Woke Orania w/ Joost Strydom: The J. Burden Show Ep. 421

the founders of this project is community. Okay, so Urania is a very specific community, and that is a community that already in the nineteen eighties started in terms of ideological context, and it was people who said they see that change is coming, and that change is going to be possibly catastrophic for Africaners as a group, as a nation, as a people what we call in Africans a folk to survive and in order to survive what is coming, it is not enough to just be pragmatic. You need

to establish something lasting. You need to actually go out and do some triage and establish something before the worst happens. And there is a set of let's say, rules that they created in terms of what is necessary for us as a people to survive.

of Urania. That is the most necessary thing in terms of Urania's survival and we as a people survival.

things to look at. One is uh standard of living, safety, security and so on, which declined general public services, ability to integrate into the general public life, which which happened to now be a dangerous inserviceable and many things that I think your your your viewers possibly can't can't even comprehend that, the lack of service delivery, thrash piling up in the streets, rolling blackouts, you know, many negative things.

But but even that is not the main factor for me, and it's not the main factor for can I say the true believers of Grana, the people who believe in this idea and the solution. The true thing, The true issue is a loss of freedom. The loss of freedom and the loss of the ability to craft your own future that goes with it. It is bad to live in dire economic circumstances.

regards to infrastructure. What is worse than all those things, Arguably one of the worst fates they could possibly be, is to not be in control of your own future, not having the opportunity to take the responsibility to be in a certain extent, to be someone sitting on the bench, not participating, to be just someone in the crowd looking as other players play out the game. That is your future and the future of your children and the future

of your people. That is a worse fate than just having bad civil delivery or insecure environment and that is to somewhat our collective fate. It's not necessarily our individual faith right. So individually South Africans Africanas still have opportunities in the country. I don't deny that. I also think that they still have international opportunities. Many of them immigrate and they go seek on an individual basis, they go

and seek better time. On the individual basis, they go and they say, listen, eighteen murders per day in a country is just not normal.

not only in individual scenes. There must be public spaces that are African or Christian spaces. If you don't have that, you just have an individual, privatized future for yourself. And it's not necessarily selfish. It can be selfish, but that's not our end goal. We want to make an area that is free, that is that is that is Africana and that is Christian and that we can live and

thrive on. If there is no public schools where your language and your religion has been put first, if there are no public spaces where your children can plain their own languages, if there are no higher education, university level education, and public churches where.

they will be Australians in a generation or two. And so I understand that that is an individually rational decision, right, you might well live better in Melbourne than you could and you know some city in South Africa, and so individually that makes a great deal of sense. But when we look at this collectively, right, you you know, whoever this is as a like a bearer of culture, someone who is part of something bigger than themselves.

of a collective. Obviously, this is not necessarily what I brought you on to talk about, but I'm curious if you have any thoughts about that transition from viewing yourself as simply one guy, maybe your family too, as part of a culture, and if you could explain, do you think that being a minority group has something to do with that view?

They're all they want to be patriots. They they they immediately adapt to their new host country and they try to be the best possible Americans that they can be. There are many people immigrating to such countries, horrible immigrants. They don't want to integrate, and that might be the saving of them as a collective culture, for better for worse. Africaners, however, make great immigrants. They want to adapt. They understand that it's a privilege to be in the new host country,

and for that reason they give their all. They cannot integrate their children into the new culture fast enough. They cannot celebrate and paint their faces with the American flag, Australian flag or whatever fast enough. They do long own they missed, they missed the African sunset, and the animals, and and and and the people and the and and everything.

And I have a tough time blaming them, because they looked out for their own fine acial beast future and that of their children, and they buy the lifestyle that they can they and so on, because they have great skills and it's you know, scar skills and so on. However, they might hold out. They might speak Africans to their children. Their children will marry Australians, Americans, Englishmen, they will go

to school in the language of the host country. They will adapt to the politics of the host country, they will have friends with the values of the ost country. They will stop being what they are now, they will

not be Africanish anymore. And if you have an individualistic, capitalistic worldview, and it's very easy to translate kind of free market thinking away from the marketplace into the marketplace of peoples and say, well, it is a better investment for myself, better in individual investment for myself to now be an Englishman or American or Australian. And in the marketplace of nations, my new host nation won the competition.

And for that reason, my old culture will die. It is not it is not competitive commercially anymore in the competition of nations.

only to preserve it, to build it out. It is a slow depth to just preserve. It is the mistake of mainstream conservatism to just try and conserve fifty years ago or twenty years ago, ten years ago, that is death.

is dying. It might you know, slow deaths, one hundred years death, but it is dying. And for that reason, we opted out as African Honiss and South Africa, the Urania people. We opted out of mainstream party politics. We opted out of just institutional fighting back, which is also very important and necessary. We opted out of many of the mainstream debates, and we said, if we want to survive, we must bold a city for our people. We started, Yeah, and one of the most add parts of the country.

For many this would be considered desert. And it's an in jest and joke and jest many times referred to the media and South Africa and other South Africans as you know, running into the desert. It's dry enough that you can say, it's hot enough, it's forty degrees cells yesterday, it's it's you can you can you can call a desert.

you year the same message.

those people, it's not out of hatred. It's not that I want them to fail. It's exactly the opposite. And it's why when I look to your people, when I look to other projects in South Africa, the solidar are taught the other things, I see that as being a rational and clear headed response to many of the same

problems in both for our nations. One of the things that I want to bring up talking about the market, and you mentioned this earlier when talking about labor, is that in both my country and yours, there are very cheap ways to build things right. You can hire people who are not legally here, you can go for kind of the lowest better and get something built quickly and cheaply. So why is that something that you at Urania have specifically avoided. What's the thought process, how do you get

things done? And again, how much if this matters right, how much more expensive is it? And why is that worth it?

more and more immigrants into the countries. That is, that is that is also fully on the shoulders of such politicians doing such things. But there is an economic side to it a few sites. One is the fact that the European population not having enough kids, so you need to bring in young immigrants, you know, in order to keep the economy going, and the need for labor for doing the jobs that that native Europeans don't want to

do anymore. So the immigrants they're willing to do it because they send the money to in regards to a great exchange rate, they send it home and their families live well because they are willing to sweep the streets or take away the trash or do the jobs that other people don't want to do.

South Africa, but also under the new one. And how I'm going to explain to this guy He probably does all his own house work and everything and so on. And I said, okay, this is how it works. We believe Africana should do all their own labor and so on. And he said, oh, well, I see it as this tell me if I'm correct, I say, let me air.

framework of legal employer employer relationships. But with that comes issues foreigners coming into the country willing to work for almost nothing. It's just the next iteration of what we had in South Africa that is a skewed labor relationship where africanners and anyone else who could afford it now also.

see fit. Some some in very firm, fair ways, very very good and nice ways, other in very unfair and very ugly ways in labor relationships. But the day the election comes, then suddenly the middle class business owner and the absolute bottom of the socioeconomic class worker their interests don't align anymore. And suddenly this guy votes for a kind of revolutionary party. He votes for expropriation without compensation, he votes for extreme politicians. And this people can't understand it.

Me as a minority, I'm but I'm the business owner, I'm the farm owner, and so why does this person that I can pay next to nothing to do my work? And he needs to obey all my orders. Why can he now have equals, say in the election. But not

only that, but other problems comes with it. As that Austrian guy told me, you socialize the cost, so that person willing to work for undrodrand maybe heasies well the people you are well off, I can just steal that stuff and go again and get to a new employer, can help give information that leads to a farm attack

or a farmer. So that's the cost is socialized. It impacts all community theft and whatnot that can come with it, but also culturally and also very specifically politically, because if it's a one man, one vote democracy, it is the number of people that counts, not the level of education, not the level of effort that you put into the business, not the good or bad decisions. It's just one man, one vote, and for that you then socialize the cost,

so you individualize the revenue. There's money to be made, and I think you see it in the United States as well, people saying well, I'd rather have the cheapest possible guy campaint my roof, or tend to my garden or bolt something for me.

I'm not going to say that that's an insignificant discount, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not that much. And in addition, not only do you pay a little more, but you get to create a community of people in rural areas who traditionally don't have access to steady employment, who can you know, support their families, have something that

they make that they are proud of. And sure, you can't point to that on a balance sheet you can't pull up in your shareholder meeting and say, oh, you know, there are now eighty people with good jobs who can spread their money around and have something to be proud of. So I think that's a definite part as well, right, that myopically focused on that one variable, right, the revenue

at the expense of other things. And in this conversation, you know, everyone always goes to the trades, which are certainly very important for you know, blue collar workers to have dignity to have something they can support their family on. But one of the interesting dynamics in America is this

has started to happen to traditional white collar jobs. You have companies like Amazon and Apple and Google just in the last couple of weeks laying off tens of thousands of highly compensated Americans and hiring roughly double the amount

of workers from India. Again, that same sort of behavior, and even in relatively you know, kind of unseerious jobs like I think of you know, how many people who you know, how many girls that I went to college with that after school, you know, worked as a nannie, worked as an all pair, you know, took a job for a good wage, right sixty or seventy thousand dollars a year to mind the children of you know, a pair of high powered lawyers or something like that in

Chicago and New York. And sure those jobs still exist, but you know, now many of them are you know, girls from Brazil or other countries who were happy to work for you know, forty cents on the dollar, which is a princely sum where they are from. And sure, you know that individual girl may be perfectly fine, perfectly good at her job, but that opportunity is you know, taken from somewhere else. And again that's not the most serious job, right, that's not the most important thing, per se.

But you see that same pattern over and over and over again. You know that idea that you know, we will simply apply the law, the the logic of you know, the open marketplace to people, turning you know, labor into a commodity in that way. And one other thing that I think needs to be said is that you know, you mentioned the fact that you know, oftentimes these jobs are you know, low status. People don't want to do them.

But I think a large portion of it is people won't do them for the wages the market is producing. You know, I think of in America, there are certain trades which are gated, right, you need to have, you know, a license or a bond or something like that. And it's this interesting relationship where those trades are still a high status and highly compensated. You know, electricians and plumbers, they are always the ones you here mentioned, whereas others

that used to be trades. You know, people who you know, hang grywall, roofers, things like that, those have been completely gutted. Even in my own instance, I think, you know, when I was an early teenager, you know, many of the guys a little bit older than me worked as roofers in the summer, and they make good money for a teenager. By the time I was old enough to do it, that job was exclusively for Hondurans and people from El Salvador.

of social development. And the interesting thing of South Africa's and I think also the future of the West, is that a lot of these advantages that you get in community, if you make enough money, you can just buy your way into it. You can you can buy your way into a good school for your kids where they socialize other kids in the same situation. So you spend as little as possible money on your labor, as much as possible on your kids and whatever. They get good opportunities to get a good school.

to a point where they lost blue collar skills. My grandfather, for example, was a fantastic bricklayery, was a man that could work with steel very very well and with wood, great craftsmen. But the generation after those people lost such skills. So we need to and and the generations after that obviously of course as well.

out and pursue the education of that those skills. And we do live in a commercial world, so you must make it successful enough so that it could bring in people just coming for the commercial value of such an education, and you keep as many of the people here, but if they just come for the studies and living, and it's also find they bring money into your economy.

make them homeowners, which is very very important. It puts down roots, It commits to the community and so on. But you also empower that person and the next generation if they come from bad circumstances, you create, incentivize and create circumstances in which they can prosper in terms of day development generational development. At the end of the day, we still need to centrally enforce it.

real cultural depth. I think it already started developing, but it's so important that you manage to enforce it to make it possible that people really really adhere to the principle of africaner only labor it's non negotiable. And as it went over the past thirty years, we did see more and more community based approach to that where the local government doesn't have to keep newcomers accountable, but more and more the people are stepping up and saying, this

is how it works. We will not accept your bringing in foreign labor to our community.

an eternal renter. That's certainly important. But you touched on something that I think is perhaps the most important part, which is one having something at stake, being a part of culkin in the game exactly. You know, if you were a renter, you you know, the town starts to go downhill. Oh, you can move down the street, you can move across the nation. Your lease may be twelve months. You can tough it out for a few and go

somewhere else. You can be this sort of nomad, this person from nowhere who's just at just as at home at you know, at Vienna or Portland or Washington, d C. Part of that be honest like rootless cosmopolitan class, and in my mind, that is another form of that cultural death we were talking about earlier. You really are nothing. Then you were simply an atomized consumer, and you can go where your consumption is the most you know, easy

and pleasurable. You have access to, you know, however many you know, goods and services you want to consume, and it's generally one of the things that I hate about going to certain cities like London is the worst for this, but also I look to places like you know, Austin, Texas, you know, which used to be this kind of quirky small town and has become sort of a second Los Angeles.

You know, it looks almost identical now. It's very odd and in that you see obviously the death of culture for those individual people, but also that place is no longer what it was. It's no longer something unique. It becomes just another outpost of that kind of globe market place. And it's one of the things that I say this as someone who's a product of it. You see very

strongly in the in the death of regional accents. My great grandmother died not too long ago at you know, her mid nineties, and she lived a very long life, but she had a very specific regional accent which came from you know, a certain area of a certain state. The way that she said, you know, water was different, that all of these little things that spoke to being from a certain place, being of a certain culture. And

sure you know I grew up. I still am, you know, very close to where she was born in the grand scheme of things. But you know, I could minus a few pieces of syntax. I could be from Milwaukee, I could be from California. My accent has been completely and totally rounded off. It sounds like an Internet American. And sure you know I would be artificial. If I, you know, got out my cowboy hat and tried to lean into it,

it'd be fake. But you see that sort of atomization and the advantage to owning property, the advantage to being tied to a place is that you can't do that. Sure you could sell your house and move, but it's way harder to do. You know, very few people you know buy and sell homes every year. It tends to both anchor you to a place, but also make you care about a place, because you know, as someone whose state is going through a very dramatic political upheaval. For

the negative, I am committed. My roots are here, especially if you have children. All of these things and being part of that renter class. And I don't blame people for it. It's a very hard thing to climb out of it sort of pulls you into that culture of nowhere.

So if you could, could you go into that program a little bit, because it actually something I haven't heard of, and I'm kind of interested to see one why you guys think it's important to give people a place that they own, but also how you go about helping people with that.

that we achieve it. So it'd be quite complicated to explain, but I'm going to try because there are so many moving parts, one of which is the fact that we have our own bank and our own local banking system, which is a cooperative bank, meaning that every person with an account at the bank becomes a shareholder at the bank. You can vote at the bank for interest rates, for both of directors, all those things. So there's a certain connectiveness there as well, long history there, but that's an

important aspect. The second thing to say is that there are institutions worth commercial visions, but not only such, so their goal is to make money to go on, but developing property still in line with what we want to achieve as a community. I don't know what to call it, maybe something like a free market with breaks on. So you still have the ambition and intention to have commercial

success as one should have. Any ambitious person should should want to have some level of success, but not to the cost of all other things.

on a political social scenes, making development possible. So you have the bank, you have the local government, you have the internal commercial entities, and then locally and outside of Urania, you have entities that bring in donations for the cause of the people and turn that into commercial success. You have all these lined up, and then with the basis of that, what we did was the following. The Helping Fund, which is Urania Movement.

term things. We brought in donations to make special industry loans possible so that people could at the bank in terms of a normal commercial transaction get a loan, but the twenty five percent deposit is covered indust free or twenty percent deposits from the Helping Fund, so they still pay back and that helps the next person, but that

part at least is interest free. Then you have the local government working with commercial entities in some of the older developments, and the commercial entities working on their own and some of the newer developments like Faglie to make it possible to serve it plots as cheaply as possible.

They are quite small, so that scale scaling as possible, and then then put this unique kind of housing and plots in the market, specifically for people who becomes a first time ownern So you have the bank blending out the money, you have this institution with donation support making industry loans possible for the deposit part, and then you have the commercial entities developing the land and making it

available for a much more affordable price. In some of all the developments I think we did, the value of the plots being sold was about twenty to twenty five percent of market value, and there was also special arrangements

for the loans for the construction material. In many cases, people built their own houses specifically because many people of that socio economic status were in the construction sector, which is one of around now's big economic sectors, so they were able to with the weekends also build their own houses, paint their own houses plaster, and so on.

development and the willingness to do the development. So and the local government of course, if I haven't mentioned that, so.

obvious reasons. Of course, I'm curious what is what is your interaction with outside observers, whether that is you know the government of South Africa, whether that is you know the press, because if you if you read the coverage in the mainstream media, for whatever that's worth, Uh, it doesn't seem to be accurate. So one, do you think that there are so many people angry at a town of three thousand people in the literal middle of nowhere?

Not to be rude, but it doesn't seem to be the most relevant thing on the face of the earth. And also, what is your interaction with the government like because you know, given Bee and some other policies, it seems as if they wouldn't be incredibly supportive. I'll put it that way.

use that as well as we can. On the other hand, you know the practical attacks from the eff they killed the boy, killed the former party, or the anc themselves. We just saw the Premier of the Northern Cape attacking Urania again, so you have that. It's a very complex relationship. The important thing is we're not doing anything illegal. We are totally alternative, I think, much comparable to our great

ancestors tearing the Great Trek Whup. They didn't rebel against the British or they did try, but it was very short lived, as many other citizens of the British crown did. They just packed up their things and they moved two thousand kilometers away from the British center of power and created new republics. They outside of a British there of influence. It was not an illegal deed per se, although the British tried to classify it as such. It was not illegal.

It was also not passive. It was an active It was an act of creating your future, of making up something. But it was not armed rebellion. It was just moving away and starting something new. And in that sense, Urania has a very unique problem to tackle. It's very you know, what do you really do about it. If people say, well, we're going to take up more responsibilities and expect less and less the state, So that is the one side of the queen.

life goes. All their perception is just New South Africa, you know, everything that is good also Africa everything that is bad, and you know, we are They just believe that everything was fine and one hundred percent in Africa until the bad colonizers came and the Dutch and then it was hell on Earth until Nelson Mandela himself came down from heaven surrounded with or a big halo or

something and just made everything perfect again. And now these people stuck in the past don't want to, you know, embrace their inbornation.

super super bad. On the other hand, Urania is establishing relationships with tribal communities in South Africa that wants to move away from the ANC government's spheres of power traditional tribal communities. On the other hand, Urania is progressive in our solutions for energy, for example, progressive and our solutions for community and upliftment. A journalist wants it, but it seems like everybody in Ironia is woke. And I told her, you know, yeah, but not in the way that you

journalists understand wokeness. We are woke in terms of understanding what we want to achieve for our people. And because the mainstream media and some of the alternative media cannot break out of this duality limiting perspective, they cannot understand this new position outside of their you know, I almost wanted to say simple minded approach. It is something totally different. It is it is outside of the mainstream kind of

commercialized understanding of life, understanding, transactional understanding of relationships. Even if we're on it cost us, even if even if we lose a bit of our own money or our own opportunities, it's still worth it. And they cannot understand that, even if we don't have access to the cheapest possible labor, and for that reason, the same things cost us more, it's fine, and we do it and we want to

do it, and they cannot understand that. And simultaneous going forward in life, expanding our services, expanding our opportunities, creating new things. So, because RONA doesn't fit into that, they need to be negative. And what do they do when they then they are negative? They just refer back to the simplest version of the argument, labels racism bad, you know,

stuck in the past, things like that. So but we have, I think, to some extent, learned to to use the media, and every journalist thinks are going to be smarter than the previous one. But I think some of the people Mournia now use the media instead of the media using us, and we get our message out and we sometimes even take them for a bit of a playful right, and and and and and catch them in their preconceived racism.

I don't know if you remember that one debate in not debate, some kind of American talk show, I don't know what it's called. Maybe it was the view of something where these ladies were speaking about the Donald Trump presidency coming up, and they said, you know, if he wants all the foreigners out, who's going to clean his toilet? And then she realized what she said, and you actually catch these people out on their their own, you know, fossilized all ancient ways of thinking.

an hour of content. It's really not a bad deal if I do say so myself. I realized being a full time internet influencer is embarrassing, but uh, you know what, I try to at least be the hardest working pot caster on the Internet. I think I've cleared that.