The Daily Stoic - Dr. Kara Cooney on the Power Strategies of the Ancient World | This Is The Secret To Stoicism

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to author and Egyptologist Dr. Kara Cooney about her new book The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World, the use of short term thinking and long term thinking as tools to gain power, ancient strategies that were used to gain and maintain power, and more.Dr. Kara Cooney is a professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture at UCLA. Specializing in craft production, coffin studies, and economies in the ancient world, Cooney received her PhD in Egyptology from Johns Hopkins University. She has released several books including The Woman Who Would Be King and When Women Ruled the World. She is also the host of the Afterlives Podcast.Check out the new perennial Daily Stoic Page A Day Calendar: https://store.dailystoic.com/products/daily-stoic-page-a-day-desk-calendarCometeer partners with the best locally owned roasters in the world and through their breakthrough brewing technology, provides a delicious, high-quality, balanced cup of coffee for a fraction of the price. For a limited time, you can save 20 Dollars off your first order - that’s 10 free cups on your first order, and shipping is always free - but only when you visit cometeer.com/STOICTalkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show.LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Kara Cooney: Homepage, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTubeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members. You can listen to the Daily Stoic podcasts early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast where each weekday we bring you a Meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace in wisdom in their actual lives. But first we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hi I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season,

Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the secret to stoicism. Just one thing every day. That's it. Seneca said that the path to wisdom was best traveled by acquiring one thing per day. Something that fortifies you against adversity. He said, poverty, death, or whatever else life might throw at you. So one might assume that Senka is talking about some physical or spiritual object of tremendous weight, but we can see from his letters to his friend Lucilius that what he was mostly talking about was quotes. One quote a day he was saying and sharing with his friend was all we needed to get better

and wiser and stronger and more resilient. It's a bit of advice that is persisted through the centuries with websites and Instagram posts and inspirational posters and tattoos and the like. And here we are in the 21st century doing the same thing. And we're excited to continue that tradition with the Daily Stoic page a day calendar, which is now back in stock. Not only that, but unlike the past versions of the calendar, this year we've made it perennial. It doesn't matter when you purchase the calendar. It'll work. We want you to stop

thinking of wisdom as something you get via epiphany or even just a couple years of study. No, it's something you accumulate day by day, action by action, as Mark's really has put it over the course of a lifetime. The Perennial Page A Day calendar is designed to help you do just that. It's one page with one stoic quote per day. Perfect for your nightstand, your desk, your kitchen counter, or your bathroom mirror. a day calendar. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. I am fascinated by this question of like, is it possible to be great, like to be truly successful, something

to reach the highest level of a profession and not be corrupted or destroyed by it. And I remain fascinated by Marcus Aurelius for this reason, Antoninus Pius II, two of the only examples of what you might call philosopher kings, people who are the exceptions to that idea of absolute power, corrupts, absolutely. And so when I had a chance to talk to today's guest, I was really excited because obviously I focus on Roman history, Greek history, but there's a whole other part of the world

although eventually they come to overlap. But Dr. Kara Kuni is a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at UCLA. She's specializing in craft production, coffins studies, talk about momentum, or an economies in the ancient world. She has a PhD from John Hopkins University. She's the author of the woman who would be King and a new book out in November 2nd called the Good King's Absolute Power in ancient Egypt and the modern world. So she is looking at the Egyptian rulers and asking herself some of those same questions.

Her other book, When Women Rule the World Explores the Rains of six powerful ancient Egyptian queens and how they changed our perceptions of power. And is a fascinating interview. I really enjoyed it. I think we get into some interesting philosophical questions, questions of leadership that I am excited to share with you. Dr. Kara Kuni can be found at Kara Kuni.squarespace.com. And you can of course check out our new book, Kings and our other books The Woman Who Would Be King.

Remember I have a book called The Boy Who Would Be King. So this is a nice little trope we're both relying on. And then her other book, When Women Rule the World, Enjoy this Interview. It's wonderful to chat. I was actually thinking about your new book this morning because I am writing right now about Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius for the books that I'm writing now. And I am fascinated by this idea that absolute power is supposed to corrupt absolutely. And it seems like generally that the rule is true. But there are a few exceptions. I don't know if there are exceptions that prove the rule, but that's sort of what you're talking about in the new book

is that there are some people who are at least not as corrupted by absolute power as others. Yeah, I don't really focus too much on those individuals because I'm talking about Kufu, San was with the third, we have to say the second. A little bit before these guys. Yes, not those guys, not those guys. But I begin it and end it with,

is this the power we want, we get the power we deserve. And then the last chapter is looking forward to a post patriarchal world and what that could potentially mean. So it's kind of like we, I saw on a colleague's door, we don't want a bigger piece of the pie, we want a different pie. And I think that's kind of where I'm going with this. And then we throw out the idea of a good ruler or not because we created a different system that doesn't depend on the mercurial ways

of particular rulers. Well, yeah, I think that's sort of on the the mercurial ways of particular rulers. Well, yeah, I think that that's sort of what the founders in America settled on somewhat imperfectly, but the idea that like although there are exceptions to the rule, it's just too big of a risk to take. Yeah. So, but so going back to the ancient world where this was the system, what do you find is the difference? Like, what makes someone, you know, go, what makes someone ruined by the power or what makes them able to at least not not not be destroyed by it. I think that it's a word that we talk about quite a lot, which is the word privilege. And privilege

grows with the the amount of wealth, with the amount of prestige, the amount that's already been done by one's ancestors. And you lose that scrappy ability to try to prove yourself on the battlefield or in the political game room. And you just start to think that everything's meant to be yours. And so often in the kings that I looked at, and I looked at five of them, and you could argue that if Egypt is a wave of ups and downs, that each time I'm looking at that top,

almost the tippy top of the wave, as it's about to come crashing down. And in each case, when you're talking about Kufu or some Wastat-Third or Akkadot and it rams as the second or Tahrqa, each of them inherits all of what their ancestors, immediate ancestors, and then the entire state of Egypt, but what they built for them.

And they just walk into it and they're like, oh, I'm a legacy Harvard guy and they just kind of get it all. And that I think is the most corrupting. And I think we could compare Trump to that, right? Trump versus his father versus the grandfather. And that kind of, and then now junior, oh my goodness, right? But like you can see what that does generationally, that kind of privilege,

educationally, economically, in all kinds of ways. And that's where I think it gets super, super dangerous. It's why I think we try to take things from our children. Do you have kids? I do, yes, yes. Yeah, you know, you try to withhold, you can't give them everything, they'll become monsters, they'll become assholes.

So you try to remove things to give them some sense of what work is. We do so so imperfectly in this world of easy access to all kinds of things. And where privilege is very binary, depending on what kind of a person or what color of a person you are. So yeah, I mean, you look at America right now,

you go from the so-called greatest generation to the boomer generation, and that's probably the same version of that up and down cycle where you inherit, you know, American boomers basically inherit a global empire unparalleled in human history. And I think that's what they did with the built and greatest military industrial complex that isn't needed to fight just wars. It's just needed for wars so that we can create the jobs for these people, these people, these people, and that's the biggest part of our budget.

And you can compare that to Rome, which I'm sure you do and can look at how much of their GDP goes to military output. So I think it's Robert Caro in his books on Lyndon Johnson. He was saying something like, it's not that power corrupts, it's that power reveals. Right. And is that something you found as you looked at these people? Is it that just inherently the privilege and the power and the ability to thumbs up, thumbs down someone's life, that that destroys a person or is it it's really just revealing what

was underneath and a fundamentally good or decent person might not be so corrupted by it. No, I don't know if it's it reveals certainly but it's also the ability to implement I would say so I would argue that Ockinatin had an easier, or Aminhoek to the fourth as he started out, right? Had an easier time implementing his crazy, whereas somebody like Ahmosa, the beginning of a dynasty not quite settled, he couldn't implement. So it's whether or not you've created a situation in which you're surrounded by sick of fans who are so rewarded by a system that continues to give them more. You just say yes, my lesh, yes, my lesh, you want to do what? Okay, yes, my lesh. And you continue to do that. Where you get more of a strong cushion pull and an elite. Maybe even a middle class is a tough word for ancient Egypt, but we can think about it. Urban empowered status group.

Whether or not they can push back against the people in power or not, or whether or not they want to push back against the people in power, I think that's where it gets the most interesting. So, Akanaten, the riches that Aman Hohota the third had, the amount of shit that he was able to build, and the lake for tea, and this, you know, the lion hunt, and all of the things that he was able to do, Akanatan inherited all of that without critical pushback from really anybody, and he was able to execute plans

that others before him would not have been allowed to do. Certainly not, Ahmed Hutz, the second child king of the third, not to the third, the son of a nobody queen, and Hanah Hachepsut, the female king, and so on and so forth. But when you get to Ahmed Hutz, you're like, oh goodness, you know, raised from childhood as King Toobie King, but became King Young and had all this privilege, Okenot and the same deal. And you could argue that with less information for others in our lineup. So it's a tricky one. Then it is absolute power corrupts.

It is. It is. It's sort of like the saving grace of a lot of these absolute rulers is that no matter how wicked they tended to be, it was almost like their lack of competence was a check. I mean, certainly this happens with Trump as well, but but Nero is a good example where it's like their ego or their vanity, their their easily distractableness or whatever is almost like God forbid. And I guess maybe you know Stalin is one of the few examples where you get someone who is both deeply evil

wields unlimited power and then seems to be effective is the wrong word because I just mean that he's actually able to bring about his horrendous heinous plans. He is effective. He is effective and that was effective and Putin is effective. So, you know, whatever their plans are, Hitler for a short period of time is a short-term effectiveness, but he was effective short-term. Not a good long-term thinker, very good in the short-term and moving things around. But, you know, you, what was I going to say, I went into short-term long-term thinking. Competence. You heard the question. Competence.

Yes. Yeah, so I would argue that competence, when you start to see rulers of great incompetence chosen, I would argue that that is a system of elites that willfully want the incompetence, but because it allows them to skim from the top, to self-deal, and to get what it is they want. And incompetence is useful. Where that can then hit you back is, as you say, you have some incompetence is useful. Where that can then hit you back is as you say, you have some incompetence and then you have Stalin coming and go, oh my god, what did we create? And now you've created the perfect system for that to come back and bite you. Incompetence is very useful. And it's almost, I would say that modern political incompetence,

if you've ever read David Graber and Marshall Salons on Kings, you know that there's a difference between divinized and sacralized. And the more sacralized you are, you could argue in today's political system, the more incompetent you are. The less competent we need you to be, you're just there as a figurehead and it doesn't really matter. And so that works for me. Competence is important.

And it's hard to study for ancient Egypt because you don't know the rail quality. You only have the perfected story. But, you know, Kufu's a great case in point. Was he a good leader? We have no idea. Was he remembered as a good leader? Hells no.

So, you know, remember it as grabby, selfish, not very clever, asking for things he shouldn't ask from priests and people who know better than he does who tell him as much, and he listens and goes, oh, okay, it's fine. But he gets the biggest pyramid. And so how much competence is there there?

It doesn't really matter. He's already empowered an elite class beyond anything that he can put back in the bottle to use the Genie metaphor. Yeah, it's sort of, it's almost like when you see these really incompetent leaders, that's when your pockets being picked. Like they're distracting and disruptive and chaotic and causing all sorts of problems, but for an elite group or a small group of society, business is operating,

not just as usual, but they're actually able to get things done that perhaps under ordinary circumstances they would not be able to do. Absolutely. It's an incompetent thing to slash and burn all of the environmental protections that we've had in the United States, but it's still worth. Oh, it's going to benefit a whole lot of, well, a minimum number of very wealthy people who in the short term we're going to be able to line their pockets very, very readily, very easily. Long-term, obviously, it's a different.

Long-term, short-term is always a part of these discussions, because most of the people we're talking about, including maybe somebody like Stalin who is a better long-term thinker. Short-term, as soon as he's done, the repercussions and the pushback were real. Most of these guys are short-term thinkers. They're there for the here and now. They don't give a shit that they're going to cut down the forest and that they only see value in its lumber. Even though the deforestation will harm their own children and grandchildren. That is not of interest. But that's exactly where you can let those things go.

That short-term thinking go if you have enough resources to let it go. You have a whole new world and a manifest destiny. The short-term thinking can go on. A whole lot longer and you don't even see it as short-term thinking. But as the world shrinks and as the resource is shrinking, as all the rain forests are cut down, that short-term thinking. But as the world shrinks and as the resources shrink and as the all the rain forests are cut down, that short-term thinking becomes much more visible to use your other analogy than it ever was before. When I guess you could argue that the short-term thinking is endemic and sort of all the strongman characters, whether you're talking about a

Putin or Kim Jong-un or just your sort of ordinary drug dealer or gangster, there's this attraction to the life. There's this idea that it will be short-term quite lucrative, but there's clearly no real conception of like, what's the ex-ist strategy? What's the end game? Because if you look at the end game, it never ends well. Or it's like there's no way out, right? And so it's probably attracts inherently people who have a blind spot towards, well, what am I going to do once I get this? Yeah, I agree. I completely agree. And you know, in Egypt, I think there's actually many systems in place to push back against that as a whole compared to the northern Mediterranean compared to Mesopotamia. Even compared to China, one could say that there's more of a communal agreement amongst people that a king has to be a certain thing. He can't push too far too hard.

And you don't get a lot of medliminical rulers or at least stories they're up, right? They're limited by what they can do with the divining ship that is a weight upon them. And other parts of the world seem to allow their leaders a lot more freedom to be medliminical or wise or whatever. And Egypt has certain structures in place and and Egypt has certain structures in place, and Egypt still has certain structures in place. You look at, it's amazing, and then I get obsessed with new materialism and how geography can help not determine, but can help form a society, and you see that same cultural agreement within Egypt today, where Cece has to work in a certain way and show

piety in a certain way, and there's expectations. That's really interesting. I've written a little bit about this period in Rome, which they call the five good emperors, which is so interesting to me the way, sort of random fate can determine, or random luck can determine whether something goes well or bad. You basically get these five emperors in a row who don't have a male heir. And then as soon as Marcus really, so I write a lot about does have one, that's the end of it, right? Like it's almost as if I think for the Romans, it was this period where sure it's an emperor, but it's a not a hereditary emperor. So there's some So the elites are at least contributing

to choosing who this person will be. And because there is, it's not about, your family's basically not wedded into this system forever. It does seem to be like it works for a few hundred years or 150 or so years. We have this decently benign system that's not filled with the neuro after neuro after neuro. Yeah, that's super interesting.

I want to think a little more about that because something I've been working on lately is the harem. And the harem, a lot of people push back against that word and say it's orientalizing, and I say, hell's yes, it's misogynistic. And as a system, and if you, if you see a harem, it likely is a harem, and we should call it what it is, the women who are exploited within it deserve nothing less.

So there's my little, but within a harem, a harem is an interesting way of connecting elites with the king one step removed in a bodily fashion and organizing, hurry, work, all of those different elites and also pushing back and saying, oh no, you know, your family's being difficult. We're not picking that son, his crown prince. We're not even going to imagine it.

We're gonna pick this other kid who's disconnected completely from any of you people and he's the king's beauty and he's favorite right now. And we're going to buy fast all of you. There were or within the harem, you could decide king's sister is where it's at. And we're going to pick a large headed Charles II kind of mess of a man, a future man. And that's going to be the next king and incest can often rule in these situations, but I see the negotiation arena of how these decisions are made in a court, in a harem, the two combined, as a kind of what you're talking about, like how do you create a good

king, how do you choose whose next. It's not always the eldest son. There's always like, you gotta keep people on their toes, right? Like a Saudi-uradian system, you know? You could go to bin salman. You could go skip a generation. And then everyone else is in jail in the four seasons. And everyone's off-balance and doesn't know exactly what's going to happen.

So that kind of social mechanism where you have a communal decision, even though they don't say it outright, even though the gods are the ones deciding, God's whenever the ones deciding. Of course. But you're creating a pushback in a real way, the Oracle is a wonderful way of understanding it.

The Oracle was this statue hidden inside a little thing held up by priests on their shoulders. We don't know exactly how it works, but imagine you've got, say you've got like as many as 20 priests holding the big oracle during the Ram's superior. And how do they decide which way to go or to kneel or to nod? It's a communal decision. And the Egyptians are visually ideologically reifying that in a super interesting way. Yeah, it's hard to compare directly to Rome, obviously, but, you know, humans have all kinds of really interesting ways of creating social buy-in, incentives, paybacks, without calling

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And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondry App. It's very primal, right? And I don't mean to say that it's somehow natural, but it's very primal in the way that you have this sort of

group of people. And then obviously there's this sexual component and this biological related component. And then it's like, I imagine part of the function of say the heron and the women inside the heron is like, well, this person can really talk to him when he's angry or she can really convince him to think maybe a little bit more big picture than he wanted. I worked at a very dysfunctional company that was sort of operated this way. And it was always interesting to see the way it gave me these flashbacks, but you're watching the way that these sort of girlfriends and motherly figures are playing this role inside this company that's not

codified in their salary or in their position, but I have to imagine that's what these court of nobles, you know, whether it's 200 years ago or 1200 years ago or 12,000 years ago. Or the Trump White House, the more I'm fighting out of it. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, there's this sort of, it's like this informal structure

that's designed to impose a tad bit of rationality on a fundamentally irrational subjective whimsical system. Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally agree. It's It's and I don't want to be just Trump-fashing. You could say the JFK White House has similar Elements to it where you see said father in there. Yeah, it's in Bobby and exactly to get him to do certain things and listen to other, you know, civil rights leaders or whatever, but yeah, it's it's interesting how influences happen. Yeah, and then this would be like

send-in moot during the reign of the female King Hutch Epsad, who is a is a perfect foil. And of course, we simplify it and romanticize it and make it into her lover and all of these other things. It doesn't need to be that. It's just a way of influencing a leader, vis-a-vis elite and nascent middle-class groups, if those things exist in Egypt. And yeah, there's all kinds of ways for people to try to get this one dude to do what they want. Well, it's such a, I imagine it's such a lonely position, right? And so fundamentally unnatural and disorienting.

Just imagine whether you're an Egyptian king or a Roman king and you're told that you're a god, but you know, you know deep down you will die, right? Like so you're a god, but then you would know you're just a human, but you'd also come to believe you're a God and you're treated like one and isolated from say it would be so fundamentally disorienting that you would need these sort of stabilizing voices around you, people that you could trust, but then how can you trust this person? So you have to have another person to balance out this person. And I think you could almost see them sort of reaching out for some kind of stability, try to negotiate this inherently un-negotiable position.

And then if you add in there that, yeah, they're entitled or stupid or in-bred, I got to imagine it's a lot of variables. And the more you look at the Egyptian kingship and you can see, by rain lengths, we don't have ages, of course, but you can see when a king comes to power or when the privilege starts, one could say. And the earlier these guys come to power, the more they are able to surround themselves

with sycophants, so they're controlled, but they're not. And that's when things can really flare up and get extraordinarily dangerous. So a situation like Ramsey's the second, who knows from early childhood that he's going to run the whole thing, his ability to create a populism that Egypt had never seen before.

I argue that in the good kings is extraordinary. And you could say the same thing about Amin Hoatep the third. Akanah and it doesn't work. He's the second son, but the privileges they're all around him nonetheless. Yeah. I am fascinated too by the process of educating a person

or preparing them for a role that they, no singular person should ever have. You know, at least the US president is sort of accident, we're sort of going like, well, who has life potentially prepared for this role? And we can select them at age 40 or 50 or 60, or now in their late 70s. Yes, yes, we go over. One of the problems, the only upside I would say about choosing the older leaders we've been choosing is that they do have a lot of life experience, hopefully. But I did this kid's book about Marcus, really, so I just fell in love with this story of like, here you have a guy, he's just a kid, and somebody says, you should be

king. What were they looking for? But then that whatever educational process, Hadrian puts in place, and he has this weird sort of system where he adopts a person, who adopts a person, but that it's one of the few instances where it worked. It didn't go terribly wrong. It wasn't perfect. Certainly, the Christians at the time would have disagreed.

But it's an interesting example where it didn't go terribly wrong. The idea of preparing someone for this role, I just find that process fascinating. How did the Egyptians think about preparing someone for a king or did they just assume that God prepared you for this role and we don't have to do anything? Oh no, it's a it's a big deal and this is where my last book comes in when women ruled the world

because Egypt unlike other places that are geographically set up one could argue from much more internal and external warlording as a constant. Egypt is rather protected internally and externally. So you don't need an able military leader to lead this whole show right away. So in fact, the elites seem to not want that older guy that able military leader, they seem to push back against that, which is why so many kings come to the throne as children. And those children, I have an 11 and a half year old, I don't want him making, he's drumming in the garage. I do not want him to make any decisions about my household. And my neighbor's going to knock on my door and be like, the drumming is too loud.

Oh my God, these things stuff. So the younger somebody comes to the throne, the more you need others to make decisions, that creates an interesting and precarious situation about who you shall pick to make those decisions. And the Egyptians are ingenious in understanding their patriarchy well enough, that if they pick an educated, high-placed email to make those decisions, who doesn't have a foundation within this patriarchy of profession,

or in some cases even the education she will need certainly not in the military backing she will need to take the throne from her son plus there's an emotional component she doesn't want to take it from her own child. It's a brilliant authoritarian strategy of training up a child that can be controlled for a decade or even more, so that the elites can come in and grab all kinds of stuff, keep the system going, keep the dynasty is going over a long periods of time as long as 250 telemaics, three telemaic dinosaurs, 300 years, the longest one.

And the female power is then used as a prop of the authoritarianism as a short-term placeholder to keep this whole thing going. So a woman's making the decisions, but she is, it is imposed upon her to think long-term. Because she's not going to be in this position forever, she's going to give it up, she's going to move out of this position. She, it is imposed upon her to think long-term to set up her son so that he does well. And it's just that regency situation where you see it working so well and not just a couple times, not six, not seven, like dozens

and times. These women were used as the best leaders of the Egyptian state, often in quiet, often in certainly not given a formal title, almost never. It's an informal job that we can see it. formal title almost never. It's an informal job that we can see it. That's, and whether one argues, and this is still up for debate, right, whether women are inherently and genetically and whatever prone to less militarism than men, I mean, our prisons seem to, the American prisons seem to bear that out, but it also could be in a patriarchal society. You don't have the foundations to meet out that kind of violent will upon other people in their sexual day. More of his is a whole problem, right? But the Egyptians understood that choosing the female within the society was the best risk-averse way. And I bet other people would have done it more, but you know,

you've got somebody like Zimri Lim of Mari was on the throne for 10 years This nothing for an Egyptian rule. They're like, oh, you're little 10 years. How cute It's so cute and sweet, but that's what he's got to work with and homerabi takes him out And that's the reality in that in when the West Asian part of the world You cannot rely on a child and a woman telling him what to do, a training somebody up. There's no way. No way.

It's kind of an interesting parallel there, I guess, with the stoicism in the Romans, which is that Seneca is called to advise and tutor Nero by Nero's mother, Agrippana, who sort of has this sort of longer term view. She, I think very clearly grasped that her son is incompetent or deranged, but she sort of rules through him. And yeah, that is an interesting check, the idea of like the sort of wise woman behind the throne, making the decisions, bringing in, in this case, the advisors or the tutors are setting up

the court around the young person or the person that's being prepared for power. So that when they eventually have it, it doesn't ruin them. And for a while, it works with Nero, the first several years of Nero's regime are not so terrible. Who better to scold Nero than his own mother, Agrippina? Right. But then and she can continue to do that and have that power. But then he's going to have her killed. Right.

So he's going to get annoyed after a while. And while the mother is less liable to kill her own child, tallemies may be an exception. But the mother is less likely to kill her own child. The the sun has no problem. The privileged sun has no problem taken

out mama. Right. At a certain point when you go, I'm the most powerful person in the world, why do I still have to listen to my mother? That becomes untenable. But it lasts for, I probably last longer than you would be willing to listen to your father. I think you're right. I think you're right. Yeah. The way that these courts have to bring in the philosophers, whether it's Athena Doris, an area of Stidemus, who advise Augustus, these are the Stoics, and then Nero and Ensenica. Marcus really says, this guy, Junius Rousticus, who introduced Stoicism to Stoicism, were there sort of philosophers in the Egyptian courts that were, or is it more astrologers? Like who's advising the ruler on,

or tutoring them in the art of leadership and power? This is a wonderful question, and I haven't ever thought about it in that way. So now I'm gonna come up with some ideas on the fly, but it's, you know, we think of the Egyptians, you always think of a priestly class, right? And so you have this group of priests who have a secret and sacred knowledge that is restricted, that they keep restricted because it gives them more power. And then they connect with the king,

but that priestly class is not, it can come from the royal family, right? Some surmise that Akanaten may have been a solar priest and then became king and then was pulled out of that priesthood and then into the kingship. And what were the, there are no firm boundaries sometimes between priesthood and political life or economic life for that matter. But I think you can talk about this more carefully during a time period when there are firmer boundaries, old kingdom, it gets tough. But, you know, in the old kingdom, you could say that an engineer able to build the pyramids

and able to figure out how to build a 50 story mountain of stone and get all those blocks up there. And we still don't know how they did it, right? Hence the alien conspiracies, which is exactly what the Egyptian kings want you to believe. Right. Still working on our simple minds today, right? Sure. I didn't think about that, but that's very interesting. Yes, it was, if it inspires us today, imagine the statement that it would have made to a person who can't even think about how they don't understand it. Exactly.

That is magic. That engineering is magic. The ability to use water level to cite the stars. You get a perfect 90 degree to go right to Cardinal North. That is magic. And we still don't completely understand it today. So the way I would understand, so just, and then I write about this in that first chapter of the Good Kings that to create his own super

human kingship, Kufu must empower his magician priest and janeers, what I call the mortuary industrial complex, and empower them to such a degree that it ends up taking over his kingship entirely. But so, and then Kufu is remembered as this king that doesn't like to listen to his spiritual advisors. And there's all of these stories where he's talking with a spiritual advisor or a magician and they're like, no my lord, we can't do things that way. Like there's one magician who's like, I know how to cut off the head and reattach it. And Kufu's like, whoa, that's awesome. Get a prisoner and let's do it. And the magician's like, my Lord,

not to one of God's sacred cattle. And Kufu's like, cat, dammit, fine. That goose. And so they get a goose. And there is that constant push and pull between the ones that hold the restricted knowledge and study it, the academics, the intellectuals, and the king who's just all power all the time. But sometimes the king is trying to get in that mix.

And I end the chapter by arguing that, and others have argued this before, that the fifth dynasty is a pushback against that kind of more, I don't know, Putin-esque, military, Stalin-esque kind of power. And the pushback of the Fifth Dynasty, the reaction is that the kings are saying we are not kings, we are priests and kings, we are priests kings, we are pious, we know this restricted knowledge, you, we will show you. And here are temples that look completely different.

And we have the first stone temples built where people can visit in its inseparation of solar worship. And so the kings are trying to get in on that game because it is so very powerful because it takes the power from them. So they try to identify with it. And you could argue that's a constant push and pull

in Egypt, the king priest, priest king, and how that works. You move a thousand years forward and go to the Ramacit period. And then you have an institution that is of priesthood and temple power, economic power, even military power that is competing with the kings. And the king then has to send his sons

and to be high priest of the temple of Pataf and send his son and to be high priest of the temple of Pataf and send his son in to be high priest of that and try to get into that institutional system and you see tons of people trying to connect to this temple institution to get jobs to get favors. It is no surprise in that institutional rise of priestly power that the king, Ramsey's the second in this context, would present himself as more divinized than ever before because he needs to be in that game. He needs to be on the receiving end or centralized within that temple institution. So there are philosophers, but the Egyptians are, you know, it's it's it's much more about restricted knowledge, I think, than it is about hacks and psychology and morality. It's more about the machine of the universe and how one works it. And as for divinization, which you mentioned, this is so very interesting. You see divinization six ways to Sunday from West Asia.

Everyone's taken apart the, you know, the liver, and you've got even the liver preserved and an iron thing with little directions about how to read the liver from, from, first millennium West Asia. And in Egypt, you have almost none of it. That restricted knowledge is kept so close to the best that you get like a so close to the best that you get

like a star chart from the ceiling of the Tomb of Sennon Moon. You get astrological charts with decons starting in kings, tombs, the valley, the kings, burial chambers, and then you get those more in places like tolamate,, like Edfu Dendera places like that. But they don't talk about the divinization that King would never let people know that he was vulnerably asking the gods, what do I do? You see it sometimes, like you'll see how Chebs would say, should I send to Amin Ray?

Should I send an expedition to put, and the god says, yes, and it comes back, and she's like, see, I told you so. Is that vulnerability? Is it strength? It's oracles are there, if that's your divinization, but oracles are more a marker of a theta-complete, telling people what they should already know,

and who already has the power, does have the power. There's less, should I invade here or there? Much less of that, than you would see in other places. I was just thinking of sort of how universal it is. You're talking about this or the priests, and then you have Alexander the Great and Aristotle, but then you have Confucius as an advisor to princes and kings. And maybe that was more, you know, back then the philosopher was also a scientist or, you know, Da Vinci's an expert on more defense it. Like, you're just like, we need smart people around

and who can I get for advice? And then those people are thrust in the unenviable position of both giving advice and then those people are thrust in the unenviable position of both giving advice and then oftentimes trying to sort of informally rein in the insane impulses of these people. Here's the other problem with Egypt and I'm sure those people existed and were needed and were innovators and created awesome shit, They're not going to share that stuff. It's not going to be shared within the highly restrictive, highly unequal, less competitive risk of her place of ancient Egypt. So let me give you an example. In the Ramasad period, so starting with Sadi the first,

you get what we see as an explosion of intellectual thought about the underworld. And you get new books that you had not seen before, where before there was only the Omduat, that which is in the underworld, you now have the book of earth, the book of caverns, the book of the heavenly cow, the book of gates, and it, and on and on, book of day and night. And you can look at that and say, oh my goodness, said the first must have had amazing counselors and philosophers who came up with all of these things, but you would have to check yourself and say, wait a minute, I know that the pyramid texts were older than the time

they were published in the Tomb of Onus at the end of the Fifth Dynasty. This is going back to the Old Kingdom, right? And you know that the pyramid texts were in use. Some of them are philosophically proven to be very, very archaic in their grammar and their words. There may be even 500 years older, or 1,000 years older from the time they were first incised into stone.

So the Egyptians create these things, but they keep them very close to the best. That restricted knowledge takes a secret. No one can even write letters or diaries. No one gets to write home about this stuff like In-Rome, right? And it's all like Kim Jong-un, you don't talk about it. You don't get to see it at all until you see it. And so there's not a famous, like there's not a class of

famous intellectuals whose work also survives to us throughout history in that in the way that we know Alexander the Great and Aristotle. Independence. Yeah, and you have people talking about them and discussing them. Well, the Egyptians were a part of this globalized world. They could close themselves off and create this hermetically sealed North Korean type place. Where people, you know, you have a Marinal letters, you know, the insight that those letters give you about what was going on in the courts of Amenhaut took the third in Okinawa

and are astounding. You gonna let my guy stay on the sun all day? Get my guys out of the sun. This is ridiculous, crazy religious shit you guys are doing. And so you get that push and pull. If we had more of those things preserved, we could say more, but given the information that we've got

and given that every geologist is studying in authoritarian regime and must behave so, but most do not. Oh, they really don't. You have to, you have to then say, okay, this explosion of underworld text that said he the first is showing. He feels he needs to show something that has already been around arguably for centuries, that was innovated some centuries before and were very useful within a closed powered society, hegemonic society before, and then they came out, they came out and said to the first is like, I'm putting this stuff up on my walls. And why?

It has smacked power to Egyptologists and generations past. And to me, it smacks the weakness. The first time a king publishes this restricted knowledge, he is trying to get a short-term bump out of it. As soon as he does it, it's the cats out of the bag, it's done, the power is lost, and they must invent something new. I always love to, I feel like when you zoom out from history

and certainly the big gaps in time disappear, you see how, as the Stokes say, history is basically the same thing happening over and over again, and that we're not that different. You know, obviously now we have a better system. We have certain things, but then it's like, well, our mystic class is the lawyers. They say, you can do this, you can't do this, or the polling expert is now the version of the Oracle at Delphi that says, well, here's why you can't do this. You know, we still have this sort of mumbo jumbo

that is kind of putting up guardrails and telling us what we can and can't do. I find that to be both humbling and terrifying at the same time. I think that that's another point of my book and I say explicitly that the modern exceptionalism that we have lived with for the last 100 years most especially despite those two world wars, whatever.

That modern exceptionalism, I think in the light of this pandemic and our reaction to it are bumbling ridiculous, stupid reaction to it continuously And on all counts, I think we can seriously prove that while we may have superhuman computers that we can put in the palm of our hand that are better than anything that was on the space shuttle or many satellites that are up in the sky, it doesn't matter, we still have these brains.

Right. And we still function, this one of my main points is Egyptologist and the public loves to look at Egypt as this place of great mystery. They love to separate it. They love to say that we have to only study them within their context, that we must particularize them, that they are not like us. We are not like them. And I push back against that most strongly and say that we are just like them. The reason we must study them

is because they learned how to package authoritarianism better than anyone else I've ever seen, so that we can't even see it. We don't even see that it's Kim Jong-un's North Korea hermatically sealed. We just see beauty and monumentalism and a kingship that was moral and good. We see our good fathers taking care of us. We are attracted to that kind of power and that is what we need to rip down and be highly critical of. Yeah, it's when you start to believe that this wasn't all just made up by someone and that it's somehow magical or guaranteed. I was talking to Stephen Pinker about this, you know, his work where you're sort of looking at at the steady decrease in violence over time. People look at that both as critics

and the fans and they're just like, oh, this is just what happens. And it's like, no, this isn't what happens. This was the result of millions of people sacrificing and fighting and insisting on certain things that this is, as they say, an experiment, and the experiment can go away if you abandon some of the principles that at least got us to be slightly better than where we were 100 years ago or 200 years ago. But we're still fundamentally the same irrational crazy people at the whim of the same irrational crazy leaders. And as for the pink argument, I mean, I agree that in warfare, we don't allow the slaughter

that we used to allow and accept. We don't. We don't want to see it. But what we do instead is we allow invisible suffering and invisible deaths in a way that is rather astounding. Of course. But anyway, we just ticked it to something else. death in a way that is rather astounding. So, but anyway. No, we just ticked it to something else. Right, we didn't go to war, but 700,000 people just died of a pandemic, right? That didn't need to happen, right? And so, right, the deaths are an incidental byproduct

instead of carnage on the battlefield. Yeah, or the decisions of a small group of wealthy white men working in cooperation with one and other can actually impoverish and threaten the lives of billions. Like that today. And that's where, you know, we warfare is an interesting one. It's, um, and we don't do it for warfare now. It's all about the complex. And I think everyone can see that when we talk about budget numbers and how, uh, in the United States right now, what, what's the analogy that two years of our defense budget is 10 years of this trillion dollar budget that the Biden team is pushing, but, um But it's kind of astounding, right?

Of course. But you know, it's about jobs and putting up satellites and making sure that all the bases are covered and by base, I mean, bases like Fort Bragg or that. Right, military base. Yeah, it's become something that's too big to fail, like so many other things. And then how many lives are harmed in that process through the opioid epidemic epidemic and I just read this horrific and and slightly old three-year-old Atlantic article about the new methamphetamines out there. Yeah. Holy crap. I did not understand this new methamphetamine and it explains to me now why

Los Angeles is covered with tens of homeless people. I think we're acting like this is a social policy issue when it's really there's this sort of slow burning underground fire that's caught, we're like where are all these people coming from? And it's like, I was thinking about. There you are, there are us. But then it goes back to your generational discussion

of privilege. And if the boomers were the top of that privilege, and I think you're right, then now we're sliding down, and we have all of these people who are just opting out of society, opting out of its pain and overwork and demands, and the open crisis is part of that, this method of crisis, and all of the homelessness is part of it. It's an interesting slow decay to be effective.

I had this little theory. I'd be curious what you thought about it as an ancient historian. But one of the things the pandemic helped me with, I'm fascinated by the Civil War. I'm fascinated by different moments of American history, particular. But the way that even you could even argue

a majority of Americans are on the same page with the pandemic, right? Or you look at California, right? The actual policy, the response, mostly, mostly correct. But still, I mean, tens, tens of thousands of people, like 50,000 people, or whatever California died of the pandemic, it was fascinating to me to see the way that history, like, can be hijacked by a small minority, right? So you look at the Civil War and you go, oh, must have been 50, 50 people, 50% of people wanted slavery, 50 didn't, and then they battled it out.

And you're like, no, it's probably like 10%. We're like 15, a 15% radicalization of society can tear the whole thing apart in the way that even if most people in California are on the same page about COVID, even if 5% of the people aren't, they'll get it, spread it to each other and then spread to other people and then everyone stuck with the consequences. Interesting to see, it just brought home even the debate amongst the founders about factions, just how at the mercy, the majority can be one dedicated, if not irrational or radicalized faction, can make everyone be at their mercy,

or at least stick everyone with the consequences of their actions. And nothing radicalizes a faction more than the privilege of having had something, easy life, easy riches, and then seeing it slip away and losing it. And one could argue, and this is where I go in the last chapter, that this faction, this 15, 20 percent, let's make it 25 of white America that benefited from this manifest destiny, taken and stolen land and enslaved peoples, right?

And slave labor, they benefited from that so much. And now that is being exposed and it's being open. So that faction must fight on multiple fronts, but they do so. They fight on the front of every baby must be born. Because you have to have all of that labor and you need to put the women back into the kitchen in the home and have the baby,

and you tell you is the best way to do it. You fight it on the fashion of the world is flat. You know, the world does not, you say, with the mother, all of this stuff of climate change, you must deny the realities of earth entirely even. Of a shared, shared realities. Yeah. Yeah. And so the pandemic, it fits into that. If you're denying that that rape and pillage of the earth is going to destroy you, and you deny that even geographic reality of its roundness, or you deny that every baby should not be born, because it will destroy the planet with overpopulation, then you must also deny the pandemic itself.

You have to make it a conspiracy. And so now that radicalized faction used to be in control. Those are our mixins. Those are our Darth Vader, what's his name? Dick Cheney's, right? That's that group, right? So that group now radicalized is, it's their last stand.

It's the most shells are fired right before the armistice is signed. And so that's what we're going through right now. And we should expect more of such radicalization because they will fight to deny that they are benefiting from these things. And then to throw in some James Baldwin to keep their innocence.

People don't like to know that they're benefiting from harming others. And it's easier to deny all of these things entirely. There is no pandemic, there is no climate change. Every baby must be born because that innocence helps to protect them now. You know, do we have things like this in the ancient world? I suspect, right?

You always have the haves that are seen what they've lost. And I would say you look to an ancient Egypt, this genre of text is called pessimistic literature, in which it's kind of like you and on, if you like. They, they go on and on, say they wax wraps audibly, saying how the people who did not have coffins have all of our coffins, the people who didn't have things before are now wearing our jewels, you know, and kind of like the two people as I just say Lewis with the little guns,

with the people marching by, that kind of. It's like that expression when you're used to privilege, equality feels like compression. And so even though it's a very zero-sum way of looking at the world. And this is probably why when you track social movements, they have almost universally come at the great resistance of the people who are currently on top because they

saw, they see women getting the right to vote or black people getting their civil rights as somehow depriving them of those rights. And in America, why are people so resistant to say the end of segregation? What does it matter? Well, the why were people so resistant to say the end of segregation? What does it matter? Well, the end of segregation, just like at the end of the Civil War, it threatened this nice lock that they had on the levers of democratic power, not Republican Democrat, but it basically says, hey, the terms of your oligarchy are now threatened. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree.

And then you bring long term short term thinking into that again and you was in the story and you know how long it takes for these cycles to work themselves out. If they take centuries, they can take millennia and you could argue that we have, well, we know we have a long way to go to work through these kinds of processes. It's not just going to happen overnight. And it's kind of an arms race, isn't it?

Between that small amount of people who are in denial, that privilege group, and then the people who are trying to change things and are trying to pull power back, will the earth survive. I think these are the stakes we're talking about. We'll win. And we have hundreds of years to work this out. Will we be able to cut down all of the forests before we can create a new system, a new pie?

Well, no, that's a great point. I think it does all come down to short-term long-term thing. Because think about it. It's like, 100 years later, we're all grateful for the national parks, right? 100 years later, we're all grateful for the national parks, right? A hundred years later, we're glad women have the right to vote. 70 odd years later, we're glad that they're in the workplace, right?

We're glad that segregation ends. In the long enough time, it's always better, but that it's fundamentally people fear change because they fear that change is coming at the expense of their current comfort that makes them not willing to trade the short-term discomfort for the long-term gain. And I think this is why people are also so resistant to acronym. They're like, but I'm comfortable saying things this way and you're telling me, I'm going to be uncomfortable

as I navigate this weird world. Even though in 10 years, no one will give a shit, and it would just be part of how we talk and think about things. And everything's up for me. You could take the instance of gay marriage and how much pushback there was against that. And now it's like, oh yeah. You can't even say it's political. Even an evangelical might say, oh yeah, I have a gay friend.

Yeah. Before that, you wouldn't see that. And now transgenderism is the boogie man. So, you know, there's always something. Yeah, there's like this dark, it's like this dark energy that is fun, is consistently anti-change, that it then becomes comfortable with the new change and then just directs itself at whatever the next wave coming and is enabled to just, this is why we need the philosophy to zoom out and go, guys, change is the one constant

in this universe, you gotta accept it. And if you're thinking long term, and the historians can do this, who especially think long term, and you understand that the patriarchy as historians define it, is, you know, 5,000 years old, 6,000, 7, you know here in California where I sit, 300, very old. And that we think of it as ossified. It is the system. We will return to it always.

We will not. We are, in my opinion, going through a big revolution. We've had the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, maybe a feminist revolution, we can discuss, I think so, still in process and in trying with all of these things, but now we're moving to a post-paturacal revolution to build we know not what,

and it's a very painful process. It will take centuries, and let's see if the human species can come out on the other side of it. No, that's a lovely place to end. And yeah, we just have to see where it goes. Yeah, yeah. And not be the person standing at the word history, futile yelling stop. Yeah, exactly. And as we see, all of us rushing as a human super species towards the end of the cliff is my son comes in. I, um, uh, and you and I can see that we're rushing to the end

of the cliff. And no one can get the humor in the super species to stop. It would be nice for the system to rebuild itself so that they have to stop. Agreed. Amazing. I'll let you go. This was so cool. Thank you for doing it. And, uh, it talks to stop. Agreed. Amazing. I'll let you go. This was so cool. Thank you for doing it. Thank you. It's time to talk soon.

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