Ep 1. | Eight Months Under (the Covers Alone)

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Terms and conditions apply by just confused and next grocery shop to your supplies. Welcome everyone back to the Piquenana Show. So Thomas and I are going to start a new series tonight. And coming off some talks that we've been having over on the Inquisition podcast with Astro and Stormy, talking about Frances Parker-Yaki. Thomas mentioned after one of the episodes after we had stopped recording. We're talking about basically Continental Philosophy. And Continental Philosophy is something that you study your whole life and you still struggle with. So I asked Thomas if he'd be willing to start a series, see how long it goes. And he said yes. So Thomas, the floor is yours. How are you? I'm doing well thanks for hosting me. I'm going to have to jump around a bit to make clear what we're talking about. And something that's important to acknowledge is that Philosophy used to be a unitary discipline. And when a discreet political philosophy branched off from that, in my opinion, that owed to the Peloponnesian War and Thucydides of the first political philosophy for an opinion, West Point types traditionally as well as in the Cold War, like strategic studies and political science types, they put a premium on Thucydides. I think they misunderstand them. They like the claims Thucydides are the first political realists. That's not true. I understand why they think that. But it's not just a superficial reading of Owing to his deliberate reticence. Also, a misunderstanding of the context of what the source is of what we're talking about is an intellectual tendency. And I should probably, so I'm going to begin our self-interdiscution by talking about Thucydides, which is going to dovetail into a discussion of Socrates. Because obviously the Peloponnesian War is the reason why Socrates was executed. I agree with Sorrel. Socrates deserved to be executed. That's an minority position. But if you're on the right, I don't see how you cannot abide that. Socrates was not one of the good guys. But I'm going to start Thucydides and then dutail into Socrates on the next episode. And I think I should start with something of an explanation as to what are political philosophies important. And basically what the political right, like how it is situated with respect to these sorts of intellectual tendencies. And it gets complicated too because a lot of the later right wing philosophers, you know, like Schoenhoer, like Nisja, like a Heidegger, the right wing connoisseur laws, as far as a latent modernity. These guys are partaking of humanist, conceptual orientations. They just had a completely different and radically adversarial perspective, contrast to the enlightenment. I think a lot of people have probably made sense of that because in America, they think that the dialectical struggle is between like reactionaries or religious people as they think of it and secular humanists. That's not what it is. You know, discourse might be framed that way. Like people don't know any better. But I basically agree with Russell Perck and as regards the American situation, we'll get him to him two later on. And the conclusion when drugs and curcs, that America is intellectually impoverished in some ways. That's not the punitive take. My background is really the only background that can be considered like ethnically American. I'm not triaging my own heritage. But I think what I just said is indesputable. Anybody who knows the subject matter wouldn't disagree. There's some basic assumptions, epistemic priors, and I think of them conceptual biases. If you will, like essential characteristics, the conceptual horizon of the political right loosely defined. Contra, the majoritarian perspective of the elites from the enlightenment downward. You know, the recurrent kind of right wing assumptions and predispositions are present in the belief in human imperfection. Like even true kind of secular right wingers, you know, like out and out, fascists who, if not out and out atheist, where at least kind of, you know, at the most like loose deists, you know, even they acknowledge a basic human imperfection and like man's fallen nature, even if they define it in kind of worldly and caloric terms. You know, and that's arguably one of the reasons why tendencies like national socialism and fascism, you know, sought to intervene selectively with respect to both the biological stock of the racial organism as well as elevate the cultural competence, the body politic that wasn't for lack of ability to identify other political projects, to dedicate their energies to. Because the fallen nature of man, again, even if defined in the secularist paradigm with something first and foremost that, you know, they accepted from inception. You know, going to that man is a social organism, even more so than any other species, you know, even do a biological reduction is this is, this is clear. Okay. Just in pragmatic terms. Empirically it's obvious. This can be grounded in a religious doctrine of original sin as an explanatory mechanism or it can be argued entirely in secular grounds as they just enumerated, you know, including but not limited to the biological facts of the kind of limited preparedness and, you know, lack of complete and instinctual mechanisms for survival at scale, you know. So the right accepts that this kind of moral imperfection or this kind of maladaptive kind of see intrinsic to man, qua man requires both certain restraints and pose of a convention and institutions, but also it requires a curated sociology, you know, to insinuate not just public morals and pragmatic behavioral modalities, you know, and what sorts of impulses identify and what sorts of impulses should be encouraged and that which should be discouraged by, you know, a system of punitive disincentives and material rewards, but also, you know, there's an understanding that man must be availed to a kind of moral education as well as like a racial education or an education in the ways of the Paulist if you want to invoke the classical conception in lieu of the kind of 20th century biological conception. This entails a certain epistemological modesty. These hubris both in grand terms that the culture brings stradum is prone to as well as in the base terms, you know, one of the sources of the ongoing tragedy, the commons is, you know, the common man's impulse to gratify his ego, you know, whether it's through, you know, coveting the wives of his fellow who's a subjugating principle to profit, you know, and enrichment at the expense of the social organism, you know, there's an understanding among the right, whether you're talking about, you know, conservatives, revolutionaries, articles, fascists, national socialists, you know, sectarian, artisans, web of, you know, originally theological view. This understanding that epistemological modesty as a restraining mechanism is humorous, but also as a correct, aesthetical posture, you know, a man who believes nothing precedes him and who doesn't understand no respect, no esteem, historical processes, and the role of the social organism in those processes as far as edifying man as an individual, an individual capacity as well as a component of a historically contingent social organism or a race, like a man who doesn't accept that is, is somebody who's worthy of contempt, okay? And basically everybody understands that except liberals, you know, and I make this point that people a lot, especially when they try and morally condemn their critics by saying, you know, who are you to judge somebody for, say, being gay? It's like it's not the issue isn't what people are interested in doing in terms of sexuality or sexuality. The issue is that, for example, to be gay is to take on a social identity rooted around what you do with your penis and that basically means you've abandoned logos and decided to live like some kind of animal. You know, it's incidental that the kind of subject of that depravity is sex. It could be any of the other things, you know, and when you confront people with this, they'll give you like a dumb look either because they know you're right and they have never buttle or because you might as well be speaking Chinese because to them, you know, they basically view the highest good as stating these kinds of glandular impulses and finding ways to gratify egoistic desires often, but not exclusively biological and mitigating the pain that exhumatically attends human existence and being alive is painful emotionally and physically. That's not all that it is, but it does have an outsized impact on the way we experience consciousness and we're talking about human life for really talking about consciousness, okay? As a consequence of these things in terms of praxis, the kind of right-wing ontology, there's a basic assumption therein that institutions and patterned social formations and concrete sociologies are self-justifying and the enduring quality of these things, out of their essential role in perpetuating the survival of the social organism, you know, whether that's the race or the nation or the ecclesiastical community, you know, whatever the primary subject is of the particular disposition, ontological disposition. So this idea, this kind of enlightenment idea, this enlightenment prejudice that institutions that are perennial and nature need to be subjected to this kind of rigorous cross-examination to determine if, you know, they're fulfilling the impulses, which is really what capital liberals mean when they talk about happiness, they're talking about impulse fulfillment, that it's not a legitimate regime, that it's not how we judge institutions, according to the practical reason, is whether they're making people happy or not. I mean, yes, obviously, the institutions that are destructive, but generally those cease to exist because there's an anthropic reason, because if these institutions were truly destructive, they wouldn't endure for millennia, because they'd be doing the opposite of what they're supposed to do. You know, like, this is obtuse, but as a counterfactual, like, suppose it was an institute that encouraged men to get drunk and beat their children, like, how long do you think that would last? You know, I mean, like, that's why, kind of the end of the intellectual laziness among people who kind of abide this capital, a liberal paradigm, they say, quote, organized religion is bad. It's like, what does that mean? You know, like, what is quote, organized religion? You know, as opposed to like, disorganized religion as opposed to some sort of sociological anarchy where each man decides privately, like, what is the good that that's not sustainable. And it's not really what they're talking about anyway, because, you know, they're, they're abiding as much of a theological paradigm as their ops are, you know, they just characterize it as grounded in, in this kind of foe, like, his understanding of science or a pragmatic cultivation, again, of impulse fulfillment. And it's total logical too, because I don't claim that, well, if you, if you deprive people in the capacity to fulfill these impulses, they'll become anti-social and they'll seek to supplement in ways that, you know, harm others and their respective pursuit of these fulfilling endeavors, which doesn't really make sense, you know, and obviously you can't code that or analyze that in any sort of scientific way. Not that I think that there's any great merit in that, but the opponents that perspective claim, you know, that a reportedly scientific methodology is like the zenith of, of identifying truth, you know, without resort to conceptual prejudice, yet, you know, they present these postulates as absolutely binding that, you know, cannot be available to such methods. So, um, there's kind of like a built-in, uh, they kind of built in an excuse for rationalizing their own assertions, um, even, uh, including even, you know, by resort to the methods that they privilege. Um, I believe that there's nothing inherently immoral or, uh, value-loaded about prejudice is another consistent aspect of, uh, the rightest conceptual paradigm. It's becoming this floating signifier for something bad that's very much owes to enlightenment conceptual biases. You know, Edmund Burke, when, uh, when he invoked the term prejudice, what he was talking about was rules of action that are inculcated by habit, that basically become instinctual. Okay, and Hume, on somewhat different contextual bases made essentially the same argument. Okay, we're talking about customary moral rules that derive from practical reason that again, um, need be available to some punitive cross-examination, you know, or some, or force to force to be defended and some conceptual, uh, court whereby the standard of review is the degree to which, you know, they produce human happiness by their ability to avail or preclude, you know, impulse fulfillment. And the problem with that is that if you start breaking down these instinctive prejudices, you know, you're basically, you're doing, you're doing violence to the, the subjective acceptance of the concept of duty, like individuality and of scale. Okay. So, if you're going to break everything down according to the aforementioned criteria, you know, at the same time declare that, you know, there's some absolute moral imperative of not interference with one's fellow man. Again, we've already established that man is unusually social, social for a biological organism. And even, you know, if you're a pious believer, you acknowledge that man's at least in a large part, you know, possessive an animalistic nature of pure biology. That's not all he is, but that's substantial what he is. And only that intrinsic soci, only, only owing to that intrinsic sociality, man, individual men are not going to live their lives in isolation. Okay. So, how they treat others and how they partake of community benefits and how they seek to engage with that communitarian structure that's going to very much be defined by their ethics and the prejudices that inform their ethics. And if the only guiding imperative is one of non-interference with impulse fulfillment, well, that's essentially a non-aggression pact that's largely unenforceable and that people are going to find ways to subvert and exploit and are going to enrich themselves at the expense of the communitarian enterprise. Like, so axiomatically that's self-defeating. Beyond that too, you know, there's obviously a moral and in the secular, in the case of secular right, an aesthetical objection, you know, to the curing on that way or irrationalizing those kinds of behavior patterns. But that's a little bit outside the scope of what I want to emphasize in the central introductory description. I think, and this is key to the broader topic of this series, historicism in the Spanglerian sense. Like Spangler obviously was not the first historicist nor was he the most influential you know, Hagel was obviously, and Hagel was a standard bear. But he probably more familiar with his historicism in the Spanglerian sense because it's somewhat more accessible at least in superficial terms. Historicism is both fundamentally right-wing and it's also an essential aspect of a rightist epistemology. You know, the understanding that human groups differ, this, you know, there's profound distinctions between and within populations. You know, yeah, there are certain universals that, oh, and derive from the human condition, you know, but the understanding that the developmental cycles of discrete races and cultural groupings and populations, you know, the prime symbols that constitute, you know, the symbolic psychological aspects of these human groupings, you know, the customary prejudices, the conception these people have of themselves, you know, the sorts of activities that they consider to constitute the highest manifestation of virtue in both individual and community and capacity. These things are going to differ profoundly, you know, like across these racial, ethnic, sectarian and population divides. You know, this idea that there's a single ambition that all human populations are striving to and that, you know, human differences and identity and criteria are some kind of obstacle to progress. That's essentially a communist-stick viewpoint. Now, I don't want to sound like some basic bitch, like Mr. Higgs said, he was not calling like saying communists are hiding under his bed, like some 1950s John Berger or something, because that's fucking retarded. But I do think we can speak of a communist-stick mode of thought, or Jacob N. if you prefer, or, you know, there's a concrete conceptual bias that I'm describing. And, you know, I think involving terms familiar rather than esoteric or constructive in describing it, but, you know, that's an insidious tendency in that, you know, it kind of does violence to the ability to produce culture and a higher kind of human life. You know, it also, it rips people out of their ability to live historically. And when you do that to people by design, you're essentially imprisoning them in their own life, you know, and even if you're not somebody who values, you know, things of an historical nature for their own sake, you know, it basically precludes human happiness. And we're talking about fulfillment and freedom from anxiety and an unreasonable fear of mortality and all these other things. You're essentially guaranteeing that people are not going to be able to navigate their living existence in a fulfilling or psychologically stable way. We suggest that there's some, there's some grand moral ambition that the political authority should seek to realize. And that's the real, that's the essence of the. of the political divide today. There's only globalism in the resistance. There's not dozens of permutations of ideological commitment or conceptual models. There are the globalists who prevailed in the Cold War. Their particular ideological paradigm of globalism prevailed. There are people who wish to live historically and not be torn out of history and have the identity characteristics that constitute their human identity ripped out of them. That's not always saying anybody who doesn't understand that isn't really in the game because they don't understand the last 500 years and they don't understand most critically the 20th century and thus they don't understand the present because you live in the aftermath of both those things. That's what the divide is. It's somebody imperfect that's talking about right versus left but again for the sake of intelligibility, I continue to invoke those signifiers but I think increasingly it's meaningless to describe it in those terms but give me one second. What kind of time we get? You know, and finally, even, you know, what you're talking about, the perspective of the sensitivities and adjacent as we'll get into though not those sensitivities wasn't the standard bearer of the position that socrates deserved to be executed. Again, he was tazeturn on those sorts of questions. You can tease out what he thought of these things, just kind of like you can with reading Machiavelli as well. But intrinsic to the right is epistemology is a belief that religion is essential. If only for utilitarian reasons. You know, make the point again and again, I hold out Charles Murass as an example. Murass was an atheist and I think he was more of a fashist than a reactionary. Even though like he held out, you know, the demistory was obviously his primary influence. So he held out the monarchy and in particular the Roman churches is essential aspects of the French as a people and as a racial organism. You know that could coherently be said to exist historically. So even people aren't devout Christians or Muslims. They are, I believe it's basically impossible to be right wing and be entire religion. So when people talk that way, they're either professional liars and shills or trying to kind of corrupt the conversation at scale or by poisoning discourse or other people who don't really have a developed view of politics and you know, political matters either concrete or theoretical. You know, they just feel threatened in some instinctive way by the excesses of regime ideology, which is normal. Like I'm not saying that I'm not throwing shade on that or something obviously. But a lot of people are inculcated with this kind of derasinated view of like a religion tries to impose duties on me that I don't like or you know, people are alienated from any sort of sectarian belief structure of a historical nature. You know, they're only experience of religion is going to some mega church, their mind drag them to or something. You know, or when they think of religion, they think of like Joel Osteen. You know, I don't know exactly because that way of life is kind of alien to me conceptually. But you know, the if for no other reason, even even right wingers or critical of this kind of zealous religious enthusiasm, that's that can be characteristic of the body politic. And you know, they're they're agitated by some crisis or some kind of historical shock. You know, even people who make a priority of criticizing that kind of put being impulse towards, you know, sweeping moral zealousness as applied to public life and sociality at scale are pretty unconditionally committed to the understanding that, you know, without some sort of metaphysics. There's not going to be any sustainability to the to the political organism, you know, and really the only way that can be intelligible and, you know, the after the 17th century or so, you know, what's what's failure, obviously, is my poll start here is through the lens of whatever the dominant religious theological strain has historically been within the culture. You know, and this part takes a symbolic psychology as well and the kind of stuff that Carl Young and in Jasper's and people like that got into that's a bit of a set of scope. But, you know, one of the reasons why I come down very strongly on people who try and fall back on this kind of Darwinist perspective, what claiming to be right wing, because that's not, that doesn't track, you know, and the only reason people think that that perspective is somewhat the right is perspective is because there's such an absolute bully pulpit until recently for a lead opinion, which is monolithic in the managerial state. And even if there are divisions therein in a system like ours or in a system like the Soviet system was when, you know, the world's divide between competing globalisms, even if there are even if the real house of the elite of the non-manclature as a house divided that will never be broadcast publicly. And you know, hashed out through some sort of this cursing process that the body politic has unveiled to you as some, you know, key participant. So I realized that probably went a little longer than I expected, but that's what we're talking about. We're talking about the kind of philosophical basis, bases of, you know, partisan political commitment, you know, and this is why it's important, not just in terms of cultivating intellectual rigor, but also in terms of in terms of praxis, you know, but that also invites the question like what is what is political philosophy? Political philosophy and again, the origins of continental philosophy and the origins of at all things that characterized the European cultural mind. weren't derived from ancient Greece, you know, classical Greece. You know, the Zenitha which was the reign of Pericles just before the Peloponnesian War. You know, then the heir to that, the heir to that culture was Rome and Europe was the heir to both, you know, is the way to understand it. And, like I said at the outset, the synities were the first political philosopher. Now, there was an division, formula conceptual in Athens, between, you know, this is religious philosophy, this is political theory, this is metaphysics, this is mathematics, there was that's a singular philosophy. Okay. An essential understanding too is that there wasn't a concept of the state. One of the weirder things to me, and as we get into the Peloponnesian War, which is the only book that the synities wrote, it also, the Peloponnesian War, in my opinion, from a Higaylian perspective, the Peloponnesian War was within the cultural form of classical Greece and its civil-national cycle. That was the equivalent of what, what they called the Eropagian Burger Tree, the European Civil War, you know, 1914 to 1945. It destroyed both Athens and Sparta. It destroyed classical Greece as we know it as an historical phenomenon. The Athenian assault in Sicily was Athens' Stalingrad, and we'll get into all what I mean by all this in the next episode. But, you know, Athens basically became this hyper-capitalistic dictatorship that became exceedingly brutal towards people within the Greek race, or Greek ethnos. It standard bearers came to rationalize this sort of extreme violence at scale by resort to a paradigm of might makes right, and this kind of total logical sensibility of, well, now we're at war, it doesn't matter, and the podium in war went on for almost 30 years. But the kind of rationalizing pathology was, it doesn't matter that this war was unjust, because now we're at war, and we've got to prosecute it to the fullest extent possible and enrich ourselves as much as we can in the process. And we've got to annihilate our enemies to survive even if they're fellow Greeks. That's an incredibly depraved perspective. I mean, it's goofy for Americans in 2025 to pretend they're the Athenians anyway. Athens was a society based on slavery, as, you know, for 40,000 years basically every society was. It was hyper patriarchal, you know, it was decidedly anti-Galitarian, and you know, the root of the term democracy is demos. Demos refers to an ethnos. It refers to a people. It's not human beings voting or persons. So there's something, there's something weirdly conceptually illiterate about, you know, regime, loyal people, like invoking Athens as the model, and pretending that America is a democracy. I mean, you can't talk about those, I mean, first and foremost, they bring it back. And I said I wasn't going to go on tangents, and they're at one, but there was no state in Athens or Sparta. You know, and you'll find some translations, particularly stuff kind of from the zenith of what I think was like John Cacodemia from like the 50s to the 80s, when it became really cheap to print books. And then it's kind of explosion of like economic tax, you know, kind of feed the these educational curriculums on the Sunday. You'll find translations where they say, oh, the Paulist means the state. It doesn't. A loose translation, it'd be like the nation or the country or like the race. I think that's a more appropriate term, but there was no concept of, okay, this is the Paulist, but there's this permanent bureaucracy that kind of manages, you know, tensions between, you know, different blocks in the body politic. And, you know, these guys are responsible for levying taxes. And, you know, this this guy is responsible for the military. There was none of that like the social organism and the political apparatus were the same thing, you know, and every adult male, what he was of a military age, you know, served in the military of war. I was expected to die on orders when necessary. And if he lived to advance age, you know, that commitment would end, but you know, he continued to serve in in the assembly, you know, really the modern state as we know, you can't hold up the state as we conceptualize it until after Westphalia, in my opinion. So, you know, you might as well be talking about, um, you might as well be talking about your own planet comparing the managerial state to Athens, you know, classical Athens or Spharta, you know, it like even even anti-status tendencies in the modern age, you know, like for example, the Confederacy here in America, they were reacting, first of all, they actually did have a state bureaucracy, like whether they wanted to or not, just because that was reality. But even people who are hostile to it on ethical or aesthetical grounds, they were reacting to something that was the norm. You know, so you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't compare the two things, but, um, excuse me, the, uh, and the traditional view of course, I know that people in the comments, um, are gonna say, Socrates was the first, uh, was the first political philosopher, you know, he was in the first, um, the first, you know, work of political theory was Plato's, uh, the Republic. Bear with me on this. Um, I'm going somewhere with this when I identify through cities. Okay, because again, what I mentioned a moment ago, the city of the, it was the first discreetly political philosopher. That's why like I said, these military science types, particularly during the Cold War, identified him as like the progenitor of strategic studies and of political realism, like the Mureshamr sword, which I think is both a midway take, and subsequently they, they don't really understand the kind of core of the cities, ontological claims, but what they are right about is that, you know, the first purely, the, the first pure political philosophy is the cities of the Peloponnesian War. Plato, like his teacher Socrates, and like Aristotle, he's exceeded both. They didn't have a discreet political philosophy. Aristotle's the politics. He's speaking about politics as an aspect of like all things related to philosophy, you know, and the nicotine ethics is as much a political work as the politics. But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. Um, [BLANK_AUDIO] And whether the other objection, I'm sure, would be that, well, neither the Cindy's Mercedes-Benz, Shirley's was philosophers who proceeded them, like, yes, obviously. But the priest of critics didn't form this course for 2000 years subsequent. And by that token, what we're getting in a pretty esoteric territory, but there may have been civilizations in the Spenglerian sense, 30,000 years ago, the record of which has been totally wiped away. But that's not where we're not speaking in absolute terms. We're talking about the origins of the European cultural mind and the historical and intellectual tendencies that it is derived from. And that begins with Socrates and Thesynides. Now it's similar vein. The, well, here, actually, strike that. I'm sorry, I lost my place. Okay, here we go. The Peloponnesian War, the book, I mean, Thesynides' book. We'll run it a little late to get into the meat of it. We'll do that in the next episode. But the core of it is, again, Thesynides was very reticent. He didn't issue forth a value judgment on the proceeding 30 years. But the core kind of crux of it is that you can't understand man unless you understand human societies. Effort clarity. The Greek word "physic", which obviously we derive physics from, it wasn't the science of motion. It literally meant things that grow or by nature. So it basically included everything. Okay, it was remarkably holistic. You know, everything from atoms to the world itself or the ocean or whatever. Okay, there wasn't even accounting for discreet dialogues about the political or the Polish. Until the Peloponnesian War by Thesynides, there wasn't a book that presented itself as, this is a book about human societies, this is a book about the nature of warfare, this is a book about human societies at war and data we can derive therein for future generations, you know, about literally the science of waging war, which is the essence of politics and thus you have the science of the political. And it was considered something of a faux pas. I mean, the final time you're like word for it. It was something that wouldn't have occurred to people, even people, even learned men of high breeding in Athens or Sparta, who have something of a punitive view of the military command structure and the weighted wage the war or of the senior men in the political apparatus like even if they even if they had, you know, like a critical view of these things, it wouldn't really have occurred to them, you know, to kind of write about the sort of baser impulses they animate individual men within these structures. It wouldn't really have occurred anybody to draw like a kind of punitive portrait of the police would nurture them in decline. Okay. Now, Thucinities obviously the punishment generally for a commander who lost the war was death. Okay, Thucinities was such a great man. He was spared and he was banished. Okay. So there's some scholars who'll say that like, well, Thucinities was an embittered man. So he's, you know, got, he's kind of presenting the war in a light, least favorable to his own country. I don't think that's true because specifically in some of the dialogues, he's clearly resorting to a kind of apologia in favor of Athens. The Spartans interestingly had come to blame themselves when the war was going badly for them and Sparta won a pure victory, okay. And I'll get into the, I'll get into these specifics of this, but the Spartans sued for war after the Athenian contingent, many of whom were actually living in Sparta because they were doing business there. They approached the Spartan assembly and they kind of like lead bear that they attended to continue on their course of conquest, no matter what the human cost. And the fact that the strong will always dominate the weak and, you know, war arrives like the seasons. And when war and rumors of war abound, I'm paraphrasing here, you know, we are going to preempt that and, you know, we are going to abide the will of the gods, the fullest. Because one of the highest good, you know, the highest good is, you know, to be remembered historically. You know, and there are some, some of the learned managed Spartans subsequently viewed this as a safe phasing face saving measure by the Athenian delegation does an invitation to arbitration in lieu of warfare, well, in the Spartans safe face, but they were being in the fact of insulted. The city says that's not true. He says these people were as obtuse as they appeared to be. You know, at the same time, he basically presents the Spartan system as it is flexible to the point that it couldn't really respond to existential crises with any other paradigm, other than like a directly military response, which is true. I think it's weird that people hold out spurt as this like based society. Spurt was all fucked up. He felt like it wasn't like, you know, you know, the, you know, how you don't read books like Spartan philosophers, you don't know why because they weren't any. You know, the reason why people like Hobbes, Bob, like, Sparta is because there was something in primitive terms. The Peloponnesians were not primitive in cultural terms at all, but I mean, it's in technological terms. They did practice a kind of radical socialism. I trust me. People would not, like like 21st century guys, I think they're right wing would not have liked living in Sparta. Okay. But um, yeah, we're coming up by about an hour. I don't want to dive into the Peloponnesian war. We'll do that next episode, but I didn't cover as much as I wanted to hear. I'll try and pick up the pace next time. Yeah, that's um, I hope that people found this to be worthwhile. Awesome. Can't wait for the next episode. Um, well, considering that Twitter is doing what Twitter does to you. where can people find you? Well, I got a Discord server now. And I've got a bunch of other cool things going on. I mean, my home is always sub-stack. And I'll always be on social media because you have to have a presence there. But I think social media is kind of, especially, especially acts is kind of bullshit. I mean, there's a story from a gene aside. It's just kind of a bullshit platform. But people should come to my sub-stack. It's real time. It's 777.substack.com. We got a pretty active telegram channel too. Now you can find that there on Instagram. The Discord server is hopping. Like a whole bunch of the guys. We got a bunch of channels. We got a text channel. We got a voice channel. We got like a multimedia channel. This week I'm very harried. And a dear friend of mine and ours is coming to town tomorrow. I got to meet him at the airport and shaperone him around the city. And then we got symphony tickets on Saturday. A bunch of the home lane faction guys and I. And plus I've also got like, I got some long foreign stuff. I got to, I really do need to complete because I owe it to other people. But so not much going to be the Discord channel's hopping. Go visit it and use it. But I'm not going to be. I'm not going to be real active with new stuff until next week. But yeah, that's go to sub-stack. You'll find a link to the discord. You'll find a link to my telegram. At long last, I released the documentary from Utah. It's anybody use a subscriber. A page subscriber can access it. I think you'll enjoy it. My dear friend, Ray, can I film another movie this summer? And a transition to more video content. I hope people will find it worth well. But that's what I got. All right. Until part two, I look forward to it. Thank you, Thomas. Yeah, thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pikenyana show. I'm here with Thomas 777. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm doing well. Thanks for hosting me. There's kind of a lot to address today. Part of that's my fault along to how I organize my outlines in my mind and things. So I'm going to try not to make this skater shot. If it ends up in a way, please, I'm going to ask. I apologize in advance. There's a few other things going on here because I want to tie together how continental philosophy relates to the present. And anything that relates to the present, obviously, relates to the 20th century. And we're in the counter enlightenment. We reach a disease in terms of these grand postulates and ethical imperatives that were presenting a challenge to what had been the consensus really since the Westphalian piece. To a greater lesser degree. Okay. And these thinkers were drawing upon the presacratics for a reason. Okay. Particularly if we're talking about, you know, niche, ethical, ethical, open-hower. I think we've picked in there too. You know, and today, the kind of re-emergence of stuff like virtue ethics that a lot of the cat, Roman Catholic comrades will know what I'm talking about there. All right. That's really Aristotelian. But Aristotle represents a complicated paradigm. Okay. But political theory starts with Lucidities. Okay. But the way things cities is presented is misunderstood. And I don't just mean by like, I mean, there's a basic intellectual dishonesty among ideal odds who was scribe to enlightenment, truisms, and things. They kind of deliberately misconstrued stuff because, you know, they practiced their own sort of dishonest revisionism with respect to the intellectual heritage of Western civilization. But there's military science types as well as a lot of people who kind of came out of Cold War, academia. They just don't understand through cities. And the way they present it is, this is the first example of, you know, military science and political realism. Because through cities is saying that, you know, falling back upon, you know, the preeminence of Athenian virtue and this integral philosophy that they're afforded, they're afforded been kind of the framing, the conceptual framing device. If any philosophical treatment award peace, he's doing away with that. That's not what he's doing. What he's saying is that he's saying Athenian civilization is falling. And so it's sparta, but obviously his concern is Athens. And he's saying it's fallen because this is what we abandoned. I do as far to say that he blames things like the plague which hit Athens, which hit Athens, concomitant with the Pelopnesian war, which went on for decades, the war I mean. And the catastrophic defeat at Sicily, the Sicily expedition was, was Athens stolen bread. Okay, history doesn't repeat itself, but there are patterns and there are data points that we can extrapolate from politics and political configurations, particularly states at war. Okay, the Sicily expedition destroyed Athens. And Red Ascent as the city is, he clearly thinks that Athens, that's like the wrath of the gods. They're like Athens abandoned virtue and this was their punishment. They were destroyed. Like we were destroyed. And if the Cittities was spared, you know, it's clear to me, I think. If you, I'm not like a classics guy, I don't, I don't read Greek or anything. You know, I'm a 20th century political theory guy. But it doesn't take, you know, layman like me can discern the city is as convenient. Like I was spared because, you know, it was ordained for me to, you know, to tell a story for posterity. You know, and the future generations, this is how our civilization fell. That's what he's saying. Okay. And there's also blind spots in. You know, I, the Athenian military, like parrically, Athens. You know, there's some confusion, especially among people who are classics types. We're not talking about the Athens of, of the Iliad. We're talking about parrically the Athens. Okay. That, that was probably the peak of civilization. You know, like that's not some romantic mythos. I mean, I think that's basically an arguable. Okay. These people, it's not like they didn't have any understanding of military science. It's not like they didn't have any understanding of like physical science. It's not like they didn't have any understanding of, you know, the realities of, of, you know, cold, the cold calculus of, of military tactics and grand strategy. They weren't a bunch of like, they weren't a bunch of like, Erie Romantics sitting around saying, oh, we disdain rational understandings of military processes. I mean, that's for poster. It's okay. If they, if they're a like that, they, I mean, nobody's like that. Okay. Like even the command, she's weren't like that. I'm not from shade of the command, geez, but they were obviously, I compared to the primitive worry of pride, you know, who prized individual valor over, you know, complex infantry maneuvers and things. But, you know, so I want to talk about the city and continue that, you know, the city of these things that it's cool through the lens of surreal door, surreal and a predium. I'm probably biased, but they're clearly making the case that socrates deserve to be executed and they're getting that through to sit from the city's account. Even though city's doesn't see that. So there's like a lot here. Okay. There's the fact that modern still present through city's correctly. There's the fact that the ideological right is very much drawing upon classical integral ethics to assert its legitimacy and to present, you know, its values in a way that is not just precedent historically. But that can be said to represent an ideal what actually was extent and that was the project. of, you know, Indo-European civilization. And also, this is the starting point of political philosophy, which to me, it takes precedent because that's what my wheelhouse is. I'm not really qualified to talk about other aspects of the continental tradition. I mean, I could, but I, there's better, there's more knowledgeable guys that could do it. But that's, that's a starting point. You know, and like I said, if this becomes scatter shot to give me, the basic, the the Peloponnesian War is the only book through Cittity's Ever Wrote. And yeah, I mean, obviously, it's a book about warfare and a war or any political paradigm. That was there to foreign precedent. But what you can extrapolate from it generally is that to understand the nature of man, you can only understand human society, you have to understand human societies. And the only way you can really understand human societies is by studying their behavior and war. Okay. But it's not, it's not some calo romanticization of war. But it's Prodhun pointed out later, Isbid Suril, which is a peculiar relevance to us. The reasons I just explicated warfare is bound up with man's, if we're talking about, you know, people, K will a high culture, but warfare is bound up with man's concept of beauty. It's bound up with his, his assumptions of honor. It's bound up with his understanding of remedial justice. It, you know, his entire kind of the prime symbols of the culture that he, that he, that has nurtured him, you know, always things. You know, that's why I'm always making the point that really the, the, the Germans only contribution to enlightenment thought was Klausowitz and Klausowitz was a great battlefield commander. And there's some truth in what he wrote. But it's, it's an object nonsense. That is postulate that, you know, warfare is this rational process that is just, you know, diplomacy, but by violence. Like that's nonsense. That's an enlightenment nonsense. You know, and it's not an accident that the, the German contribution to that rationalist paradigm, we don't derive from military science, but, you know, that, um, the city of these dogs he coming from a totally different place. Um, it, uh, the city's really in the opening paragraph of the Peloponnesian war. He tells his readers that, you know, he documented it from the beginning. He began commanding forces during the doom of the Soviet expedition. But he began writing from the onset of hostilities because he said that this was, that this is a war unlike any of that there has ever been. Okay. Um, he referred to it as the greatest emotion that ever afflicted, or ever impacted like the Peloponnesus. Like, with that translates as in real terms is the, this is the most significant catalyst or historical, um, variable or like prime constellation that causes that constantly like a prime move on. Agent or agent of motion, that never occurred. At least someone with the Greeks and, um, you know, that was, that's, not just his reference point, but this was really the center of, this was really the center of civilization. You know, it's not like there was a consolation of civilizations all over the planet that were, you know, on the, uh, on the order of the Greeks. I know people would pause at the Chinese, but they, they were very different. And obviously there wasn't contact, you know, in, in any meaningful way. Um, the, uh, there was three critical variables in the Peloponnesian war that for purposes of historicism. And again, my, and I stand by this assertion. Consider these was a proto-historicist. In a real sense, you know, that's, that, that's not just, you know, extrapolating 20th century conceits to, um, like Spanglerian paradigms to the, the only one understand people like Spangler is that this is what they were drawing upon. This is the intellectual heritage. Um, the most significant data points as we think of them today, or, uh, you know, critical battlefield events, which, as Thucydides explocage, these battlefield events were indistinguishable from political ones. I mean, part of that is, uh, the function of the Greek mind, but part of that is because this war was negatively political. You know, that's why like I compare it to, uh, you know, the conflict cycle of 20th century Europe. You know, again, not, history does not repeat itself, but it should be familiar to the Spanglerians among the subs. You know, you can extrapolate, um, paradigms. Because we're talking about a limited number of variables and outcomes, because we're talking about human beings organized politically at scale. And we're talking about armed conflict. There's not infinite, um, permutations there. Okay. But the three, the three critical variables, um, we can extrapolate from, consider these kind of Peloponnesian war is a siege of Milo's and, uh, the destruction of the Millions is a people. Okay. And, um, the Million dialogues, with the Million dialogue, which I'm sure is familiar to people who know the source material. Okay. That's, that's the reason why we was so large in the bog. It's not just because obviously it's, it's, it's incredibly, um, it's incredibly severe, but it was, it was, it was a, it was a critical event. I'd say that it's, uh, I, I'd say it's not unlike, um, a lot of the excesses perpetuated by the third right. Um, all of the causal, uh, nexus, obviously was distinguishable, but in terms of the political significance of it and, um, the sum of the repercussions. It's, there is, um, there is some common, um, there is, there is some common, uh, proverbial territory there. Um, the death is a stolt and Sicily, which as I said in my opinion, we thought of as, um, as a, as a, the Athenian Stalingrad in some ways and concomitant with both of these things and the entire kind of, um, the raison d'etre as the Athenians themselves presented it, um, what presented the causes of belly and how they rationalize their actions. This destroyed Athenian moral legitimacy. Um, they sacrificed their core virtues in an effort to secure and consolidate power political credibility, you know, which is key here. They didn't take, undertake these extreme measures and kind of openly issue what was purportedly their own core values and they did this in the Spartan assembly, you know, when they were during, um, when, when on Athenian, some of whom were residing in Sparta at that time, they went before the Spartan assembly and they were naked we, uh, hostile in their, uh, epilogue, which was impressive and, you know, and this wasn't just a flex to try and deter, um, you know, Spartan aggression and kind, the, the conditions were way beyond that. This representative, the real breakdown and the internal constitution of the Athenian cultural mind, okay? And again, uh, I'm not sure if you're going to be These dramatic and almost unfathomably brutal decisions that they rendered. These weren't difficult decisions in the heat of military crises. These were very calculated, and the end result wasn't to capture immediate battlefield advantage. It was quite literally to not sacrifice credibility moving forward, and what was viewed as a then approximately permanent conflict paradigm. And the Spartans fell on their own sword and kindness, and response to that when the Spartans directly intervened. Finally, the Spartans allied, they cultivated alliance with Persia. And for centuries afterwards, speaking of the Spartans was to utter an obscenity, because they allied with a racial enemy of all Greeks. You just don't do that. And here's another parallel and I opinion to the European conflict paradigm of the 20th century. That's why it's ironic to me that people act like, I guess it's because of that silly movie about Thermopylae or whatever. Like people have exporters, this like incredibly utopia. Like Sparta was a mess. You know, it was authoritarian, it was shortsighted, it was anti-philosophical. And they became traders to their own kind. Like this isn't some model for high culture or good stacemanship or anything. That's kind of like that aggression. But short story of Wong and I don't want to derail us with a blow by blow of the Peloponnesian War. Some kind of context is appropriate. Essentially the Peloponnesian War basically began as like a war of proxies. And the intrigues around these initial decisions were murky. And I mean, it's just pretty much always the case within complex and highly scaled conflict paradigms. The Athenians were subjected to an accusation by Corinth, which was a rival naval power. And they were an important member of the Peloponnesian Alliance, which is like the Spartan Alliance. The Corinthian's charge that Athens was assisting a colony revolt, a Corkura in a sea battle against them. I mean, I've been flourishing with technology and weapons and know how in order to wage the war. The Corinthian diplomats, their big concerns that this is inevitably going to provoke a general war, which they believe was coming in any event or going to what amount of an arms or ace throughout the Peloponnesis. That's why these alliances had emerged to begin with. It's not exactly clear why the Athenians felt specifically threatened by Corinth, but something through Cedars' explocates and statements by the Athenian diplomatic cadre in Sparta as they stated their position before the Spartan assembly was that the only way that Athens can truly thrive and be secure is if it has an absolute advantage in the ability to deploy and apply force. And even if that makes slaves of all other Greeks, all men covet power because all goods, tangible and metaphysical derive from power. So that means that fallen as the Athenians may seem, this is an inevitability and to say otherwise is too live. And it's better to admit that you wish to make slaves of other Greeks than too live before your equals. It's total logical and it's very tortured and it was very ungrick at the time. But reading between the lines and through Cedars' subtlely makes this point too, although he doesn't break his reticent narrative voice. The Athenians are really saying is that there's some sort of crisis of foot that can't really be explicated. And wars and rumors of war are, you know, being whispered by the gods and men alike. You know, war arrives like the seasons. Something apocalyptic is before us. And you know, fortune is a fickle mistress and she only grants her affections to, you know, the men are most willing to dare to take what they must in order to, you know, guarantee their continued dominance. I'm sure there's some classics types who would think I'm over simplifying things and they're probably right. But again, I already stipulated I'm not any kind of classics professor. As things deteriorated in theater and threats translated into active warring, you know, the Spartans through secret diplomacy, you know, made it clear to their league, Peloponnesian league partners that they would intervene at the opportune moment, which ultimately came during the ill fate of the assault and cis we. But before that, the slaughter of the Millions happened and for context and we'll move ahead from this historical backdrop in a minute or background. The Millions occupied an island in the G and C, which was actually neutral. It was the one island in accounting for the technology of the time in operational striking distance of the enemy of heartland that the Athenians didn't directly control. They demanded that the Millions surrender or face devastation. And again, these were fellow Greeks. The Millions refused to capitulate probably because they realized that they were doomed anyway and they wanted to die as men. The Athenians slaughtered all of them and sold the women and children into slavery. They shot the conscience even of the Spartans, you know, because again, treating people within the culture that way. We're talking about an equivalent of the Westphalian consensus. There's certain lines that are lying across, you know, and that, um, to sit at these, uh, is clear, um, subtle as it may be conveyed that this is what doomed the Athenians as a race, as a people, you know, um, this is what brought the plague upon them, literally the plague under their house. When they assaulted Sicily, um, the, the, the inhabitants of, uh, Sicily were, uh, a warrior race, you know, they were into European, um, they weren't Greeks, but they were very close to related, um, Syracuse, um, was, uh, a, uh, the Athenians were very gravely concerned, they were going to pivot to Sparta. They preemptively assaulted, they're assault-caused and too pivot towards Sparta. The Athenians laid siege to Syracuse, um, this lasted for months. When the Athenians, instead of out to reconstitute, or into this quagmire, they found themselves in. The, uh, the Spartans assaulted, um, in, uh, coordination with, uh, the Sicilian natives, they slaughtered the Athenians, they chased them literally back to the sea, during the Athenian retreat, the Athenians were trampled by their own men. Um, Athenians began slaughtering each other to try and fight their way to the sea. Um, it was, it was, um, a massacre that destroyed them. The, uh, which brings us to the case of Socrates, because again, there's nothing so simple minded as, uh, a suggestion from Thesitities, like, ironic subtle direct, direct, that Socrates somehow caused this sort of malaise and moral, um, depravity that led to the destruction of Athenian civilization. Like Norwood Pradhun, or, um, Cyril suggests that what Socrates was, was he was the standard bearer of a way of being, you know, and, um, he was a bad man, okay, but more than that, he was a standard bearer of this way of being that was nakedly and, and catastrophically deleterious to the Athenian way of life. So by executing him, the Athenians were repudiating their own corruption as a race, okay, yes, the trial of Socrates was beset by bad procedure, and probably by, perjured testimony. And Socrates was an all-probability, not afforded a proper defense, according to the, the strictures that, of justice, um, remedial justice that, you know, are, are universally accepted by men who were a higher reason, and the Athenians certainly qualified, but that isn't really the point. The issue with the trial and execution of Socrates isn't, you know, with Socrates giving a fair trial, is it for talking about some hapless poor man or something accusing him from his crime? Like the question is, does Socrates deserve to die or not? And where you following that question essentially tells us where you fall politically, the process is incidental in this case. The way to understand the significance of, uh, Socrates and what he was doing violence to by way of his intellect and his discourses, the way to understand what the civilities were suggesting constituted the Athenian ethical soul. The way to understand what people have Surah Al-And Pradhun and Sobahauer and Nisha and Hyder, and all of these counter-in-elatement thinkers, like the essence of what they're talking about is really ontological. You know, that's why I like in the first episode, I think I just talked about like values, like this being an issue of values, not in the way that's just talking about cloak, wheelie, and like American media politics or something, or not in terms of practical reason, or what is part of it, you know, it's a whole kind of way of life and a way of being and conceptual structuring of the world. You know, the classical Athenian view, the common thread we're talking about is that in this way of life, I just mentioned, the household, the Paulus, communitarian life, integral conceptual paradigms of justice and beauty and honor both, you know, masculine honor as well as, you know, what constitutes, you know, honor in a woman. This is all tied together, okay? And the household is basically the kind of training round for how to be a good citizen of the Paulus, but to be clear, the Athenians had no concept of a state that's a modern contrivance, like the Paulus isn't the state, it's not like the government of Athens, it's not even the city or the town. It's the only really way to think about it in modern terms that approaches the conceptual depth of it in any way, is it think of it as like the nation or like the race or the country if you will, okay? And the kind of core tenets of it are instinctive prejudices and judgments, okay? You know, what is just, what is beautiful and more significantly like what constitutes beauty? Like obviously, the Athenians and the Romans, you know, inherited this from them, they believe very strongly in a concept of the path they're familiar with, you know? So I mean the father, the patriarch is the absolute lord of the household, but that doesn't give them carte blanche to bully his wife or treat his kids like their slaves or something. You know, he has a reciprocal duty to his wife and children, and just as they have a duty to obey him, you know? And from there, you know, men and women and the children in that other progeny, you know, they learn how to, they learn what their duties are and what constitutes a noble life as part of the Paulus. You know, this stuff is instinctive, this stuff is transcendent. These things are, can be recognized by resort to practical reason. You know, they're not the, it's not the result of some elaborate discourse. And this is something we debate about. We don't debate about whether, you know, a patriarch would be happier like, you know, running around with his friends and hunting pigs or, you know, having a bunch of different women that he gets pregnant, then we treat treats like a. You know, we don't argue about like whether women would be happier, you know, like not not being subjected to the authority of the household because that's against reason and contradicting things derived from reason. It does violence to the concept of the good and and and cuts us off from it. Okay. So anybody who attacks these institutions is basically a tax attacking the good and that means that he's a man who either can't live among civilized people because he's a miscreant and he's just trying to cause difficulties or you know, he's something of a degenerate personality who recognizes certain frailties in the constitution of the Paulus at the end of which he lives and he decided to exploit those things only to his need to be a contrarian or maybe it's ordained by God that he do this but that doesn't have any bearing on whether or not he should be executed as a remedial measure because the honor of the Paulus demands it. You know, and this because undoubtedly the question will be raised and also this is part of the purpose of the series. What relevance does this have to the presence day? I just told you people like Cerelle were the standard bearers of this notion, you know, and Trudhoun interestingly he coined the term anarchism and he was the first political theorist to call himself an anarchist and he was a socialist but he held out what I just described as the ideal. You know, um and this is important this is a bit of a digression. I mean, we're going to get to socialism as an ethical postulate later in this series but this idea that social wisdom is axiomatically some sort of paradigm of class warfare or you know materialist reductionism or that it that or that it's a wolf like that that's not the case at all um the reason why It became so inextricably bound up with the continental political consciousness is because you know the alienation really the post was failing order. I mean it reached an intensity during the second industrial age obviously we're class war became a reality but the enterprise was the philosophical and political enterprise was to repair the social fabric that had been torn asunder by the modern age and most most modern continental philosophers had considered you know the kind of high medieval era to be the ideal but uh these um these radical socialists and um anarchists these guys like surreal these guys like Werner Sombart these guys like Tradun they were saying no no no no no it's Athens and the trial of Socrates was an example of you know essential redemptive violence and that's critical you know um Marx didn't invent socialism Marx and Lenin were social or Marx and Engels rather forgive them forgive me um Marx and Engels were socialist because that was really the only animating paradigm that had any momentum you know um like don't gonna be wrong like Dotscapital it's incredibly uh internally consistent but a lot of this derivative and I mean any any political theory that is anything other than you know a pure thought experiment the praxis of it as postulated is going to be like derivative okay because it's going to partake of the zeitgeist and it's going to build on a uh discursive foundation you know and uh i've known it's even among educated people in america there's this idea that there was no concept of state socialism but then Marx and Engels wrote a book i mean i'm i'm being cleverly obtuse for the sake of brevity but um you know i think everybody understands what i mean and um i'm not sitting here like stumbling for socialism i'm i'm very much i'm very much an american and i'm kind of a redneckish okay and i mean king aside um you know i'm the kind of person russell kirk was talking about you know in roots in american order you know i'm the last person who's gonna sit here and say that you know yeah we we really need to we really need to abide state socialism to write the shift you know let me go vote for Bernie fucking Sanders i mean anybody who's like hot and knows it's not the way to think but the european situation is very very different you know and even if it wasn't you know these uh these thinkers that were talking about who represented um the counter in a lightening in the 20th century you know which i think is the 20th century was the enlightenment enterprise um at it it's zenith reaching its conclusion that's why you know the end of history you became the rallying cry um both of of you know angler and progressives and of and of communist you know because like their goal is to end history and the reaction and the revolt against that wasn't some sort of reactionary um it's servitism that was dead it was people like syrell you know and and the progeny of syrell was um muslim and and edolf Hitler and um and and the phalanche and um the iron guard the iron guards were complicated but um these these these these thinkers and these partisans who um least conceptual horizon deride from these thinkers they want they wanted to create an alternative modernity you know not um they didn't want to turn the clock back to to you know 1700 or something i mean there were people like that but they but they were irrelevant in like by 1918 you know that that tendency died um on europe's battlefields with you know 10 million um 10 million um european youths you know um and that's important you know because like i said i was on hopping around a lot but uh it it's essential to tie this stuff together and if we don't kind of as we go along it it just becomes so much trivia or or some or you know maybe an interesting discussion but you know nevertheless that we're notwithstanding you know the the fascinations of it it's just a discussion about you know what people thought in some ancient dead civilization but um moving on key to um this kind of paradigm of Athenian virtue um was a certain anti-intellectualism now what we mean by that is just that you know um we we don't mean some hostility to learning about the world or some hostility to a moral education um but intellectualism is a discrete tendency that again avails you know the subject matter of practical reason to some punitive cross-examination you know, that it can't withstand only to the fact that, you know, these things are pre-rational judgments. And the rallying cry, particularly of social Democrats and Vimelar, was, you know, fascists are pigs and they're anti-intellectual, you know, horror, horror, they burn books. And that's very, very species. And as presented, especially in the present, it's intellectually dishonest, but it's not entirely incorrect, you know. It's not to say that, it's not to say that people should embrace some sort of jacomism of the right. Nor is it to say again that, you know, paracles Athens was some kind of combination of a weight Rome and, and the Spartan racial cousins, you know, obviously like the strength of Athens was that it was a very complete cultural form. And they had a remarkably vigorous philosophical heritage, you know, but this tendency to intellectualize things, as a matter of course, as a bad as, it's sentimentalizing them, you know, both through violence to the practical reason, you know, and reason, logos isn't rationality or rationalism. In some ways, it's the opposite of this. That doesn't mean it's irrational, but rationalism, okay. And the way that we think of it. And this plays into the idea of justice as well. And this is critical. Justice and the classical conception, it's not, it doesn't derive from social conditions or like material circumstances. It's not an ideology either. It's not, it's not some mechanism of social planning. You know, in fact, this is a concept that Nietzsche came back to a lot is that you can't put justice in the hands of some bureaucracy, because that's crude, that's anti-human, but also a state apparatus is incapable of realizing justice. Justice is implicitly sanitary. You know, if somebody kills your brother or your comrade, you don't have, you don't have some judge who doesn't know you, doesn't know your family, doesn't know your comrade, doesn't know your enemies, may not even speak your language in a real sense. Sometimes not literal sense anymore. You know, because this, not a subject matter, he can apprehend. And that's also not what justice is. You know, we don't, we don't, we don't execute men because according to, according to some modeling of paradigm, where we develop the right inputs, you know, if you execute men, then the people are such and such percentage less likely to, to do bad things. That's not what justice is. That's on sort of social planning. That part takes of some like loose concept of remedial measures, but the sake of, you know, sustaining some sort of base stability, and a highly scaled, um, political order, where the moral consensus is abstracted from concrete things, either going to a historical accident or ideological imperative or the sheer scale of, government and the premise of authority or some conspiracy of all three, but it's not, it's not justice in the way that it's traditionally thought of. Like what the, what the Athenians would have thought of as sort of a model of criminal justice, would be the kind of stuff that vigilantes do in Northern Ireland, or that they did in the American South, or that you know, in a medieval Europe or early Georgia pan, you know, the kind of privilege that nobleman had to demand satisfaction from somebody who offends against him or his family or you know, the order that he belongs to. There's a totally different thing from, you know, punishing a a healer to steal something or, uh, you know, healing somebody in the court doesn't pay their taxes or, you know, in the case of something that's axiomatically literally sanguineary, you know, again, like, it can't be said to be justice if there's some impersonal bureaucracy. The purpose of which is that it's blind to the circumstances. You know, devising some sort of remedial measure to assuage, uh, the likelihood of violent retribution outside of a legal code that itself is devised the guarantee predictability of outcomes. You know, and there are there a bottle of that would be like, well, look at somebody like King David. Okay, but King David was just that. He was a king. And he was a king of a discrete population of people who he was bound to by things like tribal allegiance and that's also like the ultimate in noblest of wise, you know, so, um, it's not, um, it's not actually a bottle. If anything, it substantiates the claim about, um, you know, classical, uh, conceptions of justice. I've only got, we're like four minutes. The hour, man, like I'm going to stop now because I get, I'm not getting in the trial aside with these itself and that's going to take a long time. Yeah, sounds good. Sounds good. Um, tell people now where they can, uh, they can find you since, uh, you've been banished off of X for the 25th time. Yeah, X is shitty, man, then it's stupid. And, um, I, uh, it's, it's not even what, I mean, it's slop now. It's a bunch of people trying to make money, you know, by posting questions. Oh, what do you think about, what do you think about the picture of this thing and everything? And they're just trying to make money with engagement. And it's just ridiculous. No. So we're going to have, and moving forward, uh, I don't, I want to go off on a big tangent about the current situation with censorship and things. But, um, I, it's not, it's not a good platform. I'm sorry, I mean, they always terrorize me, but I'm this aside from not withstanding that, um, but the best place to find me my, my home online is sub-stack, which I think sub-stack really is a good platform. Um, I actually don't ever violate TOS any of these platforms. So it's not, but they never threatened me or trying to take away my ability to reach, you know, my friends and stuff on sub-stack. But that, that's where my, that's where my longer form stuff is. That's what a podcast is. That's where like all kinds of shit is. Um, and we got a pretty active kid here. So, um, it's real Thomas 777. That's so sick that I'm, I set up a discord server and the fellas and, and females, they, they've made it like really pop. So that's, that's going really well. I mean, like I said, not because I mean, it's because of the, the people who joined it. It's behind a paywall by necessity. Otherwise, we would have been gone already. The cheapest you can set it at is $2.99 a month. Okay. So I said it to $2.99 a month. I'm sorry about that. I'm not trying to like make money off. people and if I was, I wouldn't be doing it in time. But the Discord server, you can get a link on the sub-stick and that's been very active. I'm going to start this past week, I have some of our comrades in town and I was just very busy. But this week I'm going to get more active on Discord and start experimenting with live streams and stuff. We got a T-gram channel, Thomas Graham, 777, number 7HMAS Graham, 7777. You can get the link there through the sub-stick as well but it's easy to find. If you just search for it. I also want to Instagram, you know, with that. I'm changing by necessity the way I can figure my content. It's like bear with me but you'll always be able to find me on sub-stick. I don't have a website but it needs to be updated and I'm going to try and get that done after I get back from OGC and make. But yeah, that's where you can find me. All right, Thomas, I can say for myself and I'm sure I speak for everyone listening. Can't wait till part three. Thank you. That's great. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Peacognano show. Thomas is back and this is part three on Continental Philosophy and where are we going today, Thomas? I wanted to deal with the trial of Socrates. It's not just because it's a major point of analysis in Thucydides. I mean, it's integral to his entire thesis because like we said last two episodes. Despite Thucydides' reticence, he's obviously talking about a moral crisis in the Athenian palace. Like we established, there wasn't a distinction between civil society and the political organism in Athens. And nor was there a simultaneous state as we think of it. Civil society was the state. It's something that's misconstrued quite a bit. And I don't want to insinuate my own political values into these kinds of series because I think that compromises the entirety of what's being conveyed. But something that is of interest, I believe, to the subs is what sort of they can and is of the radical right. And in dialectical terms, how these postulates were right that. And the trial of Socrates is kind of the seminal point of origin. Some hagiolians would disagree with that. As would a lot of people who are kind of the scholars of the deep lore of people like Fichter and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. But I stand by that position. Particularly because the starting point of philosophy in the Western canon is we know of the Socrates. So the fact of this meeting was executed, even if you reject the inferences I draw from that, where anybody else does, you really can't get away from discussing the fact that the man was murdered in an unofficial capacity. And George Cerelle, who I think is fundamentally important, I think beyond important, I think is essential. In conceptual terms, I think Cerelle and Demise are like the real, along the higher, like the essential theorists of the ideological right. And of course, it's something that separates people so I've identified from conservatives. And we'll get into that later, like as we get into Bible theology, which at least we need to discuss for one episode, because it's essential. It's an essential part of the canon. I mean, I'm going to do so from a secular perspective, but you can't get away from that. And when we talk about that, I think it'd be in order to talk about Russell Kirk. But I think the point again, and I've written extensively on this, that when you're talking about the radical right, when you're talking about the revolutionary imperatives that were part of the causal nexus of the European Civil War in the 20th century, you're talking about people are fundamentally at odds with conservatives. You're not talking about just like conservatives on steroids for verbally or something. You're talking about totally different tendencies and arguably ones that are actually opposite one another. And Mimical to one another rather. But I think Cyrill's description of what happened at Socrates trial and what the catalysts were for the proceedings. I think it's about the best analysis of it. So for context, that's what I'm drawing upon. Classical scholars. My primary wheelhouse is political and economic theory. And specifically like the modern era. I'm not like a classical scholar. I don't read Greek. At one time I was fairly fluent in Latin, but those days on pass that was in college. But just for context so that people don't get some sort of idea that I'm trying to punch them up my way and suggest that I'm an expert in ancient philosophy, because they're important to me. There's a basic misunderstanding. And what the people at Review Starrydeaks is being somehow scapegoated by a regime that could no longer stand on its own purported core values or a kind of high stilly to the intelligentsia. And obviously a lot of capital L liberals is sort of like a favorite sort of shibbol. There's a British military regime and they were just scapegoating intellectuals who were of course were their natural betters. It's the wrong way to understand it. For a lot of reasons. And Athens underwent this fundamental sociological change in a very punctuated way. And it was the golden age of Athens and kind of like a creek life. Really had nothing in common in terms of the social stratum with the Athens that lost, the waves that lost the Peloponnesian war. Like traditionally the education of an Athenian man and make no mistake. There was an egalitarianism in Athens and Aristotle best explicated this. But it was restricted to people capable of equality and capable of liberty. Like this idea that slaves or the people that the Athenians conquered or like women and children should have some say in things like that would be viewed as preposterous. Like that wouldn't even occur to anybody because it's an ontological absurdity. So that's a problem too when you get these kinds of dummy conservatives pretending that they're sort of like race-wind, managerial ideology where like there's just kind of fetishization of procedures is something like a legacy of the Athenian culture that's ridiculous. And to distill it down and I'm not just playing word games here, this actually matters. Democracy, the word demos is the core of it. There can't be a democracy without a demos. A demos is a people. You know, and the way to think of it is a nation or like a tribe. It's not a sin for us. humans. And democracy doesn't mean random people voting, and it doesn't describe some procedure. There could never be a "galitarian democracy" because it would mean that you're going to declare that everybody on this planet is part of some imaginary demos. And like that, again, that's an ontological absurdity. Or more concisely, it's a logical fantasy. But anyway, the conventional education and Athens, it was preparation for war. Okay, like it's not to say that Athens were like their Spartan cousins. They didn't view the primary, they didn't believe that the wellspring of the good came from martial activities. They didn't or anything like that. And it's not like the Athenian sociology was exclusively tailored towards preparation for war. But in psychological terms, what was viewed as the good was what was most virtuous, what was most virtuous, what was heroic, and obviously the most mortally significant context where these kinds of heroic virtues can be realized as warfare. So if you're going to like educate Athenian men and women, the women who manage the household and the men who guard and serve and defend and enrich the Paul is, you're going to teach some things like Homeric epics. You're going to teach some stories about why you should be patriotic and be heroic and why you should stand by your people and things like that. This wasn't a very complex and it was deliberately sort of simple in a way. And that made it accessible to everybody. Okay, again, everybody was capable of liberty. That's part of the whole point. And this intellectual culture that people associate with the Lyceum and everything that did not exist. Yeah. On the whole Athens and its cultural zenith in terms of the way the Athenians thought about themselves, you know, it didn't have an intellectual culture. And nor did it really have a bourgeoisie in it. Something else to consider will give this them minute. By the time the Peloponnesian war, you had this bifurcated sociology and Athens. You had, for the first time, you had actual oligarchs. It would become very, very rich. This kind of business class of merchants you know, could profit very much from the empire. And you know, by the ability to access things that were rare in the Paulus, which they could then curate and sell at immense profits. And you had this intellectual caste at which Socrates was kind of the center of men who kind of looked down on who viewed themselves as superior to the Holy Palloy and kind of looked down on the like the Yaleman farmer warriors as essentially, you know, in furious and kind of brutish and stupid people who were just kind of necessary to, you know, to put up proverbial and literal fires when they happened. You know, this was in apocalyptic terms of the kind of an issue of first impression that hadn't existed before. You know, and obviously Marxist historiography was one of the things that Cyrille was responding to, viewed this as sort of like the first emergence of like a primitive class consciousness. Not primitive in terms of the cultural nuances of Athens, but primitive in terms of sociological argument texture, which you know, I was a comparator like the modern age. There was just like a lot less moving parts, so to speak. You know, so the first thing one has to do in dealing with the trial and murder of Socrates, it just abuse them so as idea that, you know, figures like Socrates, which is kind of like perennial feature in Athens and the Athenians all just started acting like a bunch of mean reactionaries and decided to go after the intelligentsia, which is kind of like the dummy core history view of it. One of the things that may be Athens in a first among the Greeks, the the power political rival, but also the sort of absolute, um, and nemical force threatening the Peloponnesis was the Persians. Then this is one reason why we got into earlier. It wasn't just the Athenians that lost their proverbial honor and cultural soul in the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans, uh, made a fausty impact with the Persians and for centuries subsequent, like I said, the Sparta was, it was a dirty word. You didn't even mention Sparta. That's how much discussed people had for them because they were literally race traders. You know, the decision to host this in anemicus, you know, how you treat people within the culture and within the race and the way you treat enemies from without is totally different. You know, and obviously there's a parallel there in the Westphalia and paradigm and they should be instinctive. But that said, the Athenians have proved that they alone, they're the necessary power and power projection ability and sophistication with in military science. They could wage and they could wage great wars against the Persians and actually win. And the Persians for a long time were afraid of them for this reason. Now people forget to like Balzi and Heroic as the last standard thermopoly was like the Spartans lost. Okay. And like I'm not going to sit here and pretend like warfare is like a football game. Or we're like win lost ratio is sort of the end all be all of how you would you decay, martial valor or even aptitude. But in a very pragmatic, car political sense, the fact that the Athenians were the counterweight to the Persian Empire that afforded them a certain cloud. If you require historical metaphor, it's why a lot of people or otherwise despise the American system, nevertheless like join the alliance during the Cold War because the Soviet Union was dominating this planet. And that's an argument. Okay. It was America alone that could stand against them in power political terms. Now bring it back a bit pretty much everybody. And this is clear in the facilities on take and Cerella acknowledges this too. But the trial of solidities it was incredibly demagogic. It was basically the case in chief against them. It was polemical slander and sort of holding forth by his accusers in a way that was offensive that any rational understanding of due process. But again, there's not the point. Nobody that I know of is claiming that socrates was some conventional criminal defendant that his rights were scrupulously honored. And that under ordinary circumstances, he's the kind of man who should have found himself killed in the court and put in the ultimate penalty. It's not what we're talking about. He was a stand in for a moral sickness and cultural decrepitude that had taken a root in Athens. And he was the standard bearer of this conceptual horizon that approximately caused the then current dilemma. That means that he can't be said to be innocent. Even if you, you know, even if you hold out Plato And obviously play it on the. So along with their stop an ease of the only real sources of our knowledge for aristocratic teachings, people general rely on his Dino Phan and his description of the paradigm between old Athens and the Athens that essentially ended with its defeats in the Peloponnesian War. Dino Phan was a student of Socrates, but he wasn't prone to almost any high geographies that Plato was, even in his critical treatments. Other man. Dino Phan's big contrast was he said, look, he's like in a Homeric Athens, I mean if we can think of it that way, there is an integral understanding of virtue. Again, like the kind of one citizen cast, although there was like diversity within that cast, you know, of status and ability and intellect and everything else, but kind of the singular function was a citizenry of Yale and farmers who were also soldiers. And Dino Phan posited that, well, the way these men managed the household, you know, and taught their children and treated their wives, this was sort of the, this was sort of like a school of command and transposing that virtue and, you know, the several virtues that were curated there to the battlefield and vice versa. You know, this is how Athenians learn to be honorable and this is how they learn what it is to be heroic. So there was a practical aspect to this sort of civic education and the school of life and command if you were a man, but it was never diminished by some sort of like base and pragmatic view of it. Like, well, this is how you learn to sort of treat people equitably so that there's not tensions emerging. No, it was very clear who Dino Phan that these heroic things, you know, and you don't just take a wife and have kids because it's that because humans are animals and need to join their gametes together to make children and it wasn't just, you know, okay, well, this keeps women from ending up in difficulties and it keeps men from acting like savages. There's none of that. Okay, it was an acknowledgment of those things, but that's because the ultimate good is virtue telling who is the heroic and what derives from heroic things are like lesser but no less significant goods that allow us to live like a peaceable and civilized life, you know, peaceable IOT within the culture, you know, it's good. It's not good to be peaceable without. And this becomes important if one is going to subject socrates and secratic methodology and the substance of his paradigms into a punitive critique. So, xenophones, economicists can be viewed as kind of the seminal statement. It's kind of like the, although obviously xenophones was a student of socrates, he's writing about presacratic virtues. So bear with me. Zenophones economicists is really sort of the presacratic and what is describing equivalent of Aristotle's politics. Okay, and again, I'll stand by that, although I'm sure a lot of classical scholars will scoff at that. But the entirety of the dialogue, the exposition rather, it draws, it's not a lot of a parallel between the, literally the economics of the home and of labor and of warfare, which makes each, you know, kind of, it turns the household into an educational apparatus for war and vice versa. You know, and to be clear, within the Athenian understanding of equality, anyone capable of liberty can grasp basic military tactics, you know. And some men might only be fit when, if they lived in a war mature year, as the lead of squad, some might be suited to, you know, the command befitting a general. But nevertheless, like the stuff of virtue is learning the order command by habit and by obedience before one develops the cultivation and the wisdom and the seniority to act in a command or all, you know, and this is the, this is the, this is the stuff of a correct education. And in order to make it real or to bring it to life as a historical narrative, again, this is where stuff like, you know, Homeric epics come in, you know, this also, this cultivates in people, you know, and understanding that the routine execution and necessary tasks, they'll view that as needing to tend towards excellence and they'll, they'll try and cultivate that in themselves. So this in turn then becomes like the building blocks of what facilities truly heroic action, you know, and heroism is partakes of and derives from and also makes possible, you know, the highest virtue. So there's this sort of organic harmonies feedback loop, ideally to everything people do in their lives and waivers and, you know, the emergence of an intellectual class that kind of scoffs at this and looks down on it as the sort of stuff that, you know, appeals to simple tins or, you know, men who view themselves as too clever or too superior to willfully submit to the command of another, this is the effect of sabotaging the entire system because people start marking themselves out from that the entire basis of it collapses because then what emerges is this kind of like cast consciousness within the Paulists and one of those things to ossify and start to run deep enough and it doesn't take very long, only a few generations. People almost start to look at themselves as a different race, you know, and breeding patterns will start to deviate and then eventually you almost do have different races, you know, and you have this kind of coistered intelligentsia who's convinced that they're smarter than everybody and politics belongs only to them because, you know, these commoners can't possibly understand it. You've got a business class who says, like, well, you know, the soldier here basically have a bunch of dumb animals, formerly good at violence and these intellectuals, you know, they're not real men, they don't produce anything, you know, they basically live on our large gas because we're the ones who, you know, we're the ones who provide the wealth and the capital, you know, to sustain the attaining real life. So, you know, basically everybody parasitically lives on us and that's incredibly toxic, you know, is it inevitable at scale, probably, but, you know, again, we're talking about very, very scaled down conditions and we're social complexities. I'm not suggesting that they were less than the modern era, but the material conditions that cause permutations within these sociologies, they were absolutely quite a bit less complex and less highly scaled in. They can't be denied and now to be clear, nobody, not xenophon himself, not serral, not to them, to sit at ease, nobody was claiming that, like, well, we existed in this kind of, we just kind of amiss this like cultural zinith and its sagridies, the propaganda is subverted all of this and created these fractures within the, within the organ, social, or even the scholars. No, serral, what I'm just way to acknowledge that this. seed of these things, the seeds of Athenian demise had been sewn, you know, generations before. But that doesn't somehow acquit, socrates the fact that, you know, he went out of his way to institutionalize these things, figuratively and literally, whether his intention was born a malice or not is an importance, nor is the fact that he was not some ultimate causal agents. There had to be some sort of repudiation of that tendency and historical process, even if for no other reason then to guard the record of austerity that the Athenians were aware of what had generated their own on doing and being a highly literate people, whose understanding of historical process is quite even different than moderns like Hagle. They never less understood that virtue really, however, it's significant it may be in the moment obviously, and if those are directly partake of it and witness it, you know, it's really only as powerful as its ability to be conveyed over a casual time by deliberate documentation for posterity. You know, that's why the Athenians were so hung up on, you know, hero epics and things obviously. You know, that's literally the source of, that's how virtuous conveyed, okay, by example, but where do people derive that example from, well, they derive it from stuff like hunger. So yes, it's taught logical, but it also is internally logical. So the way to understand sorrites is the patron saint of intellectuals. If you want to, if you want to put a spit on it to make it intelligible to, you know, modern minds. At the end of the day sorrites understood why the physical side of life was important. But again, he said it's important in the same way that like almost like a wrote biological process is important. You know, if the Paulist is like an organism, this is the equivalent of like eating and expelling waste and hygiene and things. You know, because what was truly good was, you know, the intellectual and the spiritual and fracturing that concept of an integral rational soul that contains an aptitude for these things and equal measure, you know, that does violence to the entire cultural enterprise that, you know, have been curated over millennium. So you look at it like this, like all things, I mean, warfare basically, you know, again, is kind of like a matter of wrote pragmatism, you know, heterosexual love is basically just, you know, a kind of wrote physical act necessary for procreation, you know, in harmony with the household again too, is this sort of like, you know, something that lesser men can find satisfaction from and of itself. You know, this is an example of kind of like early like manasticism, although obviously like the conceptual and the literal vocabulary to, you know, structure that way didn't exist yet. But, you know, much as a socrates admonished as students not to, you know, cross their, quote, you know, cross their arms and laugh at the world. He did, it's ecstomatic that what the good is according to Socrates is to withdraw from the world as much as possible and be a loop, you know. And okay, there were a buttold of that and Socrates is on defense in part, although he admitted he deserved to be executed, which is a subject for a whole other discussion. You know, well, you know, a man surely virtue should be strong enough to understand why, you know, physical pursuits are important. And why not withdrawing from his responsibilities, you know, not just, you know, to his issue and his wife, but in the palace, he understands why he can't just withdraw from those things. It's okay, but when you cultivate this sort of sense of a curated superiority in these men, they're not going to, they're not going to regulate themselves in that way. There's a handful who are, we're kind of the cream of the crop, but most men are not. So what you're left with is, it's almost like today, well, you'll see these guys who dedicate themselves to going to the gym or like learning to fight or like bodybuilding, but they're doing it basically, they're becoming obsessed with the physical, but they're doing it to retreat from the world. They're doing it to say, like, hang around the gym all day and like not having to deal with things they find stressful. Well, that's the equivalent of like what guys were doing and we're learning from Socrates, you know, it's like, okay, so I'm curating this like, superiority in myself. You know, so I'm a superior man to these dumb, soldier, yeoman retypes, as well as these vulgar businessmen, but you know what, I'm going to spend my time, you know, discursing with Socrates and with my peers. My peers are only the people who are worthy of my intellect. I'm not going to involve myself in the dirty business of politics or the dull, you know, vulgarity of business. You know, that's, and that's really destructive, you know, and to be clear, I didn't involve the example I did that like, pick on people and something. I understand why you guys do that, but you know, it's, I think it's important and for people in a way they can understand, especially when in a present kind of, how things that otherwise would be like very worthwhile pursuits, that self-improvement, it can become something that's very destructive. You know, especially in, especially in times of real kind of spiritual disorder. It's also, you know, this is kind of the seeds of enlightenment thought. You know, I know everybody thinks of enlightenment thought is simply this kind of proto-Jacobanism or something. This is the wrong way to look at it. I mean, partly yet was, but you know, closet was very much derived from that same tradition. And I mean, I made the point that not accidentally, that's really the only crushing contribution to the enlightenment enterprise. It's such a deliberate degree, but this idea that, well, military science, it's based on the science of failings and artillery and the positioning of combined arms, you know, it doesn't really have to do with virtue and heroism. That's, you know, really not the kind of thing that we, we abide from a scientific perspective and we know now that, you know, warfare is this rational process that, you know, we implement with diplomacy fails in order to force certain outcomes according to, you know, this quantifiable paradigm. You know, that's, that leaves the pretty debased outcomes, you know, and I'm not some kind of piece Nick. I mean, I'm very, very, very far from that, but the kind of stuff people find most offensive about hypermodern warfare, you know, like the logic of the body count nutrition strategy, where you're literally calculated dead people as an input in order to devise a victory metric. Well, this derogatory, from that kind of thinking, that homo reality. It reduces life to something that at scale and relative radios terms is very grotesque. And did people like Cerelle and even you know, contemporaries of these events in question, or at least men who are abituated into the culture that was the progenitor of these things, you know, like, like, xenophonism, self, and like the cities. Did they have an idealized view of these things? Yeah, they probably did. But again, I posit and they probably would too, those among them who were aware enough to do so, that, you know, you need these kinds of ethical poll stars and this kind of enduring model of what is virtuous in order to even devise, you know, some ideal concepts of the Paulus, you know, and that really is what it was to be Greek. You know, it wasn't, you know, and again, like this, the concept of a, the human, there's not really an adequate translated and a, can simply vernacular, but the emperor way to think about it is that like an integral soul that essentially is the wellspring of all human activity. You know, this can't be bifurcated or understood to be, you know, the product and the discreet aspects of, you know, the human nature, otherwise, culture suffers. And the highest values, you know, only can derive from a virtuous cultural learning. You also to do violence to that is, is to essentially do violence to the possibility of virtue itself, you know, and again, it, that's not something that can be singularly blamed on sorrows, but he was the standard bearer of this phenomenon. And this is probably pretty far outside the scope, but one of the main functions of the penal law as it traditionally understood is the sort of symbolic logic that attends a human sacrifice. And, you know, by exuding the man, assuming it's for a political reason, it's because you're repudiating what is the standard bearer of. It's not because you'll come directly responsible for a chain of causal events like you would some infamous felon or something who you're accusing of killing somebody. You know, and yeah, like modern people would claim that that's a deliberate injustice, but modern people do this all the time and they do it in a really debased way. That's why they do things like sending Derek Shovon to prison because he's some stand in for this, like, this kind of like pretend archetype of racial prejudice, which in their secular human's mind is the ultimate evil. And this kind of poor slob George Floyd who died in police custody because he had all kinds of problems of a physiological nature. He's some stand in for this like, this like victim population that exists in their imagination. You know, and so by acting out this kind of like pantomime, but where like an actual human being is, you know, sent to prison for life, that they view it as like the theric. You know, and again, that's like far, far more debased than the three of us have heard it's sorrows, but I can't take it seriously. When people act like the Athenians were like, somehow afflicted by this like madness, born of military defeat. So they just picked on sorrows for no reason. It's like you fuckers do this all the time. You do it in the most childlike stupid way. That was pull them up on. I said, I wouldn't do that. But I think it's, I think it's important to convey where we are. Oh, um, yeah. And, um, you know, in forensic to intrinsic to to to all of this, I mean, if you account for the fact that literally the government of the Paulus, the, the men who would have the assembly, they were, you know, the adult male citizens who constituted the humanry in a Homeric Athens, you know, presumably things like a sound currency and fundamental fairness and a vigorous defense of the Paulus, but also a basically, you know, and again, I realize we're speaking in and and previously idealized terms. Um, but who also like had, you know, kind of like modest needs and ambitions. You know, the, the economics as a xenophon called it of the household and thus of the battlefield, both of which are schools of command, you know, that leads to virtue and politics. If you replace those men with either oligarchs or these, uh, alloof intellectuals of the kind who surrounded Socrates, you know, one of the, what kinds of outcomes you're going to have, you know, you're going to have, um, you're going to have people in, in, in the case of the oligarchs, you're going to have people who have reduced in our terms, the human condition and in Athenian terms, the virtue, the something vulgar and materially quantifiable as one would calculate privates on an adicus, like literally. In the case, the intellectuals again, you're talking about people who probably have an active disdain for the kind of civic mythology and virtue ethics that animate the majority of the body politic. You know, either way, you're talking about a hostile elite and even if you weren't, you know, philosophers and oligarchs can't, they can't, they can't take you to war and win. You know, and even the wars you are doomed to lose, are the fickleness of fortuna, material conditions or anything else, but these are not men who are going to cultivate heroism, nor, uh, be able to properly document the emergence of said heroism for posterity. You know, and thus, you're really talking about an emergent political class or caste that in categorical terms is precluded from acting virtuously and that's totally across purposes with the classical motion of statecraft. You know, and because intrinsic to the, as we talked about the kind of the new dynamic, I mean, I mean, that's in value neutral terms, it's in terms of the velocity of social life and its processes. You know, in society's life, this kind of newly dynamic sociology was emergence. The guys who constantly do it, it's already students, these guys are urban elitists. You know, they're the guys who, they're the sons of businessmen or, uh, they're the sons that generalize or, you know, men and command authority roles, who become wealthy enough so that their sons could pursue leisure. You know, and these, these are the guys who've taken power away from or when the pros have actually some rooting. The sovereign authority of the Yale menry and you know again, there's an axiomatic contempt there for the majority. You know, and again, we're talking about Athens, we're not talking about like a modern egalitarian ism. You know, we're talking about people who are actually worthy of formal equality. You know, this is a very bad thing. You know, so the natural, the natural constituency of a socratic elite are going to be men like themselves. You know, and you know, it's system like that stands to, stands to reproduce the self-impermanent. Now, there's something to this too, like in the, I'm not suggesting that these guys were at the same level of cultivation or something, obviously, but when you look at the non-inclatcher of the Soviet Union, like post Stalin, you know, when the kind of barefoot peasants, like literally he was a barefoot peasant, like cruise jiff and that died off or been purged. You know, this kind of, this kind of class of political managers, there's something of a parallel there. You know, these guys, yeah, a lot of these guys come up to design bureau. It was like, maybe they had a good head for mathematics, maybe they understood architecture, maybe they understood, you know, military science. At the, in the way that McNamara did, who was, you know, enlarge my other counterpart. But a class of men whose job it is to literally be political managers, and like that's it. You know, that's one of the things that killed the Soviet Union. You know, and again, I'm always making the point history does not repeat, but there's sociological permutations, only the limited numbers of variables within human power per times and social structures that do, that do reemerge. You know, a dedicated class of political managers, I go as far as I say, it's almost axiomatically inimical to the public good. And like a different than an aristocracy, like a aristocrat where many hats. And they're not, they're, it's just a different situation. And the traditional complaint about aristocrats is that they're glory hounds and that they're not particularly bright. Like they're guys who have solid warfare, or they're, you know, people who kind of stand on ceremony quite literally and, and in the accoutrements of, of, of spectacle and things in order to sustain their mandate. You know, a curated intelligency of even one that has aristocratic trappings such as the kinds of people we're talking about who constituted socrates' intellectual progeny. And you know, the fact remains like the essential characteristics of these people are the same. You know, and again, the, um, also deities or all subidies. Go Serellen Zinoffon, holy hymnaut, as an example, a man who could, uh, absorb Socrates' teachings. But then go back into the world, re-enter his command rule and be better for it. But again, Serellen's take is that he absented in himself. Before he became fully corrupted by the, by the culture of, um, Socrates' inner circle. This is Zinoffon, uh, suggests that he was strong enough to take from philosophy what, to the school of command that was, that's what, you know, that, that civic life represented for, uh, Athenian men who were capable of, uh, liberty and equality in a formal sense. But that's not realistic, you know, um, my layman's interpretation, um, and in classical studies in very much a layman, is it's another example of the exception proving the rule. But, um, I'm going to stop myself now because I want to move on a bit to a somewhat different subject matter and I can't cover that in five minutes. I didn't think he could. Yeah. Well, um, how's, um, you got anything to promote? What do we, uh, yeah, what's the, um, is it, is it documentary? Yeah, yeah, it's on my substep. It's, uh, check out Thomas TV, man, like it's, uh, it's the, uh, Skinwalker Ranch adventure. Yeah, it's been, it's been popping pretty good. Like people seem to have really liked it. Um, and now, uh, I'll put it back on the main page if there's demand for it. But yeah, anybody, anybody can access it who's a subscriber, man. I'm going to, I'm going to drop more video to, um, that's one reason to go on off the West Coast, um, not imminently, but in the next few months is, uh, like record stuff. But yeah, this, and again, I want to apologize this past week. I, I basically told everybody that I, I mean, I, I recorded it if I want to stuff, but, um, I started feeling, I wanted to give myself kind of a break anyway. I started feeling really, was he, um, so not a lot got, not a lot got done. And I, I'm not trying to be a weirdo, but I want to, I want to be accountable to people because I just do it for a few reasons. But also it's the subs that like make all this possible. So I'm not being responsive and not dropping fresh stuff. I feel like, I hope an explanation. That's many of, many of you are my friends. Um, but yeah, I, um, I'm going to be dropping, substects, the place to find me. That's where the podcast is. That's where my video content is. That's kind of my home online. It's, um, real Thomas 777, that's substect.com. Um, I'm on T gram and Instagram. I got a, I got a very active discord server now, which I'm very pleased about. Um, I owe the subs a great deal there too, because the other ones are making it pop. I'm going to start doing live streams every weekend. I was going to do it this weekend, but I felt, I felt too sick. Um, but Saturday night, we're going to start doing a stream around 9 p.m. central time every Saturday, unless I'm on the road or otherwise not well. Um, you know, like I said, I'm kind of restructuring my content, um, which is long overdue. Um, yeah, that's where you can find me. Um, got my, got my T gram and my Instagram, but yeah, my home base is, um, substect. So yeah, that's what I got. Awesome. All right. So part four. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, buddy. I want to welcome everyone back to the Peking Yuna show. Thomas is here. We're going to pick up the series on continental philosophy. Part four. Yeah, right, Ed, sir. Yeah, I wanted to dive in today. I mean, we're going to dive into a two is a pleato. Plato is understood. Ironically, because. Plato is only the foundation of, um, of the Western canon. Okay. Um, famously, the postmodernist, you know, if, you know, we're talking about, um, that isn't neat, but. You know, a Heidegger show, a power. Everybody, all commentators derivative therein of that economic, intellectual canon, you know, they famously, the famous kind of lament or critique of Plato is that Christianity is plagued as him for the people. But even that sort of pejorative is misunderstood. Okay, in the case of the Nicheans and Nietzsche himself, it owed you the kind of nihilism that in dialectical terms, you know, Nietzsche believed was the inevitable, you know, outcome of a platonic discourse. Other people, however, most notably Karl Popper, and Karl Popper is a hugely significant figure, especially in terms of post-Marxist liberalism, you know, post-Marxist radicalism, I mean, you know, if you prefer. But the left, like the contemporary left, they view Plato as this sort of like proto-fascist figure almost. Okay, Soros's NGO, his flagship NGO is the Open Society Institute. That's not just some sort of ex-domoniker. Karl Popper, he wrote this series of volumes called the Open Society and its enemies that really was his kind of a grand rebuttal in his view of Plato, or is a grand indictment of platonic ethics. And his grand, you know, assault on, on Western metaphysics. Okay, so that's one of the reasons I think exception to it. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why, and I promise I'm not going on some primrose path tangent. But that's one of the reasons I get accepted to when people refer to the regime as the cultural Marxists. Like, they're really not. Like, do cultural Marxists exist? Like, yeah, there's a minority of partisan, so essentially abide, like the kind of stuff that grabs you in a dornal postulated, but that's not like when we think of like regime ideology, that's not what we're talking about. We're very much talking about in Brezdek's terms, Karl Popper and adjacent, it's sympathetic, you know, philosophical systems and paradigms. And his big enemy, if you want to look at it in those terms, and being reductionist for the sake of coherency and brevity, you know, he, he, he, and they viewed Plato as this, this, this figure of a great, um, of a very destructive, uh, tendencies intellectually speaking, you know, so that's something to keep in mind. I mean, there's plenty of like reasons to critique Plato from the right, but, uh, you know, a lot of people must understand things and a lot of dilatantish, uh, right, wheres who don't really understand, uh, the kind of, uh, discourse, intellectual discourse around Plato, they, they seem to really, they seem to really fail on this point. And so I've always been happy the right, right, his objection is, you know, and it's, again, it's not, it's not accidental that the left despises plateenism. I mean, it's not just derivative of their anti-Christian posture. It's adjacent to that, but it's something to screen. And so that this part of organically, it was probably going to take two to three episodes to fully flesh this out. Um, notably classical historiography in terms of validating or authenticating, you know, statements by the punitive declarant is difficult. And I'm not a classical scholar in nor is with that be our mission anyway in terms of this series. But so when I speak of what's accepted as, you know, indisputably according to the commonly accepted criteria of classical scholarship, when I declare what's accepted as the platonic dialogues, I'm abiding what is, you know, the mainstream sensibility derivative of the aforementioned criteria. Okay, I'm sure people can argue that point at the time I'm here to do. Okay, so again, and I don't prefer to be a classical scholar, but there's a grant tool with 35 dialogues and 13 letters that have at various times been assigned to Plato as the source. Okay, um, some classical scholars doubt if any of the letters capture the dialogues of genuine. So we're not even going to deal with those because that's a whole complicated controversy right there. And it doesn't really cut to the prox of what we're talking about, something that we anyway. But the platonic dialogues such that there, there's an essential consensus, you know, and it has been for some time on what is valid and what is not. You know, we're going to stick to the dialogues that are accepted universally as being, you know, from the pen of Plato as you were. And uh, Plato's dialogues are interesting because they're written as that. They're written as dialogues. Plato never writes in his own voice. Um, now there's a few ways to interpret that. You know, you can interpret that as him sort of ironically acting as witness so that no sort of discrete thought system that he assigned to him, which I don't accept that. You can interpret it as um, Plato trying to kind of devise like a monument literally to his hero and his patron Socrates. Or what I think is most persuasive, you can read it as well, these dialogues were probably conversations and controversies and arguments that Plato himself or Bar witness do. And maybe he's combined certain aspects of discrete events. You know, maybe he's combined the personalities of certain declarants who are identified as the source of some of this material. I think he probably wanted to make this readable, you know, to not to a mass audience, but to an educated cadre of men who would be, you know, not just sensitive, you know, the importance of posterity of, you know, ethically and cultural intellectual products, but also the kinds of people, the kinds of men who would be receptive to, you know, kind of the discursive process. And interestingly, in all the Islamic dialogues, he's very clear about where this is taking place in terms of venue. Okay, this is Athens. Um, this is Socrates participating, you know, but he, there's no dates on these. Okay. Um, and that's significant. Okay. Because I think that some people have said, well, obviously, you know, his big concern was with the conditions surrounding the Peloponnesian war. And he's trying to paint for us a picture of a culture in decline. I don't accept that. I mean, yes, Athens wasn't precipitous decline then. But when cultures are ascendant or when they're precipitously deteriorating, if you step to a Spenglerian paradigm and I certainly do, that's when the most kind of fervent intellectual activity is going to be underway, owing to reasons that should be fairly obvious. But I think, um, I think he didn't want his dialogues to be assigned to any sort of discreet historical epoch within the broader paradigm of the Athenian historical experience. The Greeks were interesting because the Spangler himself said the Greeks didn't have the same sense of historical time as later Aryan derived civilizations did. The Spangler suggested that the prime symbol of Athenian civilization was present in a body of a certain individual. In one of these freezes or one of these sculptures or statuary, the figure in question is situated in a high relief amidst a void. The immediate presence of the figure in question, who symbolic of the culture that is the progenitor of them is what's most significant. There's not this fixation with the past or the future. The Greeks had an understanding of the universe. There's no beginning or end. The Greek language is a bit of a bit of a political philosophy. The Greek language is a bit of a political philosophy. The dialogues we can indiscriminately assign to him are all those partake of political subject matter. The subject matter of the republic is most significant in terms of political ontology, ethics, what constitutes a good society and thus a good policy. There was no concept of state in Dorik Athens. The concept of state is that we think of it as it exists. The ancient world that was not even something that could be apprehended. There are various interlocutors who represent not so much crudely drawn but rigidly characterized archetypes that we can imagine populating Athens during a time approximately the Peloponnesian world. It's obvious that the subject matter in broad terms is how do we restore political health to the Paulus? I don't agree with that. The conversation in the Republic opens with the soger of the Stangenic Catholic. He's very very old and very wealthy and he's viewed as a wise man and he's constantly pious. He's very very rich but he's a benevolent individual. He's a model of propriety. He's a master in conceptual terms. There are many phases of historical development and things of this sort. The role of siren is placed in the dialogues. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time! but sorrows is sort of the omnipotent armeter like in these dialogues. You know, so it's like what could he learn from Kaffalas? Well, sorrows is not tremendously elderly. You know, he doesn't have the same vantage point. And even if he can apprehend these things intellectually, he hasn't lived a very long away. So that's what he can learn. That's the key sort of aspect of it. But in the, in the, in the course of their discussion, Kaffalas essentially declares that, well, what virtue is is always telling the truth. Okay, you know, in the way we can distinguish justice from injustice is essentially by this sort of primitive integrity. Okay. He seems to imply that justice is synonymous with always telling the truth and always paying back what somebody has received from another. You know, whether we're talking about in business, in personal affairs, in war and peace, you know, and sorry, this is a rebuttal that is like, well, telling the truth and returning another means property isn't always just. You know, there's nuances here, especially in times of war or crisis. You know, it's not simply reducible to these things. And this times, for example, where it's necessary to not just in the case of children or easily excitable classes of people and not just heal us. It's important to invoke. Fictions are wise for the greater good or there's times where one might owe a man a debt of honor or money. But, you know, it's why they're assist that man in his endeavors or to enrich him further. Would lead to, you know, unjust outcomes because of what he plans to do. You know, there's myriad conceivable outcomes or iterations whereby this sort of absolute poll star of just honesty and paying one's debts can't be said to constitute justice or the good. Subsequently, as portfolios is savaged in some basic sense by so I resist rebuttal. Polamarkos. Who is a, the follow son, like takes up the mantle. And what he suggests is often interpreted falsely. As a kind of, to represent a kind of primitive communism. You know, we could say that Karl Popper's punitive interpretation of, of Platonism is that it's quasi-fascist in terms of its a weedism. You know, people on the other extreme, but equally prone to punitive critique. Trying to extrapolate these sort of like modern and postmodern characteristics to these dialogues. And that's misguided for all kinds of reasons. And we can't talk about modern political paradigms as applied to the Republic. I mean, regardless of yes, the one I dialogue as a progenitor of political theory in the West, but that's not what I'm talking about. You know, and it should be, it should be clear that, you know, nuance is what is what bridges the ancient past to the, to contemporary or modern conditions. Paul Margo says that what constitutes the good and absolute terms is that which is solitary. Not only do they give her, but to the receiver. You know, and again, intrinsic to that suggestion is the fact that giving to a man what rightfully belongs to him can sometimes be harmful to him. You know, not all men judge wisely. If justice is fundamentally solitary, and that it causes a reciprocal goodness, you know, what that equates to in practical terms is that every man should only own or control what is like. It's like feeding for him or what is good for him. And this is where the critique of this being proto communist comes in. Because that would seem to intrinsically demand the revelation of private property. You know, and there needs to be some arbor, whether it's literally like a sovereign adjudicator, or whether it's some sort of core principle or set of principles that can calculate these things. And not just a remedial, but spontaneous way. You know, that would assign not just material goods, but relative power of a social and political major in the most equitably efficient terms. You know, and axiomatically, that would equate to a conclusion that extremely few people would be able to determine widely across, you know, caste and discrete circumstance, like what constitutes like an equitable distribution of these goods. You know, and I would seem to imply again, either some sort of enlightened dictatorship or some sort of cadre, which in contemporary terms would, or 20th century terms, specifically would suggest some sort of, you know, party apparatus that is rendering these decisions. And again, that's the wrong way to look at it for a lot of reasons, but it's also even in even within the body rationality and even within the temporal, you know, window of when this discourse is taking place. The conclusion of Socrates' slash Plato neutralizes any interpretation of this as communist, that are fundamentally egalitarian. We'll get to that in just a second. Socrates' rebuttal is basically, is that yes, that would tend to imply the rule of the philosophers. You know, and when we're talking about any discrete polity, we've got a disregard, any sort of abstract understanding of the good. Because yes, like derivative of practical reason, there are some things that are absolutely good and some things that are absolutely bad. But what constitutes an equitable distribution can't be reduced in political terms, okay? Can't be reduced to postulates abstracted from concrete circumstances. And furthermore. One of the things that separates the President and analysis that Paul Marcos from his father Kaffalas. Kaffalas had seemed to imply that his opinion is linked in his mind with the view that, "Well, injustice is bad because there's bad karma that attaches to it, and inextricably bound up with that is the fact that after death bad things will befall the soul as well as the living the son and so the man who is prone to this sort of bad action." Paul Marcos, this plays an overall and his take on this. His view that justice must be solitary both to the giver and the receiver is strictly a worldly calculus. Furthermore, reducing it from any sort of egalitarian paradigm that's absolutely applicable according to what is presumably universal paradigms of inequity that are common to all human societies and human societies. Paul Marcos' opinions tempered by the understanding that one should ultimately be guided by hoping one's friends and harming one's enemies in political terms. Again, we're not talking about personal criteria, although it's certainly possible for somebody's personal enemy to also constitute a political hostile and socrates agrees with that. And socrates openly states that that's what can be understood to be civic responsibility is the fellow feeling one has not just for their family and their personal friends and their neighbors but for the Paulists and wanting justice to be realized within that fellow feeling and community and essentially the moral imperatives that surround these positive duties to one's friends not only at the boundaries of the Paulists but you have an obligation to not assist those outside the Paulists even if they're not enemies. So that this is more Plato according to people like Popper to bring it back to the point of minute ago. This is the big critique of the open society. You know, I'm simplifying the sake of brevity and we'll get more into this as time goes on. But that's what's being discussed and interestingly one would think this goes without saying it did kind of in terms of people's instinctive concepts. I mean such that you know we're talking about the class of people or the cast of people. We're capable of understanding politics and political matters of the theoretical level. This would go without saying. But Plato went to the trouble through the mouthpiece of Socrates to explicate this in terms that are not discreetly limited to the Paulists in which he was situated. Now find that fascinating and it's just to that this was being written for the sake of posterity. You know, not just immediate posterity like well Socrates is not long for this earth. You know, and certainly Plato is somebody who is bearing witness to the events of the Paul Panagian War and that you know the sort of transgressions actually perceived the like the Socrates being a veiled-do punitive justice and ultimately executed. You know, he wasn't just guarding the record as it were. He was transcribing these things and creating these narratives, you know, and it's not for him to say like how much of this was creatively confagulated and how much was word for word what he bore witness to in terms of the testimony of the alleged declarance. But there was an understanding that in my opinion that anybody would kind of come away with having to read the Republic of the posterity, play what in mind was for all time and that's remarkable. But moving on, sorry, I'm buried under wires. But yeah, so I mean if we understand, in its simplest terms, the just man gives to his friends what is good for them and the just man helps his friends himself and his Paulus by you know, only acting a harm knows where his enemies in public and political terms. Socrates then he starts invoking these loose metaphors which seems to suggest that justice is an art like medicine. It's not science. There might be like scientific aspects to it. It's going to be clear the way that Athenians thought of science was fundamentally different than the way that in the post-enlightenment mind is the one. This is actually significant. We'll get into that moving foreign. But you know, it requires a man to be able to identify what is best for the body politic at any given moment. I mean it goes without saying that what is best in absolute terms has to be a guiding imperative. But at any given moment, what is best for the Paulus literally like the body of the Paulus has to be diagnosed and identified and delicately remedy depending on the circumstances. Thus it's not adequate to declare that justice must merely be salutary. There's got to be a curative and cultivated understanding of what is going to facilitate the good. Obviously too, if we're reducing this to personal criteria which Paul Margo's alludes to by version of the fact that he's not as sophisticated either as his father could follow his or socrates, you know, there's some individual men who aren't really capable of benefiting from justice. You know, even if they are people who we share fellow feelings for and even if they're not bad men in, you know, objective terms. So like again, these kinds of mechanistic criteria can't really be applied to human condition. And that's actually a very kind of proto-Christian understanding obviously. And throughout the platonic dialogues, there's a lot of that, you know, I mean, in the system, I'm not being punitive at all, but one notices, especially among Roman Catholics, there want a lot of the time to involve them. looking platonic, rationalizations for things. I'm not sure they fully realize that. There's nothing wrong with that. I've got a lot of love for them in Catholics. I'm the sectarian minority on the ground. I'm not just here, but with the fellows that click up with, you know, they're overwhelmingly Catholic, or in touch, geography, other things. But, you know, this is highly significant. And we'll get into a quietness in coming weeks in this series. And we'll get into the tie that binds the classical to the modern and the, you know, the ancient heritage of Athens to Christiandom and Faustian civilization, if you will, with the caveat that, again, I'm not any kind of classical scholar or anthropologist, but I, if you bear with me, I'm not talking about the subs and everybody. I think I'll be able to devise a worthwhile outline. But essentially, what this resolves in this sort of a secondary dialogue between Socrates and Polomarchos is the conclusion that, well, you know, owing to what I just stated about Socrates understanding the epistemic aspects of what constitutes, you know, a good citizen. Really, the only man who can sort of stand in absolute judgment of the Paulus and sort of curate these ethical remedies at scale are, you know, they are the guardians. Okay. The guardians are basically the sort of philosopher kings that people, bandy in the colonial terms when discussing Plato and the platonic ideal. That's not, that's not really the best way to think of it, because Plato more than anybody, because he was immersed in the life of the Lysium and whatever, like Plato doesn't, Plato's not saying so we can discern his own, you know, views on, on the good life and on what is puttically sound. He's not saying that, you know, Socrates is the greatest man or that philosopher or the greatest of men. It's almost 10 amounts, what Nietzsche said about, you know, the messianic personage in historical terms, not theological to be clear, who would be aware of the fact that all preceding value systems were mere horizons of a conceptual nature. You know, Nietzsche famously said that, you know, the common redeemer would be Caesar with the soul of Christ. Okay. Um, it's a little bit, it's substantially less kind of apocalyptic, what Plato was suggesting, but essentially what would need to be curated in the ideal republic are, you know, men of action and men who have an instinctive view of what constitutes the good. You know, not unlike what Serelle said, it was, you know, the priest or critic ideal in terms of, you know, what constituted, what constituted good life and what constituted a civic morality. But obviously, Plato was talking about what we'd think of as a culture very stratum, you know, and they're required a more complex and kind of complete understanding of, you know, historical phenomena and processes. But, uh, you know, I think, and again, um, people welcome this degree, we're not talking about philosophy, philosophy of kings. We're talking about a culture very stratum that is self-consciously aware of, you know, the manner in which conceptual ethics and historical mandate deteriorates over time, as, uh, people simply take the, uh, the configuration of the Paulus for granted. And, uh, believe that, you know, justice and truly cosmic terms, you know, whether we're talking about, you know, in the midst of the Paul Panagian War, a bunch of Athenian assembly men, residing themselves, the fact that well, this isn't a hands of fortuna or the gods, or whether we're talking about, you know, today where people just have this kind of faith and, um, the ones that have this kind of faith and, like, endless material prosperity, whereby, if uncertainty is, by way of technological innovation and the regularization of, of commerce and things at scale, you know, well, you know, we can, we can just kind of, we can just sort of rely upon, like, the internal logic of these systems, to, you know, sort of guard not as a prosperity, but a way of life that sort of causes within parameters of reason, even if only because, you know, the systems that facilitate the effulment and prosperity, you know, we're driven above reason. And that means that, you know, it would be self-defeating for anybody to step verbally or literally outside of those things, or try to sabotage them, you know, this, this is a very, very real thing. And it's not just, it's not just effluenza or the malaise of, of, you know, success or whatever, people like to assign, whatever cause, people like to assign to, um, crisis, crises of, of morals. In, uh, the modern state, you know, or as they extrapolated those same phenomena into Asian conditions, and trying to interpret what exactly was underway during the Peloponnesian war. You know, this is, uh, this is, this is fundamentally important. But, uh, moving on, um, you know, societies goes as far and again, this is, this is key because, and this is, you know, again, I, I realized I'm carrying back a lot to Karl Popper, um, who is a very sinister personage. But, uh, the key to understanding a lot of the present regimes, ideological fetishes as well as its priorities. You know, Popper was famously, uh, a huge proponent of scientism. That was, uh, the, uh, the, uh, volume of the opens of sight in his enemies that gives a play though. I think it's volume two. I got to check that. I actually have it on my bookshelf. But, um, his big, what he viewed as his kind of big trump card was declaring that any borrowed from a lot of the same canon that John Rawls did, suggesting that, well, you know, anybody who's interested in devising an equitable social paradigm realizes that, you know, we can, we can plan society, if not down to the most minute discrete detail. You know, we can, we can basically plan, um, in economic and sociological terms, you know, to eliminate the most egregious injustices. And one of the reasons why all these people like Plato and all these Christians and all these conservatives, one of the reasons why they were unable to improve upon human well-being was because they were operating according to myths that weren't falsifiable. And this was a lot, this was what Renegio was talking about, when he talked about scientism. You know, people like Popper were talking about science. They were talking about beliefs and these sort of mythological postulates, which is ironic because their whole, their whole, um, raison d'etreau is going on declaring that everybody else was sort of taken in by this retrograde mythology. But like, scientism isn't science. What scientism is, is it's a belief structure based on certain scientific postulates, which from their, you know, the adherence of this declare that, well, the only way of knowing is truly, you know, the methodology of science and anything outside of that, well, you're, you're drawing upon things other than bear matter, you know, which again, the existence which can't be proven, according to these criteria that I or we have assigned is the only way of, you know, acquiring absolute knowledge. So, you know, this is, this is just a recipe for tyranny. Because the only way we can know anything is through this methodology that, you know, was just aforementioned. And, um, there's so many problems with that. It's almost difficult to discern what it again. It's like, it's like playing with the role playing games where it's like, you're fighting a hydra or something with like a thousand hit points. And it's like, which head do you try to cut off first? You know, um, but people find that superficially really persuasive. That is changing now. I might add. And, uh, I'm the first to, uh, point out that, uh, anybody, anybody who goes around saying like, oh, well, religion is dead. And now, you know, we understand that these progressive posh looks were correct. People like that are totally out of touch. I mean, just like an objective term. Is that there's spent only a time on a reddit where they haven't read a book, um, a fresh vintage in the last 25 years. Like, like nobody believes in that anymore. And that's dead. Like, whether, whether anybody likes that or not, that's totally dead. Like the current paradigm. I mean, first of all, what one of the things that shocked everybody as the Cold War was ending was that it was, it was, it was, it was negatively theological imperatives that were taking down the socialist community and nations as they called themselves. But the way to understand things these days, I'm Mr. Globalism aside from the fact that the primary locality resistance are in, in places that are, are animated by, by theological principles. Like for Riley, for better or worse, whatever many things about this, the Russian Federation, they view themselves as being a vanguard of Christian Dom against a profoundly evil secularism. You know, it did owe like Darul Islam. Okay. Like this is reality. Whatever people think about, either the, you know, discrete belief systems that parameter in some of these territories or what do people think about religion generally? Anybody who doesn't understand that doesn't understand the last 40 years in terms of world's historical phenomenon. But um, you know, that's some, this entire sort of, it's not just that Roman Catholicism became this formative, you know, aspect of continental Europe that Plato sort of became the starting point of Western metaphysics as we think of it. It's um, it's because that's fundamentally, you know, um, a highly sophisticated theological worldview. And the syncredism of Christianity, of the kind that, uh, you know, the Merva Ringeans in the early, I thought I had political terms, okay, to be clear, all right. I'm not saying that, you know, the, what the, I'm not saying these political cultures somehow were more theologically sound or sophisticated than the early church fathers, but there's a reason why there was this sort of ready, um, acceptance, the syncredism between Platonism and the early Roman church, you know, um, and it wasn't just a matter of the men who coveted power and the ability to sort of mold like a nascent, uh, political culture that spanned literally a continent into, you know, something that was coherent and in line with their own peculiar, um, vision of what constituted, you know, the good and human life had oriental, asional scale, you know, it was, uh, way more historically situated than that, and frankly, profound, but, uh, yeah, it looks like we're right about an hour, man, uh, if that was rambly, it'd forgive me, like it's, uh, there's a lot here and we'll, uh, I'll be more focused, uh, in the next episode and we'll get into kind of more of what's significant about Plato, um, especially as regards, you know, the, uh, the Christianization of the continent, uh, without getting ahead of ourselves, but yeah, we'll, uh, we'll finish up Plato next time, man. I hope this wasn't too skater shot. No, no, please tell everybody where they can find you, um, did you, have you had another, uh, incident with another platform? I mean, Discord, Nuke does, I kind of anticipated that, um, the Discord thing was an experiment. Like I know Discord's run by like, gay, for reasons stuff, like I, but I, I want to find us a short forum like chat home where I can also like, livestream, Discord's kind of the, the normie, sort of, uh, platform like that. And I wanted to get habituated to those kinds of servers because honestly, I haven't like really used them before. But I, I'm gonna continue with our, our, our Saturday streams this Saturday. I'm probably just gonna stream from substack and I'll shout it out tomorrow when I decide where I'm gonna shout it out from, but I, I've got a bunch of the fellows I've been suggesting other, uh, platforms, alternative to Discord, where the hosting isn't as problematic in terms of sensorious actors and what have you. Well, I'll have this figured out in the next several days. I just, I had a busy week, like preparing for the OGC kind of play, then, you know, working on my manuscripts and other things, but I promise, I'll have it figured out by this weekend. I know, you know, sell like permanent capacity, but, yeah, the most ways to find me, my online home is substack. It's real Thomas, 777, that's substack, that's common. The part guest is, that's what I like my short to medium length forum stuff is, you know, I'm on, I'm on, I'm on Instagram, I'm a, you know, um, our friends like, like Pete here and, and like Jay Burton, they're apparently up to offer me a platform regularly, but, you know, I've got my own podcast, then I do a biweekly current event show with Jay Burton called Radio Free Chicago. Yeah, check out, check out the substack and from there, you'll kind of get a sense of where to find all my content and I, this is a period of transition, forgive me, the fact that things are kind of up in the air, but it's, I promise, um, this will be for the best, man. and in the coming days and weeks, like, we'll be more accessible. - All right, until part five, thank you. I wanna welcome everyone back to the Picanana Show. We're here for part five, Conte and a philosophy. Thomas, what's happening to you, Damien? - I'm doing okay. I realize that literally the subject of this series is kind of awful. I was to be even like a capital C. But I'm gonna have to spend time with Thomas Hobbs. First of all, that Hobbs in dialogue with the current intellectual tradition, and he's a counterpart to Machiavelli. If you wanna understand modern political philosophy, there's a really good book that Leo Strauss wrote on this and Strauss' scholarship that's not of a polemical character is actually really good. I maintain he was like an important academic, okay? But if you wanna understand, wanna to read what Carl Schmidt was so much in dialogue with Hobbs, I think of Schmidt's relationship with the Hobbs as being not unlike Mars' relationship to Hegel. It's complicated. But we're gonna have to talk about Hobbs and Machiavelli. And I'm gonna tackle Hobbs first because in a lot of respects, I think he's the more significant theorist, especially considering, you know, the guiding ideology of the political monoculture of globalism, and Hobbs is ill understood by people. Like some people view him as this kind of tepid reactionary who's just making concessions to what became enlightenment shibbolus. You know, other people view him as sort of a theorist of crisis actors. Not all those things are really true. You know, and also one of the reasons why the political culture of the UK tells us things, especially for somebody who's proverbial stock and trade, as regards the research, concentration, this comparative politics. There's a microcosm of what happens on the continent in many ways in the British Isles. And the 30 years war didn't touch and concern the UK. Obviously, like it did, the continent, but the war of three kingdoms, there's a lot of common causes, the bleak to what was happening across the English channel. And the ascendancy of Cromwell, Cromwell was very much a Mohammed or Ed O'Fitler and Napoleon type figure. I'd say that he was in fact sort of the splendid example of that archetype. And Cromwell was a great man, you know, but beyond the obvious fact of his significance, the paradigms of a historical and conceptual character that created him are highly significant to anybody who seeks to identify ultimate causes in the processes of mind. And the ongoing phenomenon of conceptual discourse that creates political reality. So we're gonna dive in a Hobbes. But this is something that we're gonna dive in a Hobbes in Machiavelli. For context too, if you read people like John Mearsheimer, these are neo-realist types, they claim, like I said at the outset of this series that people like to consider these, you know, we're presented at tenancy towards realism, that's nonsense. However, in the case of Hobbes, they like to claim as well. It's somewhat less off base. There's something to that. Hobbes was a mathematician at base. And something I've noticed that people don't fully understand unless they grew up reading the King James Bible and stuff like that. When Hobbes talks about geometry, he's talking about all of mathematics. He's also talking about physics and physical sciences. You know, that was kind of the convention of academia at the time. And it's also relevant because one of the things that was happening at this point is during the scientific revolution and the proto-enlightenment and beyond was that general knowledge, what there before it'd been considered general knowledge was bifurcating. But it hadn't fully been, the verbal schisms hadn't fully ossified yet. So basically when Hobbes says geometry, he's talking about mathematics, theoretical and practical, and he's talking about physics, okay? Hobbes is an intuitive dialogue with Aristotle. And the key to that is his ontological description of what it is for man to live in nature and we'll get to that in a minute. But Hobbes viewed his mandate as well as his mission as they called to evade a scientific basis of political and ethical philosophy. And this is the first time anybody'd really attempted this. Okay. Now, that's got certain implications. Not the least to which is that it essentially calls for extricating any ambition. It's a perfect man or to force political ethics to comport with what is otherwise understood to be a virtuous soul and conduct derived therein. It's brutally pragmatic. And Hobbes goes even further and suggests that moral evaluations are basically extrapolated from these kinds of instinctive things of a pragmatic nature. And the kind of progeny of a reason within any like man capable of it is that he's acting in his own self interest. And that doesn't mean he doesn't have any attachments or genuine feelings born of passions, not reason. But it means that when he acts politically and civically in total sociological terms, any action he takes is basically self interested and what he reports to be a reciprocal abiding of duties. It more derives from a kind of non-aggression pact to further that self interest with other similarly situated individuals than it does any sort of higher moral imperative. We'll get into what's wrong with that, probably in the next episode, but just laying foundation, we're getting a little bit ahead of what I want to cover and winning your terms. But obviously the challenge therein, the vis-a-vis that first posh it, how to cultivate and curate a scientific basis of political philosophy. There's gotta be some sort of basis for civic society that is permanent, that can coexist with that first posh it and mitigate what otherwise it'd be the proverbial war of all against all and possibly the literal war of all against all. So some kind of ambition within the individuals would constantly put the body politic and make them a stake and haves as you, they are atomized individuals in their natural state. So I'm sort of impulse towards fulfillment of civic duty incident to active citizenship has to be cultivated. And this is a no mean feat. Now, this is also kind of the birth of analytic philosophy in my opinion as we think of it. Okay. Because the way haves reactionalizes what I just said and the way he approaches that paradigm, how to reconcile these apparently conflicting tendencies is by modeling sovereign authority and the essential characteristics of the character. sovereignty on a kind of systemic discourse. Now, two hubs, what was always most imperative, whether we're talking about how to inculcate the body politic with civic responsibility or how to define the parameters of sovereign authority and describing what its essential characteristics are. He was always fundamentally concerned with tethering the practical, the theoretical, and any theory of state craft or ethical philosophy, he considered it a vital imperative that it comport essentially splendidly with practices. Okay, this is very much at odds in some ways. This is the opposite of the classical orientation. And Machiavelli made that same point, although his purpose is totally different, then he was addressing a totally different audience, which is significant. It's not, it's in an essential ways. The, in other words, as long as I feel the right way to describe this, Machiavelli, he viewed the Aristotelian model as aiming too high, you know, when in fact politics is base and the political realm, which is a discrete steer of human activity. The currency of it is violence at the end of the day, and it is power activity in ontological terms. Hobbes' view was really that of the mathematician, you know, and again, like, Hadesian geometry is basically pro-analytic philosophy, and Hobbes wasn't concerned with whether it was too lofty then vision to curate virtue within the political. His view is that it's not going to do with praxis, and it doesn't mitigate the war of all against all. So what uses it? You know, it would be like arguing over the aesthetic beauty of numbers or something. In lieu of actually devising formulas that can create a bridge or a house that can stand up to weathering tensions and things like that. In some ways, I go as far as I say Hobbes' paradigm is substantially more brutal than that of Machiavelli. I think people don't understand that because in their view, they don't understand that the core philosophical curriculum of progressiveism is actually a very brutal ideology. I go as far as to say it's anti-human. It's not like people have this idea that they're like, "Well, that's like liberal stuff." So what's it like for pussy use or something? Yeah, there's only an aspect of it, especially considering we live in an age of conceptual literacy. But the original progressives, the kind of original enlightenment of utopian types, they don't know problem with killing huge numbers of people in order to realize, supposedly, sort of like perfect geometry of the political. And there's something pretty monstrous about that just as an aside. But it's also, too, that Hobbes is credited with this egalitarianism and make no mistake. Contra Aristotle completely rejected the ontology of men who were naturally fit to command the natural sleeve. But he didn't do that because he thought that there was equal dignity to all people. He said that because he said there's a basic equality within violence. Because any man can kill another man, if he's cunning enough, and if he's ruthless enough, and if he's in corral enough allies for the immediate task at hand, basically equality within the political realm is, you know, it belongs to, it's an equality of violence. Okay, it's like an equality of the capacity to commit murder. And it's not going to do with like the intrinsic dignity of the human being or anything like that. Francis Bacon echoed some of this or it's echoed in both bodies of work. Like Bacon claim that Aristotelian politics was imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths. You know, so there's a self-consert deviation of the classical view of the political, you know, but that again, that doesn't mean it make it liberal in the contemporary sense or anything like that. But this is the basis for this kind of rejection of what that afforded been, you know, the basic understanding of human nature and his intrinsic sociality and him being born to an authoritarian structure and being born to a palace in the terms of you know, the source material, you know. So in other words, the true roots of human behavior aren't really historical in nature. They're basically mathematical or geometric. The Abesian view in Leviathan, which is what we're concerned with is Leviathan, is that it's not a waste of time or irrelevant to study the historical record and even to identify processes they're in, but this has nothing to do with identifying the proximate ultimate causes of human behavior or identifying what the sources are of passions that translate to violence of a political nature. You know, so what Hobbes suggests in lieu of, you know, both what Plato did in the Republic as well as Aristotle did in the Nicomachian Ethics and the politics by saying that, you know, philosophy, if we accept that philosophy as a science and that politics is within that penumbra and thus is, you know, like a subcategory of that scientific discipline that, you know, there's one or two ways to proceed with identifying what are the bases of human action, you know, individually or collectively. One of those ways is what Hobbes called synthetically, which in brass text turns and involves identifying or reasoning out the generating causes of human action and tracing the process to apparent effects of those motives and causes. The second aspect or method of identifying these core impulses is what he called resolute or in plain English, analytical, which is basically deductive, okay, and this becomes important as I'll get to in a minute. The resolute of the analytical begins with effects, identifies the facts that constitute the essential aspect of those effects and then traces possible causes of their generation, you know, based on the totality of quantifiable variables and the conditions in which they're situated. How is this possible considering, you know, what most people consider to be the political and, you know, the metaphysical aspects that go into it? it pops and say there are no metaphysical aspects there. You know, the first principles of all things that define as body or matter, you know, and how motion change of place and self-directed action bears on, you know, that matter. Like that doesn't mean a house was saying that there's not such a thing. It's a good domain of mind, but he's saying that we're, you know, again, the the praxis of political science has to line up with the theory of human action, you know, and basically he's talking about war and peace, okay? Because that's really all that the political is concerned with as regards the human condition and the political is always the business of war and peace. It's not, you know, it's it's not how to make men better. It's not how to identify what virtue is, you know, in the palace or in a man or in a woman and how to curate these things. It's none of that. You know, it's how to identify the source of human passions that animates men to violence, how to mitigate those things or at least channel those entities constructively. And while doing that, how to prevent the deterioration into a kind of superficially dignified brutishness that, you know, simply addresses up nakedly ambitious violence as as some sort of noble endeavor, you know, and how do we accomplish these things? Well, inculcating people with a kind of civic responsibility that makes active citizenship and there's something that is beneficial to all the individuals who collected we make of the body politic. Well, at the same time, creating a strong enough civic apparatus that can fend off enemies from without. Like we haven't even gotten to how this translates to preproredness and waging war against or deterring external enemies. We're only talking about essentially how to manage civil society and generate what we know of as, you know, a functioning state where, you know, not aggression is what reigns between the otherwise animized individuals who constitute the body politic. We haven't even gotten to, you know, questions beyond that. So this is complicated, but it's it is internally logical, even if one rejects it outright. You know, the, and of course, there's what I think of as if we can think of to draw an impertinology. If we're going to think of niche as concept of eternal occurrence, it's going to his counterparts, the cons, categorical and perverted, kind of that pop be easy and counterpart to both would be, would be, or rather, or perfectly, Hobbes is versed in, oh, I think they're 4am. If it was put to Hobbes, or if it were this paradigm was challenged by, well, how can you be to speculate about the passions of other men and what concepts of things Hobbes would say, well, any, every rational man possesses passions of one sort or another. He can identify what, you know, within the parameters, the bound of parameters of reason, he will do to satisfy or accomplish things that will save those passions. So essentially, you have like a living example within your own mind and heart of what the human condition is. And inductively, you can extrapolate things about humans from that, you know, and this is universal because like Hobbes would say in rebuttal to people saying like, well, what about sectarian motives or what about people who are situated in different test paradigms? That doesn't matter because again, we're talking about the political, like we're not talking about people's view of what is good. We're not talking about somebody's like aesthetic judgments. And the quality of violence is what renders this universal, you know, and again, I, there's serious problems with this, with this entire paradigm, but there's something to a lot of what is being said. And that's why Schmidt obviously rejected outright the this, the habitian description of the state of nature. You know, Schmidt viewed the first community as the folk community. That's the pre-rational, um, identity and criteria. However, you know, Schmidt also said that Hobbes was the greatest political scientist whoever lived, you know, and I, I don't totally disagree, you know, so this is important. And I'll also add, and I wasn't jumping around a bit. One of the things that they kind of current, I sort of midwid, political science, academies, right about two, you know, during the Cold War, a lot of attention was paid to Hobbes, especially what you had to say about political psychology and the economy of violence, you know, and this, this is really the basis of game theory is applied to conflict paradigms, you know, this is very important, you know, and anybody, anybody who's learned in this subject matter who picks up Leviathan, they'll start to jump out at them where they've seen these, where they've seen these claims and posh of it's in these analogies pop up again and again, you know, and all, and all kinds of discrete sources. So it's not, it's not just a matter of kind of developing a conceptual picture or the history of political theory or something, it's important to read Hobbes for all kinds of reasons. So, you know, and I go as far to say too, and I'll move on in a minute, anybody who reads my stuff, I think that serves and I'm a radically inductive thinker, and that's probably exacerbated by the fact that, you know, I, I was a lawyer and legal reasoning tends to be highly inductive, but that, this is a bit outside the scope, but if you accept that the Hobbesian claim that politics is basically a subcategory of geometry, you know, and is a science into itself, it's essential that one proceed inductively in order to reach conclusions about the human condition, which is its subject matter, the variables being humans and their capacity for violence and everything that associated with that, and for the reasons I just enumerated that that's implicitly inductive, you know, that's the only way relevant data can be derived that could line up the theory with praxis, which within the Hobbesian paradigm is the, that's the ultimate objective of political science, you know, an arguably of analytic philosophy in the total sense, but, you know, and by, but also by looking into oneself, you know, there's predictive, that's really your only like moment to moment living model of a human mind, where one can overcome the barriers of, you know, the idea of seamlessly a thought, because obviously you can't see into another man or woman's mind, you know, you can speculate about things, you can, there's predictable nuances and observable variables, the human behavior, but there's there are no absolute indicators, but somebody who's capable of stepping outside themselves for the purpose of inductively discerning and identifying the core variables of political behavior, you know, you do have a kind of moment-to-moment model in your own mind and that's not naval gazing that's not you know positing oneself at the center of things. It's nothing like that again. The qualifier is somebody who's capable of stepping outside themselves as a scientist does, you know, and we're speaking about a discrete domain of human activity. You know, we're not talking generally about like what food you like or what kinds of women you find pretty. You're whether you like the Las Vegas readers, you know, and this is key also. You know, you've got to look at the political as a discrete domain of human activity. You know, and this is another thing that separates hops from contemporary liberals that they don't understand this. You know, those that did in the past outright rejected that, but I you know, that that distinction has been abolished. So there's that too. Hobbes is a type of theorist that doesn't really exist anymore in all kinds of ways, but you know, so at the end of the day, human behavior to Hobbes, it's not this the platonic hierarchy of you know, reason, will, and passion and obviously Freud. I mean, Freud was a con man, but he was also just kind of like a a simple minded plagiarist, you know, reason, will and passion is super ego ego. Okay, but Aristotle essentially abided that despite, you know, his political ontology basically deviating from the plateness model. And this this was the classical understanding, you know, and Hobbes is no, no, no, no, human behavior is primarily a mechanistic psychology of the passions. Okay, as applied to the political. Those are the forces that free rationally animate them. You know, now of course, man being capable of reason, he'll devise rational ways and calculated ways to again, like, see the hungars, figurative and literal, the born of these passions, but the core animating principles and phenomenon are what, are what so to speak, pushes them from behind. You know, it's not the product of like rational contemplation. You know, and how one ranks the objects of this passionate, covetousness that's going to vary from man to man, you know, and again, like any given man's constitution, education, social standing, this tends to obscure things to some degree, but not really because anything that is realizable in the political realm, you know, again, our currency is violence. There's not infinite ways to configure violence to derive some sort of award-table of seating, anything, anything, anything of the spectrum of the litany of passions. You know, and obviously the constant going into this too, in political terms, you know, Hobbes' posits that is positing rather that good and evil have nothing, these are just words what characterizes desires and other regions and how these things can be realized or avoided by way of political activity, which is again, violence and the economy of violence. You know, so it's meaningless to talk about, you know, what constitutes a virtuous activity in the political realm. Now, it's not to say there's not an narrative convention, it's not to say it's good to be needlessly violent, but Hobbes would again say, you know, in returning to the harmony between theory and praxis, it doesn't matter anyway, because what we're worried about is outcomes, and even if the only reason why, you know, a political actor shows restraint is because he doesn't want to be available to reciprocal violence of a boundlessly, you know, uninhibited nature that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what his motives are, so long as there's basic compliance with the normative strictures, tailored to maintain, you know, a permanent peace within the body politic, which constitutes civics society, you know, or at least permanent as much as it is feasible. You know, so suddenly also, to be clear, Hobbes is structuring his arguments, at least in Leviathan, I'm not a Hobb scholar, but I read Leviathan many times. And the structure of his argument is qualified, he's qualifiably agreeing with the socratic and the Thomas view, absolute view, that the character of political life needs to be defined by human nature, or at least by categorical reference to human nature, but he's got a completely different concept of what human nature entails, and furthermore, the subject matter is abrogated by the fact that we're talking about the political as a discrete sphere of human activity. You know, so you're essentially managing passions by appeal to reason, born of self-interest, and an understanding that, you know, abiding these uh, strictures that facilitate peaceable living, and the not-aggression pact between individuals and the body politic, any given man, capable of a reason, can dominate that this is the best way to satisfy the demands of the passions, which are pre-rational in nature, and which have a greater part in enemy, the human organism than any other factors. And as a consequence of that, we can also extrapolate what the essence is of sovereign authority, you know, if the, if the political is the economy of violence, and that's all it is, and if civic responsibility and the moral consensus within civil society is uh, essentially an agreement of non-aggression, and you know, what facilitates the realization of the passions, which again are what animates man in pre-rational terms towards any political activity. The only thing facilitating that is his understanding that, you know, he'll be reasonably free of the fear of him and in death. So the sovereign at the end of the day is he who decides who lives and dies, and if you transgress against his sovereign will, you will die. And we're going to get more into the concept of Leviathan itself or himself, because the Hobbes understanding the state apparatus and sovereignty as concentrated, like literally in a man or in a person, he believes this is fundamental, but we're not there yet. But, you know, and he'll, he gets into the the cycle, the symbolic psychological aspect of how man structures his concept of authority, and why this poll is like a certain fascination over the human psychology, but at the same time, you know, this isn't really that important, because the fact of the sovereign's ability to deliver death to the individual at any time, any universal capacity, that's another thing too. Like, full of vioith and like all are equal because nobody can fight Leviathan. Leviathan can kill any man. So whether you're a king or whether you're a beggar, it doesn't matter. You're like equally vulnerable before Leviathan. So, you know, even somebody who even somebody who hated the government or who had contempt for the concept of the divine right of kings or who rejected outright the concept of authority over him, his body and mind because he was some sort of anarchist or something. It doesn't matter because he understands that he will die if he doesn't abide the sovereign will of vioith. So, you know, again, praxis is and it's harmonious complement to theory is what matters. And how to go further and positive to like how can we even know like why people are abiding what Leviathan represents. Like even if they say that they believe in you know the king or they believe in king and country or they believe the emperor is like a divine instantiation of some marvelous idea. How would you know if they really think that? You know, and who'd just say that's not just some artifact of, you know, the pre rational mind, you know, and the way it develops, it's kind of a conceptual syntax, so to speak. You know, so that's important too when people, you know, again, obviously anybody who follows what I write and say, you should realize I basically reject the habisie paradigm it outright, you know, but it's um but there's an internal logic to it that's very developed. It's not just nonsense and it's also not it's the base to something like Bentham I think and this is a so different discussion kind of reduced demand almost like a bovine, you know, reduced demand almost like a talking animal or something, but you know, we're talking about a very we're talking about a very narrow although fundamentally important, I mean, due to it's it's this it's somebody that matters life and death, you know, but it's we're talking about like one kind of narrow domain of human activity, you know, like Hobbes' business isn't there wasn't to, you know, describe like the human condition and absolute terms or, you know, describe what positive it's like a good life or something like that, so that's some something to let's it stay people is kind of our punitive attacks on it. Now the rebuttal obviously even from people who again abide uh the kind of Francis Bacon view which in a lot of ways is sympathetic to what I just positive, you know, they they're a bottle that Hobbes from kind of all quarters or the attempt to rebuttal is, you know, well okay fine, you know, if there was no even if you accept that there was no kind of like first society and you know like man is born in the state of nature like what he said he was being positive here that there was some just like global state of savagery Hobbes actually wrote specifically on this and it's as a patient of those the terms that were a bottle and what he said was really interesting Hobbes didn't have it clear he never he does not say that there was ever a state of nature all over the world, you know, he's saying that at different times, in different places, you know, and in any given epoch obviously, you know, there's ordered societies and there's what we could that were or there's arrangements that says all the criteria of uh of political order but you know there's there's just as many other places you know that exist, you know, in conditions of splendid energy in the war of all against all and the example he involved was the America the day, you know 16th century 16th and 17th century America was like was this, you know, and Hobbes said that the America's in his era, you know, was erect by civil wars, independent sovereigns all like declaring dominion over you know various swaths of territory and and trade routes and you know some of these were some of these people were white men, you know, some of them were some of them were were American Indians who presided in a lot of cases over surprisingly large amount of what we consider capital and territory, you know, so his so Hobbes example is basically like well look at the Americas, you know, like you want to do an example of the state of nature and the war of all against all juxtaposed against, you know, sovereign political um societies like there you go and this is what we used to be and um you know that's uh that's fairly persuasive, you know, the problem as I said is what the problems that it becomes total logical, I mean that's a problem with the enlightenment perspective across the board is that you know if it's like okay so if you're gonna if you're gonna reduce human behavior to individual atomized integers rendering discrete decisions based on some kind of biologically in most cases quantifiable impulse, you know, then it's like oh well then the first society must have just you know, they have been this kind of state of individuals waging war on each other and it's all you know and it's not that's not the way humans work, you know, you're not born as this individual but like doesn't have parentage and doesn't live in a community and doesn't speak a certain language and doesn't isn't surrounded by symbols that are resonant in discrete cultural psychology that are probably heritable, you know and beyond that the whole kind of equality of violence, there are some men who are fit for command and some who are not. Like my example is democratic kipichia, like you know the community room you did, they killed a third of the population, they killed everybody who was master caste as they viewed it. Well okay, what did that what happened then? Does that mean that the communer rouges now like the permanent government and Cambodia like no apparently four years later they were dusted, you know and it's not that's kind of a logic of the prison yard or something like but even there it's like it's not people who just like follow around the guy who's like the most violent man who is the most weapons or something like it's not how things work, you know you follow we're often and not you know and people follow um you know um people are hardwired to follow the man who constitute this kind of archetype in their mind that you know is a comport with some sort of idealized model but beyond that there's just natural human tendencies towards obedience, you know most people aren't capable of discrete action unto itself not related to command from originating from a source that he was authoritative and anybody who doesn't recognize that doesn't really doesn't really know about man, you know and uh I suppose the counter rebuttal to that is that well people are just educated from birthing condition towards these things, I mean okay but that doesn't explain the perennial existence of caste paradise, it's a dozens, you know and like I said there's not the 20th century is a living laboratory of flavorables where people rose up and slaughtered the ruling caste and um these experiments were disastrous, you know it's got it's got a 100% failure rate so apparently that's not the way things are ontologically um I realize we're going to like 50 minutes, but I don't want to, I want to dive into Leviathan, like the concept of Leviathan. And then we have to, I don't want to go for just like 10 minutes on that. So we got, we got to wait until next time. I'm sorry for that. Let me ask a question then. Yeah, of course. If we saw in the 20th century a slaughtering of the master class, a cast, especially in the beginning of the century, is that why they had to switch over to the intense social engineering so that they at least had, you know, this, this quote unquote, upper cast, but really a slave cast that could actually keep the, keep the engines running and keep the machines moving. It's both. They had to, well, it's complicated in the case of revolutionary communism for a couple of reasons because you've got to eradicate competing modalities, psychological modalities. And the only way you can do that, you've got to, you've got to kill the host literally of those concepts. You know, one of the reasons why invoked a career in Rouge a lot is not just because I mean, I don't think I'm a cop person. At least I hope not. I don't just have a discreet fascination with the extreme violence of their, of their system. But Paul Pot, you know, aka Celeth Sartre, he was actually a very learning guy. I'm like somebody like Mao, who was an idiot? They took to its logical extreme, you know, the understanding of revolutionary praxis as the only way to realize true communism is you've got to eradicate all potential competitor modalities because that's the only way it can flourish because you've got to eradicate the understanding of value as money. You've got to eradicate the concept itself of private property. You can't just re-condition people, you know, by reeducation or something or by forcing them to, you know, repeat back ideological strictures, you know, the kind that would pop up in a propaganda pamphlet. You've got to render it literally impossible to divide psychologically a competing system or a preceding system. You know, so that's part of the social engineering. But part of it also was the idea was even among people who weren't, you know, true believing communists. Like the idea was that the machine age and the scientific age, you know, especially, you know, into the atomic age, it's like, well, you know, the master element associated exists is technicians and it's men who can wield and understand technology. In order to prevent the kind of previous caste paradigm from snapping back into some kind of reactionary form is we've got to disseminate knowledge of these technological processes and the science that underlies them is like, why is possible and take like people from diverse, um, actually diverse, not diverse as like every team was word, from diverse places and situations, you know, and make them covenant in these processes and sciences, you know, and then install them like in these key like powerful roles, you know, and that will, they'll prevent, you know, some sort of like new aristocracy from ossifying. Of course, all that happened was like the non-inclatch era, it became like a dictatorship of like the military bureaucrat, you know, that's like what Sovietism is. It's just like the dictatorship of, it's like the dictatorship of the czar and, and uh, and these like landed aristocrats, you give like a dictatorship of the guy who runs like, you know, the McCoy and Gruber's design bureau or like the guy who's, you know, the, some senior man in supreme Soviet, who, you know, you've got to like report to, um, with, with your numbers for like the green production according to like the, the yearly plan or whatever, you know, like, how, you know, people realize very quickly it's not somehow like superior. And the realists among them realize like this, this is just reality is those, there's no other thing as a, there's no other things that headless love Iathen. And that's part of why Hobbes is the count of what sovereignty is as important. Despite his blind spots, then we just kind of like, explicated here. If that makes any sense. Well, in the Soviet case, um, you know, Marx argued that you needed capitalism to keep going because not only was it going to give you the means of production that they were going to see so that they could keep so that they could eventually take it over, but also it would de-rassinate people from their capitalism would de-rassate people from their heritage from their history. Yeah. And it seems like in the, in the case of, and Stalin even knew that, he wrote that, but in the case of the Soviet Union, it would, it, it seems like it turned more into partly a revenge upon the, the orthodox revenge upon the, the Tsar, and they didn't take it to that logical conclusion because I mean, let's face it, at that point, Russia was not as industrialized as, as, you know, say the United States was. Well, not there was no, in 1918, in 1917, 1918, there was no industrial proletariat in Russia. I mean, such that there was in Moscow, it was like a tiny percentage of the body politic. No, the Soviet communism is weird. The way it developed is weird, you know, and the fact that it happened there is weird. You know, um, I mean, the Soviet Union was an incredibly strange society, you know, um, but at the same time, it made sense, you know, and it, um, it's a subject from another podcast, but as I'm always coming back to, I, people don't realize the power and the power potential of the Soviet Union as it existed. They also forget that the Soviet Union, at its Z, are you a Z-Nith, you know, like the Brezhnev era when they accomplished the Degenerity, the Soviet Union was like a crippled beast because the Third Reich had devastated it and they never really recovered, you know, without, without the Third Reich, the Soviet Union dominates this planet. And America is this kind of garrison state that, uh, you know, still has like the bounty of a continent full of, you know, probably like, probably like half the planet from any natural resources, but it's basically besieged by this kind of like a world communist Leviathan of, you know, that's over on Europe and, you know, devastated any any resistance, being in like Japan or the Islamic world or, or, or Africa or anywhere else. So Mary's basic is an island and it's like a hostile like colored world of the communist Leviathan. I mean, that's, people like born after, you know, the 1980s, like, or the 1970s, really, they go, they don't understand that, but they might intellectually, but they don't like really understand it. You know, um, yeah, it's a fascinating subject matter. All right, um, plugs. We'll get out of here. Yeah, like I, I was shouting out the last few days, I'm kind of in the process of restructuring my online presence and my content. And I'll begin that in earnest when I get back from OGC, the week of the 18th, I guess. But my online home is sub-stack. We recently got kicked off at Discord, which I, that did not surprise me, but I'm seeking out a new like online home for our chat server. And when I get home from the OGC Conclave, I will do that. I will do all this stuff. I haven't forgotten. Um, but my online home or all kinds of good stuff is this sub-stack. It's real time is 777 that's sub-stack that time. I mean, I'm active a lot of places, but go there and, you know, you can find where I'm at. I know other platforms. And as I kind of restructure my online presence, so, you know, I'll have more to tell people this regard, but for now, I'll go to sub-stack. Awesome. Thank you. So the next episode. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekinoe show continuing the continental philosophy series. Thomas 777 is with us. Are you doing it? Hey, Thomas. I know it pretty well. I know, like I said, last episode that there probably seems to be a few years of forwards as much on Hobbes and it's continental philosophy discussion, but it's essential in Hobbes and Machiavelli are the key thinkers of modern political theory in terms of its origins. I mean, obviously, I'd privilege Hagle is the most important political theorist or relived, but the transition from the classical view of the political to the modern, you've got to understand the Hobbes and Machiavelli and continental theorists, particularly those from a juristic or mathematical school, which again, all things encompassing theoretical mathematics were referred to as geometry in the early modern era. All those thinkers were in dialogue with Hobbes and Hobbes credited himself as the discoverer of the science of politics, whether you accept existence as such a thing or not, Hobbes considered himself to be the founder or discoverer or rather of that paradigm and basically everyone subsequent who accepts that postulate views in that way too. It's not accidental that he called his book Leviathan. What Leviathan is is significant to the symbolic psychological aspect of what he was talking about in basic capacities. If you're a Protestant, you mostly know Leviathan from the book of Job. Leviathan features in the Psalms in the book of Job in Isaiah and in a lot of the apocryphal. Leviathan is in the book of Enoch. I believe Leviathan is depicted within a lot of his medieval art work and subsequent as the sin of envy. This is not really what it represents in Scripture. The olfights are the olfights. I'm sure I'm putting that pronunciation in it. They were at a nice, exact in Rome in the third and fourth centuries. They were revered serpents and totemic capacities. A lot of the stuff including in the Conan movie where people are worshiping set, the Egyptian deity. I think sets Lord of the dead or something. Anyway, these sorts of sinister pagans are depicted as worshiping snakes. Well, that was the olfights. That's where that comes from. Specifically, they believe that the serpent in the Garden of Eden and Genesis was like an instantiation of wisdom and sacred knowledge. They also revered Leviathan. One of them was far as they say they worship Leviathan. Leviathan was the embodiment of the world's soul that encapsulated all living things in animate manner. It was depicted almost like the Viking world serpent. Leviathan stands and surrounds the earth like an equator. Presumably, he straddles the Carporeal realm as well as whatever is beyond. No neocosystem is essentially neoplateness. But in the Bible, the most written about Leviathan is Job 41. He was referring to Job 41 34, which says he, he meaning Leviathan, he behold all high things. He is king over all the children of pride. So in other words, Leviathan is a terrible monstrosity and it's so powerful that can crush pride out of men like all kneel before it. No matter how pridefully he is, how much humorous his possesses them. Okay. What Leviathan is literally in physical terms, it's a giant sea monster. It's a sea serpent. It's Lord of the sea. And when God created the cosmos and the earth and the sea, there was all these primordial demons that ruled the earth. Leviathan ruled the sea. And there's no more powerful at sea. The hemat was the beast of the land. He's depicted either as an elephant, the hemat is, or this kind of chimera monster. And Ziz is Lord of the air. Ziz is a giant terrible word, kind of like a crossman, a griffin and a teradact. Okay. So these in early as creation, these monstrous, massively powerful chaotic, almost like crafty and creatures, they ruled over certain aspects of creation. But then they were ultimately subjugated by God and almost and like literally made the heel when they returned into kind of almost pets. But this makes sense that an Englishman would view the absolute sovereign, the most great and terrible thing as Leviathan. Because obviously the sea and castle a great Britain. And it's the source of its power even back then. And something that was going to subjugate and crush even the mightiest warlords and would be sovereigns and so if I'm anointed Messiah's, it very much tracks what kind of psychology of the people, negative to pertain to you that it would be the sea monster. But that's, but the key to it is what I said is Joe of 4134. Like Leviathan looks upon all the highest things and he is a king over all and he's a domain. You know, he can only be subjugated by God and he's so powerful and terrifying he can crush pride out of all men who aspire to power and greatness. Now this seems that there's an over emphasis on fear emanating from the essence of the sovereign. It's not an accident because that's the essence of sovereignty. It's not just mortal decisionism and the power to, you know, determine mayors of life and death over those subjugated in the body politic. But fear is the mechanism of sovereignty that facilitates political order within this mathematical paradigm or geometric paradigm rather. You know, Hobbes's view of virtue is pragmatic. The entire book Leviathan is in dialogue, is in punitive dialogue with Aristotle and the Aristotelian concept of virtue. To Hobbes virtue was in the past in most political writing and especially that which was written for the benefit of of princes and nobles. It was basically a rationalization for how powerful people are able to exploit and vent their own strength to enrich themselves and create value. And Hobbes was saying that that's not really a bad thing. But to pretend that there's just kind of metaphysical value to it beyond that which is pragmatic is misguided. Hobbes declare that virtue is nothing more than to have it of doing what tends towards one's own self preservation. But when it goes fundamental condition and essence, you know, part of what contributes to one's own self preservation and enrichment is to facilitate permitting others to do the same. You know, an act like a brute ultimately is counterproductive and sabotages that self interested enterprise. You know, so there is a balancing calculus here. Vice contra this pragmatic orientation towards virtue is basically anything to the contrary that is offensive to order and that is self-sabotaging. And we'll get into this in a minute because first we've got to divide more about the essence of sovereign authority but this is why even from a pragmatic perspective, things like modern government or illegitimate, like sabotaging the fortunes of entire classes of people based on this like imaginary appeal to, you know, the dignity of some race or population. That's the definition of tyranny. It's also self-sabotaging of the enterprise of sovereignty which only exists. derivative they consent to the body politic. You know, so this was important. Because some people misread Hobbes and say that well, you know, once Leviathan is anointed, it can do whatever it wants. That's not true. But moving on, one of the reasons why Hobbes is credited to is kind of the father of liberalism, capital liberalism, even though in America people generally assign that significance to John Locke. Because the American system, as it existed, I mean, it hasn't existed for, you know, since 1865. Locke drew upon a lot of Hobbes as political ontology, but he frankly softened it. And also his view of the social contract, they're totally different parameters. But and also Locke wasn't nearly as hostile to the the current set of aristocracy. Like we talked about the last episode, Hobbes rejected the Aristotelian postulate that, you know, some men are by nature, you know, more worthy to command. And others, you know, axiomatically worthy to serve. They're here rejected that based on the economy of violence. And that in the hubby's the United Nature, which precedes political order, you know, and any man can murder an individual and command and seize that command for himself. You know, there's nothing in nature for including that. And beyond that, Hobbes makes the point that in government, one must do everything in their power to prevent the emergence of pride within representatives of the sovereign. And in order to abide this, in order to abide this conceptual framework where this philosophical orientation, where some men are the natural aristocracy, that does nothing if not, incocait people with pride and an overweaning pride at that. And even if they even if they believe themselves to be good men and even if by some measure they are, you know, what what derives from their decisionism is always going to be rationalized as, you know, deriving from some essential benevolence in, you know, contained within their essential nature as, you know, the natural will be. You know, and that's I don't accept that argument, but it's persuasive and it's internally logical. And within the geometry of politics that Hobbes generally believes that he had discovered, that makes perfect sense. You know, and beyond that, Hobbes says even if even if Aristotle's right, even if men are fundamentally unequal by nature, individual men, particularly those of great ambition will always consider themselves equal or at least on equal terms before the law and certainly before God. So they'll be unwilling to make peace unless this is acknowledged, you know, beyond superficial terms. There's gotta be some basic equality of status that's structurally coded in to the sovereign mechanism as well as that's internalized by the individuals that constantly embody politics. And it can't just be a perfunctory thing that's acknowledged in passing or by storing language in some official document. It's gotta actually be believed and it's gotta be a core tenant of how equity is realized and procedural as well as substantive terms. So the sake of peace within the parameters of sovereign authority, this has to be acknowledged even if it doesn't exist. So even if it's a fiction, it is a law of nature in the Hobbesian sense that all men must acknowledge each other as equal by nature even if it is a fiction. You know, this renders natural differences within the body politic irrelevant. Okay, and again, we're talking about the domain of the political which is a discrete sewer human activity. We're not talking about an absolute existential terms or something like that. And people misconstrued that as well. So the purpose of this geometry of politics, it's got a single purpose and invoking the laws of nature to rationalize, you know, the the architecture of that purpose. All this tends to make men sociable and peaceable into a ballad should reduce to a minimum or as as minimal as possible. Friction resentment, hostilities, deriving from pride or partiality or discreet ambition or excessive self-love or exploitative covetousness. All of these that that's the purpose of the entire science of politics is. And the abusing conceptual framework of nature, what they represent are guiding poll stars and rules and laws for unbiased arbitration and impartial distribution of goods and the creation of incentives to avoid in gratitude to becoming endemic within the body politic and to breed a basic absolute respect for the law. So when he's talking about nature and natural laws, he's not resorting to ethics. He's not talking about natural law arguments as we think of them in legal theory or that, you know, we think of in the terms that theologians and these liberal moralists like John Rawls talked about. He's talking about the basic architecture of the natural world and the as regards human affairs and the absence of a governing sovereign. Okay. He literally believed in self to be discovering identifiable and quantifiable geometric variables relating to power, paradigm within the within human social existence. Okay. So that's important. He's not passing a value judgment on it. Hobbes have learned in the Bible, you know, like any Englishman of his cast education would be and he wasn't believing Christian and Hobbes absolutely suggested, I don't look at this later, I wanted to go into a part three. He absolutely suggested that to purposefully and with mellus of fourth thought make hash with these laws of nature. There there'll be a terrible punishment derived from God's architecture. And in the case of a sovereign, you know, who ignores these things, you know, O'English's own hubris or only a fact he believes himself to be a God on earth, you know, he will probably be murdered in a rebellion if he's too much of a tyrant or if he merely grows him as an anages his role as sovereign obviously, you know, anything he accomplishes in legacy terms will be rapidly dismantled as whatever structures he erected, literal and figurative will be unable to serve their function of, you know, reducing friction within a body politic to minimal quantities such that, you know, the regime that he serves and in some cases created will exist in perpetuity. So that's key. And of course, the big critique from subsequent liberal schools of thought as well as, you know, from class, oriented theorists and reactionaries was, well, how can how can how can this geometry of politics be sustainable if there's no true moral framework and different center of their artists and centers? Oh, you know, again, what kind of suits virtue in political terms is do not do one to others, you would not have them do one to you. You know, so acting, violating natural laws of political geometry to enrich oneself at the expensive others, you know, is barbarism under a veneer of some sort of abiding rationale. You know, whether it's some contrivance of divine right, whether or, you know, a claim that one is a natural lord and those that oppresses are natural slaves, or, you know, a man claiming that he's part of a minority race or sect, and that affords him special privileges and protections, capture the majoritarian ethnos, and it can be anything, but this is ultimately self-defeating. And we're seeing this right now in the American situation. I shouldn't need to paint a simple this picture of what I mean. The selves are smart, so I'm sure they discern that. The, and also to, you know, the central defect of trying to extrapolate Christian ethics to politics is that the essential defect of saying that, well, logos, you know, and higher reason should, like, along should rule politics, because you're presuming that every subject of the, of the political sovereign is some sort of God-fearing actor, because the only thing that binds men in such conditions is their consciousness is in the individual and the inner witness of the individual, you know, and beyond that even, you know, all men are sinners, so even men who fear God and even men who believe in the living Christ, you know, the punishment they have to fear is that of their, you know, immortal soul and judgment before God. You know, if there's an immediate hope of reward, they'll probably take their chances, you know, even men who are otherwise, you know, basically decent people. This is what Hobbes called the fear of quote, invisible powers, you know, that exists in the state of nature and as ubiquitous, but that's not powerful enough. The political is man's domain, not God's, you know, you're ultimately accountable to God for everything you do, but God's not some arbiter or the political, you know, what is needed is the establishment of conditions that reward people for obeying the natural law, political geometry, and punish people horribly who don't. You know, in short, the essence of sovereignty is of visible power, contrary to invisible powers, you know, and security first and foremost within the body politic must be paramount. Some people suggested, particularly the 20th century, where I think even intelligent people with a long view of historical processes, they developed a skewed perspective owing the anomalous violence of it and interstate warring becoming normal, when in fact, it's totally abnormal. But a lot of these people said, well, Hobbes are really concerned with the internal situation and the body politics ability to come to consensus that violence, you know, because, you know, that 30 years war and the war of three kingdoms was what set the tenor for this, you know, so he was, his objectivity was compromised by the specter of murderous civil war, but that's the wrong way to look at it, because if you don't piece within the body politic is what makes all other security possible. You know, that's what facilitates security and they both defend against enemies of alien age, you know, and foreign threats, like that the converse isn't the case, you know, and Hobbes is really the essence of a sovereign polity. The brass text of it is the ability to achieve consensus within a body politic that is ossified around a consensus that thus then precludes civil war, you know, and it's, and, and, and, and voluntarily take themselves out of the state of war of all against all in order to identify, um, as a body politic whereby a moral consensus allows the selection of a sovereign who will then wield absolute power of life and death over every individual constituent element of the body politic, you know, so it's not the issue isn't whether civil war is rare or common or that that doesn't figure into the calculus. So what it is is it's a prerequisite for the creation of sovereignty and its establishment and its, um, and its functioning according to the, you know, parameters of the previously identified natural law. And this is why, and this is important because it's another issue of first impression. A key to Hobbes is, um, political ontology is that the sovereign must political union of the body politic, authority, conceptual and actual, deriving from sovereignty and, and the sovereign itself, this has to be concentrated within an actual person. You know, justice and injustice and political terms and what people owe to the sovereign with the sovereign owns the body politic, this all rests upon to this day the abstraction of legal personhood, but it's such a hot, poshly, a habisian politics, political theory is that this must be an actual person. And that, again, that's an issue of first impression. You know, um, there were great kings and Athens obviously, you know, like Pericles and stuff. And um, Caesar was revered as a god on earth, you know, at, this, at zenith, but this hadn't been proposed before. Or people didn't claim that the essence of sovereignty can only exist within the man of the king himself. You know, and the reason why there's a pragmatic aspect obviously because it's comforting to people and it also allows them to orient themselves correctly. And I think in point two, like a sovereign, um, king or queen or emperor or a Lord protector, you know, were a Lord like, like Cromwell and say, you know, that man is the emperor, that man is the king or that man is the Lord protector. You know, an embodied within him is the will of the body politic because your individual will, um, is sacrificed to the sovereign and the interest of, you know, security being sustained internally in perpetuity as well as, you know, allowing justice and equity to be realized, you know, you give up your right to punish privately. You give up your right to make war, you know, and identify criteria for war and to identify, you know, who the, um, the, the ability to identify private rivals as public enemies, you sacrifice all that to the sovereign and, you know, the sovereign, his will becomes the collective will of the body politic. And when he takes action either as warlord or as logger, that is where his power derives from. This can't be vested in some abstract assembly. Or this can't be reduced to some sort of procedure that can be executed by any council of men or women or by some random guy. That's not how it works. And that's ontological knowledge. And there's a consequence of that too. The legislature, the judiciary, and any other branch of government, sovereignty does not invest in those branches. So it'd be perverse for a president to claim or an emperor to claim that he's bound by the courts. Now, part of the essence of sovereignty, a sovereign can say, I'm going to forego wielding sovereign power over this court decision and allow a decision to stand. But this idea that he's not sovereign, you know, a court is or a legislature is, that's logically perverse. And it flies in the face of the entire basis of sovereign authority, both the theory of it and its praxis. And this incidentally is one reason why America makes no sense post-warrior gate. That's basically what's being a wet. You know, and you can't declare that 300 million people decided that John Roberts or Elaine Kagan represents the body politic and is some sovereign authority. I'm being obtuse, but you know, the point is valid. And that's why it's not an accident. And it's not some contrivance of, you know, horse trading or something at the original constitutional convention that the president of the state is the only nationally elected representative. You know, this is the lineage between from from a Hobbes to the founding of the United States is more proximate and conceptual linear terms direct than people think. Okay. And also what preceded Hobbes' identification of a geometry of politics was an understanding whether, again, whether I or any other man accepts this or not, was an understanding that was extant at the time of Leviathan being devised and written that there was a science of the law and you know a science of equity. You know, so Hobbes is defining the social contract in legal terms. And the commonwealth was defined in terms of legal personhood. And Hobbes takes it a step further. And you know, again, going to the fact that if there is in fact a political geometry that can be discovered, the architecture of which is what facilitates, you know, the permanent piece of the body politic and the psychological acceptance, the sovereign authority, you know, according to the terms contained within an intrinsic to the laws of nature, you know, obviously this derives from the same basis as the science of the law. And there's got to be, not just a theoretical agreement, there's got to be actual praxis there that comports with both conceptual structures. You know, not just the appearance of harmony, but for the actual harmonious exercise or execution rather of these things. Give me one second, let me see what time we've got. Okay. So the social contract is the basis of political order, facilitated by sovereign authority, you know, which can only, which can only be derivative of, you know, a consensus among the body politic. And the criteria for who and what causes the body politic is important to, especially in the present day, when this, um, these concepts are deliberately infuscated or simply just not defined, other than in the most abstract in terms, but we're probably to get to that next time. What the social contract has two components, according to Hobbes, what is it, covenant, each member of the body politic, the initial founding act of, you know, the, the creation of Leviathan is a covenant between each member of the body politic to acknowledge, you know, an intent to create a civil society, presided over by a man or a body of man as long as these people, you know, are discreetly identifiable in whom absolute sovereignty is to vest. Okay. And this is critical because this is a kind of ascending authority, you know, like a sovereign, him deciding, you know, what the criteria are, um, suicide, that facilitated authority, that's, that's, that's, that's tyrannical, but it's also a logical fallacy. You know, um, or a sovereign deciding that he wants the body politic to include more people than it does, you know, based on criteria that will not be accepted by the actual body politic. You know, again, that's, that's not just a tyrannical dictate, but it's also, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's also what odds, it frustrates the purpose of the entire procedure. And it contradicts the laws of nature that give rise to political authority in the first place. But moving on, the second component of the social contract is quite literally the vote, determining who or what is to be the sovereign or talking about the vote in somewhat metaphorical terms, some act of decisionism, some formal act of decisionism that represents the covenant and the compact between each member of the body politic, with knowledge, the sovereign authority, the person of the sovereign. Now, how that person is chosen, you know, how that man is bested within authority, that can take, like what do process constitutes for those purposes can take a number of forms. Is not, it does not seem a hard and fast paradigm or set of criteria by which that has to be conducted. Save, you know, again, that it reflects, you know, an extant and actual and verifiable covenant that is accepted by, you know, each party to that compact, what presumably would be, you know, like adult men of full majority, capable of bearing arms, but that we're going over ahead of ourselves. But, you know, and presuming a true consensus, you know, not just a raw majority of 51, 49%, but presuming that there is an actual cohesiveness and this covenant is accepted, you know, by something more, I would think that a super majority would be the criteria by which would just the enemy's attaches, but the people who are outside of the covenant and who refuse to avail themselves to the contract, you know, people who are in open revolt against it, they remain in the state of war according to the laws of nature, and thus they become the enemies of the body politic. And that's manageable. You know, the begs the question is the way what ratio constitutes a tipping point into civil war, but that's somewhat technological. You know, that consensus is kind of like what's in purposes of the social contract is probably kind of like what's the Supreme Court said about pornography, like you know it when you see it. But this is why, you know, again, and we're going to have time to get to this in this episode, but Hobbes very much believe that there had to be a basic homogeneity within the body politic, at least in terms of moral agreement, because you can't have a third of the body politic saying that they'll abide to the covenant, but with these qualifications, you know, because, you know, and they'll reject certain afferent criteria and grounds that, you know, the worship of different God, or that, you know, they don't accept certain parameters that the majority does of what is, you know, probably within the scope of sovereign authority, you know, based on a sectarian objection, you know, and that's why Hobbes goes out of his way in Leviathan to make clear that the sovereign has the authority to ban or censor, you know, matters of religious belief, you know, not because he's the pope or not because, you know, he has any legitimate authority to regulate men's inner witness and their consciences, but if people arrive or if people take on, you know, a sectarian belief structure, contra the majority, you know, that you're sewing the seeds of civil war, and you're allowing yourself as part of the minority faction, a sort of repudiation device whereby you can return to the state of war if it suits you, based on appeal to a theological preference, you know, and that, that, that puts the, a private right of war into the hands of a minority element of the body politic, and again, a sovereign can't surrender his sovereignty, that's, that's, you know, a self-refuting posh of it, you know, and it contradicts the essential nature of what we're talking about, but, you know, and there's no suggesting that the essence of sovereignty is fear and the ability to, to kill, that makes people queasy, and the lower case liberal objection to that is that, well, you know, the dignity of the individual, and the dignity of the group that it belongs to must be honored, and compliance can't be based on fear, but all compliance is based on fear. Like, again, men are sinners and avarices the norm, you can't rely upon invisible power and men's inner witness to make them abide political authority, that's preposterous. We're not talking about Hobbes and that's why we're talking about rather what is actually virtuous and what is aspirational. He's saying that, "Code of Indonature, there are literally natural laws of power, politics, the political is a discrete sphere of human activity, the subject matter of which is violence and power to ride from violence and the threat of violence, and according to this geometry, this literal geometry, the only way that a sovereign can perpetuate itself or himself, because it's literally a person we're talking about, is by resort to the power of life and death, and inculcating members the body politic, who despite their initial consent, or that of their sires, which they inherited and moral as well as ontological terms, the only thing that truly prevents them from resorting to acts derived from destructive ambition is the fact that they will be murdered if they rise up against the sovereign. There's not to say that there are no remedies before the government or that a sovereign cannot lose his mandate, but he cannot lose it when acting lawfully, and within this scope of his authority, some cadre of men simply decide that they don't want to obey his dictates anymore, or that they want to seize power for themselves based on a sectarian imperative or an ideological rationale, and people confuse those things, especially because one of the reasons why I think it was the conceptual syntax of political theory in the 20th century, and we're very much mired in that paradigm conceptually, why there's no such a point in this, because it exclusively derives from moralizing language, even that which is not only atheist or purports to be a science, it's just endless moral postulating. There's something rather profound there. Part of it is just the vulgarization of discourse and things, obviously, and the breakdown of the majority in consensus, so it's all discursive language, aims to agitate certain segments of the body politic, and to exploit these sorts of divisions. It's all those things, but it's more than that. One of the reasons why the return of general religiosity is a corrective is because a lot of I just described, I believe it's born of a moral impoverishment from religious quarters where moral education should be emanating, obviously. Any absence of that, count asleep or not, the people of the public authority as a source of those things, or what should be. Proversive that may be as sort of an any port in a storm sort of thing. But yeah, next time we'll get into Hobbes' view of a Christ and things. But you know, and that's sort of be clear, there are remedies held not just by the body politic as a collective, but individuals constituent therein. And to be clear, Hobbes viewed according to the natural law the body politic to be discrete individuals contracting with one another. This is in a were so sort of notion of, you know, some sort of psychological or metaphysical whole that, you know, possessive a collective. collective will. This is important. Okay. And this is one of the things that defines the angle, sex and tradition, contra, of the continent. How does that absolutely believed in precise remedies, contra, sovereign authority? You know, but he viewed these things as one would, a controversy in mathematics or in science. You know, so the emergence of political hostility at scale, it had to be resolved through resort to precise variables deduced from the social contract, the law, which itself has derived from natural laws. You know, in the rights and duties of the sovereign and his obligation to those subjugated and, you know, in kind, the rights, duties and obligations of the subjects to the sovereign, you know, and to one another. So this idea that, well, revolution just happens, you know, or there's a lifespan of every government and, you know, we've, we've got to just accept that civil war like all war arrives like the seasons. How has projected that outright? You know, he, he, he, he positive that it was, it would be tantamount to stating that there, there's an equation that simply can't be answered, you know, where there's some, or an engineering of bridge, there's, there's just no way to, you know, devise a proper load bearing beam, you know, and again, I don't accept that ontology, but it's internally consistent. And not only wrong, and how I was going to discipline and methodical, the political theorist who ever lived, like he absolutely, this was, this truly was like a complete conceptual structure, you know, like from inception, but even if it wasn't, you know, the internal consistency has to be sustained before it's a, a whole letting merit, you know, so even if you reject the stops and so these poshilits, there's really no other criteria that could sustain the, the paradigm, you know, other than this kind of mathematical model, then almost, that, that almost parallels Newtonian physics, if that makes any sense, but I'm, I'm going to end it here in sort of about 55 minutes and I, I'm going to change gears a bit. I hope this isn't going on too long. Again, I, I don't want to discuss angle, angle of phone philosophy and a continental philosophy series, but as you move on, like you'll see why I did this and I didn't want to start talking about, I don't want to start talking like Kant or, or Schmidt and make reference to Hobbes and then I have to, you know, kind of drop a capsule summary of these discrete concepts and things. But I hope people are getting something valuable out of this room. The feedback we got at O.G.C. told me that they were because it got a lot of props and then I think he's very happy. Well, anyone who's wondering why you would cover Hobbes, Paul Godfreed's book, it's his textbook. I think he taught, taught college course with it on Schmidt is basically all about Hobbes. Yeah. No, I got, I think it's a great, a great guy, a great thinker like he's, I really get a lot out of his, out of his scholarship. Yeah. No, it's a good point. And I should think that book out and like, refresh my record like a ready years ago and it's, it was awesome. I read after liberalism lately, which I mean, all, all Godfrich stuff is compelling. But yeah, I, thanks for reminding me of the Schmidt book. Oh, I'll dig it up. Well, mutual friend of ours talked to Paul Godfreed on Monday and told him that there was a whole bunch of young kids running around who were reading, you know, reading him and his, his comment was, I'm, I'm glad that my friends are getting younger and my enemies are getting older. Yeah. So yeah, yeah. No, I sympathize. I mean, Godfreed really is all these, like, 83, he's 83. Yeah. And he's still going, which is great. But no, I, I even in my own life, I, I see that axed him kind of coming to fruition. And yeah, I, I take some pride in it. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just plug your plug your sub stack and anything else and we'll get out here. Yeah. My online home is sub stack. It's real Thomas 777 that's sub stack.com. That's like real and magic happens and all the felonies happen. But I'm, I'm a, I started out earlier today. I, I need a few days to recover from the road and stuff, but pursuant to me, like, restructuring my brand and content and I was getting new from discord. I, I decided to rumble is going to be our home for a weekly live stream. This Saturday, I got a bunch of stuff to do and I got a couple social engagements. I mean, relating to partisan stuff, you know, just a friend of ours. I, I got to connect with, but a week from Saturday, we'll start the stream again, the weekly stream. It'll be on a rumble. Like, don't worry. I'm going to, like, pin the link where everybody can find it on the sub stack and stuff. And you'll be able to find matter of social media platforms through sub stack. And I'm restructuring and rebuilding my website and coming weeks. So, yeah, for now, get up sub stack. I'm also on T Graham and Instagram. I'm kind of ubiquitous among YouTube, but like, see, can you still find, but yeah, for now, find me on sub stack and we'll go from there. It's kind of things grow and develop. We were doing a stream recording last night about the OGC and the event and just doing a recap of the speeches. And one of the things, Bagbee speech came up and one of the things that I said was I said, go subscribe to Thomas's sub stack, the talks that he's having with Bagbee in this season of Mind Faser. You are going to want to hear. That's great. Thank you, man. Yeah. And I am maybe an intro person. Yeah. One, I'm not, but you're my friend. I'm not doing this because you're my friend. I'm doing this because you people want to hear the conversation that's happening. Yeah. Thank you, man. Yeah. Bagbee is a baby's a dear friend. And yeah, he's a brilliant guy, man. And I've been really blessed. I mean, I'm always blessed that you and Jay Burton want to collab with me because you guys always bring a lot of fire, but a Bagbee and Josh Neal, like both of them guys are super intelligent. And I think we have a good rapport like I do when they do our subject, maybe our concentrations are different, but they dovetail. And yeah, I owe both of those guys a tremendous debt, man. John slaughtered to he wrote a great book. Yeah. I mean, he's a great dude too, but he's everybody's intelligent as these other guys, but I'm very much a, I'm very much like a theoretical guy. And and baby and Josh Neal really kind of compliment my subject, never concentrations. So yeah, no, that's tremendous, man. Thank you for that endorsement. Yeah, this weekend is busy, but we can reconvene anytime next week and continue this series. We will. Thank you Thomas. Appreciate it. Yeah, man. Like I was. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pikeniano show. Thomas is back and he is going to continue talking about continental philosophy. Where are we going today, Thomas? I was going to sit with him to discuss an amaki belly. It really for the last really like since the eyes of our era, I don't know what it's like now when it speculates the same, but basically in the 1950s, when the post war era when the university curriculum was, was sort of reestablished and reconfigured until the 1990s. Have you studied political theory or western philosophy that had an like at undergraduate level, for example, they had a component of political theory. You know, the curriculum would teach, um, hubs. Spinoza and Machiavelli basically has one subject matter now How's the Spinoza succeeded Machiavelli? How's literally born right about a generation subsequent? But the reason why that's done It's an over-simplification, but I get it the internal logic of it Machiavelli and Hards are considered to be the fathers of modern political science and You know like I said people like Muresh and I'm a wrong considered to be like a liquid I mean, he's preferable to the abject morons and credence Who generally populate the academy and And the permanent state, but he's he's got a real grasp of political philosophy, but People like him They claim that Machiavelli is the father of political realism, which doesn't really make any sense, but What is true is that Machiavelli was Very much in dialogue with the Nika Machian ethics and Arguably in a punitive way But that's the whole point is that Machiavelli was arguing as an Italian Catholic and Like all Italians and really all Roman Catholics. There's this this tension between Athens and Jerusalem is full of sociable Paul stars, you know Christ and Pericles If you will there's different than the enterprise that Hobbes took on That's not what Hobbes was doing Hobbes literally thought that he was creating a science of the political you know and He wasn't He wasn't trying to reconcile That which is holy literally with You know That which is pragmatic and necessary According to the demands of power You know in the discrete domain of political activity It's like a difference between It's like trying to compare earns and old T to say like closuits because no two is a guy who wrote about the epistemological and phenomenological Process of war and peace and how where it emerges Whereas a closet is writing about like how war is waged and how you accomplish victory conditions Within the domain of political realities or it's like Comparing a book on physics to like a manual and how you build a bridge You know, so I think it's misguided that these things are lumped together at the same time It does big a question as to whether Hobbes and Spinoff said red Machiavelli in My opinion for reasons that I said the scope right now, but I'll get into a key want me to later I think Spinoff so probably did I don't think Hobbes did Because it wouldn't have interested them You know other than maybe it's like oh, well, that's what these that's what these latins are doing in this little warring states conflict that seems to never end You know But There's also to There's also represented by Hobbes and Machiavelli to You know when to the modern state emerge was it Kromels? Was it was it was it with Kromels protectorate? You know, they're a public he created literally after killing a king or Was ferdinand and Isabella Spain like the first Was failing state as we would think of it This interesting question and I don't have an answer to that It depends on what your criteria are and it depends on what Consolation of historical factors you privilege But that's that's why it's important to the to the kind of discuss Machiavelli and Hobbes and and also Spinoza, but so it you know not I don't place the same after this on Spinoza not He's not important, but I'll get into why When we reconvene the next episode next Explicate my reason, but that's why um I'm treating them Kind of uh as a singular Um Subject episode is it worth and that's also why like I think I alluded to The other week You know In a series on kind of laws if he you know why am I talking about English uh mathematicians turn Political theorist well Because from that point forward basically Every man who wrote about the politics was uh You know, I was in dialogue. We were a stoddle, but also with Hobbes, okay And um You know For clarity It's not so much of Machiavelli wrote in the prince that's so important It's what The impetus was for him writing it I think is what's significant And there's a certain naivety I think to a lot of academic types as well as People who said no better people who are insinuated into Power of political roles You know this idea that In Clasmeticity You know a prince or a king or a world-lord He had you know he he was exclusively committed to these kinds of high-faluten ideas of like an elevated morality in and discerning what you know Magnanimous virtue is and and and he would recoil at the idea of You know, that kind of cold-hearted realism and how to apply power like that's preposterous this ridiculous You know and Athens especially, but all the Peloponnesian cultures within that Nguelieu they were very aesthetically oriented there was things you didn't talk about like a pureances mattered You know the fact that The fact that um Generals and and and and princes and nobles they didn't air out the kind of nasty aspects of War and peace and The kind of dirty business of palace intrigues even among their peers that doesn't mean anything Other than the fact that you know they were highly dignified people who were Kind of a set-body uglier aspects of life, you know, I mean I that's There's a literalism to Acadiene particularly in social sciences. That's quite literally retarded. I don't mean that like colloquially. I mean It's like a stunted way of approaching the human condition and especially in um When dealing with the Matters that are impacted by discrete cultural conventions, but um the uh The key distinction You know like I said Mafia vellies and direct dialogue with the Nica Machia ethics Or as you'll run across to especially a lot of stuff from the first half of the 20th century It's just for first the Aristotle's ethics as this thing goes from the politics they're talking about the Nica Machia and ethics, okay The subject matter the Nica Machia and ethics Was virtue and Everything in the Aristotelian paradigm and this isn't unique Aristotle This was um This was what you know the classical mind There were there isn't there's an integral um quality to knowledge You know uh it wasn't it wasn't bifurcated by subject area and there wasn't done under understanding of well discrete domains of human activity. activity, the call for any equivalent, discrete moral convention that governs action within these spheres. To the Aristotle virtue is the kind of governing pulsed art of any human activity. It's also the tillos of political life and action. And, you know, it's critical to define what virtue is and what can be understood to be its zenith or its most complete manifestation. You know, and one of the big criticisms of Socrates by his enemies and by Aristotillions, you know, axiomatically, is that Socrates spent a tremendous amount of time in his discursive dialogues attempting to define and unpack and identify the constituent elements of what is virtue. And in some basic way, the entire socratic enterprise was, you know, defining what exactly virtue is and the whole fourth on the concept of it and the clarify it. And there's a subtext that any true set of factory resolution in this regard will never be arrived at, you know, which is high sophistry and that's incredibly subversive within the cultural paradigm I'm talking about. Like in contrast, Aristotle very much clarified these things in absolute terms, which had been the sort of cultural core of Athens that had zenith. This made the fact that, you know, Aristotle was a contemporary of Alexander, you know, like he taught him. Okay. At the Athens was still enjoyed tremendous cultural cache, but there were a civilization profound decline by the time. But that's often the case that kind of in the twilight of, or at least that, you know, post zenith, a cultural formal producer of its strongest thinkers because they have at least on matters of things like ethics and aesthetical subjects because they're far enough removed from the zenith of cultural production as it were that, you know, they have a kind of detached perspective. We'll still very much insinuated into a culture that although in precipitous decline is very much like a living form of life. The Nikomakian ethics, it's totally unambiguous in its definition of virtue. Aristotle defined what he called the "crowing virtue" as "magnanimity". Mananimity is the quality of being great in mind and in heart, which in turn makes possible the elevation of all other like subjugated virtues. You know, it's a code of honor. It's an intellectual orientation and it's an aesthetical commitment. It's kind of like the "added layer of, you know, a rigid intellectual discipline overlaying it. It's an impertinology but I'm trying to convey this in a way that people will find insolidable. But it's also, it is literally pagan. You know, it does not call for men to be humble. It'll embrace humility. The magnet, the magnetism is man, he's never self-deprecating, he's never a humble but he's also not arrogant because he has the correct understanding of his own abilities. He's never tried to inflate those abilities for clout or to capture power he doesn't deserve but he never tries to diminish himself and the eyes of others to make people, you know, find them reproachable or anything or abide some sort of, you know, egalitarian convention because this didn't exist in classical antiquity as a concept. Magnumity, men who possess it, they're going to be singularly oriented towards seeking greatness and great things. The way to understand is we're going to be considered to be like living historically. Okay. You know, it's a psychological orientation that adorns all other virtues and traits a character. It's not so much a discreet virtue into itself as it is, you know, a way of being. And, you know, a magnanimous man, again, he's not going to forego, for example, he's not going to forego material wealth or an interest in women or, you know, he's not going to live as some kind of hair shirt or live like John the Baptist or something, but he's not going to place under value on these things, you know, and Aristotle is very clear, like men who try and capture wealth because they want the trappings of magnanimity, they don't possess it because a man so constituted doesn't care about that kind of thing. You know, I'd say paracles is probably the best example from within a cultural milieu from which Aristotle was speaking. You know, and it's again, the Aristotelian model of human psychology and kind of human essence is a highly integral. So the understanding is that, you know, there's not discreet geniuses in different fields, you know, there's men who are oriented towards greatness and have the capability to achieve it. And they've got the psychological foresight and they're carnival enough with their own mortality to pursue these things in a complete capacity. You know, I think of Napoleon, Muhammad, Pramwell, Adolf Hitler, okay. But I don't think like an ancient person. You know, if I were transported back to the kind of situation there was, he would probably say that a man like me is far too mired in the business of like high politics, you know, at the expense of other things, which is probably true. But one of the objections I have to people who try to die off the kind of pig and mindset, like I don't mean goofballs who, you know, takes trips to Stonehenge and like run around naked on the solstice or something. I mean, I mean, people are going to be in a lot. You seem to think you can take on some sort of mindset, a class one, say, what do you, you can't do that? It's not only work. you know, when I, you can kind of, create an intellectual pastiche of the way people thought within that cultural framework, but you can't really immerse yourself in it. It's not possible. I think what's interesting about that is that a lot of the people who are doing that consider their ops to be Zionists, and that's exactly what Zionists do. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and they're, it's this thing that's makefully identity of deraç native people who are like race, idolaters, and one of the other things. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Well, it's also, I mean, we're getting a lot of time. I don't understand why they care about Zionism. It's like, well, if you reject the logos and you want to pretend to be some pagan, why do you care about what do you care about Zionists? You know, like you shouldn't, like you, like your view is that, there's this kind of binary and primitive tribalism that if dressed up with adequate, aesthetical intellectual foundations is, you know, represents truth. So, you know, you shouldn't care that you shouldn't care that, you know, people who reject logos and, you know, to think that they're above God. Like you shouldn't care about what they think. Or you shouldn't care that they oppress you or other people. You know, but yeah, no, that's, um, that's something worthy of the dedicated discussion. But um, the, there's a, um, I make no mistake. I mean, there are, this isn't, people just understand this was really imperative. I'm kind of the same way they misunderstand. And these jeans post-pression ethical orientation. Like, Aristotle makes the point again and again, and then I'm not getting out of it. It's that, you know, for example, like about what's morally upright in conventional terms. You know, young, young people should develop a sense of shame because, or do they're immature, like, for example, like they can't help making mistakes. So, you know, like, like a very young man with a potential for to be magnanimous. If he went around declaring that he was never wrong and he simply knew better, I mean, that did make him a fool, you know, and that would preclude the achievement of greatness in his moral life. Okay. But this is this thing which we'll, from, you know, a belief that that which is wholly, must always supersede, really ambitions and greatness. You know, the, um, the Leostras and Joseph Crozci book, I'm political philosophy. And, um, Leostras is a problematic theorist, but he did produce some great scholarship, a value neutral sort. And, um, you know, the first prophet that, uh, presaged the, you know, arrival of Christ was Isaiah. I mean, if you're like a Bible prod, that's the way you look at it. Catholics might look at it differently. I honestly don't know. I know something about, uh, Roman Catholic theology, because I had to take it at Leolas, I'm undergrads, but I, I'm very much a layman in it. But if you're, uh, if you're a Bible Protestant, um, the view is that, you know, there's a lineage from like Isaiah to John the Baptist, you know, to Christ. And when Isaiah received, uh, his vocation, like when, when God spoke to Isaiah and, and, you know, in a foreign him, he was to be a messenger, you know, was what a prophet is. You know, he was overwhelmed by this idea of his unworthiness. You know, he said, um, I, I can't believe that quote, because I'm a man of unclean thought in speech indeed. Okay. And I, I live a midst of people who are equally unclean in their thoughts indeed. I'm not where it served God. You know, you must find a better man. You know, this kind of like implicit kind of amazing of the idea that you are destined for greatness. That's completely at odds with the pagan idea of and the classical, I mean, ideal of magnet and you know, like if, uh, and that's, that concept of the holy and that bifurcated understanding of the transcendent from the worldly, that's totally alien to the classical perspective. You know, and that's why Leo Strauss, Russell Kerr, Prussia, Eliati, they're always talking about, you know, Athens, Contra Jerusalem. And that's what they were talking about. Okay. And this, um, Machiavelli is shot through with this. You can go as far as to say that that's the entire catalyst for his discourse. Okay. You can even go as far as to say, and Hobbes did reading between the lines. It's clear that he did. You know, a philosophy that's based on faith or premised on a theological paradigm, even as just a framing device, as to what sets the tenor of an absolute morality, which, which must frame discussion of political activity. Is they can't, this not really properly a philosophy. You know, um, philosophy is an integrated science. Okay. And, um, obviously, in the early modern period, there wasn't this integral view of knowledge, but it's not an accident. I mean, Hobbes literally said he's establishing a geometry, a science of the political that is not going to do with faith based ethics. You know, any more than there's a moral content to studying physics. You know, so Machiavelli kind of agonizing over this stuff, which he did, people don't understand Machiavelli or they, they heard some like rap album or something that involves the name or they think the colloquialism as an actual definitive weight. So they think, oh, Machiavelli, he's like unscrupulous guy rubbing his hands together and talking up, fighting against people and instead, this not Machiavelli was actually like an archimoralist and he was a pious Roman Catholic. And that was exactly why he was, he agonized over this stuff. Like the guy was a morteless, okay? Hobbes was not. And that's essential. You know, um, nevertheless, I would say that serious people who study political philosophy and political theory. There's people who aimed to understand political ontology and sort of the anthropological causes of political behavior, the kind of symbolic psychology that underlies it, the kind of data that can be drawn from conditions tending towards war or peace and the cyclical paradigms, if they do, if they exist, that can be identified as, you know, for the purpose of predictive modeling and analysis. You know, those are the kinds of, this kind of that tendency that let's split off with Hobbes. The people quite literally talking about political ethics and how to manage the demands of moral behavior with the brutal realities of state craft and how these things can be reconciled and what the relationship is between temporal authority and you know moral authority you know that's that's the Machiavellian enterprise so I mean capital liberalism it was a lot more than Machiavellian as the Hobbes okay even though people like giant lock they tried to do in a both a language of Hobbes while hanging all this sort of moral contents and the thought experiment or the conceptual model of this data nature you know but it was very superficial I think I think people like lot are incredibly overrated but this is important because you know it's not this is kind of like linear progression from oh Machiavility to Hobbes the Spinoza to you know Conter whatever and it's also again like Machiavility he actually represented the opposite tendency of what people associate them with you know it you know and it's something to there's a parallel that's interesting because both Hobbes and Machiavility came out of what could be considered you know Hobbes the intellectual progeny of of the thirty years war like the conditions that created it and obviously in the UK they were hit especially hard even though even though great Britain the British Isles weren't the battle space you know a microcosm of what was happening on the continent emerged with the worth three kingdoms you know and a Kramel was a great man he was a hero in the Carlisle sense and in the colloquial sense but those are tremendously traumatic thing you know that he did you know it was an act a creative destruction unlike any other within the political domain but you know this was this constellation of factors was well underway when Hobbes reached age on the majority and Machiavility was a you know Italy I mean Italy is still like a mess in terms of its political culture but it quite literally was mired in a perennial civil war that reached zenith around the time of seizure borges them stewardship and a Machiavility started the court of seizure borges of about a year which had to be something with terrifying experience I mean even if seizure board don't like you you know and so the bias in favor of identifying remedial measures when conditions tending towards civil war are emerging in both men's conceptual models but arguably I mean that's the ultimate challenge of a state craft as a executive crisis actor you know and I think people don't necessarily realize that and aside from the fortunes of the other Paulus of the state for the nation you know that stands the tariff self apart if conditions of pennies for civil war I mismanaged you know your own neck is literally on the line you know you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna die with the failed state you preside over I mean not you've got to be prepared for that if you're a a magnanimous man or if you know if you're any kind of man worthy of the office or the station but that does tend to incine way to sort of moral seriousness into the into the subject matter I think it goes not saying but that's some it's important contextualize that and like I said I think I think arguably that renders both men's back in several modeling more relevant than something this you know only held discrete significance in a the peculiar epoch in which you know their body of work respectively was emergent but the you know and the last thing I'll see the kind of comparative direct comparative analysis between the two men you know again my community's whole enterprise was this discursive engagement with their Aristotle Hobbs to the baby out the bathwater Hobbs quite literally said that there was no science of politics before he wrote Leviathan you know he he regarded himself as the true founder of political philosophy you know writing treaties on ethics around the aesthetical aspects of the made an animous man or you know agonizing over you know what constitutes a moral life in the core of the prince there's nothing to do with science you know and thus it has nothing to do with the study of politics which like physics or like biology is reducible to a science you know and how does words these things with a stuff of dreams not science you know and this is important because if you're going to literally craft a science of politics and the central subject matter of the science of politics is to mitigate or ideally eradicate the state of war within the polity what do you want to bet what criteria are going to base that on like what are your variables what are your inputs magnet in the middle easier input there's got to be some sort of common engagement mechanism that is universally relevant to every constituent member of the body politic and I think I'm going to this last time Hobbes says well human beings are idiosyncratic in the configuration of their desires and motives and other things but what is universal to them is there's susceptibility to the economy of violence and the economy of violence is what governs the state of nature and is the core essence of the political and there's no idiosyncracy between how men view self preservation and how they view being availed to a violent death at the hands of the sovereign who wheels absolute authority over life and death you know that might seem like a base criteria for a variable engagement but it's a very concrete one and More importantly, it's a realizable criteria that could be utilized within the geometric paradigm that Hobbes was devising something like magnanimity and higher virtue. It's not a variable that can so constitute such a science. So it doesn't matter that this is debasing the kind of soul of politics or something, or that it's precluding the emergence of men suited to greatness and situated towards those potentialities. Because again, it's like arguing over, I can build the strongest bridge over this ravine or over this chasm based on this structural configuration. But then there's a counter-argument emergent that bridge isn't beautiful enough. So you're going to have a bridge that isn't going to collapse and people traverse it. You're going to have a beautiful bridge that doesn't work as a bridge. Is that reductionist? Yeah. But there is an internal logic to that paradigm that is pretty admirable. It helps with the Hobbes if you approach Hobbesian theory like Schmick did. And you don't even need to go as far as the positive well. This is a demeaning human activity that just takes place beyond good and evil. No, we're talking about quite literally the anthropological, the symbolic psychological, the lack of a better descriptor, the mechanistic aspects that constitute the essence of war and peace and the economy of violence, which ultimately is the essence of the political. Now, moving on a bit, there's some misconceptions about Machia, Vellie. I believe, and I reread the Prince the other day, the preparation for this. I mean, I read it a bunch of times in college and subsequent, but I believe the chapter on Caesar Borgia and his machinations. Borgia was the illegitimate son of the pope. This was a very decadent family. And they were incredibly ruthless people, even for that culture and era. I got a lot of up for like, when people, I think they're saying when they're aspects and they're passionate and it's really beautiful. I'm not saying bad things about them, but they're capable of incredible violence of a very hot-blooded sort. I mean, my people are ruthless as fuck, but there's something frightening about like a Spaniard or an Italian crisis actor on the work-ath. And there's a kind of genius for the economy of violence, someone Italian, I think. And I stand by to it. But the, I'm talking about the case of Caesar Borgia. Machia really makes clear, well, you know, a Prince at all times, he should appear manly, you know, morally upright, brave, pious, you know, a religious believer in control of his faculties all time. And so then we went to Machia, well, he's a big, Machia, well, he was a big critic of Alexander, which is interesting. And he said one of the things that brought Alexander down was that the perception was that he was ruled by his mother. And Alexander may have committed a patricide. I find it persuasive that he killed his father. But whether you accept that or not, he was, Alexander has used a mama's boy. He was a guy who's dominated by women. And it's not an admirable characteristic. And that's a frailty that is literally fatal in power politics. You know, Machia, well, he emphasized again and again, these things can't just be superficial appearances. Like you've got to actually aspire to these things. But you've got to be capable of, you've also got to be capable of being a monster. That doesn't mean that you put on ears and act like a degenerate because that makes you hard or something. Like not at all, quite the contrary. Machia, Billy was very much a believing Catholic. But a man who thinks he's above doing monstrous things can't be a prince because you're going to be called upon to do monstrous things that are totally offensive to your person and that are totally offensive to God. You know, but that's how every prince, that's the tradeoff of the great wealth and power and a steam of prince enjoys on earth. But that also, I mean, everybody has their cross to bear. Like every man, no matter how, you know, like, lowly in his worldly station or how elevated. The cross, the prince bears is that he's going to have to do horrible things. Okay. To protect his people, to protect the Paulus, to defeat his enemies, to guarantee that posterior is dynasty. All these kinds of things. Now, the case of Borgia's interesting because of how Frank Herbert is a big Machiavelli guy and Vlad Mirhardt Conan. He's kind of a pastiche and both a winch dune and a villain who doon. I don't think you don't really know his character adequately. But he's in large part Caesar, Borgia. He's kind of like a cross between like Caesar, Borgia and Stalin. But Borgia was made a, he's made commander of the papal armies by his father. Who was the Pope Alexander the sixth? The, the papacy at that time wasn't as Alexander. They were highly reliant on mercenaries and Machiavelli was just coming at his point that mercenaries are shit. You know, you've got to have men who are, well, will die for the Paulus or die for the state. Interesting, I mean, I gave one of the first political theorists that did invoke the term state. But, you know, you can't, and all these like mafia movies, it's like this bastardization of the query looks better to be like feared or loved. You know, that's not a query in my, it's obvious. It's better to be like revered. Like if people fear you and the men under your arms, fight you because you pay them, like it's, you're going to be despised. Like people hate what they fear. You know, people need to fear your temper. They need to fear transgressing you. But, you know, if you're just like object, if you're just like an older who's this object of fear, who like mental bay under pain of mortal jeopardy, you're because you're paying them, you're going to be murdered at first opportunity. You know, but bring it back. The, the orcini brothers who were very much insinuated into the French court. They were these, they're, they're these kind of like mercenary aristocrats. You know, and the Pope, I real problem. Okay, because he depended on these guys. They're battlefield aptitude. You know, and their ability to. kind of finesse interstate power political concerns and intrigues like as the you know kind of Italian states were wring with themselves but obviously they've wring which had the Vatican kind of by the shorthairs you know um what uh what Caesar bourgeois did to consolidate his own power and uh cultivate and carry a view of himself as a liberator the kingdom that was key um to people authority owing to the military paradigm then underway waslamanya so what Caesar bourgeois did was he basically promised there were senior brothers that if they break with the french court when he conquered romania you know he both pay them better and he'd give him official government posts but he essentially had to stand down from military command and the receding brothers said yeah that's great but you're not going to pass the fire romania that's laughable well what Caesar bourgeois did was he hired this guy who was an notorious ghoul really a brymiro de oracle brymiro de oracle magiavoli orphrodome literally as a beast okay and in dune you know the beast raban this is exactly what Dernar Conan does brymiro de oracle he goes through romania and he starts utterly brutalizing people you know he slaughters people wholesale he doesn't give a fuck you know and Caesar bourgeois let this continue for months on end you know and when the people appealed to Alexander like you know we're being slaughtered and brutalized or wise of being raped or children are being murdered we're living in terror well Caesar bourgeois says I'm gonna liberate romania and I'm gonna cut this brute oracle in two and that's exactly what he did you know just like brymiro de oracle in his big plan was to deploy beast raban to a rakis and and reban was such a psychopath and such a brute and such a ghoul that uh when fate or out the you know overthrew him and like cut him into to liberate a rakis you know he he'd be viewed like heracles or like Caesar you know this like great man who who not only not only was like a great warlord and a real man but you know a liberator who killed the monster who killed the beast who was misleading us and brutalizing us you know um and machia velle he says like Caesar bourgeois doing that he's like that wasn't incredibly brilliant thing to do and it was like machia didn't say like Caesar bourgeois was that nice guy and I wanted him to fuck my sister or like I I think he's the kind of person I want to go bowling with and you know like tell sea stories too like he was saying that you know that that that required a genius for intriguing and ruthlessness most men simply don't possess and Caesar bourgeois Caesar bourgeois ultimately came to a bad end but he guarded his father's dynasty and posterity and this was a tenuous position too I mean he was he was um he was the illegitimate son of the pope this was delicate you know so he basically he bought off and neutralized his enemies his his his main enemies he pacified romania he conquered it and it's so doing everybody viewed him as a hero you know despite the fact that he caused all of this like that's that's utterly incredible you know like I don't know what else to say about that but not once did um not once in macaela suggests that this was a good thing you know and in fact if anything the there is none of the boroughs that are kind of synonymous with this literally like in sefjewis kind of palace intriguing and this kind of gross brutality is because of macaela because I mean he described how awful this stuff was but you know it also um we represented an aptitude for power that basically almost nobody possesses and that that's why the Italians are great people it's not it's not just because they make like the best food and really cool sports cars and produce pretty women I mean I like all those things too but you know they really do have like a genius for for uh for politics um of this really sanguine resort um they were coming up on an hour I know will will wrap up uh macaela and get into spinoza next time if that's okay sounds good to me um tell everybody where they can find you right now yeah um uh uh uh jade burnon I just dropped into sort of real freesha cargo I've seen it pop in really good um my home right now is sub-stack it's real time is 777 that sub-stack that time and uh I can't remember if I shouted this out um last week or not I uh since we got nuked off at discord I've been looking for a new um home platform to do our like Saturday night streams and uh I'm gonna start doing them on a rumble that seems like a natural fit for us I've been playing around with the with the platform like since we got back from Nashville and I'm careful with it so this Saturday um we're gonna go back to our weekly um live stream schedule like nine p.m central standard on Saturdays it's not my there's an announcement my sub-stack and my t-gram it then it'll be like a link to it but yeah that's um I mean the pros are reconfaring my content but um the sub-stacks popping very good and there's a lot of stuff there I there's this stuff I do with j-burden there's a bunch of my own like videos there's my podcast there's a bunch of like long form stuff there's my science fiction novel that this serialized on there and in its complete form so yeah if you want to uh get engaged um with what I do that's the way to do it all right Thomas thank you so the next episode appreciate you yeah I want to welcome everyone back to the Picaniano show Thomas is back and we will continue the series on continental philosophy are you done Thomas I went pretty well I uh I slept a little late today because my sleeve schedule threw up but I I feel well prepared but if if it seems uh short that's why so forgive me for that so it was kind of a hectic week thankfully I feel a lot better but I'm still fighting some fatigue and stuff um I read up I study a lot on grotesque the legal theorist you know and he was active about 20 years before Hobbes and he's Hobbes is something of a counterpart to grotesque although grotesque rejected the idea that he himself was in the mold of an Aristotelian clinical theorist and he rejected outright the idea of a political science and that's important and grotesque really everybody from all our window homes junior to HLA heart and I would argue even these law and economics types their spiritual forebearer is grotesque and grotesque is the father of legal positivism as we know it there's a lot of capital L liberals who like to claim that the idea of a natural right accruing in all humans to certain protections at law and Things of this nature derived from grotesque. I think that's what is guided for a lot of reasons Grotesque was He was a hostile dialogue with the concept of natural law and For complicated reasons but Anybody who picks up a grotesque The law of war and peace Which is as magma opus We'll notice to that Carl Schmidt was a debt to grotesque and there's something peculiar in America because on the one hand I mean, I'm convinced the American judiciary is quite Literally a positive for you have abject mediocrity's I think a lot of these people don't have any meaningful understanding of the law like I really don't That's not just because I have a not flattering view of People in government. I I mean they're they're conceptual or whatever it's like like the conceptual syntax of the law Which is pretty complicated at base they just don't understand it and I think that's gonna become clear I know a lot of people don't accept that but I if you know what to look for In reading these opinions can not from the federal bench It's not just that they're ideal logs who enjoy that pretty to participate the reason why they read like sociological Screes or like essays it's because these people don't understand legal reasoning so they're they're not really capable of rendering political opinions, you know because it's It's a it's like somebody who Who can't master high school algebra holding forth on As an MIT lecturer and like advanced, you know theoretical math or something You know But there's a peculiar tendency in America to act like there's some sort of something like sacrosanct about the law and I think that's frankly a highly semitic tendency. That's what I said the scope of what we're talking about here but What they but the people who proposed these kinds of things they invoke kind of like a bastardized legal positivism to sort it up You know, then they they claim that they reject quote-unquote religious rationalizations for right-based paradigms and things but you know you can't You can't claim to be a secularist and then invoke natural law it doesn't work that way You know, you can't claim that the judiciary is somehow sick sacrosanct we've all got to like take a knee before it because the law is a sacred thing well acknowledging that legal positivism is basically an empirical and pragmatic enterprise and That's one of the that's one of the contradictions. I think that is gonna prove fatal to this increasingly decrepit theological consensus this reign since 1933 I mean I see it's happening over the place because like that just It doesn't have a leg to stand on in terms of precedent and it's when you're talking about a body of law and the theoretical foundations of it you can't rely on a toxicology You know for reasons that Some of which are obvious and some maybe not so obvious, but you know, this isn't This isn't a superficial thing It It's got a new laptop. It's gonna have figuring out. I'm sorry. Let me try to open this fucking window. There we go Yeah, the law the law of war and peace grudges was most active and The early 17th century is born in 1583 and Yeah, his the law of war and peace Was is a most significant work and again this proceeded This proceeded hobs his body of work by about 20 years That'd be clear to a grudges he wasn't interested in Establishing a paradigm of or producing a central treaties It's simply on positive law It's not limited exclusively to law of nations or what we consider international law in some rudimentary sense but That is its central focus and the law of nations In grudges opinion it derives from practical reason and It comes into existence by way of consensus of the body politic within You know the several states that constitute You know political structure Between governments. So there's an interconnectivity here that You know has to be abided so you can't talk about positive law in discrete terms You know that are it categorically isolated from the systemic whole The way to understand it is kind of like a statement of what the Romans have been considered the public law, you know, they just public them You know from The perspective of a science if you will okay, but again Grown is conspicuously distinguished as enterprise from that of Aristotle You said this there isn't a science of politics. There's a science of a law wherein you know order can be imposed on political impulses which are often pre rational and Although predictable and cyclical and you know Arguably Conducted limb parameters of boundary rationality You know particularly a zenith of the expression of these impulses which is you know the state of war That that doesn't mean that there's some underlying science to political behavior or You know the manner in which nations conduct each other in their efforts to survive and perpetuate their existence and capture power from their rivals, but The law however can be understood through You know the lens of Of a systemic science, you know that framework at least Grotes is the first thinker as far as I know in the Western canon Who held himself out held out his body of work is juristic purely juristic because opposed to a philosophical or theological treatment of politics and The law of war on peace had kicked off this entire Body of work in Western Europe that dealt with treaties is on the public law the laws of nations and This this tendency kicked off, you know again in the 16th century and really continued until You know the end of the 18th century and That's really interesting. There's a significance there and it's not it's not just the fact of You know the century leading up to the to the 30 years of war was very anarchic But there's some that there's like an apoccal significance in terms of The development of of Europe's intellectual heritage that You know, it is the reason for this. I'm convinced you know, it's something that would require a way a way more thorough investigation, but the central premise of The law of war and peace and grudious his entire body of work Is the idea that man is by nature a rational and social animal, okay? That doesn't mean that everything man does is is derive some rationality and again he acknowledges that politics often is derivative of of pre rational impulses but Man is capable of a reason and that's what distinguishes him from beasts of the field and Ultimately, man is most expedient in looking after what's going to guarantee his own self-preservation. And this is a point too that is echoed very much in Hobbes. Almost certainly Hobbes read a lot of grotesque, you know, different as they were in terms of their suppositions on political ontology. But, you know, it's a rodeous conspicuously too. He attacked the classical idea of conventionalism and classical natural rights. It's distinguished from Thomas to natural rights, you know, which is basically a Aristotelian model. Which, as we got into an earlier episode, it's suggest not just that it's a despotative component of the essential natures of different kinds of men, like what their station is. And what the potentialities are, what the potentialities are of their soul, you know, and this idea that convention, you know, justifies itself by its tendency to be perpetuated. You know, this is suggestive of, you know, institutions being the product of a pre-ordained structure and things. Grotes rejects that and interesting, we, he attacks it in part in the form of a dialogue. And one of the recurring characters in his dialogue was Carnietus. Carnietus was, he was the head of the Athenian Academy during what was called the skeptical period around the 150's BC. And Grotes has, Carnietus, argue and plead the cases of foreign against, like various tendencies that Grotes either wants to explicate or contrast with his conceptual paradigm or that he wants to attack outright and attempt to impeach. Basically, what you can derive from these dialogues is Grotes is saying, what all of us is, is these are, these are rules that man is imposed upon himself collectively, you know, in, in Congress with the social organism of which he's a part. For a reason that expediency and self protection, you know, and yeah, from place to place and culture to culture and race to race, you know, laws are very, but there are certain commonalities that derive from that core rational impulse. And the law is the product of that capacity to reason, but that doesn't mean that there is some law of nature strictly speaking. You know, all men are impelled in Grotes' view by natural desires towards ends that are ultimately advantageous to themselves and are largely exclusivist. Yes, man is a social organism and unless a man are truly possessed of pure avarice, they're not going to go out of their way as individuals to harm their fellows for just, you know, for, for its own sake. But the other day in Grotes is pertinent, these, these consensus don't emerge that impose law upon the body politic or the social organism, you know, based upon some immutable natural law that can be identified and divinated by, I just want to like learn cast a jurist or by, you know, resort to pious reflection on, you know, the conscience of the inner witness or by, you know, the study of scientific principles that, you know, seem to suggest a harmonious order to the universe, you know, be it physical properties or the metaphysical permutations of, you know, value judgments and things, you know, consequently there is no form, there is no justice that is natural to man, other than, you know, remedies for social evils that derive from this capacity for higher reason, you know, and mangebility to calculate those remedies. And Congress with others, you know, as part of a social organism, you know, suggests that man is capable of higher purposes in his designs and plans. But again, you know, we're back to this impulse towards self preservation and self protection and the practical business of governance in lieu of energy and reversing its savagery. We're not talking about identifying, you know, the sun godly or metaphysically present or epistimically prior, you know, body of knowledge or something that that just adheres to some perfect concept of justice or something, you know, and like I said, and what really jumps out of me is sitting grotesque and the manuscript I'm writing right now, grotesque teachers rather large. And I got turned on to grotesque before I went to law school, not anybody cares, this for context, I started reading it when I was under red because I realized this. And I bumped up again and again against this kind of peculiar sort of bastardized claim that cloked itself in the language of positive law, it was returning to natural law arguments, but again, not ones that were familiar and precedented. And that's kind of like what is this and I realize well, it's an effort by, you know, liberals and progressives and people with kind of utopian ideas that were common to the new deal era, and especially the post war years that draw upon legalism. And an attempt to suggest a layer heritage between themselves and, you know, the progenitors of of kind of modern legal theory, which axiomatically leads to some, you know, and any such person trying to lay claim to grotesque or lay claim to the man was as air. But yeah, so what would jump out to me first and foremost was, you know, this is all of rental homes and actually hard and that's, you know, where they, that's probably great legal positive is, or real real is, would, you know, that would be their starting point. So that that's important. And this thing lead to, Grotesque, he, he, Andrew and Pete stoicism as well as Epicurianism in a lot of his dialogues where carnietis is like a main character. And that that's not exit down, well, carnietis was very heterodox and he wasn't enemy of the stoics and intellectual terms, which was unusual, at least in the way he went about it, like to be clear, like the stoics technically fell in the skeptic camp, you know, even though they, they had some concept that like a monadic unity to reality. And presumably contained at least an aspect of, you know, a, a will of the gods or a prime, a metaphysical prime move on, you know, and obviously that that's at odds with a pure skepticism of the kind that it took and rooted the academy, but it's, it's so outside the scope. [BLANK_AUDIO] complexity the argument I mean but um it's not it's not an accident that uh that grotesse of suggested this setting and and the characters that he did for these thought experiments that that's important for context is what I mean but uh the uh but he also but he also took a lot from the stoics and I think that that's why grotesse another secondary reason why he went on his way to make much of the aspects of their ethical posture and and they're and they're on ontological claims that he disagreed with um it uh what grotes did except again men are in their natural state impelled really merely merely preserve their own being their own physical essence um this is distinguished from wanting to seek pleasure and avoid pain you know you can train an animal to seek pleasure and avoid pain grotesse isn't saying that man is basically a highly capable animal who's at first of one kind of stimulus and favors another is now what he's saying he's saying that from jump or from this you know beginning point man's cable is conceptualizing what is going to preserve himself and he's also capable of contemplating a posterity beyond himself whether it's his nation or his tribe or his direct lineage you know it's not it's not self preservation and the basis most primitive sense i mean i was that's a component of it but again this is derivative of man's nature as you know the exclusive uh beneficiary of of of higher you know the capacity to reason and in a way that you know set some apart from all the life forms um and that's why he denies that this is the defining quality of man you know this might be the behavioral paradigm that gives rise to all theoretical structures that come to constitute you know the political and the juristic framework that makes the political possible but you know these things derive from the capacity to reason and that is what is the definitive quality of man so simply stated to grotesse that kind of core original desire to preserve on his natural physical constitution and guarantee one's posterity that's essentially a hard wire to instinctive or subconscious drive in man to realize it's full nature and to grow and develop and continue to develop as a rational being capable of higher reason so the rational faculty is the essential quality of man and you know that that can be said to be the most excellent and the highest of all the of all the original or natural desires or instincts or tendencies of the man if another reason that it makes it makes all other human activity possible you know and it's this rational faculty which precedes justice as virtuous because justice makes it possible to live in society and living in society is the only way that this rational faculty and man's excellent and a higher nature can truly flourish you know so Brodieus is saying that the the the classical view as well as the Thomas view is backwards you know in the way it describes you know the the ontology of these things as well as the as well as the metaphysics of virtue you know and this is a very novel argument you know and people should take notice there's there's nothing in this that suggests some like equilitarian or you know remedial social justice in terms of equalizing tendencies there there's nothing like that in here because Brodieus never made those claims you know so this idea that as some early and you know not so really progressives claim that well you know Brodieus describing the essential nature of man like investing in in the human being like qua the human being rather than suggesting that invest in that human being station or that you know his function you know be it a landlord or a father or a patriarch or a slave or a king you know the idea of that essence the essential nature of investing in the human being and dependent upon function see that that that's that's the first suggestion of a progressive view of the human being and you know the dignity of the human being that's nonsense nothing like that is being suggested and again anybody who claims that what they're doing is they're they're making a positive as argument well injecting these these kinds of undefinable in concrete terms you know metaphysical characteristics into the human being and suggesting that the the the the substance of justice has to be the realization of the dignity of every human being which seems almost always entailed some kind of wishful filaments that you know doesn't really have to do with you know capital S society or with improving upon the human beings moral character you know nor of uh perfecting the rationality of of the human being which you think that somebody would consider paramount if they're a true humanist but that I I'm not trying to rant about attention to subject but this is important because you'll find all kinds of treatments agrogenous that from the especially in the last 50 years that are kind of through the lens of people like either John Rawls or they're these kinds of bastardized them progressive as Screeds and that are always trying to claim you know modern political theorists as as their own but um to bring it back um grotesque description and his impeachment of the concept of natural or natural right as conventionally understood that's the key to understanding since his conceptual paradigm it's interrelation to this conception of man as a rational and social animal that uh any any any notion of right and any concept of political society or the understood um right and it's primary meaning the grotesque is is that which is just you know and that which is just is that what facilitates you know society and the man finding society within a political organism. You know, so again, what's right is what is just what is just is what derives from practical reason and What derives some practical reason is the highest good because it's the most excellent human characteristic And it's the most excellent human characteristic because it allows man to fully flourish and realize his exceptional potential reality as an organism and What is unjust thus is anything that is in conflict with the nature of society between human beings or endowed with the aforementioned higher reason um And interestingly grotesque Cicero and Senna to shore up This statement. I believe that's him invulking a I'm a kind of loose model of praxis or something at least suggestive of that West People dismiss these things that's just axioms and posh it's about you know What can be identified as the good in? in kind of axiomatic terms Obviously to the great Roman Staseman You know the the natural attraction of men to society and their ability to act and conformity with that instinctive attraction would be Something very worthy of praise and discussion. I'm not enough of a Roman historian. I'm not like a class was I know something about Doric Athens but I don't I'm not qualified enough to speak on why he chose a Cicero and Senna. I've got this Caesar probably been Why invoke but again, I I'm not I'm not living in the subject matter in a way that can sustain she the posh it's um You know so practically speaking A crime Is an act of injustice Because it's destructive of trust in generally within the social organism You know like for example you steal from somebody you see if you see if you steal what belongs to others It's not just you're not just harming that person and violating that person's trust in their fellow man You're undermining the basis of All trust and therefore of society and You're acting against The natural order to which man belongs You know Which in addition to being a pragmatic Affair the structuring of This social organism in society it also reflects man's capability towards The flourishing of his excellence so really All injustice is merely injustice There's not some that's acceptable and some that's not You know basically any unjust act is Is as bad as any other You know and this is This is what kind of a limates the distinction between you know a kind of civic morality and You know a true morality if you will a Lot of positive law theorists subsequently made that distinction Very enthusiastically and anyone who reads grotesque realizes that there is no such distinction In fact the core tenet is that that's an artificial paradigm You know or it's it's just an incorrect way of understanding What's under discussion? um How we do it okay. I was just checking on our time You know and Similarly You know the law of nature is such that it exists again not natural law with the law of nature the The conditions that attached to things that From which you know the social organism derives in terms of its structure and You know the behavioral modes Incoming upon Parties to it and things like that The law nature permits a person to kill somebody escaping with stolen property You know if for example it's not possible to otherwise recover that stolen property You know, but the reason why that's acceptable is because again It's not that you know property is so very important And it's not because You know any any any any individual man Is permitted to the satiate some some sort of Instinct towards vengeance if somebody steals from them. It's because again To commit a crime is to commit uh is a due violence to the entire concept of trust and the threatened The totality of the enterprise so Any misgreant So disposed Needs to be eliminated with extreme prejudice Because it's not a matter of precisely because it's not a matter of individual rights you know um It's a matter of collective defense and Without the social organism and the laws that both derive from and facilitate it No man's property no man's life No man's family is safe and can be secure And that's the nature of justice In Grotesis paradigm And that's interestingly There's a selective invocation of that reasoning Is somewhat perverse Capacity that's traditionally invoked by amnesia the death penalty That's an issue that's kind of falling off. I was thinking about this if we're going to tangent but there's Uh de Santis uh fort is executing a huge amount of people lately. I think they've already executed seven people this year And there's two more guys There's two more condemned uh The tainees and the san is just signed their death warrant literally one of them You know, it's a particularly horrible and bizarre case this uh This this guy committed this brazen rape on a homicide of this poor lady and a fairly public place And um You know it uh it is definitely kind of a textbook case of uh What's the euphemistically called special circumstances which digi're are aggravating circumstances That permit the imposition of of the of capital liability But any event what jumped out at me is This was in the national news cycle. I think probably more because people are I've kind of like a passing interest in to santis and the facts this case are so horrible and lurid but You know really until I mean you're a little more than me remember this too There used to be this really impassioned Discussion and and opposition to the death penalty and it's really kind of gone away You know, I don't It's just not something people really engage with anymore, but traditionally There's this kind of egalitarian or not a um Yeah, there's there's the egalitarian argument which is what's arbitrary and capricious who gets executed but then there's uh they they didn't vote uh This kind of pragmatic argument that well If if if if a capital If camel punishment doesn't add it, we'll see. what we, functioning as a deterrent, then it can't be justified. And that's really not precedent in terms of why men are put to death. You're put to death because that's the punishment because like scripture tells us, you know, the blood of the victims cry out the heaven for vengeance. And like Demonstra said, you know, the essence of sovereignty is the power of life and death. So if the sovereign is gonna say, I'm gonna let some miscreant the murder of people with impunity and I'm gonna hamstring myself and deny myself the same power, then what's purporting to me the sovereign isn't actually sovereign. If some sort of gilded, you know, imposter. But such that there is precedent, I mean granted the argument that it is outlined that was often invoked by a ponetogable punishment, that it's a bastardized version of the argument, but it is whether they realize they're not derriere of this kind of early positive law paradigm as to what the nature is of justice and things of that nature, which is interesting. But again, I realize younger people probably aren't gonna be familiar with the fact that there was this tremendous debate over death penalty issues and the kind of resolution of that and gun rights. I know there's a lot of bluster and a lot of cap about from the regime and these functionaries saying they want to ban guns, but that's not gonna happen. I got mixed feelings of the Supreme Court enforcing the Second Amendment against the states, but regardless of those concerns, just the fact that it has been incorporated against the states means that it's essentially a settled issue. Like private ownership of firearm just never gonna be categorically banned and the death penalty is never gonna go away nationally. You know, the states that have it, it's gonna continue in earnest and it's just kind of off the table and that's fascinating because it represents a sea change. So, you know, this is the key kind of takeaway and the reason why I keep invulking these examples of how this paradigm, the grotesque developed deference from contemporary perspectives is because it's completely at odds with the idea of human rights as we would think of it. Or the idea of subjective rights that held by the person simply as a human being and not embodying objective qualities again, such as that of a master, a slave, a ruler, or a father, or head of a household, or a landowner. There is some sort of connection between grodius' body of theory and the kind of fully realized contemporary idea of absolute subjective rights. But that's not unlike, you know, there's a connection between murks and haggle, you know, that doesn't mean that haggleianism is truly, you know, the ethical forebearer of merpsism or something. You know, and if you accept the, you know, anxiety that the dialectical process is kind of like the prime agents and the development of political and sociological structures, you know, there's gonna be cross-pollination between monumental ideas, obviously. That doesn't suggest some sort of unimpeded lineage or like some unsullied heritage between, you know, what came before in the present. It just means that nothing occurs in isolation and particularly not, you know, matters of political significance that impact the psychological environment in just positive ways and, you know, inform, and impact these structures in the real world. I mean, that should be obvious, but I, I anticipate some pushback on this. So I'm kind of trying to, or maybe not, but I'm trying to preclude some of that. And I mean, and that's totally legitimate. I mean, I'm not saying people shouldn't call me out on some of these things. It's a complicated subject matter. But it's important to clarify and not just because I'm interested in depriving the regime of credibility in terms of the intellectual precedent that it claims to be the heirs to. But I think that's important too, or appropriate, obviously. But that's not the kind of linear of you of historical processes as insidious for the similar, for similar reasons. You know, it kind of cuts off not just critical analysis, but constructive structuring and conceptual terms of what came before. And that really precludes a meaningful diagnosis of the state of things, particularly again, and dialectical and psychological terms. And these things are paramount if you're a political theorist, or if you're a a layman who dedicated himself to this subject matter, like I am. (silence) There's also, and the system has developed, at least in Grodius' main body of work. The kind of final iteration of right, as a naturally occurring phenomenon, derived from these structures that are the product demands higher rationality and the social organism that encompasses and is the product of that capability, the kind of the kind of unexamined aspect of that is that which obliges the men to act correctly. Not just to refrain from doing things that violate the public trust. And the conferences in the essential aspects of the social organism and political society. But there's a a natural sanction that must attend people who refrain from correct action. And people who deliberately shirk their obligations. they're in and that kind of volitional understanding of right and that kind of affirmative obligation towards action of a certain type. You know within the penumbra justice we're probably talking about you know what citizenship is but it's not what's distinguishable from an active citizenship because it's explicitly more you know um and that warrants a kind of deeper dive. I've got my own thoughts on that but I've got to I'd have to delve deeper into some of grotesque more esoteric stuff and particularly the dialogues that he wrote. You know with this is another aspect that you know kind of removes um this entire theoretical model from the merely pragmatic utilitarian you know um you don't impose affirmative duties for the sake of mere pragmatism you know in the purely in the purely utilitarian model of what constitutes the the duties of and coming upon individuals in the social organism. It basically stops at non-interference you know and I think uh there's more of uh there's at least an Aristotelian echo in grotesque much as he sought to distinguish himself from political theorists. I think that that owes more to just that I I think you wanted to make it clear that he wasn't suggesting some overall theory of politics he was suggesting a science of the law which had anthropological and psychological aspects that were explanatory of the human condition within this narrow domain of human activity you know that domain being you know within political society. I I don't read um into that some sort of blanket repudiation of you know Aristotelian political ontology but again um I uh I'd have to dive deeper into the subject matter that's uh that's not only got engrodious for today I hope that was worthwhile it's a very complicated subject matter. I mean that's not said this you know I the the subs can follow this stuff as as well as I can. I wasn't suggesting anything like that but it can be difficult to make it interesting but it's important it's the essential foundation of some of what we're going to get into. I was contemplating I want to cover Calvin and Martin Luther because I think that that's important but to be fair that means I should also cover a coinus and I've got to bone up on that because I'm not Roman Catholic and when I was at Loyola I had to read a coinus and everyone should read a coinus anyway but um in the interest of kind of like equal time and it probably seems like I should have uh arguably like after the asceticities I should have we should have gotten into a coinus in the schylastics but to be fair you know I'm a political theorist at base and I wanted to emphasize the trajectory of political theory within the continental tradition and um you know um if it seems like I'm jumping around to go back to a coinus and schylasticism as we're reading about reformation thinkers I wanted to include they're in I mean theology is always in dialogue with theology there's something about it that is kind of outside of temporal politics I mean it's not to say that the theological considerations aren't impacted by political and cultural variables that are temporally sensitive obviously it continues rather obviously they are but I think it makes sense to deal with the the the directly theological aspects you know kind of in succession so I gotta think about this for a minute but yeah I if not next session the following one I'm going to get into um the Calvin and um and Martin Luther if that sounds agreeable man it's your show study both of them at length look yeah yeah that's great yeah all right man I hope this was um worthwhile to the subs well it all it seems to me when you look at Grudius considering he's talking about natural law the fact that he's also a humanist there's tension there so it's going to be it seems like it's going it's going to be complicated yeah and the law is always when you're talking about the law like unless you're literally talking about you know and unless you're talking about you know I need to most kind of basic and primitive you know like a penal code that just like sanctions like obvious you know violations of the person's property or their bodily integrity you're talking about a you're talking about like conceptual models that are like abstractions built on abstractions and you know one of the reasons uh I like all of rental homes you know I keep it at the point that the law is always politicized you know and and people who can't accept that they're they're going to resort to this kind of increasingly torture to reasoning that that's trying to suggest that you know well you know the the the laws that sort of like learned in science of ethics you know I mean that that that's spinning things off and all kinds of sophistry and technological you know nonsense but it's um yeah it uh what also too I mean it there's just uh there was uh it's kind of remarkable to like this the uh like the the 15 16 and 17 centuries you had there's like the politics of Europe were incredibly complicated you know and you still had uh you know like sectarian matters we're we're still having a huge impact on I I'm warned piece question of mental data affairs you know the scientific revolution was going full steam you know the modern state was arriving within you know imposing genuine future shock on populations you know the first industrial revolution was kicking off you know and uh so you had really really great minds writing on matters of politics and um you know it's um yeah it's really fascinating and contemplating but yeah we'll uh we'll continue the series in earnest and yeah I I was like I said I'm I'm still I'm not I'm feeling good but I I'm still struggling with fatigue a little bit so like forgive me if I see a little energy though I hope I didn't convey that I'm no worries do uh quick plugs we'll get out of here yeah I uh I'm trying to increase the volume and frequency of my content on sub-stack yeah I'm doing a lot of collabs and just collab with Joel Davis I'm doing the world at war collab with you know my dear friends Adam and Nick at the myth of 20th century podcast I just dropped another episode of radio free Chicago was my collab with James burden. You know you can find all that stuff plus like the Mindfaser pod on my subs deck. It's real time is 7777 that's subs deck.com. As I think I mentioned before I'm kind of restructuring my content but my subs deck is your one-stop shop right now. You know my mind Instagram on telegram on YouTube. I'm a lot of places but my long form stuff my podcast content you can find my subs deck. I'm gonna be seeing me the one platform that doesn't censor me. Despite the fact I never byly TOS anywhere but that's that's where you should go for now and just search around like on Spotify you'll find my stuff on YouTube you'll find my stuff and like I said I'm I'm trying to structure things to make it easier to find all of my shit so moving forward this summer we'll get that done. All right thank you talking a couple days. Yeah man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanana show or back with Thomas for another episode on continental philosophy Thomas take us away please. Yeah thanks for hosting me and I'm sorry for the high heat it sounds really sick because I think I shouted out on my T-Ramp. I we're gonna deal with Hagle today and this is gonna be a two or three-part treatment. Everybody else I'm jumping around a bit but it's important to contextualize continental philosophy I mean it's actually essential in a way it's not for some other subject areas that are less kind of a numbering their in their significance and subsequent to this Hagle treatment I want to do a single episode or two on theology I want to deal with Aquinas and Martin Luther and Talvin you know because I think it's essential to address Aquinas within that same discussion and if that seems like a conceptual bias because of my own you know a confessional heritage please let me know that like any of the subs I mean and I'll tweak how I break it down but I I thought about this because I certainly don't want anyone to feel offended or slighted and I think that's the sensible way to proceed and Aquinas really would broaden Aristotelianism to the West I mean obviously learn it men and especially church men you know obviously they were very they weren't just competent in ancient languages they were amongst the stewards of the classical intellectual canon it sounds like this was unknown but this is what really sort of brought Aristotelian thought paradigms into what we think of as European philosophy but Hagle when I'm talking about political theory we're talking about Hagle just in absolute terms and even if you're talking about Anglo-Saxon political philosophy as this thing was from the continental tradition it's still in dialogue with Hagle and that's key Hagle in my other than Hobbes Hagle is really the only purely political theorist like that's not to say that there's not a complex metaphysical understanding within Hagle there absolutely is it's not to say that he doesn't have a general theory in knowledge obviously he does because anybody who posits a theory of mind is is dealing fundamentally with you know a metaphysical tradition that you know originates with with classical Athens but his his subject matter is to explicate man's experience as a historical agent and Hagle's discussion of political ontology it's it's fundamentally existential it's bound up with what man is and it's bound up with mind in a way that's an trickable and that's something that people misunderstand Hagle wasn't he wasn't some he didn't have some idolatrous view of the state he didn't view the state that some marble is a godly thing or and he didn't view the modern state as it existed you know really from the 15th century on where he didn't view it as some perennial thing his point was that the way that the state is structured that's essential to understanding human praxis and it really is an externalization of processes of mind you know and there's an internal logic to statecraft that really can be understood in Hagle in terms as a providential move on that's what the source of it is and to know that the process is to understand reason-quar reason and you know man being created in the image of God is the only organism capable of reason you know in higher rationality and to perceive the historical process of which the state is but one aspect is to perceive the mind of God and to participate in statecraft is for man to reconcile this kind of inner psychological existence with the pragmatic reality of you know his own mortality and his desire to create enduring structures and to bring formal and symbolic things that he holds to be sacrosanct as well as practical things that are prosaic and related to mere survival is taken as the process which these things are brought into corporeal reality so that's what I think of it he's not saying the state is wonderful or the state is something that we should review at all like what he's saying is that politics and political life of which the state is the subject matter you know is the instantation of man's inner psychological experience which partakes of you know the divine spark in man whereby you know he is the literal progeny of God okay so that's key and he also wasn't saying again when he talks about the state he's not he's not falling into this trap that a lot of neo-realists do and a lot of political science types in the 20th and 20th century are who are fixated on this kind of empirical modeling but he's not saying that the state as we know it in his epoch or even a thousand years prior a thousand years subsequent he's not saying that the peculiar configuration of any even era of the state is somehow essential there will always be some kind of state even if it's a minimal state in the way you know people like Murray Rothbard thought about it you know and even somebody like myself you know I very much a band artist in my disposition and part of the reason why I'm committed to this current law and form manuscript I'm working on is because I'm constantly trying to you know assist in understanding that the Westphalian state is dead and what's going to succeed it is what's important then it's not going to it's not really going to resemble the 20th century state managerial state nor is it going to resemble some sort of scaled down version of that same conceptual paradigm and enterprise you know but that doesn't matter even if we're talking about you know a structure of of kind of where by remedial justice is promised on self-help and we're private actors are primarily responsible for what you're to for and the modern era has been the exclusive domain of of public authority we're still talking about state craft we're still talking about a kind of state a state is literally that like a present sense experience of deliberate political authority derived from you know an ongoing historical process that we can interpret through our faculty for for for both practical and higher reason you know that's what he's talking about like state has been kind of a dirty word especially in rhetorical capacities where people think that we're exhumatedly talking about, you know, some kind of bloated bureaucratic, you know, 20th century type state that is, that simply is endured in the 20th century, you know, and doing a basic and flexibility of the current system, you know, and that's something that people need to remedy, you know. But, so there's a, you know, hey, and finally before I get into like the meat of this, you know, again, like any, whether people think they are or not, people find themselves well done the right-of-the-left making, they get away in our humans, even if they don't realize it, you know. And that's essential too, I think, because most people haven't read a halo, because it's, I mean to me, it only is particularly art-of-the-wears, but if it's not your subject area, your research concentration, you know, it can, it can seem daunting to take, to take on a study of halo, but, halo's thought is singularly and remarkably systemic, and they can't be overstated. It's most impactful and significant works, I think, and arguably, are elements of the philosophy of right. I'm going to butcher this pronunciation, but the original title, the German title, is, "Gruining the philosophy, this is right." "Elements the philosophy of right." It's a tomey of almost pure theory. And I'd say complimentary to elements of the philosophy of right, where it's essays on then contemporaneous government and process as a government, that, you know, he viewed as anextricably related to this durable process. He wrote a series of essays on the German Constitution when he was young, that I can say are essential reading, and then decades later, he wrote this very detailed treatment of the British reform bill, which changed everything. There was a number of reform bills in the UK. I'm talking about the 1830 reform bill, that, you know, it's expanded the voting franchise to basically every male citizen of majority who wasn't in a workhouse or a jail. But this was both of these, despite being discreet and temporally situated, in peculiar in particular ways, both of these kind of bodies of essays, you know, they were singular and thorough examples of Higaylian praxis. But again, conceptual modeling and praxis within the Higaylian paradigm, that's something with distinction without categorical difference. What I mean by that is Higayl's philosophy of right. He's not talking about right in the way that humanists talk about it, or the way that, you know, somebody like John Locke talked about it. He's basically talking about, you know, natural law and like a quasi-tomest sense. But Higayl's philosophy of right, and thus his philosophy of state craft, it's really inseparable from his philosophical teaching and doctrine as a whole. And again, this is far more systemic and integrated than most other thinkers. You know, when this is clear, really from the moment, that somebody takes on a study of Higaylian thought, there's echoes of this and his stuff on the hard sciences, as well as metaphysics in the science of logic and the encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences. Higayl talks about a universal history that is the product of eternal reason. And the cutting of reason and the revelation of this process, you know, whereby man can apprehend it. And, you know, through his capacity for higher reason, you know, the dialectical process, then becomes this ongoing, total logical developmental paradigm. You know, so in the final analysis, reason, quiet reason, and history in the struggle process, these are not separable. The unfolding of reason, the revelation of the mind of God, you know, it parallels this struggle process because there's synonymous. You know, and in that way, the struggle process is fundamentally rational. You know, and that's why misguided as, again, a lot of these contemporary political sciences may be in their methodology, that I'm not making an argument, like some of the Vinesesians do, and that, you know, modeling is a fool's errand and impossible. Like, it absolutely is possible. It's just that the criteria and the inputs that are being employed aren't the correct ones. That's somewhat tangential, but that's important to understand. Essential to Hagelian thought is the concept of siddling-skites, literally ethical life or ethical order, the concept of siddling-skites, that rugged soul is the apparent polarity and irreconcilability between metaphysics and historiography and engaged praxis within political life. As Hable described it, it represents, quote, "the life of the states within individuals," or probably more properly within individual minds. Okay. It attitudes a moral, a theological, a self-consciously intellectual nature. You know, the common critique is that, well, political philosophy is a domain of academics and for allards, and part of the history of the West. You know, with the domain of menacically cloistered, you know, churchmen. You know, and according to a lot of enlightenment theorists, this is incorrect because it's not pragmatic, and it's somehow divorced from the reality of statecraft. Hable suggested that it's absolutely incorrect. Okay. This contemplative orientation, it doesn't at all reject the proverbial sound and fury of political reality, or in peace, or the struggle of the classes or anything else, like whatever your chosen emphasis of subject matter. You know, conceptual, political life and the praxis of the political arsononymous and Hagee-Wien thought, it is through the state. And again, we're not talking about the state as if it's some object of reverence or anything, and of itself. This is value-neutral. Okay. But it is through the state, whatever configuration the state takes, and then he given a buck, that the individual man, you know, gains a true reality, as his conceptual existence, comes to full flourishing, and he partakes of that universal history and the cunning of a reason, which is the mind of God at work in man's affairs. And through this process, this is how the state comes to devise laws and the sovereign actor being the only agent that can implement universally binding strictures through instituting the laws. You know, man in his psychological cloister of inter-life, such that he experiences it, participates in this universal historical process. You know, even if he's only so situated as an observer who can perceive what is underway. And finally, a state that's at all legitimate, and this is key, and I'm always making the point that he goes exy-ematically, a right-wing thinker and will get deeper into what I mean by the act as we go on. But at the end of the day, the only state that is legitimate, the only state that protects of this aforementioned process and thus reflects, you know, higher rationality and practical reason is based on morality, because morality itself is derivative from reason, and morality, seeking universality, and the flourishing through universality, and absolute application. This can only be realized and actualized by being incarnated in institutions and manners. Manors and morals are one way to understand Ziplich's title, Ziplich's title, Ziplich's title. In other words, the life of the state is really the life of the culture, the constitute of individuals, and their devotion to a discreet way of life bound up with manners and morals, which themselves derive from a historical mode of existence. And it's through, this is the topology too of racial and cultural posterity. You know, the state derives from this psychological existence of man with, and it gives him a training and an education and habituates him to the manners and morals of his culture or his race. And these things, you know, this is an educational mechanism and a mechanism and it means of imbueing people with cultural competence, but these institutions themselves derive from the psychological interlives of people who are the constituent elements of that culture. So it's a topology but not in punitive terms. It's kind of a feedback loop. And this is where the devotion to a state or a political order derives from. And this is one of the, this is at base why secular regimes fail because they're not premised on anything that's truly human. You know, nobody's going to devote their lives. You know, nobody's going to invest this kind of higher moral value and some sort of abstract theory of, you know, distributive justice. You know, this should be obvious, I think, but I think many people don't fully understand the kind of constituent elements of that perspective, you know, in order to develop a full conceptual picture. So there's, so the angle there's an ontological and existential significance to political order, you know, and the state. It's not merely a pragmatic derivation, you know, but again, it's not to say the state is some ending itself, you know, by virtue of its mere existence, you know, merely perfunctory or profound. The, it is true, you know, and again, like any, any, any praxis, you know, derives from an ontological imperative and thus the state can be said to constitute a kind of final end for the individual in order to find truth within his own existence, you know, and the revelation of things like duty and dissatisfaction and actualization or appearance or at least the suggestion of the divine in the external world. But again, this is a, this is a reciprocal relationship, you know, essentially reciprocal, even total logical again. You know, it's only a final end to the extent which the political order derives from practical reason and higher rationality, which is essentially human and exclusively human, but also only can come to fruition in conditions where human minds can perceive the process that is underway, you know, and thus participate in the dialectical, you know, the phenomenon of higher dialectics. Okay. You know, so there's not a, there's not a trend to the moral content to the state other than what, you know, human and discreetly and cultural and conventional practices and morals, you know, bring to it in this kind of a reciprocal cycle of development, you know. And as the individual goes beyond the level of his private, discreetly personal thoughts and passions and wishes, you know, this, this process of the flourishing of higher reason through the political order and statecraft is what he will cause the subjective mind. I've heard people refer to it as the collective subconscious as if there's something a young in implication, that's not the way to think of it. It's a, it's far more kind of brass tax and categorically essential than that. But through the dialectical process and through the state and its development, the individual man becomes habituated to universalizing his wishes in terms of, you know, his political existence and his life is as a historical, as a historically situated actor, you know, because again, the state being the exclusive sovereign agents with the power, actual potential to implement universally binding laws, you know, that's the only, that that is all, that's the only thing that can be the subject matter of this process, you know, as a prepraxis, you know, the state is a reality, not projects and this is key as well. not some modality of social engineering. it has to do, it derives from the way man leaves his life and thinks his thoughts. It's the means by which the individual man is an identityarian and communitarian terms and in historical terms and thus political terms. This is the means by which he takes his place in the world. He comes to identify what is reasonable within his moral and political and thus historical consciousness from what is pre-rational and merely derived from the passions. Now the mere appearance again in realization of the divine of a providential phenomenon of the mind of God that does not say that God's will was some ultimately constituted or exhausted or fulfilled by the state or the existence of the state. Again, this is a misunderstanding and that that that be a form of high idolatry and it's also a basic misunderstanding of the haggles' political ontology. The state is not an ending itself. It's a process of man's capacity to reason and God's will in the affairs of a man. The realization of the inner psychological life in terms of praxis and tangible and concrete and corporeal things. That's why it's essential to understand that haggle was not some romantic nationalist or any kind of nationalist because the state is essentially an in-state craft. It is essentially rational and to turn away from practical reason in favor of some romantic ambition or to pursue some utopian social engineering project in contrast. There's a lot of reformers and capital-eleverals are prone to or to turn away from the state and political order as it actually is, ungrounded somehow immoral or incorrect. This is to deny reality. And it's it's it's down to saying that you don't believe in gravity, you know, like Wiley Coyote does. You know, Wiley Coyote claims he's ignorant of gravity so he's like you walk off a cliff and he's like walking on nothing. But then he wrote her hands and like a book on gravity and then you learn something and then he falls like that. That's that's that's that's that's kind of a good metaphor for you know the way utopian's tend to view political matters. You know, philosophy can't go beyond the reality of human affairs, you know, or beyond what is potential and potentially realizable within, you know, the domain of the political. And this actually is a significant beyond beyond this kind of narrow domain. The function of philosophy itself, it's not it's not to criticize the the the the supposed moral shortcoming of of of sociological or political paradigms or to invent, you know, perfect societies and conceptual terms. Its function is to identify and draw out the truth that informs reality as it is. You know and this is what he reviewed as a mandate. He was quite a manly like concerned with demonstrating systemically exploiting and proving that there was an underlying and essential rationality to the state and statecraft and praxis in spite of apparent and characteristic irrationality. You know, born of passion and will of a reason as is commonly alleged about the political. You know, the the entirety of the process of statecraft or presents a total logical whole which is greater than the sum of its constituent elements. And again, this this whole tennis towards the realization and fulfillment, hegal use the term triumph of reason. You know, there's this metaphor of applied to the hegelian paradigm of a of a gothic receipt, gothic cathedral where there's this enormous complexity within its architecture that nevertheless is, you know, incredibly harmonious. You know, when viewed from a distance, I think I've been at something more like, you know, like I mentioned an obelisk like in 2001, you know, like the monolith. If you see, if you're pressed up against an obelisk in the desert, you know, like you can't really make out its configuration, but at distance, you know, it becomes clear that there's like a perfect symmetry there and that it's it's, you know, a deliberately configured object. That's really the way to understand this durable process and demyze drew echo this and and and and and moral moral and aesthetic terms. This is really interesting, but that the the the historical process, you know, the political theorist needs to and the inform layman alike need these approach this as as a systemic whole. You know, you you can't take discrete instances, you know, um of what appears to be a you know, a mass flight from reason in the historical record and you know, and and out of context, you know, hold this out as a proverbial case in chief that see there's not there's not there's not any any sort of rational practice underway here. You know, it's all this sort of scatter shot and an impassioned um activity that isn't informed by, you know, precedent nor historical memory. This this the wrong way to look at it. And um the Higley or a bottle too would be well obviously it's not true because like here we are. You know, I mean that that that that that that speaks for itself. You know, you don't know and that that's why a lot of people too miss a miss can't just through a miss and a thing. Higley is a progressive like that's not what he's saying. He's not saying that you know, the historical process is just like developmental cycle to a higher morality. What he's saying is that you know, there's there's underlying um structural features that you know can only be interpreted as derivative of reason, you know, and I think that's an arguable. Um if another reason then that we would exist in a state of complete stasis or I'm asking we would have gone extinct, you know, um because people would have starved death and we were being able to you know, develop remedies based upon you know, the knowledge arrived from precedent and things. But um, the uh, this does create something of a paradox because it does suggest that history is the result of unconscious forces. You know, well at the same time, positing that conscious processes of the rational mind, creating the model of God, you know, is um, what corresponds to this historical process. You know, so the orient against this perspective is that um, the state is both a final result allegedly and a precondition. But again, that's, that's, that's true. That's the way to understand it. You know, it is the result of individual action and thought and inter-psychological experiences. The interplay of the passions does play a huge role in these outcomes, but the empirical fact of statecraft, as you know, understood from, on the conventional timeline, I guess you know, 5,000 BC, like a TIGER-C-FREEDYS civilization until the present, you know, um, the origin of political order and the cutting of reason or a basic rational core, even if you reject the providential move on as the key variable, you know, I think those objections tend to evaporate. Um, it's uh, what kind of time we got? And this too, this is one reason it's so misguided when people interpret, uh, when people interpret or assign some, so some kind of moral weight to history or speak of war and peace as, as a process that needs to be remedied or arbitrarily declare that slave-holing societies were just evil. You know, the state, like any dialectical, like the product of any dialectical process is born of conflict, obviously. And the state itself, again, the state, meaning the configuration of political order, is literally the setting of the theater, if you will, a myriad potential conflicts. You know, and this is um, this is where Carl Schmidt, part of Hegel in very explicit terms, you know, when Schmidt talks about the doctrine of exceptionalism, like the state of exception, which is essential to understanding the Schmitty and concept of sovereign authority. You know, he emphasizes above all else that the invocation of the state of exception cannot be legitimately involved to preserve an obsolescent constitutional regime. You know, categorically and axiomatically, you know, state craft and the praxis of political order is a process of creative destruction. You know, and this is the state reflects the mind and soul and the man himself. Man doesn't do what he does to exist in isolation and remove himself from history. One's existence as a historical actor is basically like a fight to the death for recognition, for some kind of posterity, you know, because his mortal life is short and man essentially is a creator. You know, that's again, what distinguishes man from peace of the field. No man other than an absolute cretin or a mental dwarf views his life as existing only for himself in splendid isolation. You know, the only really the only in historical terms again, the only reason to create or act at all is for recognition and to guarantee the enduring historical memory and posterity of his deeds and actions. And extrapolated to a nakedly political context between friends and enemies, the degree, the wish for recognition in the form of cultural posterity and triumph within this historical process while repudiating a competing actor, you know, similarly situated within an opposing paradigm. I mean, that's the essence of or in peace. I guess the essence of conflict for which, you know, the state is the stage. You know, the enemy is he who wishes for his own way of life to flourish and endure apparently while repudiating the similar wish, will and impulse within his enemy, within the heart and mind of his enemy. You know, and this is neither good nor bad. This is simply what is. You know, and I mean, such that there is a moral aspect to it, okay, to remove that catalyst. I mean, what would there be like a cultural a society of sleeping people like figuratively and literally like, how would that be desirable? You know, I say again and again, one of the reasons why contemporary liberals are not, they do not have a legitimate perspective. You know, they're basically saying that like the perfect society is like a nursing home or a hospital or something or maybe like a prison where there's, you know, comparatively when there's serious accommodations or good food or something. You know, I mean, that like like robbing the human life of all meaning, eradicating history, eradicating old value because that's what makes things physically secure. I mean, that's literally senile, you know, and I realize a lot of these people probably are incapable of apprehending political life in any thing approaching a complete capacity. But even, even in limited capacities, I mean, that's a strike any man or woman is totally absurd. You know, and I think that I think some of that is beginning to accrue. I think that's one of the reasons why this kind of consensus on values or lack thereof, that was so characteristic of, you know, the brief kind of triumphalist era of the Clinton '90s, until, you know, 2001. You know, I think that that's why the vestigial aspects up out or something nobody takes seriously. You know, I mean, because like how could you take that? that seriously. But, uh, yeah, sorry, I mean, it's the only way to tell him still not 100% so if you're giving me a vaccine, I swear I'm not going to see no. I'm just still feeling a bit odd of it. Yeah, let's, uh, yeah, let's, uh, and not, well, and it's also to hear the, this, and this is important and this is, uh, Hobbes, um, this is, this is, this is a parallel and have busy in thought. So, the, the original conflict, kind of the original, you know, um, the original, um, conflict paradigm that is prior to the state is the conflict between master and slave. Okay, and in Hagel's formulation, this, this kind of setting of the stage of the, of the, of the primordial stage with, you know, the master slave dichotomy. And, and the Hagelean formulation that, that's, that's the parallel of, uh, of Hobbes, you know, state of nature. If you follow me, um, and in both cases, there's a tremendous mark, like imprint rather on, on historical reality subsequent, you know, and axiomatically, you know, that, is suggests not only at the state emergence from violence, because the first relationship among men is, you know, want to conflict. Um, and it, uh, it establishes the motivating factors in pre-rational terms for political action, which are derivative of the passions. You know, the first being, the first being vanity or the desire for recognition and posterity and, and power. We think it was clout. And secondly, the fear of violent death. You know, um, but there's a unique characteristic in the master slave paradigm, because the, it doesn't end with the victory of the master. And his ability to corral his slave into, um, this paradigm of, uh, servitude. You know, this is a dynamic process. In hegelian terms, you know, and the master is far from idle. In fact, he's the opposite. The master is able to devote 100% of his energies and thought in his quest for recognition and posterity, you know, for prestige and glory. Generally through war, you know, slavery in society, the first societies were, were, were, were based on war. And slavery, there's a, the slavery is complex. And the reason why it's truly the universal sociological institution. There's anthropological reasons for this. There's psychological ones. I mean, we could, we could devote, uh, an endless series on discussing the various aspects of slavery. Okay. And what its origins are in anthropological terms, historical ones, biological ones, psychological ones. But in purely political terms, you know, uh, warrior societies take slaves essentially so that, you know, the master cast can be free to pursue glory through warfare. Okay. Um, but at the same time that, that doesn't mean the slave is, it's something like worthless life or that he should be disdained or that people should have to intem for him. Like not at all. Because he works. You know, albeit that satisfy the demands of the master and the produce or and or harvest things according to the master's needs, it's the slave who transforms nature and himself. You know, he becomes physically strong. He develops skills. He removes objects from nature and reconfigures them or processes them to make them utile. You know, um, and his daily life, you know, he's working in the service of an abstract idea, you know, devised by the master, but also, you know, an immediate project to be realized. So this, I just don't mean he, the external world is basically only exists. And like the praxis of the master only comes to fruition through literally the physical labor of the slave. You know, and that's, um, that this is also like resonant in Christianity too. Like a lot of people don't understand that either. You know, and the the ammunition and in the Paul and letters, especially to like not just, I mean, you shouldn't disdain slaves anyway because you like a man's moral character is not determined by a station. But this is a core component of that and people don't understand it. It's not, it's not some primordial or or um, great integrity version of like a noble savage math or something. And it's not, it's not, it's not some moral claim about, you know, how the, the wretched classes are somehow superior to their haughty masters. It's exactly what I just relayed, you know, and what he will explicated. You know, and the, um, but in turn, you know, the masters, uh, when we talk about leisure in within this classical paradigm of, of master and slavery, like we're not talking about a guy sitting around and sipping bulk drinks and and wearing like, Hawaiian shirts or, or having, you know, like pretty like sexy ladies like feeding grapes. I mean, yeah, there's like some of that. But generally, uh, we're talking about, um, you know, the cultivation of the heroic and aristocratic attitude, which is brought to full fruition through creative destruction and warfare and high politics and state craft. You know, so there's this, there's an essential, um, there's, there's an essential, um, function that both the master and the slave perform, you know, without either one, um, the cutting of reason would not have been possible. You know, and, um, higher life, you know, of which, uh, the political is kind of both the most sanguine area and, and, um, immediately significant. I mean, all the fact that it's subject matter is literally life and death, like none of this would be possible. So you can't sit around and say like, well, slavery is evil. That's exactly like plate tectonics is evil. Okay. I mean, so, okay, find history is evil. Because I mean, I, you can't, you know, it's, it's not something that serious people entertain. You know, um, I mean, it's something too. Like I, one of the reasons, um, you know, and this is one of the things that it is actually pure. It's one of the few things that Marxists are appear hagelians in terms of, you know, like you're, uh, one of the reasons I object to it. So, it's treasonously. Like, you know, I was talking about this on a pod the other day with my, my dear friend Anthony, you know, like, like, like limousine. liberals who love to sit around and morally pontificate about the supposedly evils of class dynamics. They're not Marxists. Marxists don't think that way. Like Marxists are true Hageelians in this sense. You know, plus two like it's arbitrary. Like people like optons and Claire, you know, like in the jungle, I mean, that's like the subtext. You know, like it's a novel. Like, oh, agrarian slavery is the most evil thing ever, but you know, working in some filthy, dangerous factory, restoration wages were like 20% of men die on the job. Like that's that's that's okay. You know, it's some, there's an arbitraryness to this kind of fame world outrage that additionally like impugnaps any legitimacy. But I'm yeah, I'm gonna we should stop here because I'm gonna take us in a bit of a different direction and the Hageel discussion. But I hope this is a huge topic. And frankly, it's hard to distill down to an intelligible term. I hope I'm doing an okay job of it. I'm not fishing for praise. But if I'm not, I want the subs to tell me that I'm not, you know, I the feedback is essential. But yeah, I really appreciate you hosting me for this man. Of course, of course, anytime. Tell everybody where they can find your stuff and what you got going on. Yeah, there's a lot going on actually. And again, forgive me this past week. Nothing really got done on to me being ill. But I um, that's ways to find you right now is sub-stack. You know, that's one of the few platforms that doesn't censor me and other people. That's where you can find my podcast. That's where you can find my long form stuff. You know, that we got an active chat there. It's a real Thomas 777 that's subs to calm. That's I'm still listening, help in building a new website, man. And I'll shout that out again on my platforms. But I need help with that as I kind of reconfigure my content. I'm doing a stream here in about an hour on rumble. And at one last, I'm going to start doing regular streams there. You can link to the rumble through the sub-stack. I'm on telegram. I'm on Instagram. Seeking you shall find. But yeah, for right now is I reconfigure my kind of the way I do things. I'm, you know, finding it's sub-stack. And I am making progress on my manuscript. I'm running a book on modern political theory and particularly the regime that was imposed after the Second World War. And that should be wrapped by the end of summer. What's them? Yeah, that's where I'm at, man. All right. Until part two on Hagle. Thank you very much, Thomas. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanana show. Thomas is here. And we do part two Hagle, continental philosophy series. Yeah, yeah, indeed. And, you know, something that's important to register in a discussion of Hagle. You know, I always come back to the point again and again that Hagle's not just an intrinsically right-wing theorist. He's the, the progenitor of his storicism, you know, and owing to the epistemic assumptions of his storicism. And Hagle's political ontology, like what he insists is the purpose of the state, as well as his psychological you know, constitution. That can't be extricated from, you know, things that are discreetly, you know, related to the significance of organic cultural phenomenon and things like that. You know, it's really anti-liberal. Okay. Just exhumatically. So that's the reason why I've always maintained this inappropriate, in conceptual terms, to talk about right and left Hagle. And I mean, it's kind of shorthand for real phenomena. Yeah, but left Hagleians aren't Hagleians. You know, they're people who believe in a dialectical process in history. But it really has nothing to do with the Hagleian paradigm other than other than in the most kind of loosely structured capacities. You know, so if you're talking about Hagleianism, you're talking about it kind of a I'd argue right wing and at the very least kind of conservative historicism that views human populations as the product of a discreet psychology that, you know, the nuances of which can't be interpreted a primary or by appeal to, you know, abstract universalisms and things. You know, and that's kind of what I wanted to get into today too today. Like I said, before I went live. So I'm associated with some fatigue and some symptoms of this virus I can't seem to shake. So this subs please forgive me if I repeat myself or if I seem a little bit out of it. You know, I, I try to make sure that I always deliver properly. I believe where we left off last time was I believe I raised the matter of Carl Schmidt very much wanted that to Hagle and describing the state as being fundamentally born of conflict. You know, not just conflict external to the, you know, insular population that devises the state for defensive purposes, you know, contra the external foe. But within the state itself, it's a venue for myriad conflicts and excellent potential. You know, within the cultural form that consensus is emergence. And this always the Hagle identifies the, the origin of this phenomenon as anthropological and nature, it drives on the nature of man himself. Okay. Man rises above the level of an animal, the Oendologas and Oend, you know, of his capability for a higher reason. But you know, there's also a process of engagement psychologically by which man like raises himself to that status of elevation. And he doesn't do so in isolation or through, you know, merely contemplative processes or something. But really in a mortal struggle for recognition, you know, every man is conscious, every man who's, you know, is, is saying and reasoned, you know, and not, and not somehow mentally compromised. You know, he largely exists for himself and for his own purposes. You know, in these purposes, derive from a consciousness of his freedom to act in ways that gain him recognition. Now we're not just talking about, you know, clout or fame or prestige. I mean, obviously people covet those kinds of things too. And it's part in parcel what we're talking about. But we're discussing if an almond on this rather deeper, you know, we see when he's about recognition, he's really talking about participation and things that are, you know, transcendent and historical terms. You know, what Aristotle talked about is, you know, the magnanimous man, he has a basically aristocratic perspective. You know, well, even men who aren't aristocratic by nature or magnanimous, you know, they do have this desire to kind of overcome death through historical living. You know, whether it's that the fame of a dead man's deeds ring out or, you know, siring strong children, you know, who will go on to, you know, participate in the life of the nation. or excelling at a learned profession or at a trade that requires learned craftsmanship. And the only way for this kind of recognition of any significance or for which it really be emerging within that paradigm is if others recognize the significance of these things. So this process can't occur in isolation. It requires a historical and doesn't cultural situated in this. It's also a process that's inherently competitive. You know, each every man, even if he's even if he's basically moral and basically fair-minded and has a developed sense of equity and things of this nature, he's still going to want his own acts and deeds and character to accomplish recognition without being forced in turn, you know, to recognize equivalent merit and others. You know, and this in very basic terms, you know, is the kind of conflict intrinsic to the human condition. So such that man is a social animal and human sociality again is what makes this process possible. And thus it's what it is to be a human being in an exceomatic terms, you know. Yeah, there's really just locations and things where people deliberately remove themselves from this paradigm, but that itself is kind of overcoming, you know, and transcendent activity precisely because they're taking themselves out of a psychological state and a kind of social situatedness that is at base intrinsically human and normative. You know, and to accomplish this process of recognition, you know, men will risk their their life, their wealth, their reputation, and even their life, since it becomes a mortal struggle. And it can only end in inequality, because at some point the dominant cast, and this can take various forms you know, in terms of the peculiar characteristics that define it. Um, you know, we'll submit to the superior prestige or de-dewarantine recognition or mode of life that defines the cultural environment. You know, there will always be a ruling class and that ruling class only is extant because the competitors to it have submitted to it. You know, and um, have ceased to waging this struggle whereby, you know, they demand any quality of recognition or more properly perhaps, they cease trying to overcome their masters, you know, um, there's always a willful aspect of submission in the paradigm between masters and slaves. Even if you accept the postulate, you're a civilian postulate that there is such a thing as, you know, natural slavery. Um, you know, so in other words, every man emerges from this struggle by necessity, every man emerges from this fight for recognition, is either a master or a slave. Um, so human reality is essentially social, you know, and uh, human sociology, owing to logos, is intrinsically political. So, this submission to the mastery of another and the accomplishing the realization of peace within the parameters of this sort of ethical and uh, aesthetic and um, cultural consensus, you know, based on a shared historical experience and um, ancestral memory, this is the be, this is the beginning of states, okay. Um, the state, the primordial state is uh, the boundaries within this process has been accomplished. Um, however, both uh, the, the, the master requires more than just mere acknowledgement from his social infuriars, and similarly, you know, the slave requires for his life to hold meaning, you know, more than just an acknowledgement of this supremacy of the master cast, and uh, you know, thus an, an, an entitlement of his cast, uh, no blitz obliged. Um, in general terms, you know, even if there's um, even if the moral and ethical value of the weaver of the slave is acknowledged, and even if it's still a submission to the authority of the master, well still retaining his own dignity as a man is acknowledged, you know, he's still as a man and as a human being, similarly, longs for recognition in his own right and to be situated within a higher, or at least a perennial conceptual reality or form of life, um, like material compensation, and cannot see this desire, nor facilitate it, but even if the slave is manumitted and later becomes rich, you know, that, that doesn't see, um, in first of all, it's an exception anyway, but regardless, it doesn't see this, um, this desire, um, it's, uh, the only thing that can facilitate that is a recognition by another free consciousness, the paradigm then within the state, between the classes, is it basic, logical, you know, again, I, I know I said it before, but this is fundamentally important, understand the haggie-way in ontology, and it is the state which facilitates the recognition, and it's the, I was just the setting of it, and this desire is stated collectively and individually by living historically, okay, and taking part in, um, the communitarian and historical life of the nation, and living perennially within the historical consciousness that is timeless and linear, okay, um, and transcends death and generational, um, and temporal boundaries, um, now, what's essential to heal, is that the state basically has to, it's got to act as we reconcile these things, it's not enough to just, you know, create a system whereby tensions between casts are just mitigated, such that, you know, there's not sangenary, um, I still want to be emergent. And that it's not enough that the state simply you don't protect property rights and things. You know by enforcing you know the positive law or what have you. The it's it's it's got of a select date that's kind of reciprocity of recognition that was the master and slave both aim in vain without the state. On the other hand to or in addition to the state needs to be a teacher and implicate what the master and slave with a belief in their own historical situatedness and their own belonging you know to the Paulist or the racial community the bulk or the or the nation you know and it's got to implicate people with these values as such a degree that they'll put aside not just the discrete private ego and the desires they're in as well as um you know the kind of wider caste based identity contra the other within the social organism um but it's got to it's it's got to make people truly believe you know in the efficacy and value of the labor of the other as well as uh an understanding that it wore you know each man is uh who can take up arms there's a an ethical equality there among all who are willing to lay down their lives you know to preserve the historical life of the nation you know and uh this is why the subject matter of the state is worn piece not just because in existential terms and practically speaking it's a defensive structure you know um whereby the historical community can only exist within its parameters without being subsumed or destroyed you know by those outside of it who by asserting their own is our for recognition and historical imperative would repudiate you know their their way of life violently but there's also um you know a profoundly psychological mechanism that work here you know what would reconcile with the glue of civil society again is um the common enterprise of warfare actual and potential and the obligation of citizenship um you know upon incumbent upon every every class you know in common which uh I mean yes there's command and obedience is nowhere more sharply expressed than you know in in uh in a nation's military forces but you know all men die the same in battle you know and um the uh command element and um the consperector and listed element you know they rely on each other um in the most critical ways you know and that breaks down um what would otherwise be an intractable hostility um and this is why the state can only derive from a common psychological experience of ancestral memory okay and this is why it's key you know as I said I think for one alive haggles axiomatically anti-liberal you can't talk about a liberal haggalianism and you can't talk about haggles account of uh what proceeds you know the form of political organization and anthropological terms in in terms of abstract postulates you know because the only tie that binds the only thing that facilitates peace within the parameters of the state I mean the only thing that rationalizes the state in and of itself is this kind of shared ancestral memory and this experience of a common history you know and um this is key and again I think also before I went live you know for the guys who reached Bengal to write I know I know a lot of the the young guys do and that's great the death that he owes that haggle cannot be overstated haggle the progenitor of historicism you know um in a way that's even more pronounced than other um you know modern uh disciplines of political theory and you know historical graphical um analysis and things um so if people need uh an answer to why is haggle important from like a partisan perspective well that's why um the uh and there's two the two aspects of the human being as a political agent um that the state must account for and reconcile and permit the flourish within constructive parameters haggle identified these two tendencies a subjective liberty and object of liberty subjective liberty is the natural state of a man and it's most product we express capacity that is subjective liberty is an individual will and consciousness pursuing its particular goals it's creative impulses you know it's desires for recognition and transcendent um you know uh life of a sort beyond this mortal coil um objective liberty is the substantial general will you know essentially the demands of citizenship and the things that facilitate the realization of those demands for example at war you know the general will deriving from aspects of shared psychology born of historical memory the reconciliation of these things is what he will call the serene totality which is the union of the particular and the universal within the unity of the state you know ideally if the state is performing its function it guarantees not just the posterity of the people you know of the demos of the vulc what have you but it facilitates the unity and the the flourishing of uh the discrete individual will and the particular interests therein and allows those things to find full expression in the fact of the citizens duties to the state um in direct proportion you know to the individual rights he is allowed i mean unpack that a little bit you know basically what he goes getting at is that these sacrifices and coming upon the discrete subjective ego you know born of will and passion The state as the instantation of a reason, you know, the aspects of those things that demands the sacrifice are perfected by way of objective liberty and the channeling of these energies into enterprises that can only be fulfilled by the general will. Okay, so you're not really talking about deprivations of, you know, discrete liberty and action or you're not really asking the individual man to forfeit some sort of potentiality within himself because it's only within the state that these things can be, it can find full, can come to full foresh. And again, as we talked about last time, Hegel's not talking about the state that sounds like bureaucratic, like secular apparatus, nor is it some kind of ending itself. You know, this is critical. Hegel would have viewed a state, like a managerial state, like we have today, is totally illegitimate and pointless. You know, the state is only legitimate again, so far as it is allowing the realization of these things, you know, and that is tailored to facilitate these things and that it's premised on, you know, the posterity of the historical community that it encompasses, you know, in other words, it's a true, you know, like folk community, if you want to think about it in those terms, you know, because that comes up again and again, especially from, you know, people who are culturally anglophone, who have this kind of natural enmity towards political authority, which is well situated, considering the state of things since 1933 and arguably since, you know, the 1840s or so. But that's not what Hegel's talking about. And it's interesting here because Hegel compares and contrasts Athens and Rome in ways that are critical, in my opinion. You know, Hegel's view of the Greeks much as, you know, they deserve to be praised and much as high culture was perfected in the path of capacities, you know, in paracles Athens. The Greeks failed on grounds that their cultural form, their psychological and moral orientation, their political ontology. It didn't permit or acknowledge subjective liberty in the freedom that it tends to, in any meaningful way. The Greeks lived very organically, spontaneously and immediately, you know, spangler made the point that in these Athenian freezes, you know, it's always, it's always a sensuously present body, you know, of like a warrior or like a farmer or of like, you know, a beautiful woman, but they're always standing in front of nothing, you know. It's like there's, there's not, there's not like a historical past and future in the way we think about it. And this is key because again, you know, and to understand Hegel's criticism, you know, read through cities and read about the trial of Socrates, like the Athenian ideal was basically living up to what your function is, you know, as a Yale man, you know, as a slave, you know, like as a, as a craftsman, you know, education should be for military service and the demands of citizenship, you know, and the household should be, you know, essentially a school of command and obedience. You know, there's no thought given to the subjective, what gives rise is the subjective liberty, you know, and the desire for recognition and the flourishing of these impulses and imperatives, you know, to be a good Athenian is to be in the habit literally, you have bitch-related of a living and dying for the fatherland with, like without reflection, you know, so there's no place for subjectivity in any capacity, you know. And anybody who claimed otherwise, you know, well, that's, that that be viewed as a lolly, you know, it be viewed as related to personal well-being and, you know, that kind of thought only worthy of a slave or alternatively, it be viewed as subversive, you know, and as a subtle way of attacking public morals, you know, which is exactly why Socrates found himself. I mean, I think, I can't really hear what Cyril, I think Socrates was not a good guy, but the reasons why he ended up going to the gallows were fairly dubious, you know, and his critics acknowledged that. You know, the, you know, at the same time, you know, he all acknowledged that there was a lot to be said for the Athenian civic culture, and that it did, you know, inculcate men with what was inarguably, you know, a heroic and noble ambition, you know, so he goes through the baby with the bathwater, but, you know, the, and this is significant, I mean, or has something around a bit, but this is significant to Haydor's critique too, because Haydor mirrored a lot of that critique. Haydor made the point that the Greeks believed in natural world, you know, revealed itself to man, on grounds that, you know, being, and the way it was interpreted, from the presacredics through Plato, was basically that like a man is like part of the natural world, you know, is intrinsically capable of accepting these revelations, but through Logos, you know, the world opens up to him to exhibit a deeper reality than beasts could perceive, you know, but Dyson, as, as Haydor referred to it, it's still fundamentally passive, you know, in this capacity. What's critical to Hagle and Haydor in contrast is that, you know, they reject that entirely. Man on grounds of Logos, he finds it a situated within a discreet political anthology, and, or, into that fact, he experiences being as a rational and deliberate agent. You know, he's not, he's not just situated within nature and owing to his elevated capacity to reason, you know, he's noticing a revelation that, you know, a woofer, a dog, or a bear can't. You know, this is not a middling distinction, it's key to understanding the difference between classical philosophy and, you know, what became the continental tradition. A living organism, capable of higher reason, noose, noose, Arrational Soul. This axiomatically finds expression. through fellow fueling within the Paulus and between people's constituting the demos of the body politic and The Heideggerian view and and that's a Higley in point two you know There is no The Paulus doesn't emerge because of this kind of like accidental revealing within you know With the conceptual horizon of mains being going to logos whereby then you know the better man realizing oh we've got to we've got to educate men to be heroic you know and and abide you know with the fatherland requires them no there's a very Man is a Active agent You know and Through higher reason He create he literally creates this paradigm so that you know all higher values and recognition can Come to fruition You know and that is the process of state craft literally. That is the origin of the state The Those bits in general, but I think it's important Hegel bring it back hegel contrasted it into the room You said his He cited the room he said the room is frailty of essentially a Consolation of mirror causes within the body politic Contra the Athenian situation In Rome individuality The subjective individual will it was absolutely recognized both Abstract we and externally but in So doing the state as an organic whole was dissolved Rome like late America has more in common with Rome than People think and I know that that's like a cliche comparison But people think about it in terms of things like excess or It's a bit of a consumption or you know new imperialism. They're approaching it the wrong way A lot of laws causes stories or wise to this incidentally like even if you don't accept that perspective the um The Roman Political ethos it basically degraded all individuals the level of private persons like formally equal one another You know within the class they found themselves you know possessed a formal rights um But the the only thing that held them together was this kind of like Abstract commitment to you know you're liberty your rights as our Roman You know There was nothing at all organic about the Constitution There was no concept of You know An ethical consensus born of a organic historical experience There was nothing concrete in the moral life of The Roman nation later the Roman Empire other than these kinds of abstract postulates relating to at least nominally individual rights and concerns you know So consequently and taken to Logical extremes the abstractness of equality and the purported absolute moral imperative Facilitating the free expression of of individual wants and desires The demand for recognition by again an a historical way Related to wish fulfillment more than anything and actively opposed to any communitarian imperative You know, this is the Roman state and states like it like in my opinion the American regime This creates a repository of active nihilism You know and there's a very real danger of all such States deteriorating into terror like the state itself and the minister mentality of terror Going to the fact that the very the aforementioned abstractness and an ability to define equality What the same time suggesting that formally quality or these kinds of formal rights Individual rights attending citizenship You know are it is the is not just um The highest imperative of the state but also the only tie the binds Between these discretely situated individuals that basically that basically renders all public perspectives Outside of those Promulgated by the minority cadres who constantly the state itself that basically renders everything else oppositional to the state like every other modality of thought I mean that's where we're at now, you know obviously I mean people aren't being slaughtered on mass like in in Jacob and France or The Soviet Union, but that doesn't mean that couldn't happen You know, no history doesn't repeat itself. I know the idiots say that it does but um There are There are predictable outcomes within You know common paradigms You know going to The limited number of variables that Composite we constitute you know political life at scale You know so this is this is a real thing and it's not It's not just simply shay of like all the right types or of um You know midwid Libertarian guys like they're actually right about that when they when they point out that this Like the cult of equality is Morse acceptable to becoming a terrorist mentality than You know a more conventional mode of uh of government That's that's very true You run into people and it's not just most world liberals who You know abide this Kind of Alan bloom crawl popper. Let's stupid on purpose sort of You know superficially persuasive but you know kind of intellectually impoverished uh Viewpoint held out as as as pragmatic it's not as guys like that um it's You know, it's it's there's people who are more reasonable and learned You know in common who presented a critique of of hagel as well as it's being this kind of authoritarian brute. That's that's the wrong way to That's the wrong way to To characterize hagel hagel is adamant that um It's it's an absolute moral imperative that the state recognize The liberty inherent to minds capable of higher reason you know derivative of low-gots and You know, you considered an absolute imperative that the state recognize that um You know low-gots is the source of discrete is to speak an individual ambitions You know within human minds um But by no means Does this suggest that this must or should you know lead the procedural democracy? You know um And those things aren't mutually exclusive or somehow inconsistent You know Hey, let me the point like look like this idea that Every single person and has some share or stake In deliberating or deciding on critical matters You know and grounds that all individuals are members of the state. So that's its concerns are are there concerns You know, he He said that he said that's abdic nonsense You know um Like again, like really all the state owes the people in this regard is uh an acknowledgement you know of um Of uh the liberty inherent to low-gots And the minds of people so capable You know that doesn't confer upon any given man like a right to have a say in affairs of state craft um the individual Person you should only be taken into account politically So far as the occupies it definite place within the political organism. Say for example, he's a general or you know he's got an obvious aptitude for statecraft you know or he's got a unique skill set that confers upon him a kind of augury about power political affairs you know or he's a brilliant analyst you know a haggly one even further he said the positive you know the potentiality at least in abstract terms for each man to potentially become member of the governing class or you know or like a higher judiciary or anything like that you know that that still doesn't confer upon him a right to be heard or for authority to you know somehow defer to his opinion as if it has some sort of merit you know if in fact he has aptitude for such things you know he will rise to that office and you know a natural authority will accrue based on his services a competent representative but it does violence to reason and good government is derivative of a reason to entertain this delusion that there's some sort of general right to be heard on political affairs you know and again like that the this balancing between the general will and the subjective mind you know the grave grave violence is done to this you know kind of necessary unity and balancing of these essential aspects this suggests any sort of any any sort of egalitarian ethic needs to rain and in terms of procedural democracy you know so that's kind of that should put a bad any notion that you can reconcile the galean theory with with any any kind of like liberal theory of government you know and this is why haggles cut the constantly European modern European philosopher you know before every European theory is modern European theory of statecraft prior to the defeat because there are no more like European theories of statecraft at the 45 I mean it's not a part of take like it is not they don't exist you know you've got you got these car will call iterations of of the the of the American regime you know in occupied countries and then you have this kind of bizarre minigurialism in the UK that it isn't really promised on anything you know then other than a loose and deluded mythology that you know they they have some legacy moral authority on grounds that you know they they were an American lackey during during the design is in communist war on Europe but yeah that's what I got for haggle I'm gonna speak more on this but then we'd um we'd be here all night I'm probably gonna I'm probably gonna have just some concluding thoughts the next episode on haggle and then we'll like I said I want to do a theology episode because it's it's essential I mean that's important stuff anyway but I think it's critical to include that then discussion account and I'll put a whole theory you know we'll talk about a quietness and then we'll cover um Martin Luther and Calvin and um yeah that's what I think if the next episode if that's a real sounds good all right um let everyone know where they can find you yeah I'm I'm retooling my website with um what the help of a dear friend of mine who assists me with things relating to IT um you can access it now although bear in mind it's a work in progress it's time of 777.com is number seven HOMAS 777.com otherwise right now you should visit my subset that's where most of my content is you know especially hot content and longer form stuff it's real time is 777.subst.com and from there there's links to my Instagram my 12 gram and things of that nature all right until the next episode yeah thank you man