful. If an indefinite human future can be restored, and I believe that it can, there is one way out. And that's physics. And Mike Lazaridis, if you're out there somewhere, thank you for building the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics to do this. I'm sorry it got taken over by Quantum Gravity.

00:15:24

Eric Weinstein: We have to go beyond Einstein because we are simply not capable of getting to the stars if we have a speed limit set at "c." Western science must lead the way. Vivek Ramaswamy is convinced that somehow China and India are pulling ahead of the West. This is not true. The greatest threat comes from France—the world's greatest mathematicians. If we are prepared to take on India and China, are we prepared to take on Paris and Marseilles? I put this to you.

00:15:55

Eric Weinstein: Up. Can I go back? Apparently, you cannot. What I want to say is the following: we Jews have a meal that isn't really a meal. It's a survival manual. And it's the Passover Seder. And I ask you this year to find, if you're not Jewish yourself, find a Jew and get invited to a Passover Seder. It describes how we survive, and the way we do it is that at some points, you have to realize that you cannot stay here and you must leave, even if you feel that there is no way out.

00:16:29

Eric Weinstein: You may feel that you are backed against the Red Sea, but if you do not actually realize what time it is, you will surely perish. I believe that the end of physics is almost in sight. It may bring us wonders, and it may bring us the ability to traverse the cosmos. This could be the greatest time. We have a brief period of vitality before the wars will surely start, if we choose to revitalize. We must use it well. And our greatest challenges are ahead. But I think we're going to make it. And I think that the future will be amongst the stars and be glorious indeed. Thank you all very much.