The Pete Quiñones Show - Continental Philosophy and Its Origins - Episode 1-10 w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: September 6, 2025

9 Hours and 55 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.This is the first 10 episodes of our ongoing Continental Philosophy series with Thomas777. He covers Aristotle, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Grotius, and Hegel.Thomas' SubstackRadio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to Vest Havis. value. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano 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 Astral and Stormy, talking about Francis Parker Yaki, you know, Thomas mentioned after one of the episodes after we had stopped recording, you know, 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've done 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. When a discrete political philosophy branched off from that, in my opinion, that owed to the Peloponnesian War and Thucydides was the first political philosopher, in my 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 him they like to claim lucidies with the first political realist that's not true I understand why they think that but

it's not just the superficial reading of owing to is deliberate reticence, it's also a misunderstanding of the context of what the sources of what we're talking about is an intellectual tendency. And I should probably, so I'm going to begin ourselves into discussion by talking about lucidities, which is going to dovetail into a discussion of Socrates, because obviously the Peloponnesian wars the reason why Socrates was executed.

I agree with Sorrell. Socrates deserved to be executed. That's a 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 dovetail into Socrates on the next episode. But I think I should start with something of an explanation as to why political philosophy is important

and basically what the political right like how it is situated with respect to these sorts of intellectual tendencies and this gets complicated too because a lot of the later right-wing philosophers you know like Schoenhower like Inesia like

Heidegger the right-wing kind of philosophers as a late modernity. These guys are partaking of humanist conceptual orientations. They just had a completely different and radically adversarial

perspective contra the Enlightenment. And I think a lot of people have trouble making sense of that. Because in America they think that the dialectical strength, struggle is between, like, reactionaries or, like, religious people as they think of it, and secular humanists. That's not what it is. You know, discourse might be framed that way

by people who don't know any better. But I basically agree with Russell Kirk and as regards the American situation. We'll get into him too later on. And the conclusion when draw us in Kirk is that America is intellectually impoverished in some ways. That's not a punitive take. My background is really the only type of background that can be considered, like, ethnically American. I'm not trashing my own heritage. But I think what I just said is indisputable. And anybody who knows the subject matter wouldn't disagree.

There's some basic assumptions. epistemic priors, as 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 onward. You know, the recurrent kind of right-wing assumptions and predispositions, or person

forms as a belief in human imperfection. Okay. Like even true kind of secular right wingers, you know, like out and out fascists who, if not out and out atheists, 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 and kind of worldly and telluric terms,

you know, and that's arguably one of the reasons why penancies 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 cultural competence, the body politic, that wasn't for lack of ability to identify other political projects to dedicate their energies to. It's because the fallen nature of man, again, even if defined in a secularist paradigm, was something first and foremost that, you know, they, they accepted from inception. you know, owing to that, man is a social organism even more so than any other species. You know, even to a biological reductionist, 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 could be argued entirely in secular grounds as I just enumerated, you know, including but not limited to the biological facts of the kind of limited preparedness and, you know, lack of complete instinctual mechanisms for survival at scale, you know. So the right accepts that this kind of moral imperfection or this kind of maladaptive tenancy intrinsic to man, qua man, requires both certain restraints imposed at both 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, identifying 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, in lieu of the kind of 20th century biological conception. This entails a certain epistemological modesty. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range for Mentor, Leon, and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro.

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Man's hubris, both in grand terms, that the culture bearing stratum is prone to, as well as in the base terms, you know, that one of the, 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 fellows or 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, radicals, fascists, national socialists, you know, sectarian partisans, you know, originally theological view, this understanding that epistemological modesty as a restraining mechanism of hubris, but also as a correct aesthetic 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 and in his individual capacity as well as a component of a historically contingent social organism or a nation or a race.

Like a man who doesn't accept that is somebody who's worthy of contempt. And basically everybody understands that except liberals. you know, and I make this point to 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. 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 number of 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 no rebuttal or because you might as well be speaking Chinese. because to them, you know, they basically view the highest good as ceding these kinds of glandular impulses and finding ways to gratify egoistic desires often but not exclusively biological and mitigating the pain that axiomatically attends human existence. 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, we're really talking about consciousness. 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 owe to their essential role in perpetuating the survival of the social organism. You know, whether that's the race or the nation or the or the ecclesiastical community. You know, whatever the primary subject is of the particular disposition, ontological disposition. You know, so this idea, this kind of like enlightenment idea, this enlightenment prejudice that institutions that are perennial in 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 ill-liberals mean when they talk about happiness. They're talking about impulse fulfillment. That that's not a legitimate regime. That that's not how we judge institutions, according to practical reason, is whether they're making people happy or not. I mean, yes, obviously there's institutions that are destructive, but generally, though, 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 institution that encouraged men

to get drunk and beat their children. Like, how long do you think that would last? You know, I mean, like, it's that's why kind of the zine and the intellectual laziness among people who kind of abide this capital ill liberal paradigm

they say quote organized religion is bad it's like well what does they 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 abiding as much of a theological paradigm as their

ops are you know they just characterize it as grounded in this kind of faux like layman's understanding of science or a pragmatic cultivation again of of impulse fulfillment.

And it's tautological too. Because they'll claim that well if you deprive people in the capacity to fulfill these impulses, they'll become antisocial and they'll seek to sublimate in ways that harm others in 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 proponents of that perspective claim,

you know, that a reportedly scientific methodology is like the zenith 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,

it'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, a belief that there's nothing inherently immoral or value-loaded about prejudice is another consistent aspect

of the right is conceptual paradigm. Prejudice becoming this floating signifier for something bad that's very much owes to enlightenment conceptual biases. You know,

Edmund Burke, 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, needn't be availed to some punitive cross-examination, you know, or some or forced to... You catch them in the corner of your eye.

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both individually and at scale. okay so if you're going to break everything down according to the aforementioned criteria yet at the same time declare that you know there's some absolute moral imperative of non-interference with one's fellow man again we've already established that man is unusually social social for a biological organism and uh even, you know, if you're a pious believer, you acknowledge that man's at least in large part, you know, possessed of an animalistic nature of pure biology. That's not all he is, but that's substantially what he is. And 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 community structure that's going to very much be defined by their ethics and the prejudices that inform their ethics and if the only dieting 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 earner to enrich themselves at the expense of the communitarian enterprise. So axiomatically, that's self-defeating. Beyond that, too, you know, there's obviously a moral and in the secular, in the case of the secular right and aesthetical objection, you know, to the carrying 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 this 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 is he the most influential you know Hegel was obviously and Hegel was a standard bearer but people are probably more familiar with 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. There's, you know, there's this profound distinctions between and within populations. You know, yeah, there are certain universals that owe and derived 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

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 communitarian capacities, 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 identitarian criteria are some kind of obstacle to progress. That's essentially a communistic viewpoint. Now, I'd want to sound like some basic bitch, like Mr. Higseth.

I think what I'm calling, like saying communists or hiding under his bed, like some 1950s John Bircher or something, because that's fucking retarded. But I do think we can speak of a communistic mode of thought, or Jacobin, if you prefer, or, you know, there's a concrete conceptual bias that I'm describing. And, you know, I think invoking terms familiar rather than esoteric or more constructive in describing it. But, you know, that's beyond 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 a historical nature for their own sake you know it 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 when you 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 that that's the essence of the

of the political divide today you know there's only globalism and the resistance There's not like dozens of permutations of ideological commitment or conceptual models. You know, there are the globalists who prevailed in the Cold War. You know, their particular ideological paradigm of globalism prevailed. And there are people who wish to live a situation. historically and not be torn out of history and have the identitarian characteristics that constitute

their human identity ripped out of them. You know, that's what I'm 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 you know and that's

that's what the divide is it's somewhat imperfect to talk about right versus left but again for the sake of intelligibility you know I continue to invoke those signifiers but I think increasingly it's meaningless to describe it in those terms

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Okay. You know, and finally, even, you know, whether you're talking about the perspective of Thucydides and adjacent, as we'll get into, though not, though Thucydides wasn't the same, standard bearer of the position that Socrates deserve to be executed. Again, he was taciturn on those sorts of questions. But you can kind of tease out what he thought of these things, just kind of like you can with, you know, reading Machiavelli as well. But intrinsic to

rightest 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 Maras, an example. Maras was an atheist. And I think he was more of a fascist than a reactionary. Even though he held out, you know, de Meister was obviously his primary influence.

So he held out the monarchy and in particular the Roman church as essential aspects of the French as a people and you know, the and as a racial organism.

You know, that could coherently be said to exist historically. You know, so even people aren't devout Christians or Muslims. They, I believe it's basically impossible to be right-wing and be anti-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 political matters either concrete or 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 like throwing shade on that or something, obviously. But, um, a lot of people are

inculcated with this kind of deracinated view of like, oh, 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, their only experience of religion is going to some mega church, their mom dragged them to or something. You know, or when they think of religion, they think of like Joel Austin. 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 another reason, even right-wingers are critical of this kind of zealous religious enthusiasm that can be characteristic of the body politic when, you know, they're agitated by some crisis or, or some kind of historical shock, you know, even people who make a priority of criticizing that kind of plebeian impulse towards, you know, sweeping moral zealuseness as applied to public life

and sociality of 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 political organism. You know, and really the only way that can be intelligible in, you know, after the 17th century or so, you know, what's failure, obviously, is my poll star here, is through the last, ends of whatever the dominant religious theological strain has historically been within the culture. And this part takes a symbolic psychology as well and the kind of stuff that Carl Jung and Jaspers and people like that got into. That's a bit outside the 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 while 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 some like a right-ist perspective is because there's such an absolute bully pulpit. until recently for elite 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 the world was divided between competing globalisms,

even if there are even if the the per real house of the elite of the nomenclature as a house divided that will never be broadcast publicly and you know hashed out um through some sort of discursive process that the body politics is available to with some you know key participant so i realized that probably went a little longer than i expected but that that's what we're talking about we're talking about the the kind of philosophical basis,

bases of, you know, a 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, what is political philosophy? Political philosophy, and again, the origins of continental philosophy and the origins of all things that characterized the European cultural mind were derived from ancient Greece, you know, classical Greece. You know, the zenith of 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 error to both. You know, is the way to understand it. And, like I said at the outset, Thucydides was the first political philosopher.

Now, this is somewhat, to be clear, there wasn't a division, formal or conceptual in Athens between you know, oh, this is religious philosophy, this is political theory,

this is metaphysics, this is mathematics, there was just a singular philosophy. Okay. And essential to understand, 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 Thucydides wrote.

It also, the Peloponnesian War, in my opinion, from a Hegelian perspective, the Peloponnesian War was within the cultural form of classical Greece and its civilizational cycle. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design. They move you. Even before you drive.

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Liddle, more to value. That was the equivalent of what Nolty called the Iro-Paisch-Burger Creek, the European Civil War, you know, 1914 to 1945. It destroyed both Athens and Sparta. It destroyed classical Greece, as we know it, as a historical phenomenon. The Athenian assault in Sicily was Athens-Stalingrad. And we'll get into what I mean by all this in the next stuff. 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 tautological sensibility of well now we're at war it doesn't matter and the and the and the podium war went on for almost 30 years but the kind of rationalizing potology 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-egalitarian 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 weirdly conceptually illiterate about you know regime, loyal people like invoking Athens as the model and pretending that America's a democracy. I mean, you can't talk about those

I mean first and foremost to bring it back and I said I wasn't going to go on tangents and there I went 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 junk academia from like the 50s to the 80s when it became really cheap to print books and you have this kind of explosion of like academic texts, you know, kind of feed these educational curriculums all in sundry. You'll find translations where they say, oh, the Paulus 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 Paulus, but there's a permanent bureaucracy that kind of manages, you know, tensions between, you know, different blocks and the body politic and, you know, these guys are responsible for levying taxes and, you know, this guy's 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, military age, you know, served in the military at war, and was expected to die on orders when necessary. And if he lived to advanced age, you know, that commitment would end, but, you know, he'd continue to serve in the assembly.

You know, really the modern state, as we know, you can't talk about the state as we can conceptualize it. until after Westphalia, in my opinion. So, you know, you might as well be talking about, you might as well be talking about a different planet, comparing the managerial state to Athens, you know, classical Athens or Sparta. 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 compare the two things. But, excuse me. the traditional view, of course, I know that people in the comments are going to say Socrates was the first political philosopher, you know, and the first, the first, you know, the first, you know, the first, you know, work of political theory was Plato's, the Republic. Bear with me on this. I'm going somewhere with this when I identify Thucydides. Okay. Because again, what I mentioned a moment ago, Thucydides 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 Mearsheimer sort, which I think is both the midwit take, and substantively they don't really understand the kind of core of Ducydides' ontological claims, but what they are right about is that, you know, the first purely, the first pure political philosophy is the Cittany's the Peloponnesian War.

Plato, like his teacher, Socrates, and like Aristotle, who's exceeded both, they didn't have a discrete 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 Nicobachian ethics is as much a political work as the politics. But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. You know, and whether the other objection, I'm sure, would be that, well, neither Nicodicus nor Socrates, surely there was philosophers. who preceded them.

Like, yes, obviously. But, you know, the pre-Socratics didn't form, discourse for 2,000 years subsequent. You know. And by that token, you know, I mean, how, what we're getting in a pretty esoteric territory, but there may have, have been there may have been civilizations in the Spanglarian sense you know 30,000 years ago

that the record of which has been totally wiped away okay but that's not we're not not speaking absolute terms we're talking about 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 Thucydides. Now, in a similar vein, the, oh, here, actually strike that. I'm sorry, I lost my place from it.

Okay, here we go. The Peloponnesian War, the book, I mean, Thucydides' book, will run it a little way to get into the meat of it. We'll do that in the next episode. But the core of it is,

again, the Cidides was very reticent. He didn't issue forth a value judgment on the preceding 30 years. But the core kind of crux of it is that you can't understand man unless you understand human societies. Okay. And for 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 you know, the world itself or the ocean or whatever.

Okay. There wasn't even accounting for like discrete dialogues about the political or the polis. Until the Polypennesian War by Lucidities, 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 like data we can derive therein, like 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. You know, and it was considered something of a faux pot.

I mean, the problem isn't the right 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 had something of a punitive view of the military command structure and the way to wage the war or of the senior men in the political apparatus, like 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 that animate individual men within these structures.

It wouldn't really have occurred to anybody to draw like a kind of punitive portrait of the polis which nurtured them in decline. Okay?

Now Thucydides obviously, the punishment generally for a commander who lost a war was death. Okay, Thucydides was such a great man, he was spared and he was banished. Okay.

So there's some scholars who say that like, well, Cicydides 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, um, specifically in some of the dialogues, he's clearly resorting to a kind of epilogia in favor of Athens. The Spartans, interestingly,

had come to blame themselves when the war was going badly for them. And Sparta won a Puric victory, okay? And I'll get into the... I'll get into the 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 Spartans, assembly and uh they kind of like laid bare you catch them in the corner of your eye distinctive by design they move you even before you drive the new cooper plug-in hybrid range for mentor leon and terramar now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services

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Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash Northwest. That they attended to continue on their course of conquest, no matter what the human cost. owing the fact that the strong 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 to will of the gods the fullest

because what is the high is good you know, the highest good is, you know, to be remembered historically, you know. And there was some of the learned men in Sparta subsequently viewed this as a safe-facing measure by the Athenian delegation. that was an invitation to arbitration in lieu of warfare while letting the Spartan safe face because they were being de facto insulted. Ducydides says that's not true. He says these people were as obtuse as they appeared to be. At the same time, he basically presents the Spartan system as inflexible to the point that

it couldn't really respond to existential crisis. with any other paradigm other than like a directly military response which is true I think it's weird that people hold out Sparta as this like base society Sparta was all fucked up you know like it wasn't like you know all the you know how you don't read books by Spartan philosophers you want to know why because there weren't any

you know the reason why people like Hobbs I'm like Sparta is because there was something in primitive terms. The Peloponnesas was 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 21st century guys, I think their right wing would not have liked living in Sparta.

Okay. But, yeah, we're coming up about on an hour. I don't want to dive into the Peloponnesian War. We'll do that next episode. But I didn't cover them as much I want to do here. I'll try and pick up the pace next time. But yeah, I hope that people found this to be worthwhile. Awesome.

Can't wait until the next episode. 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 substack. And I'll always be on social media because you have to have a presence there. But I think social media is kind of, and especially, especially acts is kind of bullshit.

I mean, their censorious regime aside, it's just kind of a bullshit platform. But people could come to my substack. It's Real Thomas 777.7.7.com. We got a pretty active telegram channel, too, now. You can find that there. I'm 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... It's very harried. And a dear friend of mine and ours is coming to town tomorrow.

I got to meet him at the airport and ship. run them around the city and then we got symphony tickets on Saturday a bunch of the homelain faction guys and I and plus I've also got like I got some long farm stuff I got a

I really do need to complete because I owe it to other people but so now it's 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

Go to Substack. 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. Anybody who's a subscriber, a paid subscriber can access it. I think you'll enjoy it. My dear friend Rake and I were going to film another movie this summer. And as I transition to more video content,

I hope people will find it worthwhile. But that's what I got. All right. Until part two. I look forward to it. Thank you, Thomas. Yeah, thank you, ma'am. I want to welcome everyone back to the Peking Mena show.

I'm here with Thomas 777. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm knowing well. Thanks for hosting me. There's kind of a lot to address today. Part of that's my fault, knowing to how I organize my outlines in my mind and things.

So I'm going to try not to make this scatter shut. If it ends up in a way, please, I'm going to ask, I'm going to 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 reached a Zenev in terms of these grand postulates and ethical imperatives

that were presenting a challenge to what had been the consensus really since the Westphalian peace to a greater lesser degree. And these thinkers were drawing upon the pre-Socratics for a reason. Particularly if we're talking about, you know, Nietzsche Heger Schopenhauer,

I think we'd fictin or two. You know, and today, the kind of reemergence of stuff like virtue ethics that a lot of the 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 lucidity, okay?

But the way Thucydides is presented, it's misunderstood. And I don't just mean by like, I mean, there's the basic intellectual dishonesty among ideologues who are ascribed to enlightenment truisms and things. they kind of deliberately misconstrued stuff because, you know, they practice 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 academic. They just don't understand through cities. And the way they presented is this is the first example of, you know, military science and political. realism. Because Thucydides is saying that, you know, falling back upon, you know, the preeminence of Athenian virtue and this integral philosophy that therefore had been kind of the framing,

the conceptual framing device of 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 has fallen. And so is Sparta, but obviously he's concerned as Athens. And he's saying it's fallen because this is what we abandoned. I go as far to say that he blames things like the plague, which hit Athens, concomitant with the Peloponnesian War, which went on for decades, the war, I mean. And the catastrophic defeat at Sicily.

The Sicily expedition was, like, was Athens-Stalinbred. Okay. Like, history doesn't repeat itself, but there are patterns, and there are data points that we can extrapolate from

politics and political configurations, and particularly states at war. Okay, the Sicilian expedition destroyed Athens, and reticent as Thucydides 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 Thucydides was spared. You know, and it's clear to me, I think, if you, I'm not like a classics guy. I don't read Greek or anything. You know, I'm a 20th century political theory guy.

But it doesn't take, like, even a layman like me can discern Thucydides is conveying. Like, I was spared because. Employers. Reboarding your staff? Why choose? between a shop voucher or a spend anywhere card when with Options Card, you can have both. With Options Card, your team gets the best of both worlds.

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Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash northwest. You know, it was ordained for me to, you know, to tell his story for posterity, you know, and for the benefit of 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, uh, military like pericles athens you know there's some confusion especially among people who aren't classics types um we're not talking about the athens of of the iliad we're talking about pericles

evans okay that that was probably the peak of civilization you know like that's not some romantic mythos i mean that 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 an understanding of like physical science. It's not like they didn't have any understanding of, you know, the realities of, of, you know,

the cold calculus of military tactics and grand strategy. They weren't a bunch of like, they weren't a bunch of like airy romantics sitting around saying, oh, we disdain, rational understandings of military processes.

I mean, that's preposterous. Okay, if they were like that, they, I mean, nobody's like that. Okay, like even the Comanches weren't like that. I'm not the same shade of the Comanches, but they were obviously a comparatively primitive warrior tribe, you know, who prized individual valor

over, you know, complex, infantry maneuvers and things. But, you know, so I want to talk about Thucydides and continue that. You know, Thucydides thinks that it's through the lens of Sorrell,

Dorisarel, and Pratun, I'm probably biased, but they're clearly making the case that Socrates deserved to be executed, and they're getting that through from Thucydides account,

even though Thucydides doesn't say that. So there's like a lot of here. There's the fact that moderns don't present lucidity correctly. There's the fact that the ideological right is very much drawing upon classical ethical ethics to assert its legitimacy and to present its values in a way that is not just precedented historically. but that can be said to represent an ideal. It actually was extant, and that was the progenitor of, you know,

Indo-European civilization. And also, this is the starting point of political philosophy, which to me takes precedent, because that, I mean, 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, I, there's better,

there's more knowledgeable guys who can do that. Um, but that's, that's a stirring point. Um, you know, and like I said, if this becomes scattershot,

forgive me. Um, the basic, the only, the Peloponnesian War is the only book Thucydides ever wrote. And yeah, I mean, obviously it's a book about warfare and a war and a political paradigm that was there before unprecedented. But what you can extrapolate from it generally is that to understand the nature of man, you can only understand human societies.

And the only way you can really understand human societies is by stuff. studying their behavior at war. Okay. That's not some callow romanticization of war. But as Prothun pointed out later, as it's Sorrell, which is a peculiar relevance to us for reasons I just explicated, warfare is bound up with man's,

if we're talking about people capable of high culture, but warfare is bound up with man's concept, of beauty. It's bound up with his conceptions of honor. It's bound up with his understanding of remedial justice. You know, his entire kind of the prime symbols of

the culture that he that he that has nurtured him, you know, all these things. You know, that's why I'm always making the point that really 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 abject nonsense that his postulate that, you know, warfare is this rational process that is just, you know, diplomacy, but by violence. Like, that's nonsense. That's enlightenment nonsense. You know, and it's not an accident that the German contribution to that rationalist power. we don't derive from military science but

you know that um Ducydides is obviously coming from a totally different place um that Ducydides

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 doomed Sicilian expedition but he began writing

from the onset of hostilities because he said that this was this is a war unlike any that there has ever been okay he referred to it as the greatest emotion that ever afflicted or ever impacted like the Peloponesis like what that translates as in real terms is

the this is the most significant catalyst or historical um variable or like prime constellation of causes that constitutes like a prime move on agent or agent of motion that never occurred at least some of the Greeks and um you know that was that's 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 constellation of civilizations all over the planet that were, you know, on the, on the order of Greeks. I know people would posit the Chinese, but they were very different. And obviously there wasn't contact, you know, in any meaningful way. The, there was three critical variables in the Peloponnesian War that for, for,

purposes of historicism. And again, my, and I stand by this assertion, Thucydides was a proto-historicist. And in a real sense, you know, that's, that's not just, you know, extrapolating 20th century conceits to, or like Spanglarian paradigms to Thucydides. They only would understand people like Spangler is that this is what they were drawing upon. This is the intellectual heritage.

The most significant data points, as we'd think of them today, or critical battlefield events, which, as Thucydides explocates, these battlefield events were indistinguishable from political ones. I mean, part of that is a function of the the Greek mine, but part of that is because this war was nakedly political. That's why I like I compare it to the conflict cycle of 20th century Europe. You know, again, history does not repeat itself, but it should be familiar to the Spanglerians among the subs. You know, you can extrapolate 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 permutations there. Okay, but the three critical variables we can extrapolate from Cucydides' account of Pelpennesian War is the siege of Millos and the

destruction of the millions as a keyhole. Employers, rewarding your staff? Why choose between a shop voucher or a spend anywhere card when with Options card you can have both. With Options card,

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it was a critical event I'd say that it I'd say it's not unlike a lot of the excesses perpetuated by the third right although the causal nexus obviously was distinguishable

but in terms of the political significance of it and some of the repercussions it's there is there was some common there was some common proverbial territory there the disaster's assault on Sicily

which as I said in my opinion we thought of as the Athenian Stalingrad in some ways and concomitant with both of these things and the entire kind of Marais on Detra as the Athenians themselves

presented it, what presented the cause of Beli and how they rationalized their actions. This destroyed Athenian moral legitimacy. They sacrificed their core virtues in an effort to secure and consolidate power political credibility, which is key here.

They didn't take it. undertake these extreme measures and kind of openly eschew what was purportedly their own core values. And they did this in the Spartan Assembly. You know, when they were during, when, when Athenians, some of whom were residing in Sparta at that time, they went before the Spartan Assembly and they were nakedly, hostile in their apologia,

which was impressive, and this wasn't just a flex to try and deter Spartan aggression in kind. The conditions

were way beyond that. This represented a real breakdown in the internal constitution of the Athenian cultural mind. And again, these dramatic

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. You know, and the Spartans fell on their own sword and kinds. In response to that, when the Spartans directly intervened, finally, the Spartans allied, they cultivated an alliance with Persia.

And for centuries afterwards, speaking of the Spartans was to utter an obscenity because they allied with, you know, a racial enemy of all Greeks. You just don't do that. You know, and here's another parallel, in my opinion, to the European conflict paradigm of the 20th century. That's why it's ironic to me that people act like, I mean, I guess it's because of that silly movie about Thermopylae. whatever. Like people have like Sparta is this like incredible utopia. Like Sparta was a mess. You know, it, uh, it was authoritarian. It was short-sighted. It was anti-philosophical. And, um, you know, they, they became traitors to their own kind. You know, like this isn't, this isn't some, this isn't some model for high culture or,

for good a statesmanship or anything. Well, that's kind of a digression. But short story long, and I don't want to derail us of the blow-by-blow of the Peloponnesian War, but some kind of context is appropriate. Like, essentially, the Peloponnesian War basically began as, like, a war of proxies.

and the intrigues around these initial decisions were murky. And I mean, as is pretty much always the case within complex and highly scaled conflict paradigms. The Athenians were subjected to an accusation by Corinth, which was a right, naval naval power. And they were an important member of the Peloponnesian alliance, which was like the Spartan alliance. Okay. The Corinthians charged that Athens was assisting a colony revolt, Korkira, in a sea battle against them. I mean, I've been furnishing 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 believed was coming in any event owing to what amounted to an arms race throughout the Peloponnises. That's why these alliances had emerged to begin with. It's not exactly clear why the Athenians felt specifically threatened by Corinth, but Southern Thucydides 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 to lie and it's better to admit that you wish to make slaves of other Greeks

than to lie before your equals that's tautological and it's very tortured and it was very on Greek at the time. You know, but reading between the lines and Thucydides subtly makes this point to, although he doesn't break his reticent narrative voice.

What the Athenians are really saying is that there's some sort of crisis afoot that can't really be explicated, you know, and wars and rumors of war are you know being whispered by the gods and men alike you know

war arise like the seasons something apocalyptic is before us and you know fortune is a fickle mistress employers

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Find out more at airgrid.com.i. 4.S. Northwest. And she only grants her affections to, you know, the men are most willing to, 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 or not any kind of classics professor. As things deteriorated in theater and threats translated into active warning, 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-fated assault on Sicily. 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 Aegean Sea, which was actually neutral. it was the one island in accounting for the technology at the time

in operational striking distance of the enemy heartland that the Athenians didn't directly control they demanded that the Malians surrender

or face devastation. And again, these were fellow Greeks. The Malians refused to capitulate probably because they realized that they were doomed anyway and they wanted to you know

die as men. The Athenians slaughtered all of them and sold the women and children into slavery. They shocked the conscience even of the Spartans. Because, again, treating people within the culture that way, we're talking about an equivalent of the Westphalian consensus. There's certain lines you didn't cross. And that Thucydides is clear.

subtle as it may be conveyed that this is what doomed the Athenians as a race, as a people. You know, this is what brought the plague upon them, literally, the plague under their house. When they assaulted Sicily, the inhabitants of Sicily were a warrior race. You know, they were Indo-European, they weren't Greeks, but they were very closely related. Syracuse was a, the Athenians were very gravely concerned.

They were going to pivot to Sparta. They preemptively assaulted. Their assault caused them to pivot towards Sparta. the Athenians laid siege to Syracuse. This lasted for months when the Athenians set about to reconstitute or into this quagmire they'd found themselves in. The Spartans assaulted

in coordination with 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 Athenians began slaughtering each other to try and fight their way to the sea it was

a massacre that destroyed them which brings us to the case of Socrates because it again, there's nothing so simple-minded as a suggestion from Thucydides, like ironic, subtle, direct, or indirect, that Socrates somehow caused this sort of malaise and moral depravity that led to the destruction of Athenian civilization. like nor would Proudon or Sorrell suggest that.

What Socrates was, was he was the standard bearer of a way of being. You know, and he was a bad man. Okay. But more than that, he was a standard bearer of this way of being that was nakedly and catastrophic. 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 in all probability not afforded a proper defense, according to the strictures of justice, remedial justice,

that, you know, are universally accepted by men capable of 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, was Socrates given a fair trial, is if we're talking about, a hapless poor man or something accused of an infamous crime. The question is, did Socrates

deserve to die or not? And were 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

Socrates and what he was doing violence to by way of his intellect and his discourses. The way to understand what Thucydides was suggesting constituted the Athenian ethical soul. The way to understand what people like Sorrell and Pradun

and Schopenhauer and Nisha and Heidegger and all of these counter-enlightenment thinkers, like the essence of what they're talking about is really ontological. You know, that's why, 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, this talk about colloquially in, like, American media politics or something, or not, not in terms of practical reason, although it's part of it.

You know, it's a whole kind of way of life and, uh, way of being and conceptual structuring of the world. You know, the classical Athenian view, the common thread of 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 and a woman.

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Like the polis isn't the state. It's not like the government of Athens. It's not even the city or the town. The only really way to think about it in modern terms that approaches the conceptual depth of it in any way is to think of it as like the nation or like the race or the country, if you were. 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 most significantly, like, what constitutes duty? 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 familias, you know.

So, I mean, the father, the patriarch is the absolute lord of the household, but that doesn't give him par blanche to bully his wife or treat his kids like they're 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, and, you know, men and women and and the children that of their progeny, you know, they learn how to, they learn what their duties are and what constitutes a noble life as part of the polis. 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, it's not the, it's not the result of some elaborate discourse. And this isn't something we debate about. But we don't debate about whether, you know, a patriarch would be happier, like, you know, running around with his friends and, and hunting pigs. Or, you know, having a, having a bunch of different

women that he gets pregnant and we, he treats like a herm. You know, we don't argue about, like, whether women would be happier, you know, like not being subjected to the authority of the household, because that's against reason, and contradicting things derived from reason, does violence to the concept of the good

and cuts us off from it. Okay? So anybody who attacks these institutions is basically 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 polis at the epoch in which he lives and he's decided to exploit those

things owing choice 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 um as a remedial measure because the honor of the polis demands it you know and this um because undoubtedly the question will be raised and also this is part of the purpose of this series what relevance is the head of the present's day i just told you people like sorrel were the standard bearers of this notion you know and prudhun 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 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 socialism is axiomatically some sort of paradigm

of class warfare or, you know, materialist reductionism, or that it's woke. Like, that's not the case at all. 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, where 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 modern continental philosophers had considered the kind of high medieval era to be the ideal. But these

radical socialists and anarchists, These guys like Sorrell, these guys like Werner Sombart, these guys like Trinoon, they were saying, no, 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, Marx didn't invent socialism. Marx and Lenin were social, or Marx and Engels rather, forgive me, Marx and Engels were socialist because that was really the only animating paradigm

that had any momentum. You know, like, don't get me wrong, like, Das Kapital, it's incredibly internally consistent. but a lot of it is 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 on the zeitgeist and it's going to build on a discursive foundation.

You know, And I've noticed 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 being literally obtuse for the sake of brevity, but I think everybody understands what I mean. And I'm not sitting here like stumbling for socialism. I'm very much I'm very much an American and I'm kind of redneckish okay I mean kidding aside

you know I'm the kind of person Russell Kirk was talking about you know in roots of American order you know I'm the last person who's going to sit here and say that you know yeah we we really need to we really need to abide state socialism to write the ship

you know let me go vote for Bernie fucking Sanders. I mean, anybody reads my content knows it's not the way I think. But the European situation is very, very different. You know, and even if it wasn't, you know, these thinkers that were talking about who represented the counter-enlightenment in the 20th century, you know, which I think is the 20th century was the Enlightenment Enterprise at zenith,

reaching its conclusion. That's why, you know, the end of history became a rally and cried. On the many nights of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee Christmas nights at gravity. This Christmas, enjoy a truly unique night out at the Gravity Bar.

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We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i. 4.n. Northwest. Both of, you know, Anglo-American progressives and of communists. You know, because, like, their goal was to end history.

And the reaction and the revolt against that wasn't some sort of reactionary. um conservatism that was dead it was people like sirel you know and and the progeny of sirel was um musilini and edoff hitler and um and the flange and um the iron guard the iron guard is more complicated but um these these these these thinkers and these partisans who um who um who's conceptual horizon derived from these thinkers. They wanted to create an alternative modernity. You know, not,

they didn't want to turn the clock back to, you know, 1700 or something. I mean, there were people like that, but they were irrelevant by 1918. You know, that tendency died on Europe's battlefields with, you know, 10 million, um, 10 million, um,

10 million, um, European youths, you know, um, um, and that's important, you know, because like I said, I realize I'm 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, and it just becomes so much trivia or, or some, or, you know,

maybe an interesting discussion, but, you know, nevertheless, not we're notwithstanding, you know, 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, uh, this kind of paradigm of Athenian virtue, um,

was a certain anti-un intellectualism. Now, what we mean by that is just that. You know, We don't mean some hostility to learning about the world or some hostility to a moral education. But intellectualism is a discrete tenancy that, again, avails the subject matter of practical reason to some punitive cross-examination, you know, that it can't withstand. owing to the fact that, you know, these things are pre-rational judgments. And the rallying cry, particularly of Social Democrats in Vimar, was, you know, fascists are pigs and they're anti-intellectual. You know, horror of horrors, they burn books.

And that's very, very specious. And as presented, especially in the present, it's intellectually dishonest. But it's not entirely incorrect. That's not to say that people should embrace some sort of Jacobism of the right. nor is it to say again that you know Pericles Athens

was some kind of combination of a weight Rome and and their 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, is as bad as

sentimentalizing them. You know, both do violence to the practical reason. You know, and reason Logos isn't rationality or rationalism. In some ways, it's the opposite of that. 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 or either. It's not some mechanism of social planning. 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 isn't taken.

of realizing justice. Justice is implicitly sanguinary. 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 in a literal sense anymore, you know, because that's not a subject matter. He can apprehend. And that's also not what justice is. You know, 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 that people are such and such percentage less likely to do bad things. That's not what justice is. That's some sort of social planning that partakes of some like loose conscience. concept of remedial measures for the sake of, you know, sustaining some sort of base stability in a highly scaled political order where the moral consensus is abstracted from concrete things, either owing to historical accident or ideological imperative or the sheer scale of government and the premise of its authority

or some conspiracy of all three but 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 medieval Europe or

early show of Japan you know the kind of privilege that no woman had to demand satisfaction from somebody who offends against him or his family or you know the order that he belongs to

um There's a totally different thing from punishing a healer to who steals something. Or, you know, healing somebody into court doesn't pay their taxes. Or, you know, in the case of something that's axiomatically literally sad. sanguinary. 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 the likelihood of violent retribution outside of a legal code that itself is devised to guarantee predictability of outcomes.

You know, and the rebuttal 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 discreet population of people who he was bound to by things like tribal allegiance and... On the many nights of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee Christmas nights at Gravity. This Christmas, enjoy a truly unique night out at the Gravity Bar. Savour festive bites from Big Fan Bell,

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Get the facts be drinkaware, visit drinkaware.comer. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash northwest. That's also like

the ultimate and nobles oblige, you know, so um, it's not, um, it's not actually a rebuttal, 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, I was going to get in the trial of socrates itself and that's going to take a long time.

Yeah, sounds good. Sounds good. Tell people now where they can, they can find you since you've been banished off of X for the 25th time. Yeah. X is shitty, man, and it's stupid. It's not even, 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 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, I don't 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 mean, they always terrorize me. but aside from notwithstanding that. But the best place to find me, my home online is Substack,

which I think Substack really is a good platform. I actually don't ever violate TOS any of these platforms. So, I mean, it's not, but they never threaten me or try and take away my ability to reach, you know, my friends and stuff on Substack. but that's where my that's where a lot of my longer form stuff is that's where the podcast is that's where like all kinds of shit is and we got pretty active shit

so um it's real Thomas 7777 that's subsect dot com I set up a Discord server and the fellas and females they they made it like really pop so that's that's going really well

I mean like I said not because of me it's because of 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 at $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 $2.99 at a time

but um the Discord server you can you can get a link on the substack um and uh we got that's been very active I'm gonna start This past week, I had some of our comrades in town, and I was just really busy. But this week, I'm going to get more active on Discord and start experimenting with live streams and stuff. But we got a T-Gram channel, Thomas Graham, 777, number 7, HMAS, gram, 777. You can get the link there through the substack as well, but it's easy to find. if you just search for it.

I'm also on Instagram, you know, but that's... I'm changing by necessity kind of the way I can figure my content. So just like, bear with me, but you'll always be able to find me on substack. I do 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 me. But, yeah, that's... 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 until part three. Thank you. That's great.

Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekino 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, not just because it's, a major point of analysis in Thucydides. And, 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 polis. You know, and like we established, there wasn't the distinction between civil society and the political organism. Inflation pushes up building costs, so it's important to review your home insurance cover to make sure you have the right cover for your needs. Under-insurance happens where there's a difference between the value of your cover and the cost of repairing damage or replacing contents. It's a risk you can avoid.

Review your home insurance policy regularly. visit understandinginsurance. I.E. forward slash under insurance. Brought to you by Insurance Ireland. Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person.

So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity. supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid. a.e. forward slash northwest. In Athens, and nor was there nor was there an Athenian state, as we think of it.

Civil society was the state. You know, um, and, uh, that's something that's misconstrued quite, 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 integrity of what's being conveyed. But something that is of interest, I believe, to the subs, is what sort of the canon is of the radical right. and in dialectical terms how these postulates were arrived at you know and the trial of Socrates

is kind of the seminal point of origin you know some Higalians would disagree with that as would a lot of people who are kind of scholars of the deep lore of people like Ficta and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. But I stand by that position, you know, and particularly because, you know, the starting point of philosophy in the Western Canada, as we know it is Socrates, so the fact that this man was executed, like, you know, even if you reject the inferences I draw from that, whether anybody else does,

you really can't get away from discussing the fact that, you know, the man was murdered, you know, in an official capacity, you know, and George Sorrell, who I think is fundamentally important, I mean, I think it's essential. In conceptual terms, I think Sorrel and de Maestra are like the real, along with Heidegger, I like the essential theorists of the ideological right. And of course, that's something that separates people so 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 would be in order to talk about Russell Kirk. But, you know, I think the point again and again, I've written extensively on this, that, like, when you're talking about the radical right, when you're talking about the revolutionary imperatives that, uh, We're part of the causal nexus of, you know, the European Civil War in the 20th century. You're talking about people who 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 Sorrell's description of what happened at Socrates' trust. while 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. And people who find some of these points of emphasis familiar, that's why they will. Okay.

And again, I don't claim to be some classical scholar. You know, 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 long past, that was like in college. But, you know, just for context so that, you know, people don't get some sort of idea that I'm trying to punch above my weight and suggest that I'm an expert. in an ancient philosophy, because I never purport to be. But there's a basic misunderstanding in what the people either view

as being somehow scapegoated by a regime that could no longer stand on its own purported core values or a kind of hostility to the intelligence. and obviously a lot of like capital L liberals as a sort of like a favorite sort of shibboleth there's is oh there's this brutish militarist regime and they they were just scapegoating intellectuals who of course were their natural betters it's the wrong way to understand it for a lot of reasons and you know Athens underwent this fundamental sociological change in a very punctuated way you know and the goal what was viewed as a golden age of Athens and kind of like

Greek life really had nothing in common in terms of the social stratum with the Athens that lost, the waged and 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, you know, like

women and children should have some saying 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, conservative. pretending that they're sort of like race-blind managerial ideology where there's this kind of fetishization of procedures is something like legacy of the Athenian culture. That's ridiculous. You know, 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 lot of demos. A demos is a people. And the way to think of it is as a nation, you know, or like a tribe. It doesn't, it's not, it's not a synonym for humans. You know, and democracy doesn't mean, like,

random people voting. And it doesn't describe some procedure. You know, so there could never, be like a quote egalitarian 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 that's an ontological absurdity or more concisely it's a logical fallacy but anyway the conventional education in Athens

it was preparation for war okay it's not to say that Athens or like their Spartan cousins, they didn't view like the primary they didn't, they didn't believe that like the wellspring of the good came from martial activities.

They didn't or anything like that, you know, and it's not like Athenian sociology was exclusively tailored towards, you know, preparation for war, but in psychological terms, what was viewed as the good was what was most

virtuous, what was most virtuous, was what was heroic and obviously you know the most kind of 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 you know the women who manage the household and the men who guard and serve and defend the planet rich the palace you're going to you're going to teach some things like Homeric epics you know you're going to

teach up stories about, you know, why you should be patriotic and be heroic and why you should stand by your people and things like that. This wasn't 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. You know, that's part of the whole point. You know, and this intellectual culture that people associate with the lyceum and everything that did not exist yet on the whole um athens and its cultural zenith in terms of the way the athenians thought about themselves inflation pushes up building costs so it's important to review your home insurance cover to make sure you have the right cover for your needs under insurance happens where there's a difference

between the value of your cover and the cost of repairing damage or replacing contents. It's a risk you can avoid. Review your home insurance policy regularly. For more, visit Understandinginsurance.I.E. forward slash under insurance. Brought to you by Insurance Ireland. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans.

Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.com.i.4 slash Northwest. You know, it didn't have an intellectual culture. And nor did it really have a bourgeoisie. Something else to consider, I'll give this in a minute. By the time of the Peloponnesian War,

you had this bifurcated sociology in Athens. For the first time, you had actual oligarchs who had become very, very rich, this kind of business class of merchants, you know, who profited very much from the empire, and, you know, by the ability to access things that were rare, you know, in the, in the, in the, the in the paulus you know who they who they which they could then you know curate and sell at immense profits you know when you had you had this intellectual cast um at which socrates was kind of the

center you know of men who kind of like looked down on who view themselves as superior to the hoi poloi and kind of look down on like the yeoman farmer warriors is is essentially you know inferiors and 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

a in apocal terms it was kind of an issue of first impression that hadn't existed before you know and obviously Marxist's historiography it was one of the things that Sorrell was responding to viewed this as sort of like

the first emergence of like a of like a primitive class consciousness, but not primitive in terms of the cultural nuances of Athens, but primitive in terms of the sociological architecture, which, you know, obviously compared to 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 murderousogities, it just abused themselves with this idea, that, you know, figures like Socrates, which is this kind of like perennial feature in Athens, and the Athenians all just, you know, started acting like a bunch of mean reactionaries and decided to go after the intelligentsia, which is kind of like the dummy court history view of it. The, uh, one of the things that made Athens sort of first among the Greeks, the, uh, the, the, the power political rival, but also the sort of absolute enemical 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 Polynesian War, the Spartans made. of Fausty impact with the Persians. And for centuries subsequent, like I said, Sparta was a dirty word. You didn't even mention Sparta. That's how much disgust people had for them.

Because they were literally race traders. You know, the decision between hostas and anymachus, you know, how you treat people within the culture and within the race, and the way you treat enemies from without is totally different. And obviously it's a parallel there in the Westphalian paradigm. And they should be instinctive. But that said, the Athenians have proved that they alone, they had the necessary power and power projection ability and sophistication in military science. 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. Okay. And people forget, too, like, balzy and heroic as the last stand at Thermopyla 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 where, like, win-loss ratio is sort of the end-all, be-all of how you adjudicate Marshall, valor, or even aptitude. But in a very pragmatic power political sense, the fact that the Athenians were the counterweight to the Persian Empire, it afforded them a certain clout. If you require a historical metaphor, it's why a lot of people who otherwise despise the American system nevertheless joined the alliance during the Cold War because the Soviet Union was dominating this planet.

and that's an arguable, 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 was clear in, you know, in Thucydides' own take, and Sorrel acknowledges this too.

Like, the trial of solidarity, it was incredibly demagogic. It was basically the case in chief against him, it was polemical slander and sort of holding forth by his accusers in a way that was offensive to any rational understanding of due process. But again, that'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, hailed into court, and put in the ultimate penal jeopardy. That's not what we're talking about. He was a stand-in for a moral sickness and cultural decrepitude. that had taken root in Athens, and he was the standard bearer of this conceptual horizon that approximately caused the then current dilemma.

You know, that means that he can't be said to be innocent. even if you you know and you know even if you hold out Plato and obviously Plato along with their

Aristophanes are the only real sources of our of our knowledge for aristocratic teachings people generally rely on xenophon and his description of the paradigm between old Athens and, you know, the Athens that essentially ended with its defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Xenophon was a student of Socrates, but he wasn't prone to the almost kind of hegiographies that Plato was, even in his critical treatments.

of the man. With Xenophon, Xenophon's big contrast was he said, look, he's like in Homeric Athens. I mean, if we can think of it that way, there was 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 Zianovon posited that, well, the way these men manage 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 learned what it is to be heroic so there was a practical aspect to this sort of civic education in the school of life in 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 emergent. No, it was very clear of going

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Get the facts. Be drinkaware. Visit drinkaware. That these were 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 gammies together to make children and then it wasn't just you know okay well this this keeps women from ending up in difficulties and it keeps men from hacking like savages there's none of that okay it was an acknowledgement of those things but that's because the ultimate good is virtue tending towards the heroic and what derives from hero of things are like lesser but no less significant goods that allow us to live like a piece of bowl of things. civilized life, you know, peaceability 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 Socratic methodology and the substance of his paradigms to a punitive critique. So Xenophon's Economicus can be viewed as kind of the seminal statement. It's kind of like the, although obviously Xenophon was a student of Socrates, he's writing about pre-Socratic virtues.

So bear with me. Xenophon's Economicus is really sort of the pre-Socratic 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, or the exposition, rather, it draws a parallel between literally the economics of the home and of labor and of warfare, which makes each, you know, kind of, They turn 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 if they lived in more mature years to lead a squad.

some might be suited to, you know, the command befitting a general. But nevertheless, like the stuff of virtue is learning there to command by habit and by obedience before one develops the cultivation and the wisdom and the seniority to act in a command role. you know and this is this is the this is the stuff of a correct education and uh 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 um this also this uh 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 try and cultivate that on themselves. So this in turn then becomes like the building blocks of what facilitates truly heroic action. You know, and heroism is,

partakes off and derives from and also makes possible, you know, the highest virtue. So there's this sort of organic harmonious feedback loop ideally to everything people do in their lives and labors 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 simpletons 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 just kind of like cast consciousness within the Paulists.

And once those things 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 cloistered 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. We've got a business class who says, like, well, you know, the soldiery are basically a bunch of dumb animals who are only 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 largesse because we're the ones who, you know, we're the ones who provide the wealth and the capital, you know, to sustain the Athenian way of 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 and they can't be denied. And now to be clear, nobody, not xenophon himself, not Sorrell, not Thucydides, nobody was claiming that, like, well, we existed in this kind of, we existed kind of amid this like cultural zenith. and then Socrates, the propaganda is subverted all of this and created these fractures within the organ, social organ, and the polis. No. Sorrel went out of his way to acknowledge that the seed of these things, the seeds of Athenian demise, had been sown 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 tenancy.

historical process, even if for no other reason then to guard the record for posterity that the Athenians were aware of what had generated their own undoing. And being a highly literate people whose understanding of historical processes were quite have been different than moderns like Hegel. They nevertheless understood that virtue really, however significant it may be in the moment, obviously, and those who directly partake of it and witness it, you know, it's really only as, um, it's really only as powerful as its ability to be conveyed over a chasm of time by deliberate, documentation for posterity.

You know, um, 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 virtue is conveyed, okay, by example, but where do people derive that example from? Well, they derive it from stuff like Homer. So, yes,

that's taught logical, but it also is internally logical. Um, so the way they're understand Socrates as the patron saint of intellectuals. If you want to put a spit on it to make it intelligible to, you know, modern minds. At the end of the day, Sadrides 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 rote biological process is important. You know, if the polis is like an organism, This is the equivalent of, 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, for these things in equal measure, you know, that does violence to the entire cultural enterprise that, you know, had been curated over millennium. You know, so when you look at it like this, like all things fit. I mean, warfare basically, you know, again, it's kind of like a matter of rote pragmatism, you know, heterosexual love is basically just, you know, a kind of

wrote physical act necessary for procreation. You know, in harmony within the household, again, too, is just sort of like, you know, something that lesser men can find satisfaction from in and of itself. You know, this is an example of kind of like early, like, monasticity. although obviously like the conceptual and the literal vocabulary to you know structure it that way didn't exist yet but um you know much as uh socrates admonished his students not to you know cross their quote you know cross their arms and laugh at the world he he did it's axiomatic that what the good is is, according to Socrates, is to withdraw from the world as much as possible and be aloof.

You know? And, okay, the rebuttal to that, and Socrates's own 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 who 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 to the policy. He understands why he can't just withdraw from those things. It's like, okay, but when you cultivate this sort of sense of

curated superiority in these men, they're not going to regulate themselves in that way. way. There's a handful who are who are 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 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 for the sake of like hanging around

in the gym all day and 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, I'm a superior man to these dumb soldier, yeomanry types as well as these vulgar businessmen. But, you know what? I'm going to spend my time, you know, discoursing with Socrates. and with my peers, or 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

to, like, pick on people or something. I understand why guys do that. But, you know, um, it's, uh, I think it's important and invader people in a way they can understand, especially within a present context, how things that otherwise would be very worthwhile pursuits of self-improvement, it can become something that's very destructive, you know, 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 that's the wrong way to look at it

I mean in part like yeah it was but you know Klausowitz very much derived from that same tradition and I mean I've made the point that not accidentally that's really the only Prussian contribution to the Enlightenment

enterprise to such a deliberate degree, but this idea that, well, military science, it's basically the science of phalanx 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 abide from a scientific perspective.

And we know now that, you know, warfare is this rational process that, you know, we implement when diplomacy fails in order to force certain outcomes according to, you know, this quantifiable paradigm. You know, that's, um, that leaves the pretty debased, debased outcomes, you know, and I'm not some kind of peace, 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, the nutrition strategy, where you're literally calculated dead people as an input in order to devise like a victory metric. Well, this derives from that kind of thinking, that whole modality. it reduces life to something that at scale in relative or absolute terms is very grotesque, you know. And did people like Sorrell and even, you know, contemporaries of these events in question,

or at least men who are habituated into the culture that, was the progenitor of these things, you know, like Xenophon and like Thucydides. Did they have an idealized view of these things? Yeah, they probably did. But again, I'd posit, and they probably would too, those among them who were aware enough to do so, that, you know, you need,

kinds of ethical poll stars and this kind of enduring model of what is virtuous in order to even devise you know some ideal concept of the Paulus you know and that really is what it was to be Greek you know it it wasn't and you know and again like this the concept of a of the human, there's not really an adequate way to translate it in a contemporary vernacular, but the imperfect way to think about it is that like an

integral soul that essentially is the wellspring of all human activity. This can't be bifurcated or understood to be the product of discrete 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 know, so to do violence to that is to essentially do violence to the possibility of virtue itself. And again, that that's not something that can be singularly blamed on Socrates, 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's traditionally understood is the sort of symbolic logic that

attends a human sacrifice. And, you know, by executing the man, assuming it's for a political reason, it's because you repudiating what he's the standard bearer of. It's not because you'll hold him 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. justice, 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 Chauvin to prison, because he's some stand-in for this, like, this kind of like pretend archetype of racial prejudice, which in their secular humanist 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

victim population that 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 is sent to

for life that they view it as like cathartic. You know, and again, that's like, that's like far, far more debased than the treatment as afforded Saudis. 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 sorries for no reason. It's like, you fuckers do this all the time. You do it in the most childlike stupid way.

That was polemic on. I said I wouldn't do that. But I think it's, I think it was important to convey. Um, where were we? Oh, um, yeah. And, um, you know, intrinsic to, uh, intrinsic to, to, to all of this, I mean, if you account for the fact, um, that literally the government of the polis, the, the men who had at the assembly, they were, you know, the adult male citizens who constituted the yeomanry in, uh,

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 Purrously idealized terms But who also like had You know kind of like modest needs and ambitions you know, the economics, as xenophon called it, of the household and thus of the battlefield,

both of which are schools of command. You know, that leaves a virtue in politics. If you replace those men with either oligarchs or these aloof intellectuals of the kind who surrounded Socrates you know

what kinds of outcomes you're going to have you know you're going to have you're going to have people 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 progress on an abacus, quite literally. And in 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. Either way,

you're talking about a hostile elite. And even if you weren't, philosophers and oligarchs can't, they can't take you to war and win. And even the war is you are doomed to lose along to the fickleness of fortune, material conditions or anything else, but

these are not men who are going to cultivate heroism nor be able to properly document the emergence of said heroism for posterity

you know and thus you're really talking on an emergent political class or cast that in categorical terms is precluded from acting virtuously and that's totally across purposes

with the classical notion of statecraft you know and because intrinsic to as I as we talked about the kind of the new um dynamic I mean I mean that in value neutral terms

it's in terms of the the velocity of social life and in its processes you know in Socrates's life this kind of newly dynamic sociology was emergence

the guys who constituted Socrates students these guys were urban elitists you know they were the guys who they were the sons of businessmen

or they're the sons that generals or, you know, men in command authority roles who become wealthy enough so their sons could pursue leisure. You know, and these are the guys who've taken power away from or in the positive actually subverting

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 egalitarianism. You know, we're talking about people who are actually worthy of formal equality.

You know, this was a very bad thing. You know, so the natural constituency of a Socratic elite are going to be men like themselves. You know. and you know a system like that stands to reproduce itself in perpetuity

you know there was something to this too like in the I'm not suggesting that these guys were had the same level of cultivation or something obviously but when you look at the nomenclature of the Soviet Union like post-Stalin

you know when the kind of barefoot peasants, like literally he was a barefoot peasant, like Khrushchev had died off or been purged. You know, this kind of class of political managers, there's something of a parallel there. You know, these guys versus, yeah, a lot of these guys come up through design bureau was like maybe they had a good head for mathematics,

maybe they understood architecture, maybe they understood, you know, military science in the way that McNamara did, who was, you know, in large measure, their 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

owing to limited numbers of variables within human power programs and social structures that do reemerge. You know, a dedicated class of political managers I go as far as I say it

is almost axiomatically inimical to the public good. And like that's different than an aristocracy. Like aristocrats wear many hats. And they're not, they're, it's just a different situation. And,

um, the traditional complaint about aristocrats is that they're glory hounds and that they're not particularly bright. Like they're guys who excel at warfare or they're, you know, people who kind of stand on ceremony quite literally and, and, in the accoutrements of,

of, um, spectacle. and things in order to sustain their mandate. But, 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's intellectual progeny,

you know, the fact remains, Like the essential characteristics of these people are the same. You know, and again, the Alcibiades or Alcibiades, both Sorrel and Xenophon held him out. As an example, a man who could absorb Socrates' teachings, but then go back into the world, reenter his command role, and be better for it. but again

Sorrell's take is that he absented in himself before he became fully corrupted by the culture of Socrates's inner circle Zinophon suggests that he was strong enough to

take from philosophy what would lend itself you know, to the school of command that was, that's what, you know, that civic life represented for Athenian men who were capable of liberty and equality in a formal sense. But that's not realistic. You know, my layman's interpretation, and in classical studies I'm very much a layman. is it's another example of the exception proving the rule. But 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 you could. All right. Well, you got anything to promote? What do we? yeah like I said is it is a documentary up yet yeah yeah it's on my substack 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 i'll uh i'll put it back on the main page if if there's demand for it but yeah anybody anybody can access to it who's a subscriber man I'm gonna drop more video too that's one of the reason I'm going off to the West Coast not imminently but

in the next few months is to like record stuff but yeah and again I want to apologize this past week I I basically told everybody that I I mean I record a fair amount of stuff but I started feeling

I wanted to give myself kind of a break anyway, but I started feeling really lousy. So not a lot got done, and I'm not trying to be a weirdo, but I want to be accountable to people because I just do, and for a few reasons. But also, it's the subs that, like, make all this possible. So if I'm not being responsive and not dropping fresh stuff, I feel I open explanation. plus many of you are my friends. But yeah, I'm going to be dropping. Substacks, 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 Real Thomas 777.7.7.7.com. I'm on Tigram and Instagram. I got a very active Discord server now, which I'm very pleased about. And I owe the subs a great deal. too because they're the ones who 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 too sick. 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. You know, like I said, I'm kind of restructuring

my content, which is long overdue. But, yeah, that's where you can find me. I'm on Gabb, I'm on Tgram, I'm on Instagram, but yeah, my home base is subsdeck. 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 Pekina show. Thomas is here. We're going to pick up the series on Continental Philosophy, part four. Go right ahead, sir.

Yeah, I wanted to dive in today. I mean, what we're going to dive in today, too, is Plato's ill understood, ironically, because it was really the foundation of, um, of, uh, the Western canon, okay? Um, famously, the postmodernist, you know, if, you know, we're talking about, um, not, not just Nietzsche, but, you know, Heidegger Schopenhauer. Everybody, all commentator's derivative they're in of that academic or intellectual canon, you know, they famously, the famous kind of lament or critique of Plato is that Christianity is Platonism for the people. Okay.

But even that sort of pejorative is misunderstood. okay um in the case of the nicheans and nita himself it owed you the kind of nihilism that in dialectical terms you know nita believed um was uh the inevitable you know outcome of a platonic discourse other people however most notably Carl Popper, and Carl 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 accidental moniker. Carl Popper, he wrote this series of volumes called the Open Society and its enemies. That really was his kind of

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 that's one of the reasons I take 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 take exception to when people refer to the regime as being cultural Marxists. Like, they're really not. Like, do cultural Marxists exist? Like, yeah, there's a minority of

partisans who essentially abide, like, the kind of stuff that Gramsian adornal postulated. But that's not, 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 Bradstack's terms,

Carl Popper, and adjacent sympathetic, you know, philosophical systems and paradigms. And his big enemy, if you want to look at it in those terms, being reductionist for the sake of coherency and brevity. You know, he and they viewed Plato as this figure of a great, of a very destructive

tendencies, intellectually speaking. So that's something to keep in mind. I mean, there's plenty of reasons to critique Plato from the right. But, you know, a lot of people must understand things. And a lot of dilettanteish right-wingers who don't really understand the kind of discourse, intellectual discourse around Plato, they seem to really fail on this point. It's like what exactly the rightest objection is.

You know, and it's, again, it's not accidental that the left despises Platonism. And it's not just derivative of their anti-Christian posture. It's adjacent to that, but it's something discreet. And so that's part of what we're going to get into. It's probably going to take two to three episodes to fully flesh this out. But notably, classical historiography in terms of validating or authenticating, you know, statements by the putative declarant is difficult. And I'm not a classical scholar, and nor would 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. That's how what I'm here to do. Okay. So, again, and I don't purport to be a classical scholar, but there's a grand tool of 35 dialogues and 13 letters that have, at various times, been assigned to Plato as the source. Okay. Some classical scholars doubt if any of the letters counter the dialogues are 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 crux of what we're talking about substantively anyway. But the platonic dialogues

is such that there's an essential consensus, you know, and 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 Plato's dialogues are interesting because they're written as just that. They're written as dialogues. Plato never writes in his own voice. Now, there's a few ways you can interpret that. You know, you can interpret that is him sort of ironically acting as witness so that

no sort of discrete thought system could be assigned to him which I don't accept that. You can interpret it as 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 had borough witness to. 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 to, you know, the importance of posterity of, you know, ethnic, cultural, intellectual products, but also the kinds of people, the kinds of men who would be receptive to.

you know kind of a discursive process and interestingly in all the platonic dialogues he's very clear about where this is taking place in terms of venue okay this is Athens this is Socrates

pontificating you know but he there's no dates on these okay 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 accept a spengal Larian 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

I think he didn't want his dialogues to be assigned to any sort of discrete historical epoch within the broader paradigm of, you know, the the Athenian historical experience and

the Greeks were it's interesting because as Spangler himself said you know the Greeks didn't have the same sense of historical time as later Aryan derived civilizations did

specifically the Faustian civilization which is literally, you know, men against time. Spangler suggested that the prime symbol of Athenian civilization was a sensuously present individual body, like perfectly proportioned. And, you know, in one of these freezes or one of these sculptures or statuary,

you know, the figure in question is situated in high religion. belief amissed a void. You know, the immediate sort of presence of the figure in question who's symbolic of the culture that is the progenitor of him is what's most significant. You know, there's not this fixation with the past or the future. and again, I'm not a classic scholar or some sort of expert in pre-Christian metaphysics, but I do know that the Greeks had an understanding of the universe, their epistemology at grand scale,

was that, you know, reality is perennial, it has no beginning or end. you know, and this is important. It's not just a kind of trivia that is compelling or that has aesthetic sorts of, you know, qualities that lend insight into the cultural mind. This is actually important. But bringing it back a little bit to political philosophy specifically, Plato is hugely important. On account discreetly of three dialogues.

Those are the Republic, the statesmen, and the laws. The titles of which should be fairly self-explanatory. You know, arguably pretty much everything that Plato, pretty much all the dialogues that we can, according to the terms again of of commonly accepted evidentiary criteria the dialogues we can

indisputably assign to him arguably all those partake of political subject matter but those relating directly and unqualifiedly of the political or the three that I just mentioned okay

the subject matter of the republic which is most significant in terms of political ontology as well as in terms of ethics what constitutes a good society and thus you know like a good polis and again to be clear there was no concept

of state in Doric Athens you know arguably and this is about outside the scope, even the later medieval era in the early modern period,

the concept of the state, as we think of it, didn't exist. However, at least the primitive architecture in conceptual terms of it existed in the modern period. In the ancient world,

that was not even something that could be apprehended. It just simply didn't exist. Okay? and that's one of many, one of myriad reasons why it's completely misplaced when these American polls or when these sort of midwit regime adjacent academics, these people like Victor Davis Hansen, I call them venereal disease Hansen, because I think that's more appropriate.

But, like, neocons especially have like a fetish for this, like declaring that somehow they're the heirs to the Athenian tradition of state, craft or you know america is a post-93 america is the heir to this like grand philosophical tradition of government that's totally off base like arguably what they are positing is uh the core tenants of uh you know good not just good government but in ontological terms what constitutes the political arguably that's the opposite of what was being posited by by Plato but moving on

the subject matter of the republic at base is what what constitutes justice like the nature of justice the general theme is uh you know what constitutes essentially like a good society and therein you know like

what is like a good citizen you know within that society and there's various interlocutors who represent not so much crudely

drawn but kind of rigidly characterized archetypes that we can imagine populating you know Athens during the time of approximately the Peloponnesian War. Okay. It's obvious that the subject matter in sort of broad terms is how do we restore political health to the polis?

You know, and again, some people like to interpret these three aforementioned dialogues as, you know, being born of a crisis modality. I don't agree with that. Like, yes, I don't disagree that. those are the conditions from where these things were emergent, but that's not the purpose of them. You know, they're too, they're too universal in scope. I mean, universal in terms of being cross-culturally applicable or being egalitarian. I mean, that these are absolutely partialists. They're not, nobody is suggesting, not the characters within the dialogue.

nor Socrates himself, as we can interpret Socrates as sort of opinion to the pen of Plato, you know, none of them are saying, well, these are rare conditions and this is an essential sort of emergent remedy. No, they're saying that in absolute terms, what's being proposed here is, is absolute in all times and all places. The conversation in the Republic, It opens with Socrates he's talking to Cafalos. Cafalos is the kind of constant, respectable citizen of Athens. He's very, very old, he's very, very wealthy,

and he's viewed as a wise man, and he's constantly pious. He doesn't drink to excess. He's not a womanizer. He's not conspicuous with his wealth. You know, everybody knows that he's very, very rich, but, you know, he's a benevolent individual. The life he's lived, and again, he's one of the oldest men in Athens,

is a model of propriety. So, Socrates, presumably Socrates, you know, is a mastery in conceptual terms, if not in his own, if not in his own life. He has mastery of what constitutes the good, but what he can learn from Kefalo says, what is it like to be very old? You know, what does it like to have your perspective over time?

And over many phases of, as we think of it, historical development and things of this sort. So that's what Socrates could conceivably learn from him. because it's not just the role Siretys plays in the dialogues. It's not just I mean, again, a lot of people perceive this kind of like, oh, this is Plato's hegeography of Sariades.

It's not just that. I mean, yeah, obviously that's like a component of it, although I suggest it's more complex than a lot of people, including classical scholars who admittedly know more than I do in the subject matter. It's more nuanced than they allow. But Saurities is sort of the

omnipotent arbiter like in these dialogues. You know, so it's like, what could he learn from kafos? Well, Saraje 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 life. So that's what he can learn. That's the key sort of aspect of it.

But in the course of their discussion, And Caffalo's essentially declares that, well, what virtue is is always telling the truth. Okay. You know, and 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's, somebody has received from another, you know, whether we're talking about in business, in personal affairs, in war and peace, you know, and sobrily this is a rebuttal that is like, well,

telling the truth and returning another man's 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 there's times, for example, where it's necessary to, not just in the case of children or easily excitable classes of people and not just helots, it's important to invoke fictions or lies 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 whether assists 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 Gaffalo's is savaged in some basic sense, by Socrates rebuttal, Paula Marcos, who is a Gapha's 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, like if we could say that Carl Popper's punitive interpretation of of Platonism is that it's quasi-fascist in terms of its elitism.

You know, people on the other extreme, but equally prone to punitive critique to try and extrapolate these sort of like modern and postmodern characteristics to

these dialogues. And that's misguided for all kinds of reasons. We can't talk about modern political paradigms as applied to the Republic. I mean, regardless that, yes, the Blenic Dialogues are the progenitor of political theory in the West, but that's not what I'm talking about. You know, and it should be clear that, you know, nuance is what bridges the ancient past to the contemporary or, modern conditions. Paul Margoe says that

what constitutes the good in absolute terms is that which is salutary. Okay? Not only to the giver 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 salutary and that it constitutes a reciprocal goodness, you know, what that equates to in practical terms is that every man should only own or control what is like fitting 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 evalation of private property.

You know, and there needs to be some arbiter, 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 in not just a medial but spontaneous way that would assign

not just material goods but relative power of a social and political nature 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 chaos and discrete circumstance like what constitutes like an equitable distribution of these goods

you know and that 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 even within the bounded 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 communistic or fundamentally egalitarian and we'll get to that in just a second well Saturday's 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 to disregard any sort of abstract understanding of the good because yes like derivative of a 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's, analysis that of Polo Marcos from his father Kefaloz. Cafallos 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 descendants. of the man who is prone to this sort of bad action. Polon Argos displays no role in his take on this.

His view that justice must be salutary, both to the giver and the receiver, is strictly a worldly calculus. furthermore, reducing it from any sort of egalitarian paradigm that's absolutely, you know, applicable according to what is presumably universal paradigms of inequity that are common to all human societies. Polamarko's opinions tempered by the understanding that one should ultimately be guided by helping 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, you know, 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 polis. and wanting, you know, justice to be realized within that, you know, fellow-feeling community. And essentially, you know, the moral imperatives that surround these positive duties to one's friends, not only do they end at the boundaries of the Paulus,

but you have an obligation to not assist those outside the polis, you know, even if they're not enemies. So that, this is where Plato, according to people like Popper, to bring it back to the point I made a minute ago, this is the big critique of the open society. You know, I'm simplifying for the sake of brevity, and we'll get more into this as time goes on. But that's what,

being discussed. And interestingly, one would think this goes without saying, and 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 at 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 Paulus in which he was situated. I find that fascinating, and it suggests, too, that this was being written for the sake of posterity. You know, and not just immediate posterity like, well, Cyretis is not long for this earth. You know, and certainly Plato is somebody who was bearing witness to the events of the Polypenean War, and that, you know, the sort of transgressions actually perceived that led to Socrates being availed due 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 and it's not for me to say how much of this was creatively confabulated and how much was word for word what he bore witness to in terms of the testimony

of the alleged declarants. But there was an understanding that, in my opinion, that anybody would kind of come away with have to read the Republic of the posterity played out in mind was for all time and that's remarkable but um moving on sorry i'm buried under wires but uh yeah so i mean if we understand in its simplest terms um the the the just man gives to his friends what is good for them. And the

just man helps his friends himself and his polis by you know only only acting to harm those who are his enemies

in public and political terms. Socrates then, he starts invoking these beliefs and metaphors which it seems to suggest that

justice is an art, like medicine. It's not a science, there might be like scientific aspects to it. And to be clear, the way that Athenians thought about science was fundamentally different

than the way that, and in the post-enlightenment moderns do. And this is actually significant. We'll get into that moving forward. 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 about saying that what is best in absolute terms has to be a guiding imperative but at any given moment like what is best for the polis literally like the body of the

Paul is, you know, has to be diagnosed and identified and delicately remedied, depending on the circumstances. Thus, like, what is, it's not, it's not adequate to declare that justice must merely be salutary. You know, there's, there's got to be a curative and, and cultivated understanding of what, it's going to facilitate the good. You know, and obviously, too, if we're reducing this to personal criteria, which Polamargos alludes to

by virtue of the fact that he's not as sophisticated, either as his father of Ghafalo's 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 the human conditions. 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 made, and this isn't, I'm not being punitive at all, but one notices, especially among Roman Catholics, there want a lot of the time to invoking platelets, 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 Roman Catholics. I'm the sectarian minority on the ground. Like not just here, but the fellows that click up with,

you know, they're overwhelmingly Catholic onto geography, and other things. But, you know, this is this is highly significant and we'll get into we'll get into Aquinas

in coming weeks in this series and we'll get into like the tie that binds the classical to the modern and the you know the ancient heritage of of Athens to

Christiandom and Faustian civil if you will, with the caveat that, again, I'm not any kind of classical scholar or anthropologist, but 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 Palomarchos is the conclusion that, well, owing to what I just stated about Socrates' understanding of sort of the epistemic aspects of what constitutes, you know, a good citizen. really the only men who can sort of stand in the absolute judgment of the polis and sort of curate these ethical remedies at scale

are the guardians, okay? The guardians are basically the sort of philosopher kings that people bandy in colloquial terms. when discussing Plato and the Platonic ideal, that's not really the best way to think of it. Because Plato more than anybody, because he's immersed in the life of the Lyceum and whatever, like Plato doesn't,

Plato's not saying so that we can discern his own, views on on the good life and on what is politically sound. He's not saying that Socrates is the greatest man or that philosophers are the greatest of men. It's almost tantamount to 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, nature families said that, you know, the calming

redeemer would be Caesar with the soul of Christ. Okay. 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 Sorrell said was, you know, the pre-Socratic ideal in terms of, you know, what constituted good life and what constituted a civic morality.

but obviously Plato was talking about what we'd think of as a culture bearing stratum you know and that required a more complex and kind of complete understanding of you know historical phenomena and processes but you know I think and again people welcome to disagree. We're not talking about philosophy, quote, 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 people simply take the the configuration of the polis for granted and believe that justice in truly cosmic terms whether we're talking about in the midst the Peloponnesian War a bunch of Athenian assemblymen themselves the fact that, well, this is in the hands of

a fortune or the gods, or whether we're talking about you know, today where people just have this kind of faith and people have this kind of faith in like endless material prosperity whereby if uncertainty is

by way of technological innovation and the regularization 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 cows within parameters of reason even if only because you know the systems that facilitate

the affirmative prosperity you know were derivative of 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 is a very real thing. And it's not just, it's not just affluenza or the malaise of, you know, success or whatever people like to assign, whatever cause people like to assign to a, uh, um, um, crises of

morals in the modern state or as they extrapolated those same phenomenon to Asian conditions and trying to interpret what exactly was underway during the Peloponnesian war

you know this is this is fundamentally important but moving on you know socrates goes as far and again this is this is key because and this is you know again i realize i'm coming back a lot to carl popper um who was a very sinister personage but uh the key to understanding a lot of the present regime's ideological fetishes as well as its priorities

you know, Popper was famously a huge proponent of Scientism. That was the volume of the Open Society and its enemies that deals with Plato. I think it's volume two. I got

to check that. I actually have it on my bookshelf. But his big, what he viewed as this kind of big Trump card was declaring that. And he 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 plan society, if not down to the most minute, discrete detail. You know, we can basically plan an economic and sociological terms, you know, to eliminate the most egregious injustices. And, you know, one of the reasons why all these people like Plato and all these Christians and all these, you know,

conservatives, one of the reasons why, you know, they were unable to improve upon, you know, human well-being was because they were operating according to myths that weren't falsifiable. And this was a lot this was what Renee Geone was talking about when you talked about Scientism you know people like Popper weren't talking about science

they were talking about beliefs and these sort of mythological postulates which is ironic because their whole their whole raison d'etro 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 there,

you know, the adherence of this declare that, well, the only way of knowing is truly, you know, the, the, the methodology of science and anything outside of that, well, you're drawing upon things other than bare

matter, you know, which again, the existence which can't be proven according to these criteria that I or we have assigned as the only way of acquiring absolute knowledge. So, you know, 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 there's so many problems with that. It's almost difficult

to discern where to begin. It's like playing one of the old 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, but people find that

superficially really persuasive. That is changing now, I might add. And I'm the first to point out that anybody anybody who goes around saying like oh well

religion is dead and now you know we understand that these progressive poshals were correct people like that are totally out of touch I mean just like an objective terms either spent all their time on Reddit or they haven't read a book

of fresh vintage in the last 25 years like nobody believes in that anymore and that's dead. Like whether anybody likes that or not, that's totally dead. Like the current paradigm, I mean, first of all,

one of the things that shocked everybody as the Cold War was ending was that it was, it was nakedly theological imperatives that were taking down the socialist community of nations, as they called themselves. But the way to understand

things these days amidst the globalism aside from the fact that the primary loci resistance are in places that are animated by

theological principles like for better or worse whatever many things about this the Russian Federation they view themselves as being a vanguard of Christiandom against a profoundly evil secularism. You know, ditto

like Darryl Islam, okay? Like, this is reality. Whatever people think about either the you know, discrete belief systems that predominate in some of these territories or what do people think about religion generally?

Like, this is reality. Anybody doesn't understand that, doesn't understand the last 40 years in terms of world historical phenomenon. But, um, you know, that's 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 because that's fundamentally, you know, a highly sophisticated theological worldview. And the syncretism of Christianity of the kind that, you know, the Mervorindians in the early, I'm talking 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, where we're more theologically sound or sophisticated than the early church fathers. But there's a reason why there was this sort of ready acceptance of the syncretism between

Platonism and the early Roman church. You know, and it wasn't just a matter of men who coveted power and the ability to sort of mold like an nascent political culture that spanned literally a continent into you know something that was coherent and in line with their own peculiar

vision of what constituted you know the good in human life at organizational scale you know it was way more historically situated than that

and frankly profound but yeah it looks like we're at right about an hour man if that was rambly forgive me like it's there's a lot here and we'll I'll be more focused

in the next episode and we'll get into kind of more of what's significant about Plato especially as we're regards, you know, the, the Christianization of the continent without getting ahead of ourselves. But yeah, we'll finish up Plato next time, man. I hope this wasn't too scattershot.

No, no. Please tell everybody where they can find you. Did you, have you had another incident with another platform? I mean, Discord nuked us. I kind of anticipated that. The Discord thing was an experiment. Like, I know Discord's run by, like, gay furries and stuff. Like, I, but I, I, I want to find us a short form, like, chat home where I can also, like, live stream.

Discord's kind of the, the normy sort of a 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 going to continue with our, our Saturday night streams. This Saturday, I'm probably just going to stream from Substack, and I'll shout it out tomorrow when I decide where I'm going to shout it out from. But I've got a bunch of the fellas I've been suggesting other platforms, alternative to Discord, where the hosting isn't as problematic in terms of censorious actors and what have you. Well, I'll have this figured out in the next several days. I had a busy week, like preparing for the OGC, kind of believe, and, you know, working on my manuscript and other things. But I promise I'll have it figured out by this weekend in a semi-permanent capacity.

But, yeah, the best place to find me. My online home is Substack. It's Real Thomas 7777.7.7.com. That's what the podcast is. That's what a lot of, like, my short-to-medium-length form stuff is. you know, I'm on, I'm on Instagram. I'm, uh, you know, um, our friends like, like Pete here and, and like Jay Burton, they're kind of to offer me a platform regularly, but, you know, I've got my own podcast and

I, 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 for giving 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, will, we'll be more accessible. All right. Until part five.

Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekinez show. We're here for part five, Continental Philosophy. Thomas, what's happening? How you doing, man? I'm doing okay. Thanks for hosting me. I realize that literally the subject of this series is

continental philosophy, like a capital C, but I'm going to have to spend time with Thomas Hobbs. First of all, that Hobbs is in dialogue with the continental tradition, and he's a counterpart to Machiavelli. And if you want to understand modern political philosophy, there's a really good book that Leo Strauss wrote on this. And Strauss's scholarship that's not of a polemical character is actually really good.

I maintain he was like an important academic, okay? But if you want to understand, one of the reasons why Carl Schmidt was so much in dialogue with Hobbs. I think of Schmidt's relationship to Hobbs as being not unlike Marx's relationship to Hegel. It's complicated. But we're going to have to talk about Hobbs and Machiavelli. And I'm going to tackle Hobbs first because, in a lot of respects, I think he's the more significant theorist, especially considering, you know, the guiding, um, guiding. ideology of the

political monoculture of globalism and Hobbes 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 chivalists you know other people view him as sort of a theorist of crisis actors neither 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 to research concentrations as 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 was a lot of common causes oblique to what was happening across the English Channel. And the ascendancy of Cromwell, Cromwell was very much a Mohammed or Adolf Hitler or Napoleon-type figure. I'd say that he was, in fact, sort of the splendid example of that archetype. I mean, 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 processes of mind. And the ongoing phenomenon of, you know, conceptual discourse that creates political reality. So we're going to dive into Hobbs. For the next, this episode on the next one, we're going to dive into Hobbs and Machiavili.

For context, too, if you read people like John Mearsheimer, these like neo-realist types, they claim, like I said, at the outset of this series, that people like Thucydides, you know, represented a tendency towards realism. That's nonsense. However, in the case of Hobbs, who they like to claim as well, it's somewhat less off base, there's something to that. Hobbs 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 Hobbs 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, you know, the scientific revolution and, you know, the proto-enlightenment and beyond was that general knowledge, what they're to Ford had been considered general knowledge was bifurcating, but it hadn't fully been, the verbal schisms hadn't fully ossified yet.

So basically, when Hobbs says geometry, he's talking about mathematics, theoretical and practical, and he's talking about physics. Okay. Hobbs is in punitive 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 Hobbs viewed his mandate as well as his mission, was to cultivate a scientific basis of political and ethical philosophy. And this was the first time anybody had really attempted this. Okay. Now, that's got certain implications, not the least of which is that it essentially calls for extricating any ambition to perfect a man or to force political ethics to comport with what is otherwise understood to be a virtuous soul and conduct derived there.

in, 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 reason within any, like, man capable of it, is that, you know, he's acting in his own self-interest. And that doesn't mean he doesn't have any attack. attachments or or

genuine feelings born of passions, not reason but it means that when he acts politically and civically in total sociological terms and he actually takes is basically self-interested

and what he purports to be a reciprocal abiding of duties it more derives from you know a kind of a 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 in linear terms. Obviously, the challenge therein, vis-à-vis that first postulate, how to cultivate and curate a scientific basis of political philophobes. There's got to be some sort of basis for civic society that is permanent

that can coexist with that first postulate 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 who constantly the body polypolling. and make no mistake, and Hobbs's view they are atomized individuals in their natural state. Some 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 Hobbs rationalizes what I just said and the way he approaches that paradigm of how to reconcile these apparently conflicting tendencies is by modeling sovereign authority and the essential characteristics of sovereignty on a kind of systemic discourse. Now, to Hobbs, 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 of tethering the practical and theoretical. and any theory of statecraft or ethical philosophy, he considered it a vital imperative that it comport essentially splendidly with praxis. Okay. This is very much at odds with, in some ways, this is the opposite of the classical orientation. And Machiavelli made that same point, although his purposes were totally different.

then he was addressing a totally different audience, which is significant. It's not, it's in essential ways. In other words, I was looking for the right way to describe this. Machiavelli, he viewed the Aristotelian model as aiming to 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 proto-analytic philosophy, and Hobbes wasn't concerned with whether it was too lofty ambition.

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 use is it? You know, it's, to him, it would be like arrewing over like the aesthetic beauty of numbers or something in lieu of actually devising, you know, formulas that can create a bridge or a house

that, you know, can stand up to weathering tensions and things like that. You know, in some ways, I'd go as far as to say Hobbs' paradigm is substantially more brutal than that of Machiavelli. And I think people don't understand that because in their view, like, they don't understand that the kind of core philosophical curriculum of progressivism is actually a very brutal ideology. I'd go as far as to say it's anti-human. Okay, it's not People have this idea They're like, oh, that's like liberal stuff, so which's like for

Pussy's or something? Yeah, there's definitely an aspect of it, especially considering we live in an age of conceptual illiteracy. But the original progressives, the kind of original enlightenment utopian types,

they have no problem with killing huge numbers of people in order to realize the supposedly sort of like perfect geometry of the political you know and that's there's something pretty monstrous about that just as an aside

but um you know it's also too it's not Hobbs is credited with this egalitarianism and make no mistake like contra Aristotle he completely rejected the ontology of you know

men who were like naturally fit to man and the natural slave. But he didn't do that because he thought that there was equal dignity to like all people. He said that because he said there's a basic equality within violence. Okay, because any man can kill another man, you know, if he's cunning enough,

and if he's ruthless enough, and if he can corral enough allies for the immediate task at hand, like 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. It's nothing to do with, like, the intrinsic dignity of the human being or anything

like that. Francis Bacon echoes some of this, or it's echoed in both bodies of work. Like Bacon claim that Aristotelian, um, politics was imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealth. You know, so there's a self-conced repudiation of the classical view of the political. You know, but 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 there to four had been, you know, the, the basic understanding of

human nature and his intrinsic sociality and him being born to an identitarian structure, him being born to a polis 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 Habeesian 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 therein, but this has nothing to do with identifying. the proximate or ultimate cause is a human behavior, or identifying what the sources are of passions that translate to violence of a political nature. You know, um, so what Hobbes suggests in lieu of, you know, both what Plato did in the Republic as well as what Aristotle did in the Nicomacian,

Hockey and 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, individual. or collectively. One of those ways is what Hobbs called synthetically, which in brass text terms 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 resolutive. Or in plain English, analytical. Which

is basically deductive. Okay? And this becomes important. For reasons 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. Hobbs and say there are no metaphysical aspects there. You know, the first principles of all things are defined 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 Hobbs was saying that there's not such a thing as a good domain of mind, but he's saying that we're, you know, again, the, the axis 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 to the human condition. And the political is always the business of war and peace. It's not, you know, it's not how to make men better. it's not how to identify what virtue is 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 energies constructively and while doing that how to prevent

the deterioration into a kind of superficially dignified brutishness that simply dresses up nakedly

ambitious violence as some sort of noble endeavor and how do we accomplish these things well inculcating people

with a kind of civic responsibility that makes active citizenship into something that is beneficial to all the individuals who collect that we make up the body politic. Well, at the same time, creating a strong enough civic apparatus that can fend off enemies from without. We haven't even gotten to how this translates to preferiteness and waging war against or deterring external enemies. We're only talking about essentially how to. how to manage civil society and generate what we know of as, you know, a functioning state, where, you know, non-aggression is what reigns between the otherwise animized individuals who constantly

the body politic. We haven't even gotten to, you know, questions beyond that. So this is complicated, but it is internally logical, even if one, rejects it outright. You know, the, and of course, there's a, what I think of as, if we can think of, to draw an impregnology,

if we're going to think of Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence as kind of his counterpart to cons category, empirical imperative. Kind of how Babesian counterpart to both would be or rather more perfectly

Hobbs's version of I think therefore I am. If it was put to Hobbs or if this paradigm was challenged by well how can you begin to speculate about the passions of other men and what concepts of things Hobbs would say well any

every rational man possesses passions of one sort or another, he can identify what, you know, within the parameters, the boundary 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 caste 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 Habeasian description of the state of nature. You know, Schmidt, viewed the first community as the folk community. That's the pre-rational

identitarian criteria. However, you know, Schmidt also said that Hobbs was the greatest political scientists who ever lived. You know, and I don't totally disagree. You know, so this is important. And I'll also add, and I realize I'm jumping around a bit, one of the things that the kind of current I

sort of midwit political science academy is right about two you know during the Cold War a lot of attention was paid to Hobbs especially what he 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 who's learned in this subject matter who picks up

Leviathan it'll start to jump out at them where they've seen these where they've seen these claims and posulates and these analogies pop up again and again you know and all kinds of discrete sources

so it's not it's not just a matter of kind of development a conceptual picture or the history of political theory or something it's important to read hobbs for all kinds of reasons um so you know and i go as far to say two and i'll move on in a minute um anybody who reads my stuff i think discerns that 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 Habezian claim that politics is basically a subcategory of geometry, you know, and is a science and to 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 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 Habesian paradigm is the, that's the ultimate objective of political science.

You know, and arguably of analytic philosophy in a 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 idiosyncrasy of 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 navel-gazing. That's not, you know, positing oneself at the center of things.

There'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 or whether you like the Las Vegas Raiders. 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 Hobbs from contemporary liberals that they don't understand this. You know, those they did in the past outright rejected that, but I, you know, that distinction has been abolished.

So there's that too. Hobbs 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 Hobbs 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-ego-id. Okay. But Aristotle essentially abided that,

despite, you know, his political ontology basically deviating from the Platonist model. And this was the classical understanding, you know, and Hobbs says, no, 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 pre-rationality them. You know, now, of course, man being capable of reason, he'll devise rational ways and calculated ways to, again, like, state the hungers,

figurative and literal abhorne of these passions but the core animating principles and phenomenon are what so to speak pushes him from behind you know it these aren't 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 war

capable of sating anything on the spectrum and the litany of passions you know and obviously the consequence of this too

in political terms you know Hobbs posits that is positing rather that good and evil have nothing these are just words for what characterizes

desires and aversions 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, that's not to say there's not a narrative convention. That's not to say it's good to be needlessly violent. but Hobbs would again say

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 a political actor shows restraint is because he doesn't want to be availed to reciprocal violence

of a boundlessly uninhibited name character that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what his motives are so long as there's basic compliance with these normative strictures tailored to maintain you know

a permanent peace within the body politic which constitutes civic society you know or at least permanent as much as is feasible you know um

so subtly also, to be clear, Hobbes is structuring his arguments, at least in Leviathan. I'm not a Hobb scholar, but I've read Leviathan many times. And the structure of his argument, he's qualifiably agreeing with the Socratic and the Thomas view, absolute view, that the character of political life it 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 strictures that facilitate peaceable living, and the non-aggression pact between individuals and the body politic, any given man capable of reason, can divinate that this is the best way to satisfy the demands and the passions, which are pre-rational in nature, and which have a greater power to animate the human organism than any other factors. And as a consequence of that, we can also extrapolate what the, you know, what the, you know, 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 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 imminent 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 Hobbs understanding the state apparatus and sovereignty is 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 symbolic psychological aspect of how man structures his concept of authority

and why this polls 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 in a universal capacity, that's another thing too. Like before Leviathan, 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 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 Leviathan. So, you know, again, praxis is, and it's harmonious complement to theory is what matters. And Hobbs go further and positive, too, like, how do we even know 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 instantation of some marvelous idea. How would you know if they really think that?

You know, and who's to 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, I, obviously anybody who would follows what I write and say you should realize I basically reject the Havisian paradigm 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 uh it's also not

as debased as something like Bentham who I think and this is a sort of another discussion kind of reduced demand to almost like a bovine, you know, almost like a talking animal or something. But, you know, um,

we're talking about a very, we're talking about a very narrow, although fundamentally important. I mean, due to its, it's the subject matter's life and death. You know, um, but it's,

we're talking about like one kind of narrow domain of human activity, you know, like, Hobbs' business isn't or wasn't to, you know, describe like the human condition in absolute terms or, you know, describe what caused it was like a good life or something

like that. So that's something to let's stay people. It's kind of more punitive attacks on on it. Now, the rebuttal obviously, even from people who again abide

the kind of France's bacon view which in a lot of ways is sympathetic to what I just posited you know they rebuttal to Hobbs from kind of all quarters or the attempted 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 to the state of nature. Like what exactly is being positive here? That there was some just like global state of savagery. Hobbs actually wrote specifically on this and anticipation of those attempts at rebuttal and what he said was really interesting. Hobbs didn't, Hobbs very clear, he was not saying that there was ever a state of nature all over the world.

You know, he's saying that at different times and different places, you know, in any given epoch, obviously, you know, there's ordered societies and there's what we could, or there's arrangements that says to all the criteria of political order. But, you know, there's just as many other places, you know, that exist, you know, in conditions of splendid anarchy 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 Hobbs said that the Americas in his era, you know, was wracked by civil wars, independent sovereigns,

all like declaring dominion. over, you know, various swaths of territory 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 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 Hobbs' example is basically like, well, look at the Americas. You know, like, if you want an example of the state of nature and the war of all against all, juxtaposed against, you know, sovereign political societies, like, there you go. And this is what we used to be.

And, you know, that's fairly persuasive. You know, the problem, as I said, is what, the problem is that it becomes totalized. I mean, that's a problem with the Enlightenment perspective across the board is that, you know, it's like, okay, so if you're going to 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, have been this kind of state of individuals waging war on each other. And it's all, you know, and that's not, that's not the way humans work. You know, you're not born as this individual, like, doesn't have parentage

and doesn't live in a community. It doesn't speak a certain language and doesn't, isn't surrounded by symbols that are resonant in discrete cultural, psychological, 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 Campocia. Like, you know what the community rooms did? They killed a third of the population.

They killed everybody who was master cast as they viewed it. Well, okay, what happened then? Does that mean that the Khmer Rouge is now like the permanent garment in Cambodia? Like no, apparently four years later they were dust. You know, and it's not, that's kind of the logic of the prison yard or something. But even there, it's like it's not, people don't just like follow around the guy who's like the most violent man who has the most weapons or something. Like it's not how things work. you know, you follow more often than not, you know, and people follow, you know, people are hardwired to follow the men who constitute this kind of archetype in their mind that, you know, is, comports 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 it doesn't really know about man You know, and I suppose the counter rebuttal to that is that, well, people are just educated from birth and conditioned towards these things. I mean, okay, but that doesn't explain the perennial existence of caste paradigms. It just doesn't. You know, and like I said, there's not, the 20th century is a living laboratory of slavery where people rose up and slaughtered

the ruling cast and these experiments were disastrous you know it's got a 100% failure rate so apparently that's not the way things are ontologically

I realize we're only going like 50 minutes but I don't want to I was going to dive into Leviathan like the concept of Leviathan and then I'll have to, I don't want to go for just like 10 minutes on that. So we got to wait until next time. I'm sorry for that.

Let me ask the question then. Yeah, of course. If we saw in the 20th century of 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 quote on. quote, upper caste, but really a slave caste that could actually 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 kill the host, literally, of those concepts. You know, one of the reasons why I invoke the Khmer Rouge a lot is not just because I, I don't think I'm a macabre person, at least I hope not. I don't just have a discreet fascination with the extreme violence of their system. But Paul Pot, you know, aka Celeth Sarr, he was actually a very learned. guy, unlike somebody like Mao, who was an idiot. They talk 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, or you've got to, you've got to, you've got to, you You've got to eradicate the concept itself a private property. You can't just recondition people, you know, by re-education 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 devise 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, like true believing communists, like the idea was that the machine age and the scientific age, you know, and especially, you know, into the atomic age, it's like, well, you know, the master elements that it exists is technicians. And it's men who can wield and understand technology. and in order to prevent the kind of previous cast 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 as wide as possible and take people from diverse actually diverse not diverse as like a regime buzzword from diverse places and situations you know and make them confident in these processes and science. and then install them

like in these key like powerful roles you know and that'll prevent you know some sort of like new aristocracy from ossifying of course all that happened was like the nomenclature it became like the dictatorship of like the military bureaucrat

you know that's like what Sovietism is it's just like the dictatorship of instead like the dictatorship of the czar and and these like landed aristocrats you have like the dictatorship of guy who runs like, you know, the McCoy and Gruish 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 grain production according to like the yearly plan or whatever, you know, and like how, you know, people realize very quickly that's not somehow like superior. And the realists among them realized like this, this is just reality. There's those So there's no this thing as a headless leviathan. And that's part of why Hobbes' account of what sovereignty is is important, despite his blind spots that we just kind of like explicated here. If that makes any sense. Well, in the Soviet case, 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 seize 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. And it seems like in the case of, and Stalin even knew that, he wrote that, but in the case of the Soviet Union, it seems like it turned more into partly revenge upon, 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 say the United States was well no in 1918 in 1917 1918 there was no industrial proletariat in Russia I mean so that there was in Moscow 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, I mean, the Soviet Union was an incredibly strange society. You know, but at the same time, it made sense.

You know, and it's a subject for another podcast, but as I'm always coming back to, people don't realize the power and the power potential of the social. Soviet Union as it existed. They also forget that the Soviet Union, arguable zenith, you know, like the Brezhnevera when they accomplished strategic parity. The Soviet Union was like a crippled beast because the Third Reich had devastated it and they never really recovered. You know, without the Third Reich, the Soviet Union dominates this planet. And America's this kind of garrison state that, you know, still has like the bounty of of a continent full of you know probably like

probably like half the planet's remaining natural resources but it's basically besieged by this kind of like world communist leviathan of you know that that's overrun Europe and you know devastated any any resistance be it in like japan or the islamic world or or africa or anywhere else so mary is basically this island amidst like a hostile like colored world of the communist leviathan. I mean, that's... People, like, born after, you know, the 1980s,

or the 1970s, really, they don't understand that. Or they might intellectually, but they don't, like, really understand it. You know, um, yeah, that's a fascinating subject matter. All right.

Plugs. We'll get out of here. Yeah. Like, 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 substack. We recently got kicked off at Discord, which I, that did not surprise me. but I'm seeking out a new online home for our chat server. And when I get home from the OJC conclave,

I will do that. I will do all this stuff. I haven't forgotten. But my online home or all kinds of good stuff is, it's substack. It's real Thomas 777.7.7.com. I mean, I'm active a lot of places, but go there and, you know,

you can find where I'm at on other platforms. And as I kind of restructure my online presence, so I'll have more to tell people in this regard. But for now, I'll go to Substance. Awesome. Thank you. Until the next episode.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. Continuing the Continental Philosophy series, Thomas 777 is with us. How are you doing today, Thomas? I knew it pretty well. I know, like I said, last episode that it probably seems peculiar to focus this much on Hobbes and a continental philosophy discussion, but it's essential. And Hobbs and Machiavelli are the key thinkers of modern political theory in terms of its origins. I mean, obviously, I'd privilege Hegel is the most important political theorist to ever live.

but the transition from the classical view of the political to the modern, you've got to understand 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 of those thinkers were in dialogue with Hobbs and Hobbs credited himself as the discoverer of the science of politics

whether you accept the existence of such a thing or not Hobbs considered himself to be the founder or discoverer rather of that paradigm and basically everyone's subsequent who accepts that postulate views him 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 a Leviathan from the book of Job. Leviathan features in the Psalms in the book of Job in Isaiah and in a lot of the Apocrypha.

Leviathan is in the book of Enok, you know, and Catholics and Orthodox, I believe, I believe Leviathan is depicted within a lot of this medieval artwork and subsequent as the sin of envy. Okay, that's not, that's not really what it represents in scripture. significantly the ophites or the ophites i'm sure i'm butching that pronunciation they were a gnaistic sect in rome in the third and fourth centuries a d they revered serpents in totemic capacities a lot of the stuff including in the conan movie where people are worshipping sets you know the the Egyptian deity I think sets Lord of the dead or something okay but anyway

these sorts of sinister pagans or depicted as worshipping snakes well that was that was the ophites that's where that comes from okay specifically they believe that the serpent in the Garden of Eden in Genesis was like an instantation of of wisdom and sacred knowledge.

And they also revered Leviathan. What was far as to say, they worship Leviathan. Leviathan was the embodiment of the world's soul and encapsulated all living things in animate matter. And it was depicted almost like the Viking world serpent. Leviathan spans and surrounds the earth like an equator. and, you know, presumably he straddles, you know, the corporeal realm as well as whatever is beyond. You know, narcissism is essentially neoplaton's, okay?

But in the Bible, the most that's written about Leviathan is Job 41. and Hobb specifically was referring to Job 4134, which says he, he meaning Leviathan, he beholdeth all high things. He is a king over all the children of pride. So in other words, Leviathan is this terrible monstrosity and it's so powerful, it can crush pride out of men, like all kneeled before it. you know, no matter how pridefully are or how much humorous has possessed 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 was none more powerful. at sea. Behemoth was this beast of the land. He's depicted either as an elephant, behemoth is, or this kind of chimeric monster.

And Zizz is Lord of the Air. Ziz is a giant terror bird. Kind of like a crossing at Griffin and a terraced. Okay, so in earliest creation, these monstrous, massively powerful, chaotic, almost a little crafty and creatures, they rolled over certain aspects of creation. But then they were ultimately subjugated by God and literally made to heal when they were turned 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 encapsulates Great Britain, you know, and it's the source of its power, you know, even back then.

something that was going to subjugate and crush even the mightiest warlords and would-be sovereigns and self-appointed messiahs. It very much tracks with kind of the psychology of the people native to Britannia that it would be the sea monster. But the key to it is what I said. It's Joe 4134. like leviathan looks upon all the highest things and he is a king overall in his 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 um now this seems that there's uh 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 matters 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 Hobbs's view of virtue was pragmatic the entire book Leviathan is in dialogue is in punitive dialogue with Aristotle and the Aristotelian concept of virtue um to Hobbs virtue virtue was in the past in most political writing,

and especially that, which was written for the benefit 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 wasn't saying that that's necessarily a bad thing, but to pretend that there's this kind of metaphysical value to it, beyond that which is pragmatic is misguided. I've declared that virtue is nothing more than the habit of doing what tends towards one's own self-preservation,

but owing to its fundamental condition and essence, part of what contributes to one's own self-preservation and enrichment is to facilitate, permitting others to do the same. You know, and acting 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 define more about the essence of sovereign authority. But this is why, even from a pragmatic perspective, things like modern government are illegitimate. Like sabotaging the fortunes of entire classes of people based on this 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 of the consent to the body politic. You know, so this is important because some people misread Hobbs 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 Hobbs is credited to was kind of the father of liberalism, capital of 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' political ontology, but he frankly softened it,

and also his view of the social contract at totally different parameters. And also Locke wasn't nearly as hostile to the concept of aristocracy. Like we talked about the last episode, Hobbes rejected the Aristotelian postulate that some men are by nature more worthy to command and others. axiomatically worthy to serve. He rejected that based on the economy of violence. And that in the Habeasian state of nature, which precedes political order, you know, any man can murder an individual in command

and seize that command for himself. You know, there's nothing in nature precluding that. And beyond that, Havs 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 inculcate people with pride and an overweening pride at that.

and 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 as you know deriving from some essential benevolence in you know contained within their essential nature as you know the natural elite 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,

Hobbs says, 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. um so they'll be unwilling to make peace unless this is acknowledged you know beyond superficial terms there's got to 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 constitute the body politic and uh it can't just be a perfunctory thing that's acknowledged in past or by storing language in some official document.

It's got to actually be believed, and it's got to be a court tenet of how equity is realized in procedural as well as substantive terms. So for 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 Habeasian 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 the discrete sphere of human activity.

We're not talking about an absolute existential terms or something like that. and people misconstrue 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 architecture of that purpose. All this tends to make men sociable and peaceable and to abolish or reduce to a minimum or 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's what the purpose of the entire science of politics is. and the Havisian 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 ingratitude, 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 as regards human affairs in the absence of a governing sovereign. He literally believed himself to be discovering identifiable and quantifiable geometric variables

relating to power paradigms within human social existence. Okay, so that's important. He's not passing a value judgment on it. Hobbs would learn it in the Bible, you know, like any

Englishman of his cast and education would be, and he was a believing Christian. And Hobbs 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 malice of forethought make hash with these laws of nature there'll be a terrible punishment derived from God's architecture and in the case of a sovereign

who ignores these things owing to his own hubris or owing to fact he believes himself to be a god on earth you know he will probably he will probably be murdered in a rebellion if he's too much of a tyrant or if he merely gross he mismanages his role as sovereign and obviously um you know any anything he accomplishes in legacy terms will be rapidly dismantled as um 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 classically oriented theorists and reactionaries was, well, how can, how can this geometry of politics be sustainable if there's no true moral framework and disincentives? There are this incentives, though. You know, again, what constitutes and virtue in political terms is do not do unto others, what you would not have them doing to you. You know, so acting, violating natural laws of political geometry to enrich oneself at the expense of others, you know, is barbarism under a venue? 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 he 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, contra the majoritarian ethnos. I mean, 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. It's what I mean.

The subs are smart, so I'm sure they discern that. And also, too, 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 alone, 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 consciences and 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 were otherwise, you know, basically decent people. this is what Hobbs called the fear of quote invisible powers you know that exists in the state of nature and is ubiquitous but that's not powerful enough um the political is man's domain not gods you know you're ultimately accountable to god for everything you do but god's not some arbiter of the political you know what is needed is the establishment of conditions that

reward people for obeying the natural law of political geometry and punish people horribly who don't. In short, the essence of sovereignty is visible power, contra

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 is totally abnormal but a lot of these people said well Hobb is overly concerned with the internal situation and the body politics ability to come to consensus without violence you know because you know that 30 years war in the War 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, peace within the body politic is what makes all other security possible. You know, that's what facilitates security and they're going to defend against enemies of alienage, you know, and foreign threats. like that the converse isn't the case you know and hobbs is really the essence of a sovereign polity the brass tax 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 men voluntarily take themselves out of the state of war of all against all in order to identify as a body politic, whereby a moral consensus allows the selection of a sovereign who will then wield the 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's doesn't figure into the calculus what it is is it's a prerequisite for the creation of sovereignty and its establishment and it's um and it's functioning according to the you know parameters of the previously identified um natural law and this is why and this is important because it's another issue of first impression

a key to Hobbs' political ontology is that the sovereign must political union of the body politic authority conceptual and actual deriving from sovereignty and the sovereign itself, this has to be concentrated within an actual person. You know, justice and injustice in political terms and what people owe to the sovereign

owns the body politic. This all rests upon, to this a day, the abstraction of legal personhood. but an essential posthal of Habesian politics, political theory is that this must be an actual person and that

again, that that's an issue of first impression. You know, there were great kings in Athens, obviously, you know, like pericles and stuff. And Caesar was revered as a god on earth.

you know at at zenith but this hadn't been proposed before 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 If they can point to, like, a sovereign king or queen or emperor or a lord protector,

you know, warlord like Cromwell, and say, you know, that man is the emperor or that man is the king or that man is the lord protector, you know, and embodied within him is the will of the body politic. because your individual will is sacrificed to the sovereign in 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 who the ability to identify private rivals as public enemies, you sacrifice all of that to the sovereign. And, you know, the sovereign, his will becomes the collective will of the body politic. You know, and when he takes action either as warlord or as lawgiver, you know,

that is where his power derives from you know this can't be vested in some abstract assembly you know or this can't be reduced to some sort of procedure that can be executed by any like counsel of men or women or by some random guy you know that's uh that's not how it works and that's ontological nullity you know as a consequence of that too. You know, the legislature and 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 court. Now, part of the essence of sovereignty, a sovereign can say, I'm going to forgo wielding sovereign power over this court decision and allow its 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, you know, both the theory of it and its praxis. And this incidentally is one reason why America makes no sense post-war. gave because that's basically what's being alleged, you know, and, um, you can't, you can't declare that 300 million people decided that John Roberts or Elaine Kagan, you know, represents the body politic and is some sovereign authority. You know, like, I'm being, I'm being obtuse, but, you know, the point is valid, you know, um, 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 United States is the only nationally elected representative. You know, this is the lineage from Hobbs to the founding of the United States is more proximate in 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 a science of equity you know so Hobbs is defining

the social contract in legal terms and the Commonwealth was defined in terms of legal personhood and Hobbs takes it a step further

and, you know, again, owing 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 peace within the body politic and the psychological acceptance, the sovereign authority, you know, according to, the terms contained within and 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 for 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 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,

of, you know, a consensus among the body politic. And the criteria for who and what constitutes the body politic is important, too, especially in the present day when these concepts are deliberately obfuscated or simply just not defined other than in the most abstract of terms. But we'll probably have to get to that next time. The social contract has two components, according to Hobbes. One is a covenant. Each member of the body politic, the initial founding act of 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 men, 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

sua sponte that facilitates its authority that's that's tyrannical but it's a logical fallacy that's not how it works you know

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 as a tyrannical

dictat, but it's also it's also at 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 we're talking about the vote in somewhat metaphorical terms some act of decisionism some formal act of

decisionism that represents the covenants and the compact between each member of the body politics to acknowledge the sovereign authority the person of the sovereign now how that person is chosen you know how that man is vested with that authority that can take like what due process constitutes for those purposes can take any number of forms is not there's not some hard and fast um paradigm or set of criteria by which that has to be conducted say you know again that it reflects you know an extant an 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 getting a little bit 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's an actual cohesiveness and this covenant is accepted, you know, by something more I would think than a super majority would be the criteria by which legitimacy attaches. but the people who are outside of the covenant and who refuse to avail themselves to the contract, you know, people who are an 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. Okay.

and that's manageable. You know, it begs the question as to what what ratio constitutes a tipping point into civil war, but that's somewhat tautological. You know, a consensus is kind of like what's, for purposes of the social contract,

is probably kind of like what the Supreme Court said about pornography, like, you know it when you see it. You know what? But this is why, you know, again, and we won't have time to get to this in this episode, but Hobbs very much believed that there had to be, 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 affirmative criteria on grounds that, you know, they worship a different God or that, you know, they don't accept certain parameters that the majority does. of what is, you know, properly within the scope of sovereign authority, you know, based on a sectarian objection.

You know, um, and that's why Hobbs 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, 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 sowing the seeds of civil war. And you're allowing yourself as part of the minority. 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 puts the private right of war into the hands of a minority. minority element of the body politic. And again, a sovereign can't

surrender his sovereignty that's a self-refuting postulate. 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 kill that makes people queasy. And the lowercase liberal objection to that is that, well, you know, the dignity of the individual and the dignity of the group that individual 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 avarice is 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 Hobbs is not talking about what is actually virtuous and what is aspirational. He's saying that, quote it into nature, 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 derived 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 of body politic who despite their initial consent or that of their sires, which they inherited in 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. That's not to say that there's there are no remedies before the government or that the sovereign cannot lose his mandate

but he cannot lose it when acting lawfully and within the scope of his authority, some cadre of men simply decide that they don't want to obey his dictats anymore or that they want to seize power for themselves based on a sectarian imperative or an ideological

rationale, you know, um, and people confuse those things, especially because one of the reasons why the what I think of is the conceptual syntax of political theory in the 20th century, and we're very much mired in that paradigm conceptually. Why the reason that's so poignant is because it exclusively derives from moralizing language,

you know, even that which is nominally atheist or purports to be a science, you know, it's just endless moral postulating. and there's something rather profound there. I mean, yeah, part of it is just kind of like the vulgarization and discourse and things, obviously, and the breakdown of the majoritarian consensus, such that 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 you know it's um and one of the reasons why i view the return of general religiosity as a corrective is because a lot of i just described i believe it's born of you know a kind of moral impoverishment from religious quarters where the moral education should be emanating obviously. You know, in the absence of that, countessly or not, did people look at public authority as a source of those things or what should be? You know, perverses, as that may be, it's sort of in any port than a storm sort of thing. But, yeah, next time we'll get into Hobbs' view of Christ and things. But, you know, and that's, so to be clear, there are remedies.

held not as up by the body politic as a collective but individuals constituent therein and to be clear Hobbs viewed according to the natural law the body politic

to be discreet individuals contracting with one another this isn't a Rousseau sort of notion of you know some some sort of psychological or metaphysical whole that, you know, possess of a collective will. This is important, okay?

And this is one of the things that defines the angle sex and tradition, contrary to that of the continent. Hobbs 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 to resort to precise variables deduced from the social contract, the law. which itself is derived from natural laws, you know, and 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 got to just accept that civil war, like all war arrives like the seasons. Hobbs projected that outright. You know, he posited that it would be tantamount to stating that there's an equation that simply can't be answered. you know, where there's some, or in engineering a bridge, 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 going to be wrong, and hob was one of the most disciplined and methodical, the political theorists 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 you have to be sustained for it to hold any merit you know so even if you

reject the substance of these partial it's there's really no other criteria that could sustain the paradigm you know um other than this kind of mathematical model um that almost that almost um parallels Newtonian physics if that makes any sense but um I'm gonna end it here it's right about 55 minutes and I I'm gonna change gears a bit I hope this isn't going on too long again I I'd want to discuss Anglophone philosophy and a continental philosophy series but as we move on like you'll see why I did this and I didn't want to start talking about I don't start talking about Kant or Schmidt

and make reference to Hobbs and then I have to you know kind of drop a capsule summary of these street concepts and things but I hope people are getting something valuable out of this.

The feedback we got at OGC told me that they were because it got a lot of props and that makes me very happy. Well, anyone who's wondering why you would cover Hobbs Paul Gottfried's book It's his textbook

I think he taught college course with it On Schmidt is basically all about Hobbes Yeah No like Godfrey's a great A great guy A great thinker like he's I've I really get a lot out of his

Out of his scholarship Yeah no it's a good point man I should dig that book out and like refresh my record I read it years ago and it's it was awesome I read after liberalism lately which I mean all Godfrey stuff is compelling but yeah I thanks for reminding me of the Schmidt I'll dig it up well a mutual friend of ours talked to Paul Gottfried on Monday and told him that there was a whole bunch of young kids running around who were reading Paul you know reading him

and his his comment was um I'm I'm glad that my friends are getting younger and my enemies are getting older. Yeah. There's some, yeah, yeah. No, I, I, I sympathize. I mean, Gophe really is old. He's like, he's 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 axiom kind of coming to fruition. And yeah, I, uh, I take some pride in this. Yeah. Awesome. Well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just, uh, plug your, plug your substack and anything else and we'll get out of here.

Yeah, my online home is Substack. It's Real Thomas 777. That's substack.com. That's like where all the magic happens and all the felonies happen. But I shouted out earlier today. 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 decided Rumble is going to be our home for our weekly live stream. This Saturday, I got a much of stuff to do, and I got a couple social engagements. I mean, relating to partisan stuff, you know, just like friends of ours I got to connect with. But a week from Saturday, we'll start the stream again, the weekly stream. It'll be on Rumble. Like, don't worry, I'm going to like pin the link where everybody can find it on the substack and stuff. and you'll be able to find my other social media platforms through Substack and I'm restructuring and rebuilding my website in coming weeks.

But yeah, for now, hit up Substack. I'm also on Tgram and Instagram. I'm kind of ubiquitous. I'm on YouTube, but like, Seekin each of find. But, yeah, for now, find me on Substack, and we'll go from there as kind of things grow and develop. We were doing a recording last night about the OGC of the event and just doing a recap of the speeches.

And one of the things, Bagby's speech came up. And one of the things that I said was I said, go subscribe to Thomas's substack. The talks that he's having with Bagby in this season of Mind Faser, you are going to want to hear. That's great. Thank you, Ann.

Yeah. And I am 100%. Yeah, one, I'm not, you know, 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, Bagby, I mean, Bagby'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 Bagby and Josh Neal, like both of them guys are super. super intelligent and I think we have a good report like I do and they do. Our subject matter concentrations are different, but they dovetail. And yeah, I owe both of those guys a tremendous debt, man. John Slaughter, too, he wrote a great book.

I mean, he's a great dude too, and he's every bit as intelligent as these other guys. but I'm very much a, I'm very much like a theoretical guy. And Baby and Josh Neal really kind of compliment my subject matter concentrations. So yeah, no, that's tremendous, man. Thank you for that endorsement.

Yeah, this weekend's busy, but we can reconvene any time next week and continue this series. We will. Thank you, Thomas. Appreciate it. Yeah, man, likewise. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. Thomas is back and he is going to continue

talking about continental philosophy. Where are we going today, Thomas? I was going to segue into a discussion of Machiavelli. Really for the last, really, like since the Eisenhower era, I don't know what it's like now when it's speculated the same, but basically in the 1950s from the post-war era

when the university curriculum was, was sort of reestablished and reconfigured until the 1990s. If you studied political theory or Western philosophy that had an, like at undergraduate level, for example, that had a component of political theory, the curriculum would teach Hobbes, Spinoza and Machiafell and, Machiavelli basically has one subject matter. Now, Hobbes and Spinoza succeeded Machiavelli. Hobbs is literally born right about a generation subsequent,

but the reason why that's done, it's an oversimplification, but I get it, the internal logic of it. Machiavelli and Hobbes are considered to be the fathers of modern political science. And, you know, like I said, people like Mearsheimer, who I consider to be like a complete midwit. I mean, he's preferable to the abject morons and cretans who generally populate the academy and the Department of State. But he's gotten a real grasp of political flaws.

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 Nicomacian 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 tension between Athens and Jerusalem as philosophical ball stars you know

Christ and Pericles if you will that's different than the enterprise that Hobbs took on that's not what Hobbs was doing Hobbs 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 of power you know in the discrete domain of political activity it's like a difference between it's like trying to compare Ernst Nolte to say like Klausowitz because Nolte was a guy who wrote about the epistemological

and phenomenological process of war and peace and where it emerges whereas that Clausus is writing about 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 on 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 Hobbs and Spinoza read Machiavelli. In my opinion, for reasons that I've said the scope right now, but I'll get into it if people want me to later. I think Spinoza probably did. I don't think Hobbs did. Because it wouldn't have interested in them. You know, other than maybe it's like, oh, well, that's what these, that's what these Latins are doing in this, their little warring states. Conflict that seems to never end.

You know. But there's also to, there's also. represented by the Hobbes and Machiavelli to, you know, when did the modern state emerge? Was it Crommel's, was it, was it with Cromwell's protectorate?

You know, the Republic he created literally, after killing a king? Or was Ferdinand and Isabella Spain, like the first Westphalian state, as we would think of it? That's an interesting question.

And I don't have an answer to that. It depends on what you're, criteria are and it depends on what constellation of historical factors you privilege. But that's why it's important to to kind of discuss Machiavillian Hobbes and also Spinoza, but so, you know, I don't place the same emphasis on Spinoza. Not because it's not important, but I'll get into why when we reconvenile. the next episode and explicate my reason. But that's why I'm treating them kind of as a singular subject episode as it were.

And that's also why, like I think I alluded to the other week, you know, in a series of economical philosophy, you know, why am I talking about English mathematicians termed political theory as well, because from that point forward, basically, every man

who wrote about the politics was obviously in dialogue with Aristotle, but also with Hobbes, okay? And, you know, for clarity, it's not so much what Machiavilly 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 should know better, people who are insinuated into power political roles. you know, this idea that in classical antiquity you know a prince or a king or a warlord

he had you know he he was exclusively committed to these kinds of highfalutin ideas of like an elevated morality and and discerning what you know magnanimous virtue is and and he would recoil at the idea

of you know a kind of cold-hearted real and how to apply power. Like, that's preposterous. It's ridiculous. You know, and Athens especially, but all the Peloponnesian cultures within that milieu, they were very aesthetically oriented.

There was things you didn't talk about. Like, appearances mattered. You know, the fact that the fact that generals 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 any of them. Other than the fact that, you know, they were highly dignified people who were kind of upset by the uglier aspects of life. You know, I mean, I, that's, there's a literalism to advocate. and 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 when dealing with the matters that are impacted by discrete cultural conventions.

But the key distinction you know, like I said, Machiavelli's indirect dialogue with the Nicaramaki and ethics. Or as you'll run across, especially a lot of stuff from the first half

of the 20th century, that just refers to Aristotle's ethics as distinguished from the politics. They're talking about the Nicaramacian ethics. The subject matter of the Nicaramacian ethics was virtue. everything in the Aristotelian paradigm, and this isn't unique to Aristotle, this was, you know, the classical mind. There was an integral quality to knowledge.

You know, it wasn't, it wasn't bifurcated by subject area, and there wasn't an understanding of, well, discreetly. domain to human activity it called for you know any equivalent discrete moral convention that governs action within these spheres

you know to Aristotle virtue is the kind of governing poll star of any human activity you know 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 um and one of the one of the big criticisms of Socrates by his enemies

and And by Aristotelians, you know, axiomatically, is it socrates spent events, Socrates spent a tremendous amount of time, you know, in his discursive dialogues, attempting to define and, like, unpack and identify the constituent elements of what is the virtue. and in some basic way, the entire Socratic enterprise was, you know, defining what exactly virtue is and to hold forth on the concept of it and to clarify it. And there's a subtext that any truly satisfactory resolution in this regard will never be a right. that, 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 Zena. Despite the fact that you know, Aristotle

was a contemporary of Alexander, you know, like he taught him. Okay. Athens was still enjoyed tremendous cultural cachet, but there were a civilization

and 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 forum will produce some 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.

Well, still very much insinuated into a culture that although in precipitous decline is really much like a living form of life. The Nygomagian ethics, it's totally unambiguous in its definition of virtue. Aracel defined what he called the crowning virtue as magnanimity. mananimity is the quality of being great in mind and 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 it's an aesthetic commitment it's it's kind of like it's kind of like uh it's kind of kind of like Bushito with the added layer of, you know, a rigid intellectual discipline overlaying it. That's an impertog analogy, but I'm trying to convey this in a way that people will find intelligible. But it's also, it is literally pagan. you know, it does not call for men to be humble or to embrace humility.

Now make no mistake, the magnanimous man, he's never self-deprecating, he's never humble, but he's also not arrogant because he has a correct understanding of his own abilities. He never tries to inflate those abilities for clout or to capture power he doesn't deserve, but he never tries to diminish himself in the eyes of others to make people, you know, find no more approachable or anything, or abide some sort of, you know, egalitarian convention. Because this didn't exist in classical antiquity as a concept. magnanimity, men who possess it, they're going to be singularly oriented towards seeking greatness and great things. The way to understand that is what we would instead of 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 discrete 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 shirts. or live like John the Baptist or something, but he's not going to place some due value on these things.

You know, and Aristotle's 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 Pericles, is probably the best example

from within the cultural milieu from which Aristotle was speaking um you know and it's uh again the Aristotilian model of

human psychology and kind of human essence is a highly integral so the understanding is that you know There's not discrete 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 comfortable enough with their own mortality to pursue these things in a complete capacity. you know um i'd think of napoleon uh mohamit prom will edoff hitler okay um but i don't think like an ancient person you know if i were transported back to have a conversation there was stalled he would probably say that a man like me is is far too mired and the business 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 and adopt the kind of pagan mindset, like, I don't mean goofballs who, you know, take trips to Stonehenge and, like, run around

naked on the solstice or something. I mean, I mean, people like Ellen DeBenwa who seem to think you can take on some sort of mindset, a class plan, say, what do you can't do that. It's not only work. You know, and I, you can kind of create an intellectual prestige 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.

interesting about that is, is that a lot of the people who are doing that consider their opts to be Zionists. And that's exactly what Zionists do. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And there, it's like this make-believe identity of derrassated people who are like race idolaters and one of the things. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. And, um, well, it's also, I mean, we're beginning a little about topic, but it's like, well, I don't understand, like, why they care about Zionism. It's like, well, if you if you reject Logos and you want to pretend to be some pagan, like, why do you care about

why 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 and 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 um but yeah no that's um that's um that's subject worthy of the dedicated discussion but um the uh there's a um not me there's a um not me

no mistake. I mean, there are this isn't, people misunderstand this resilient paradigm and kind of the same way they misunderstand in the Chians post Christian ethical orientation. Like, Erisal makes the point

again and again in the Nicaragian ethics 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 under their immaturity, for example,

they can't help making mistakes. So, you know, like a very young man with the potential to be magnanimous, if he went around declaring that he was never wrong and he simply knew better, I mean, that'd make him a fool. You know, and that would preclude the achievement of greatness

in his moral life, okay? But this is distinguishable from, you know, a belief that that which is holy must always supersede worldly ambitions and greatness. You know, the Leo Strauss and Joseph Crofts book on political philosophy. Leo Strauss is a problematic theorist, but he did produce some great scholarship, a value-neutral sort. And, you know, the first prophet that presaged the 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 Roman Catholic theology because I had to take it at Loyola as an undergrad. I'm very much a layman in it. But if you're a Bible Protestant, 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 his vocation, like when God spoke to Isaiah and, you know, in a fordum, he was to be a messenger, you know, which is what a prophet is. you know, he was overwhelmed by this idea of his unworthiness.

You know, he said, I can't really exact quote, but he said, I'm a man of unclean thought and speech indeed. Okay, and I live amiss of people who are equally unclean in their thoughts indeed. I'm not worried to serve God. You know, you must find a better man. you know this kind of like implicit condemnation of the idea that you are destined for greatness that's completely at odds with the pagan idea and the classical i mean ideal of magnanimity 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, Marcia Eliotti, they're always talking about, you know, Athens, Contra Jerusalem. And that's what they were talking about. Okay? And this Machiavelli is shot through with this. You could go as far as to say that that's the entire catalyst for his discourse.

Okay. You could even go as far as to say, and Hobbs 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 must frame discussion of political activity. That can't, that's not really properly a philosophy. you know, philosophy is an integrated science. Okay, and obviously in the early modern period, there wasn't this integral view of knowledge, but it's not an accident. I mean, Hobbs literally said he's establishing a geometry, a science,

of the political that is nothing 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 heard some like rap album or something that invoked the name or they think the colloquialism has some actual definitive weight

so they think oh Machiavoli was this like unscrupulous guy rubbing his hands together and talking about plotting against people and institutions. That's not Machiavelli was actually like an arch moralist and he was a pious Roman Catholic and that was exactly why

he was he agonized over this stuff. Like the guy was a moral socialist, okay? Hobbs was not. And that's essential. You know, nevertheless,

I would say that serious people who study political philosophy and political theory, there's people who aim 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 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 like split off with Hobbs people quite literally talking about political ethics and how to manage the demands of moral

behavior with the brutal realities of statecraft and how these things can be reconciled and what the relationship is between temporal authority and, you know, moral authority. You know, that's the Machiavellian enterprise. So, I mean, capital L. liberalism, it owes a lot more to Machiavelli than is the Hobbes. Okay. even though people like John Locke, they tried to invoke the language of Hobbs while hanging all this sort of moral content

on the thought experiment or the conceptual model of the state of nature. You know, but it was very superficial. I think people like Locke are incredibly overrated. But this is important because, you know, it's not this is kind of like linear progression from oh machiavilli to hob to spinoza to you know Kant or whatever it um and it's also again like machiavili he actually represented the opposite tendency of what people associate him with you know um it uh you know and it's um something to

there is a parallel that's interesting because both houses and Machiavelli came out of what could be considered you know the unilateral progeny of the 30 years of war 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 War of Three Kingdoms, you know, and Cromwell was a great man. He was a hero in the Carlisle

sense and the colloquial sense, but that was a 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 Hobbs reached age of majority. and Machiavelli was 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 a seizure bourgesism stewardship and Maggioli served the court of Caesar Borja for about a year,

which had to be something of a terrifying experience. I mean, even if Cesar Borja-Borja-Li like you. You know, and so there's a bias in favor of identifying remedial measures when conditions tending towards civil war are emergent. in both men's conceptual models. But arguably, I mean, that's the ultimate challenge of statecraft as a executive crisis actor. You know, and I think people don't necessarily realize that.

And aside from the fortunes of the... the of the polis or the state or the nation you know that stands to tear herself apart if conditions depending towards civil war are mismanaged

you know your own neck is literally on the line you know 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 magnanimous man or if you're any kind of man worthy of the office or the station. But that does tend to insinuate a sort of mortal seriousness into the subject matter. I think that goes about saying. But that's, it's important contextualize that. And like I said, I think, I think arguably that renders both men's kind of conceptual modeling more relevant than something that's, you know, only held discrete significance in the peculiar epoch in which, you know, their body of work, respectively, was emergent. but the uh you know and the last thing i'll say in the kind of comparative direct comparative analysis between the two men you know again market really's whole enterprise was this discursive engagement

with aristotle hobbs threw the baby out the bathwater hobbs quite literally said that there was no science of politics before he wrote Leviathan. You know, he regarded himself as the true founder of political philosophy. You know, writing treaties on ethics or on the aesthetical aspects of the magnanimous 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, um, in, uh, how does words, these things were the 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 criteria are you going to base that on? Like what are your variables? What are your inputs? Magnanimity is your 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 got into this last time. Hobbs says, well, human beings are idiosyncratic in the configuration of their desires and motives and other things, but what is universal to them is their 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 idiosyncrasy between how men view self-preservation and how they view being availed to a violent death at the hands of the sovereign who wields absolute authority over life and death.

You know, that might seem like a base criteria for variable engagement, but it's a very concrete one. And more importantly, it's a realizable criteria that can be utilized within the geometric paradigm that Hobbs was devising. Something like magnanimity and higher virtue is 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. You know, because again, it's like, it'd be like arguing over, you know, it'd be like saying, 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, but that bridge, isn't beautiful enough. You know, okay, well, you can have a bridge

isn't going to collapse and people traverse it. You can have a beautiful bridge that doesn't work as a bridge. You know, is that reductionist? Yeah. But there is an internal logic to that paradigm that is pretty admirable. And again, it helps with the Hobbes if you approach Habesian theory like Schmidt did.

And, you know, you don't even need to go as far as to posit, well, this is a domain of human activity that just takes place beyond good and evil. No, we're talking about quite literally the anthropological, the symbolic psychological, and 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, you know, the essence of the political. Now, moving on a bit to some misconceptions about Machiavelli, I believe, and I reread the prince the other day in preparation for this. I mean, I read it a bunch of times in college and subsequent, but I believe the chapter on Caesar Borja and his machinations. You know, Borja was the illegitimate son of the Pope. This was a very decadent family, and they were incredibly ruthless people. You know, even for that culture and era.

I got a lot of love for, like, Latin people. I think they're sanguinary aspects and their passion is really beautiful. I'm not saying bad things about them, but they're capable of incredible violence. Of a very hot-blooded sort. It's, um, I mean, my people are ruthless as fuck, but it's, uh, there's something, there's something, there's something, there's something frightening about, like a Spaniard or an Italian, um, crisis actor on the warpath. Um, and there's a kind of genius for the economy of violence, some of Italians, I think. And I stand by to, but, um, the, uh, the, uh, And talking about the case of seizure bargeum, Machiavelli 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 at all time. Incidentally, when a Machiavelli's big, Machiavelli 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 patricide. I find it persuasive that he killed his father. But whether you accept that or not, he was, Alexander was viewed as a mama's boy. He was viewed as 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, Mogadilly emphasized again and again, these things can't just be superficial appearances. Like, you've got to actually aspire to these things, you know, but you've got to be capable of, you've also got to be capable of being a monster. You know, that doesn't mean that you put on airs and act like a degenerate because that makes you hard or something. like not at all quite the contrary Machiavelli was very much a believing Catholic

you know 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

that's how every prince but that's the tradeoff for the great well and power and esteem a prince enjoys on earth but that 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 palace to defeat his enemy to guarantee the posterity of his dynasty, all of these kinds of things. Now, the case of Borgia is interesting because of how Frank Herbert is a big Machiavelli guy,

and Vladimir Harconin, he's kind of a pastiche, and both Lynch Dune and Villanou Dune I don't think either one

really nails his character adequately but he's in large part Seizor Borja

he's kind of like a cross between like Caesar Borja and Stalin but

um Borja was made uh he was made commander of the papal armies by his father who was the Pope

Alexander the 6th um the the papacy at that time wasn't it's Alexander they were highly reliant on mercenaries and Machiavelli was going to have to this point

that mercenaries are shit you know you've got to have men who are will die for the Paulus or die for the state interesting in Machiavelli is one of the first political theorists who invoked the term state

but you know you can't in all these these like mafia movies, there's like this bastardization of the query. It's better to be like feared or loved. You know, but that's not a query in mind. It's obvious. It's better to be like revered. Like if people fear you and the men under your under arms fight for you because you pay them.

Like it's, you're, 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 ogre who's this object of fear, but men obey under pain of mortal jeopardy, because you're

paying them. You're going to be murdered at first opportunity. But bringing it back. The Orsini brothers who were very much

insinuated into the French court. Um, they were these, uh, they were these kind of like mercenary aristocrats, you know, um, and, uh, the Pope had a real problem. Okay, because he depended on these guys for their battlefield aptitude, you know, and their ability to kind of finesse, uh, interstate, power political concerns and intrigues, like as the, you know, kind of Italian states were warring with themselves. But obviously they very much had the Vatican kind of by the short hairs. You know, what Caesar Borgia did to consolidate his own power

and cultivate and curate a view of himself as a liberator. The kingdom that was key to papal authority owing to the military paradigm underway was Lomagna. So what Caesar Borgia did was he basically promised they were seen brothers that if they break with the French court, when he conquered Romania, you know, he both paid them better and he'd give them official government posts, but they essentially had to stand down from military command. And the Rossini brothers said, yeah, that's great, but you're not going to pass to

fight Romagna. That's laughable. Well, what Caesar Borges did was he was he. hired this guy who was a notorious ghoul, really, named Ramiro de Orico. Ramiro de Orico, Maggiably referred to him literally as a beast. Okay, and in Dune, you know, the Beast, Rabon, this is exactly what Baron Arconin does. Ramiro de Orico, 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 Borgesa 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 wives are being raped,

their children are being murdered. We're living in terror. Well, Caesar, Borgia says, I'm going to liberate Ramania and I'm going to cut this brute orco in two. And that's exactly what he did. You know, just like Baron Harcunin, his big plan was to deploy Beast Raban to Iraqis. And Raban was such a psychopath and such a brute and such a ghoul that when Faderoth, you know, overthrew him and like cut him in two to liberate Arachus. you know, he'd be viewed like Pericles or like Caesar, you know, this like great man 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 enslaving us and brutalizing us, you know, and Machiavelli, he says like, Caesar Borset doing that. He's like, that was an incredibly brilliant thing to do, and it was. Like, Maggaville didn't say, like, Cedre Borgia was a nice guy,

and I want him to fuck my sister. Or, like, I think he's the kind of person I want to go bowling with and, you know, like, tell C stories, too. Like,

he was saying that, you know, that, that required a genius for intriguing and ruthlessness, most men simply don't possess. And Caesar Borgia 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 the illegitimate son of the Pope. This was delicate, you know. So he basically, he bought off and neutralized his main enemies. He pacified Romagna. He conquered it. And in so doing, everybody viewed. him as a hero, you know, despite the fact that he caused all of this.

Like, that's utterly incredible. You know, like, I don't know what else to say about that, but not once that, not once that Maguiovoli suggests that this was a good thing, you know, and in fact, if anything, the, uh, there is another borders that are kind of synonymous with this literally, like, incestuous kind of palace intriguing and, and this kind of, kind of, gross brutality is because of Machiavelli because I mean he described

how awful this stuff was but you know it also represented an aptitude for power that basically almost nobody possesses and that's why the Italians are a great people 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 a genius for for uh for politics um of us really sanguinary sort but um

yeah we're coming up on an hour i'm gonna we'll we'll wrap up a Machiavelli 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 i'm uh

uh jade burn and I just dropped the new episode of Radio Free Chicago that seems to be popular and really good. My home right now is Substack. It's Real Thomas 7777 at Substack.com.

And I can't remember if I shouted this out last week or not. Since we got nuked off at Discord, I've been looking for a new home platform to do our Saturday night streams. And I'm going to start doing them on Rumble.

That seems like a natural fit. it for us. I've been playing around with the, with the platform, like, since we got back from Nashville, and I'm comfortable with it. So this Saturday, we're going to go back to our weekly live stream schedule, like 9 p.m. Central Standard on Saturdays. It's not my, there's an announcement of my substander, and my Tgram, and there'll be, like, a link to it. But, yeah, I'm in the process of reconfiguring my content, but the subsdex popping very good, and there's a lot of stuff there. There's the stuff I do with Jay Burton. There's a bunch of my own videos.

There's my podcast. There's a bunch of long-form stuff. There's my science fiction novel that is serialized on there in its complete form. So, yeah, if you want to get engaged with what I do, that's the way to that's the way to do it. All right, Thomas. Thank you. Until the next episode.

Appreciate you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. Thomas is back and we will continue the series on continental philosophy. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm doing pretty well. I slept a little late today because my sleep schedule screwed up, but I feel well prepared. but if if it seems

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 I read up I study a lot on

Grotius the legal theorist you know and he was active of about 20 years before Hobbes. And Hobbes is something of a counterpart to Grotius, although Grotius rejected the idea that

he himself was in the mold of an Aristotelian political theorist. And he rejected outright the idea of a political science. And that's important. And Grotis, really, everybody from Oliver Wendell Holmes, junior to HLA heart and I would argue even these law and economics types their spiritual forbear is Grotius and Grotius 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 Grotius, I think that's misguided for a lot of reasons. Grotius was he was in a hostile dialogue with the concept of natural law

and for complicated reasons. But anybody who picks up Grotius the law of of war and peace, which is as magnum opus, we'll notice, too, that Carl Schmidt was a debt to Grotius. And there's something peculiar in America,

because in the one hand, I mean, I'm convinced the American judiciary is quite literally a positorial of abject mediocrities. 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 mean they're conceptual illiterates. Like the conceptual syntax of the law, which is pretty complicated at base. They just don't understand it. And I think that's going to become clear.

I know a lot of people don't accept that, but if you know what to look for, in reading these opinions and not from the federal bench, it's not just that they're ideologues who enjoy opportunity to pontificate. The reason why they read, like, sociological screeds or, like, essays, it's because these people don't understand legal reasoning, so they're not really capable of rendering political opinions, you know, because it's, it's like somebody who can't master high school algebra holding forth on, as, like, an MIT lecturer in, like, advanced, you know,

theoretical math or something, you know. But there's this 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 about outside the scope of what we're talking about here. But what they, but the people who propose these kinds of things, they invoke kind of like a bastardized legal positivism to shore it up. You know, and then they, they claim.

that they reject, quote-unquote, religious rationalizations for rights-based paradigms and things. But, you know, you can't claim to be a secularist and then invoke natural law. It doesn't work that way. You know, and you can't claim that the judiciary is somehow sacrosanct. We've all got to, like, take a knee before it because the law is a sacred thing, while 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 going to prove fatal to this increasingly decrepit, uh, ideological consensus that's reigns since 1933. I mean, I see it's happening all over the place because like, it 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 tautology, you know, for reasons that some of which are obvious and some maybe not so obvious.

But, you know, this isn't a superficial thing. It's got a new laptop. I'm still kind of figuring out. I'm sorry. I'm trying to open this fucking window there we go but yeah the law the law of war in peace

Grodius was most active in the early 17th century he was born in 1583 and yeah the law of war and peace

was his most significant work and again this preceded this preceded Hobbes' his body of work by about 20 years.

Now to be clear to, like, Grotius, he wasn't interested in establishing a paradigm of, or producing essential treaties is simply on positive law. It's not limited exclusively to the law

of nations or what we'd consider international law in some rudimentary sense but that is its central focus and the law of nations in Grodius'

opinion it derives from practical reason and it comes into existence by way of consent to 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 categorically isolated from the systemic whole. The way to understand it is kind of like a statement of what the Romans would consider the public law, you know, the just publicum, you know, from the perspective of

a science, if you will. Okay. But again, Grotius conspicuously distinguished his enterprise from that of Aristotle. You said, 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 within parameters of bound of rationality,

you know, particularly at zenith of the expression of these impulses, which is, you know, the state of war. That doesn't mean that there's some underlying science to political behavior. or, you know, the matter 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 a systemic science, you know, or that framework at least.

Grotius is the first thinker, as far as I know in the Western canon, who held himself out, held out his body of work as juristic, purely juristic, as opposed to a philosophical or theological treatment of politics. And the law of war on peace, it kicked off this entire body of work in Western Europe that, dealt with treaties on the public law, the laws of nations. And 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 just the fact of, you know, the century leading up to the, to the, to the, 30 years of war was very anarchic, but there's some, there's like an apocal significance in

terms of the development of Europe's intellectual heritage that, you know, 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, uh, the central premise of, uh, the, the central premise of, the law of war and peace and Grotius's entire body of work is the idea that man is by nature a rational and social animal. That doesn't mean that everything man does is derived from rationality. And again, he acknowledges that politics often is derivative of pre-rational impulses. But man is capable of a reason, and that's what

distinguishes him from beast of the field and ultimately you know man is most expedient in looking after what's going to guarantee his own self-preservation okay and this is a point too that is echoed very much in Hobbs okay almost certainly Hobbs read a lot of grotes you know um different as they were in terms of their suppositions on political ontology. But, you know, it's, uh, Rodeus conspicuously, too, he attacked the, the classical idea of conventionalism and classical natural right as distinguished from Thomas' natural right, you know, which is basically a Aristotelian model. which as we got into an earlier episodes it suggests not just that it's you know it's a

a dispositive component of the essential natures of different kinds of men like what their station is and what their potentialities are what the potentialities are of their soul you know um 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 preordained structure and things. Grotius rejects that, and interestingly, he attacks it in part in the form of a dialogue. and one of the recurring characters in his dialogue was Carniatis. Carniatis was, he was the head of the Athenian Academy during what was called the skeptical period around the 150s BC.

and Grotius has Cernietes argue and plead the cases for and against like various tendencies that Grotius 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 grodhies are saying look all the law is is these are 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 is self-protection you know and yeah from place to place and culture to culture and race to race, you know, laws vary, 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 Grotius's view by natural desires towards ends that are ultimately advantageous to themselves and are largely

exclusivist and yes man is a social organism and unless men are truly possessed a pure avarist they're not going to go out of their way as individuals to harm their fellows for just, you know, for its own sake.

But at the end of the day, in Grotius' paradigm, 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, either something like learned casted jurists or by you know resort to pious reflection on you know the the conscience of the inner witness or by you know this study of uh 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, 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 man,

man's ability to calculate those remedies in 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 the governance in lieu of anarchy and reversing to savagery. We're not talking about identifying, you know, some godly or metaphysically present or epistemically prior, you know, body of knowledge or something that just adheres to some perfect concept of justice or something. You know, and like I said, what really jumps out of me is studying Grotius, and in the manuscript I'm writing right now, Grotius features rather large.

And I got turned on to Grotius before I went to law school. Not that anybody cares, but just for context, I started reading them when I was in undergrad, because I realized as I bumped up again and again against this kind of peculiar sort of bastardized claim that cloaked itself in the length. which of positive law, yet was returning the natural law arguments, but again, not ones that were familiar and precedented. You know, it's kind of like, what is this? And I realized, well, it's, it's, it's an effort by, you know, liberals and progressives and people with kind of utopian ideas that were common to the, to the New Deal era, and especially the post-war years to draw upon legalism.

and an attempt to suggest a linear heritage between themselves and, you know, the progenitors of, of kind of modern legal theory, which axiomatically leaves to some, you know, any such person trying to lay claim to Grotius, or lay claim to the mantle as his error. but yeah so what jumped out to me first and foremost was you know this is all rindle homes and hLA heart and that's you know where they that's really great legal positives or legal realists would you know that would be their starting point so that that's important um interestingly too grotius he he and to impeach stoicism as well as epicureanism in a lot of his dialogues where Cerniatis is like a main character. And that's not accidental. Cernietta's was very heterodox.

And he was an enemy of the Stoics in 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, even though they had some concept of like a monadic unity. to reality that presumably contained at least an aspect of, you know, a will of the gods or a a metaphysical prime move on. You know, and obviously that's at odds with a pure skepticism of the kind that had taken root of the academy, but it's a little outside the scope. Its complexity, the argument I mean. But it's not an accident that Grotius suggested this setting and the characters that he did for these thought experiments. That's important for context is what I mean.

But he also took. a lot from the Stoics and I think that that's why Grotius, another secondary reason, why he went out of his way to make much of the aspects of their ethical posture and their ontological claims that he disagreed with. what Grotius did accept, again, men are in their natural state impelled, really merely to preserve their own being, their own physical essence. This is distinguished from wanting to seek pleasure and avoid pain. You know, you can train an animal to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Grotius isn't saying that man is basically a highly capable animal who's averse to one kind of stimulus and favors another.

That's not what he's saying. He's saying that from jump or from this, you know, beginning point, man's capable of conceptualizing what is going to preserve himself. And he's also capable of contemplating a point. 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 in the basis, the most primitive sense. I mean, obviously, that's a component of it. But, again, this is derivative of man's nature as, you know, the exclusive beneficiary of higher, you know, the capacity.

to reason and in a way that, you know, sets him apart from all of their life forms. 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 of reason. And that is what is the definitive quality of man. So simply stated, to Grotius, that kind of core original desire to preserve on his natural physical constitution

and guarantee one's posterity that's essentially a hardwired or instinctive or subconscious drive in man to realize its 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 original or natural desires or instincts or tendencies within man.

And for another reason that it makes all other human activity possible. You know, and it's this rational faculty which perceives. justice is 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 and higher nature can truly flourish. So Brodeus is saying that 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 metaphysics of, of virtue, you know. And this is a very novel argument, you know, and people who take notice, there's, there's nothing in this. suggest some like equalitarian or, you know, remedial social justice in terms of equalizing tendencies.

There's nothing like that in here because Grotius never made those claims. You know, so this idea that as some early and even not so really progressives claim that, well, you know, Grotius describing the essential nature of man investing in the human being like qua, the human being rather than suggesting that it vests in that human being

station or that his function be it a landlord or a father or patriarch or a slave or a king you know the idea of that essence, that essential nature vesting in the human being independent

of function, see that 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 making a positivist argument while injecting these kinds undefinable in concrete terms

you know metaphysical characteristics into the human being and suggesting that the substance of justice has to be the realization of the dignity of every human being which seems to almost always entail

some kind of wish fulfillment that you know doesn't really have to do with you know capital S society or with improving upon the human being's moral character you know nor of perfecting the rationality of the human being

which you think that somebody would consider paramount if they're a true humanist but that I'm not trying to rant about a tangential subject but this is important because you'll find all kinds of treatments of grogiest that from the, especially in the last 50 years, that are kind of through the lens of people like either John Rawls or their, these kinds of bastardized, um, progressivist screeds and that are always trying to claim, you know, uh, modern political theorists as, as their own. But, um, it's, um, bring it back um grotes description and his impeachment of the concept of natural natural right as conventionally understood that's the key to understanding since his conceptual paradigm it's in relation to this conception of man is a rational and social animal that any

any notion of right and any concept of political society or be understood right and its primary meaning to Grotius is that which is just

you know and that which is just is that what facilitates you know society and the men 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 from 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 potentiality as an organism. And what is unjust thus is anything that is in conflict with the nature of society between human beings who are endowed with the aforementioned higher reason. And interestingly, Grotius quotes Cicero and Seneca. to shore up this statement. I believe that's him invoking a kind of loose model of praxis,

or something at least suggestive of that, less people dismiss these things as just axioms and partial, it's about, you know, what can be identified as the good in kind of axiomatic. terms. Obviously, to the great Roman statesman, you know, the natural attraction of men to society and their ability to act in 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 classicalist. I know something about Doric athletes. things. But I don't, I'm not qualified enough to speak on why he chose Cicero and Seneca. Augustus Caesar probably would have been who I invoke, but again, I, I'm not, I'm not learned in the subject matter in a way that can substantiate that partial it. Um, you know, so practically speaking, a crime. is an act of injustice because it's destructive of trust generally within the social organism.

You know, like, for example, if you steal from somebody, you steal what belongs to others, it's not just, you're not just harming that person and violating that person's trust and 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 all 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 as bad as any other. You know, and this is, this is what, kind of eliminates the distinction between, you know, a kind of civic morality and, you know, a true morality, if you will. A lot of positive law here has subsequently made that distinction very enthusiastically. And anyone who reads Grotis realizes that there is no such distinction. In fact, the court 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.

How we went, 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, but the law of nature. The conditions that attach to things that from which, you know, the social organism derives in terms of its structure and, you know, the behavioral modes incumbent upon parties to it and things like that. The law and 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 individual man is permitted to desaciate some some sort of instinct towards vengeance if somebody steals from them it's because again

to commit a crime is to command is a new violence to the entire concept of trust and to threaten the totality of the enterprise. So any miscreant so disposed needs to be eliminated with extreme prejudice because it's not a matter of, because it's not a matter of individual rights. you know 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 Grotius' paradigm. And that's, interestingly, there's a selective invocation of that reasoning in a somewhat perverse capacity that traditionally invoked by enemies of the death penalty.

That's an issue that's kind of falling off. I was thinking about this, forgive the tangent, but there's Desantis, Florida 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 detainees and the Sanis just signed their death warrant, literally. One of them is a particularly horrible and bizarre case.

This guy committed this brazen rape and a homicide of this poor lady in a fairly public place. And, you know, it is definitely kind of a textbook case of what's the euphemistically called special circumstances, which de juries are aggravating circumstances that permit the imposition of capital liability. But in any event, what jumped out at me is this was in the national news cycle. I think probably more because people have kind of like a passing interest in DeSantis and the facts of this case are so horrible and lurid. But, you know, really until, I mean, you're a little older than me. You remember this too. There used to be this really impassioned discussion and opposition to the death penalty.

And that'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 that yeah there's there's there's the egalitarian argument which is what's arbitrary and capricious who gets executed but then there's uh they'd invoke uh this kind of pragmatic argument that well if if if a capital if capital punishment is inadequately functioning as a deterrent, then it can't be justified.

And that's really not precedented 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 de Maistre said, you know, the essence sovereignty is the power of life and death. So if the sovereign is going to say, I'm going to let some miscreant murder people with impunity,

and I'm going to hamstring myself and deny myself the same power, then what's purporting to be the sovereign isn't actually sovereign. It's some sort of gilded, you know, imposter. But

such that there is precedent I mean, granted, the argument that I just outlined that was often invoked by opponents to capital punishment, that it's a bastardized version of the argument, but it is whether they realize they're not, derivative 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 going to be familiar with the fact that there was this tremendous debate over death penalty issues.

And the kind of resolution of that, that and gun rights. I know there's a lot of like, there's a lot of bluster and a lot of cap about, you know, from the regime. and these functionaries saying they want to ban guns, but that's not going to happen. You know, and 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 firearms is never going to be categorically. banned and the death penalty is never going to go away nationally. You know, the states that have it, it's going to 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 invoking these examples of how this paradigm that Grotius developed differs 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 you know held by the person, simply as a human being, you know, and not embodying objective qualities, again, such as that of a master or a slave or a ruler or a father or head of a household or a landowner, you know, there is some sort of

connection between Grotius's body of theory and the kind of fully realized contemporary idea of absolute subjective rights. But that's not unlike, you know, like there's a connection between Marx and Hegel, you know, that doesn't mean that Hegelianism is truly, you know, the ethical forbearance, of Marxism or something. You know, and if you accept the, you know, as I do, that

the dialectical process is kind of like the prime agent in the development of political and sociological structures, you know, there's going to be

cross-pollination between monumental ideas, obviously, that doesn't suggest some sort of unimpeded lineage or like some unselling 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 and just positive ways and, you know, inform and impact these structures in the real world. I mean, that should be obvious, but 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. Um, 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 to or appropriate, obviously. But that's not, um, the kind of linear view of historical processes is insidious for the similar reasons. You know, it kind of cuts off not just critical analysis, but constructive structuring in conceptual terms of what came before. And that really precludes a meaningful diagnosis of, you know, the state of, you know, the state of, you know, the state of things, particularly again

in dialectical and psychological terms. And these things are paramount if, you know, you're a political theorist or if you're a layman who dedicates himself to the subject matter, you know, like I am.

There's also, and this isn't as 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, you know, are the product of man's higher rationality and the social organism that encompasses and is the product of, that. 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 you know the public trust and the

you know confidences in the essential aspects of the social organism and political society but you know there's a a natural sanction that uh

must attend um people who refrain from correct action and people would 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 of justice, we're probably talking about, you know, what citizenship is.

But it's not, but it's distinguishable from an active citizenship because it's explicitly morally, you know, and that warrants the 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 Grotius' more esoteric stuff and particularly the dialogues that he wrote. You know, but this is another aspect that, you know, kind of, removes this entire theoretical model from the merely pragmatic or utilitarian. You know, you don't impose affirmative duties for the sake of mere pragmatism. You know, in the purely utilitarian model of what constitutes the duties incumbent upon individuals in the social organism,

it basically stops at non-interference, you know, and I think there's more of a, there's at least an Aristotelian echo in Grotius, much as he sought to distinguish himself from political theorists. I think that that owes more to just that. I think he 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 into that some sort of blanket repudiation of you know Aristotelian political ontology but again

I I'd have to dive deeper into the subject matter. That's what all I got on Grotius for today. I hope that was worthwhile. It's a very complicated subject matter. I mean, that's not to say that the subs can follow this stuff as well

as I can. I wasn't just 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 Aquinas 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 Aquinas

and everybody should read Aquinas anyway but in the interest of kind of like equal time and it probably seems like I should have arguably, like after Thucydides, I should have we should have gotten into Aquinas and the Scholastics. 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, you know, if it seems like I'm jumping around to go back to Aquinas, and scholasticism, as we're reading about Reformation thinkers, I wanted to include, 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 theological considerations aren't impacted by political and cultural

variables that are temporally sensitive. Obviously, they're contingent, rather. Obviously, they are. but I think it makes sense to deal with the directly theological aspects, you know, kind of in succession. So I got to think about this for a minute. But, yeah, I, if not next session, the following one, I'm going to get into Calvin and Martin Luther. If that sounds agreeable, man, it's your show. Study both of them at length.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, all right, man. I hope this was worthwhile to the subs. Well, it seems to me, when you look at Grotius, 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 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, unless you're talking about, you know, at its 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, you're talking about, like, conceptual models that are like abstractions built on abstractions. And, you know, one of the reasons, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, you know, I came to the point that the law is always politicized, you know, and people who can't accept that, they're going to resort to this kind of increasingly tortured reasoning to try and suggest that, you know, well, you know, the law is a sort of like learned science of ethics.

You know what I mean? that that spin things off and all kinds of sophistry and tautological you know nonsense but it's um yeah it uh

well and also too I mean there's just there was a it's kind of remarkable too like this the uh like the 15 16th 16 and 17th centuries

you had there's like the politics of Europe were incredibly complicated, you know, and you still had, you know, like, sectarian matters were still having a huge impact on, on war and peace question, the middle of day-to-day affairs, you know, the scientific revolution was going full steam, you know, the modern state was arriving and, you know, imposing genuine future shock on populations, you know, the first industrial revolution was kicking off, you know, and so you had really, really great minds writing on matters of politics. And, you know, it's, yeah, it's really fascinating to contemplate. But yeah, we'll continue this series in earnest. And yeah, I was, like I said, I'm still, I'm not, I'm feeling good, but I'm still struggling with fatigue a little bit.

So like, forgive me if I seem a little low energy. So I hope I didn't convey that. No worries. Do quick plugs. We'll get out of here. Yeah. I, I'm trying to increase the volume and frequency of my content on Substack. you know, I'm doing a lot of collabs.

I just collab with Joel Davis. I'm doing the World at War Collab with, you know, my dear friend Adam and Nick at the Myth of 20th Century podcast. I just dropped another episode of Radio Free Chicago, was my collab with Jay Burton. You know, you can find all that stuff, plus like the Mindphaser pod on my substack. It's Real Thomas 777.7.7.com.

As I think I mentioned before, I'm kind of restructuring my content. but my substacks your one-stop shop right now. You know, I'm on Instagram, on Telegram, on YouTube. I'm a lot of places, but my long-form stuff, my podcast content, you can find my substack. And they seem to be the one platform that doesn't censor me, despite the fact I never violate TOS anywhere.

But 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 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 of days.

Yeah, man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. We're 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 hiatus, so I was really sick. Because I think I shouted out on my T-Ramp. We're going to deal with Hagle today, and this is going to be a two- or three-part treatment.

I realize I'm jumping around a bit, but it's important to contextualize kind of philosophy. I mean, it's absolutely essential in a way it's not for some other subject areas that are less kind of penumbric in their in their significance. And subsequent to this Hegel treatment,

I want to do a single episode or two on theology. I want to deal with Aquinas and Martin Luther and Calvin. 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, confessional heritage. Please let me know that, like any of the subs, I mean, and I'll tweet how I break it down. But 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 brought Aristotelianism to the West. I mean, obviously, learned.

men and especially churchmen, you know, obviously they were very, they weren't just competent in ancient languages. They were around as the stewards of the classical intellectual canon. It's not as if this was unknown, but this is what really sort of brought Aristotelian thought paradigms into into what we think of as European philosophy. But Hegel when we're talking about political theory, we're talking about Hegel

just in absolute terms. And even if you're talking about Anglo-Saxon political philosophy as distinguished from the continental tradition, it's still in dialogue with Hegel. And that's key. Hagle in my, other than Hobbes,

Hagle is really the only is really the only pure 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 of knowledge. Obviously he does because anybody who posits a theory of mind is is dealing fundamentally with a metaphysical tradition that

originates with classical Athens but his subject matter is to explicate man's experience as a historical agent

and Hegel's discussion of political ontology it's fundamentally existential. It's bound up with what man is. And it's bound up with mind in a way that's inextricable. And that's something that people misunderstand. He didn't have some idolatrous view of the state.

He didn't view the state that's a marvelous, godly thing. And he didn't view the modern state as it existed, you know, really from the 15th century onward, 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 Higalian terms as a providential move-ons. That's what the source of it is.

And to know that process is to understand reason qua 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. 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 take care of the process of which these things are brought into corporeal reality so that's what to think of it he's not saying the state is wonderful or the is something that we should revere at all. 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 neolists do and a lot of political science types in the 20th and 21st 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, and the way, you know, people like Murray Rothbard thought about it.

You know, and even somebody like myself, you know, I'm very much a vanguardist in my disposition, and part of the reason why I'm coming. committed to this current long-form manuscript I'm working on is because I'm constantly trying to, you know, assisting understanding that the Westphalian state is dead. And what's going to succeed is what's important. And 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 scale 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 kind of a, whereby remedial justice is premised on self-help and where private actors are primarily responsible for what here to fore in the modern era has been the exclusive domain of, of public authority. We're still talking about state crap. We're still talking about a kind of state. A state is, States 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 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 exhumatically talking about, you know, some kind of, some kind of bloated, bureaucratic, you know, 20th century type state that is, that simply is endured in the 21st century owing to an, a basic inflexibility of the current system, you know, and that that's something that people need to remedy, you know. But, um, so there's, 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 both on the right and the left, making Hegelian arguments, even if they don't realize it. You know, um,

and that, that's, that's essential too, I think. Um, because most people haven't read Hegel. Because it's, um, I mean, to me, I don't think it's particularly Arduous, but if it's not your subject area, your research concentration, you know, it can, it can seem daunting to take on a study of Hagel. But Hagel's thought is singularly and remarkably systemic, and that

can't be overstated. His most impactful and significant works, I think in arguably elements of the philosophy of right. I'm going to butcher this pronunciation. But the original title, the German title, is Gruninin de philosophy des rex, elements of the philosophy of right. It's a tome of almost pure theory. And I'd say

complementary to elements of the of the philosophy of right, elements of the philosophy of right, where his essays on then contemporaneous government and processes of government that, you know, he viewed as an extricably related to this historical process. He wrote a series of essays on the German constitution when he was young that I consider essential reading. And then decades later,

he wrote this very detailed treatment of the British Reform Bill. which changed everything. There's a number of reform bills in the UK. I'm talking about the 1830 reform bill that, you know, expanded the voting franchise to basically, you know, every, every male citizen of majority who wasn't, you know, in a workhouse or a jail. But, you know, this was,

uh, both of these, uh, 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 Higalian praxis. But again, conceptual modeling and praxis within that, Hegelian paradigm, that's something of a distinction without categorical difference.

What I mean by that is Hegel'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 in like a quasi-thomest sense. But Hegel'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 and this this is clear really from the moment if somebody takes on a of Higelian 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 philosophic sciences, Higel talks about a universal history that is the product of eternal reason and the cunning of reason and the revelation of this process

you know whereby man can apprehend it and you know through his capacity his capacity for higher reason you know the dialectical process then becomes this ongoing tautological developmental paradigm you know so in the final analysis, reason, qua reason, and history in the historical process, these are not separable. The unfolding of reason, the revelation of the mind of God. You know, it parallels the historical process because they're synonymous. You know, and in that way, the historical process is fundamentally rational. You know, and that's why misguided, as, again, a lot of these contemporary political scientists may be.

and their methodology that I'm not making an argument like some of the Von Miesians do and that 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 aren't the correct ones that's somewhat tangential but that's important to understand essential to Hegelian thought is the concept of Cichkite

literally ethical life or ethical order the concept of syplishkite that reconciles 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 state within individuals. Or probably more properly within individual minds. Okay. Attitudes of a moral or theological or self-consciously intellectual nature, you know, the common critique is that, well, political philosophy is a domain of academics and

for a large part of the history of the West, you know, with the domain of monasticly cloistered, 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. Hagle suggested that's absolutely incorrect. Okay. This contemplative orientation, it doesn't at all rejects the proverbial sound and fury of political reality, war and 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 practice of the political are synonymous. in Hegelian 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 in any given epoch, 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 reason which is the mind of God at work in man's affairs you know and

through this process this is how the state you know comes to devise laws and the sovereign actor being the only agent that can implement universally binding strictures through instituting laws, you know, man in his kind of in his, in his psychological cloister of inner life, such as the experiences that, um, participating in this universal historical process, you know, even if he's only so situated as an observer

who can perceive what is underway. Okay. And finally, a state that's at all legitimate, and this is key, and I'm always making the point that Hegel is axiomatically a right-wing thinker, and we'll get deeper into what I mean by that as we go on. but at the end of the day, the only state that is legitimate,

the only state that partakes 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. Manners and morals are one way to understand Ziplichite. Zittlichichite. In other words, the life of the state is really the life of the culture, constitutive of individuals and their devotion to a discrete way of life bound up with manners and morals, which themselves derive from a historical mode of existence. Okay.

And it's through, this is the tautology, too, of racial and cultural posterity. you know, the state derives from this psychological existence of man, 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 that's, you know, this is an educational mechanism, and a mech and it means of imbuing people with cultural competence but these institutions themselves derive from the psychological inner lives of people who are the constituent elements of that culture you know so it's a tautology but not in punitive terms it's kind of a feedback loop okay

and this is where the devotion to a state or a political order derives from you know and this is one of the this is at base why secular regimes fail because they're not premised on anything that's that's truly human you know nobody's going to devote their 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, um, 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, in order to develop a full conceptual picture.

Um, so there's, so to Hagell, there's an ontological and an 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, be it merely perfunctory or profound. It is true, you know, and again, like any, 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, and,

the revelation of things like duty and the satisfaction and actualization or appearance, or at least the suggestion of the divine in the external world. But again, this is a reciprocal relationship, you know, essentially reciprocal, even tautological 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 and can where human minds can perceive the process that is underway

you know and those participate in the dialectical you know the phenomenon of higher dialectics okay um you know

so there's not intrinsic moral content to the state other than what you know um human and discreetly and cultural and conventional practices and morals, you know, bring to it in this kind of 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 process of the flourishing of higher reason through the political order and state craft. That's what Hagell calls the subjective mind. I've heard people refer to it as the collective subconscious

as if there's some sort of Jungian implication. That's not the way to think of it. 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 as a historical

as a historically situated actor you know because again the state being the exclusive sovereign agent with the power actual potential

to implement universally binding laws you know that's that's the only that that that is all that's the only thing that can be the subject matter of this process you know as a per praxis you know the state is a reality not not a project and this is key as well it's not some modality of social engineering you know it has to do it it it it derives from the way man leaves his life

life and thinks his thoughts. You know, it's the means by which the individual man as in identitarian and communitarian terms and in historical terms and thus political terms, this is the means by which he takes his place in the world, you know, and whereby, you know, he comes to identify what is reasonable within his, you know, moral and political and thus historical consciousness from what is pre-rational and merely, you know, derive from the passions. Now, the mere appearance, again, in realization of the divine of a providence, fundamental phenomenon of the mind of God.

That's not to say that God's will is somehow ultimately constituted or exhausted or fulfilled by the state or the existence of the state. Again, this is a misunderstanding. And that be a form of high idolatry and it's also a basic misunderstanding of Hegel's political ontology. You know, the state is not an end. ending itself. You know, it's a process of man's capacity to reason and, you know, God's will in the affairs of a man.

And, you know, the realization of the inner psychological life in terms. of, you know, praxis and tangible and concrete and corporeal things. You know, and that's why it's essential to understand that Hegel was not some romantic nationalist or any kind of nationalist, you know, because the state is essentially, and state craft, you know, is essentially rational, you know. And to turn away from practical reason, you know, in favor of some romantic ambition, or to pursue some utopian social engineering project in contrast, you know, as a lot of reformers and capital L liberals are prone to,

or to turn away from the state and political order as it actually is on grounds it's somehow immoral or incorrect. This is to deny reality. You know, and it's, it's tantal just saying that you don't believe in gravity, you know, like Wiley Coyote does. You know, Wiley Coy claimed,

or he's ignorant of gravity, so he walks off a cliff and he's like walking on nothing. And then wrote under our hands on like a book on gravity and then he learns of it, then he falls. Like that's not, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, a good metaphor for, you know, the way utopians tend to view political matters. You know, um, 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 significant beyond this kind of narrow domain. The function of philosophy itself, it's not to criticize the supposed moral shortcoming of

of sociological or political paradigms or to invent 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 Hegel viewed as his mandate he was fundamentally concerned with demonstrating systemically explicating 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 lieu of reason as is commonly alleged about the political you know, the entirety of the process of state craft

represents a tautological whole which is greater than the sum of its constituent elements. And again, this whole tends towards the realization and fulfillment. Hegel used the term triumph of reason.

You know, there's a metaphor of a applied to the Higalian paradigm of a gothic cathedral where there's this enormous complexity within its architecture that nevertheless is incredibly harmonious, you know, when viewed from a distance. I think of it as something more like imagine 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 the historical process and de Maestra echoed this

in in in moral and aesthetical terms which is really interesting but that the historical process

you know the political theorist needs to and the informed laymen alike needs to approach this as as a systemic whole you know you you can't take discrete instances, you know, of what appears to be, you know, a mass flight from reason in the historical record and, you know, 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 sort of rational practice underway. here. You know, it's all this sort of scattershot and impassioned

activity that isn't informed by, you know, precedent or historical memory. This is the wrong way to look at it. And the Higalian rebuttal, too, would be, well, obviously it's not true because, like, here we are. You know, I mean, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that speaks for itself. You know, you don't, you don't, you don't, And that's why a lot of people too misconstrue or misunderstand Hegel is a progressive. Like that's not what he's saying.

Like 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 underlying structural features that, you know, can only be interpreted as,

derivative of reason, you know, and I think that's an arguable. If for another reason, then that we would exist in a state of complete stasis. Or, manseem we would have gone extinct, you know, because people would have starved at death, and we were being able to, you know, develop remedies based upon, you know, the knowledge derived 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 while at the same time positing that conscious processes of the rational mind

um created in the model of God you know is what corresponds to the historical process. You know, so the argument against this perspective is that the state is both a final result, allegedly, and a precondition. But again, that's true. That's the way to understand it.

You know, it is the result. result of individual action and thought and inner 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, five thousand BC, like a Tigris-Euphrates civilization until the present, you know, 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

it's what kind of time we got okay and this two this is one reason it's so misguided when people interpret when people interpret or assign some

some kind of moral weight to history or speak of war in peace as a process that needs to be remedied, or arbitrarily declare that slaveholding 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 for the theater, if you will, a myriad potential conflicts. You know, and this is where Carl Schmidt partook 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 Schmidian concept of sovereign authority you know he emphasizes above all else that the invocation of the state of exception cannot be legitimately invoked

to preserve an obsolescent constitutional regime you know categorically and axiomatically you know statecraft and the

praxis of political order is a process of creative destruction you know and this is the state reflects the mind and soul of man himself man doesn't do what he does

to exist in isolation and remove himself from history man'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 immortal life is short and man essentially is a creator you know that's again what distinguishes man from beast of the field

no man other than an absolute cretan 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 wish for recognition in the form of cultural posterity and triumph within the historical process

while repudiating a competing actor you know, similarly situated within an opposing paradigm. I mean, that's the essence of war and peace. Like, that's 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 perennially. 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 he is.

You know, and, I mean, such that there is a moral aspect to it, okay, to remove, to remove, to remove, that catalyst I mean, what would there be like a a culturalist society of sleeping people, like figuratively and literally, like how would that be desirable? Like I say again and again,

one of the reasons why you can't operate 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 luxurious accommodations or good food or something. You know, I mean, that, like, robbing the human life

of all meaning, eradicating history, eradicating all value, because that's what makes things physically secure. I mean, that's, that's literally senile. You know,

and, um, I realize, uh, I realize a lot of these people probably aren't capable of, apprehending political life

in any thing approaching a complete capacity but even in limited capacities I mean that to strike any man or woman is totally absurd you know and I think that some of that is

beginning to accrue I think that's one of the reasons why this kind of consensus on values or lack their own of, that was so characteristic of, you know, the, 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 of that or something nobody takes seriously. You know, I mean, because, like, how could you take that seriously?

but yeah sorry let me see where I'm at as you can tell I'm still not at 100% so forgive me if I seem kind of

I swear I'm not going to see an oil I'm just still feeling a bit out of it yeah let's yeah let's uh

well and it's also too here the this is important and this is Hobbs This is a parallel in Habesian Thayer, too. The original conflict,

kind of the original, you know, the original conflict paradigm that is prior to the state is the conflict between master and slave. Okay? And in Hegel's formulation,

this this kind of setting of the stage of the of the primordial stage with you know the master slave dichotomy in the Hegelian formulation that that's

the parallel of Hobbes's you know state of nature if you follow me and in both cases there's a tremendous mark or like imprint rather on historical

reality subsequent. Historical and political reality subsequent. You know, and axiomatically you know, that suggests not only that the state emerges from violence because the first

relationship among men is, you know, one of conflict. And it 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 power what we think of as clout and secondly the fear of violence

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 this paradigm of a servitude. You know, this is,

is a dynamic process in Higalian 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, slaveholding society, the first societies were, we're based on war. And slavery, there's a, 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 an endless series on discussing the various aspects of slavery. and what its origins are in anthropological terms historical ones, biological ones, psychological ones, psychological ones but in purely political terms you know warrior societies

take slaves essentially so that you know the master cast can be free to pursue glory through warfare okay but at the same time that that doesn't mean the slave is

something like worthless life or that he should be disdained or that people should have contempt for him like not at all because he works you know albeit to satisfy the demands of the master

and to 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, 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, I 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. And like a lot of people don't understand that either. You know, and the admonition and in the polling letters especially to like not, I mean, you shouldn't disdain slaves anyway because you, like a man's moral character is not determined by his station.

But this is a core component of that. And people don't understand it. It's not, it's not some primordial or great antiquity version of like a noble savage myth. or something. And it's not, it's not, it's not some moral claim about, you know, how, uh, the the wretched classes are somehow, you know, superior to their haughty masters. It's exactly what I just relayed, you know, and what Hegel explicated. Um, you know, and the, um, but in turn, you know, the masters, uh, when we talk about leisure in, in, and within this classical little paradigm of

of masterhood and slavery. Like we're not talking about a guy sitting around sipping boat drinks 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, we're talking about you know, the cultivation of a heroic and aristocratic attitude which is brought to full fruition through

creative destruction and warfare and high politics and statecraft. You know, so there's this, there's an essential um, there, there's an essential

um, function that both the master and the slave perform. You know, without either one, um, the cunning of reason would not have been possible, you know, and higher life, you know, of which the political is both the most sanguinary and immediately significant.

I mean, owing to the fact that its subject matter is, you know, literally life and death. Like, none of this would be possible. So you can't, you can't sit around and say, like, well, slavery is evil. That's like saying, like, plate tectonics is evil. Okay, I mean, so history, okay, you 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. And I mean, I submit, too, like, I, one of the reasons, um, you know and this is one of the things that is actually pure it's one of the few things that

Marxists are pure Hegelians in terms of you know like you're uh one of the reasons I object to it so strenuously like you know I was talking about this in the pod the other day with my my dear friend Anthony you know like like limousine liberals who love to sit around and morally pontificate about the supposed evils of class dynamics like They're not Marxists. Marxists don't think that way. Like, Marxists are true Hegelians in this sense. You know, and, um...

You know, and plus, too, like, it's arbitrary. Like, people have got up to Sinclair. You know, like, in the jungle, I mean, that's like the subtext. You know, like, his novel. Like, oh, agrarian slavery is the most evil thing ever. But, you know, working in some filthy, dangerous factory restarvation wages where, like, 20% of men die on the job.

Like, that's, that's something. That's okay. There's like an arbitrariness to this kind of feign moral outrage that additionally impeaches any legitimacy. But yeah, I'm going to, we should stop here because I'm going to take us in a bit of a different direction in the Hegel discussion. But I hope this is a huge topic. And frankly, it's hard to distill down to intelligible terms.

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, that 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, best place to find me right now is substack. You know, that's one of the few platforms that doesn't censor me and other people. That if you can find my podcast, if you can do my long-form stuff, you know, that we got an active chat there. It's real Thomas 777.7.7.com. I'm still soliciting help in building a new website, man. And I'll shout that out again on my platforms, but I need help with that.

to reconfigure my content. I'm doing a stream here in about an hour on Rumble. And at long last, I'm going to start doing regular streams there. You can link to the Rumble through the substack. I'm on Telegram. I'm on Instagram.

Seekin, you shall find. But yeah, for right now, as I reconfigure my kind of, the way I do things, you know, find me at Substack. And I am, 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. But yeah, that's where I'm at, man. All right. Until part two on Hegel. Thank you very much, Thomas. Yeah, I appreciate you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Peking. Yon-o show. Thomas is here. And we're doing part two, Hagel, Continental Philosophy Service. Yeah. Yeah, indeed. And, you know,

something that's important to register in a discussion of Hegel. You know, I always come back to the point again and again that Hegel's not just an intrinsically right-wing theorist. He's the

progenitor of historicism. You know, and owing to the epistemic assumptions of historicism and Hegel's political ontology, like what he insists is the purpose of the state, as well as its psychological, you know, um, 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 axiomatically.

So that's the reason why I've always maintained it's inappropriate, in conceptual terms, to talk about right and left Higalians. I mean, it's kind of shorthand for a real phenomenon, yeah, but like, left Higalians aren't Higalians. You know, they're people who believe in the dialectical process in history, but it really has nothing to do with a Higalian paradigm, other than in the most kind of loosely structured capacities. You know, so if you're talking about Higalianism, you're talking about a kind of

I'd argue right wing and at the very least kind of conservative historicism that views human populations as the product of a discrete psychology that

you know the nuances of which can't be interpreted a priority or by appeal to you know abstract universalisms and things you know um and that's kind of what i wanted to get in today to today um like i said before i went live um i'm so i'm still shaking off some fatigue and some symptoms of this uh virus i can't seem to shake so to the subs please forgive me if i repeat myself or if i seem a little bit out of it um you know i um

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 going to Debt to Hagle in 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,

the actual and potential, you know, within the cultural form that consensus is emergent. And this owes to, Hegel identifies the origin of this phenomenon as anthropological in nature. It derives from the nature of man himself, okay? Man rises above the level of an animal owing to logos and owing, you know, for his capability for a higher reason. But, you know, there's also a... process of engagement psychologically by which man

raises himself to that status of elevation and he doesn't do so in isolation or through merely contemplative processes or something but really an immortal

struggle for recognition you know every man is conscious every man who you know is is sane and reasoned, you know, and not somehow mentally compromised. You know, he largely exists for himself and for his own purposes. You know, and 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 and parcel what we're talking about. But we're discussing a phenomenon that's rather deeper. You know, when we say when Hagle looks 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, 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, 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, you know, excelling at a learned profession or at a trade that requires, you know, learned craftsmanship, you know, and the only way for this kind of recognition to have any significance or for it to really be emergent within that paradigm. is if others recognize the significance of these things. Okay, so this process can't occur in isolation. It requires a historical and thus a cultural situatedness.

You know, 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, such that man is a social animal. And human sociology, again, is what makes this process possible. And thus it's what it is to be a human being in axiomatic terms. you know um yeah there's uh religious vocations and things where people deliberately remove themselves from this paradigm but that itself is kind of overcoming you know and and transcendent activity

precisely because they're taking themselves out of a psychological state and um 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 wealth, their reputation, and even their life, so 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, you know, will submit to the superior, um, you know, will submit to the superior, um, prestige or deeds warranting 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 have ceased 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, there's always a willful aspect of submission in the paradigm between masters and slaves. even if you accept the postulate, the Aristotelian postulate, that there is such a thing as, you know, natural slavery. You know, so, in other words, every man emerges from this struggle by necessity. Every man emerges from this fight for recognition

as either a master or a slave. So human reality is essentially social, you know, and human sociology owing to logos is intrinsically political. So this submission to the mastery of another and the accomplishing or the realization of peace within the parameters of, this sort of ethical and aesthetical and cultural consensus, you know, based on a shared historical experience and ancestral memory. This is the beginning of states, okay? the state the primordial state is the boundaries within this process

has been accomplished however both the master requires more than just mere acknowledgement from his social inferiors and similarly you know the slave

requires for his life to hold meaning you know, more than just an acknowledgement of the supremacy of the master cast and, you know, thus an entitlement of his cast nobles oblige. In general terms, you know,

even if there's, even if the moral and ethical value of the labor of the slave is acknowledged, and even if his stoic submission to the authority of the master, while still retaining his own dignity as a man, is acknowledged, you know, he's still as a man and as a human being, singly 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. Like material compensation cannot sate this desire nor facilitate it. But even if the slave is manumitted and later becomes rich, you know, that doesn't say,

um, first of all, that's an exception anyway, but regardless, it doesn't say this, uh, this, uh, this desire. It's 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 based psychological. You know, again, I know I said it before, but this is fundamentally. important to understand the Higalian ontology. And it is the state which facilitates the recognition and establishes the setting of it. And this desire is sated collectively and individually by living historically.

Okay. And taking part in the communitarian and historical life of the nation and living perennially within the historical consciousness that is timeless and linear, okay, and transcends death and generational and temporal boundaries.

Now, what's essential to Hagle is that the state basically has to it's got to actively reconcile these things. It's not enough to just, you know, create a system whereby tensions between

chaos are just mitigated such that, you know, there's not sanguinary hostilities emergent and that it's not enough that the state simply, you know, protect property rights and things. you know, by enforcing, you know, the positive law, or what have you.

The, it's got to facilitate this kind of reciprocity of recognition at which 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 inculcate both the master and slave with a belief in their own historical situatedness and their own belonging to the polis or the racial community the vogue or the or the nation you know and And it's got to inculcate people with these values to such a degree that they'll put aside not just the discrete private ego and the desires therein, as well as, you know, the kind of wider caste-based identity, contra the other within the social organism. them. Um, but it's got to, it's got to make people truly believe, you know, in the efficacy and value of the labor of the other, as well as an understanding that at war, you know, each man is, uh, who can take up arms.

There's a, 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 this is why the subject matter of the state is war and peace, not just because in existential terms, and practically speaking, it's a defensive structure, you know, 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 desire for recognition and historical imperative would repudiate, you know, their way of life violently, but there's also, you know, a profoundly psychological mechanism at work here.

You know, what reconciles with the glue of civil society, again, is the common enterprise of warfare, actual and potential, and the obligation of citizenship. you know, upon, incumbent upon every class, you know, in common. Which, I mean, yes, there's command and obedience is nowhere more sharply expressed than, you know, in a nation's military forces. but, you know, all men die the same in battle, you know, and the command element and the conscript or enlisted element, you know, they rely on each other in the most critical ways, you know, and that breaks down. what would otherwise be an intractable hostility.

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 before we went alive, Hegel's axiomatically anti-liberal. You can't talk about a liberal Higalianism. And you can't talk about Hegel's account of what precedes, you know, the form of political organization in anthropological terms 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 this is key. And again, I think also before it went live, you know, for the guys who reached Spangler, and I know a lot of the young guys do, and that's great. The debt that he owes to Hegel cannot be overstated.

Hegel is a progenitor of historicism, you know, in a way that's even more pronounced than other, you know, modern disciplines of political theory and, you know, historiographical analysis and things. So if people need an answer to what? Why is Hegel important from a partisan perspective? Well, that's why. There's two aspects of the human being as a political agent that the state must account for and reconcile and permit to flourish. within constructive parameters.

Hegel identified these two tendencies as subjective liberty and objective liberty. Subjective liberty is the natural state of man in its most perfectly expressed

capacity, that is. Subjective liberty is an individual will and consciousness, pursuing its particular goals its creative impulses, you know, its desires for recognition and transcendent, you know, life of a sort

beyond this mortal coil. 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 Hagle called 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 Volk, what have you.

But it facilitates the unity and the flourishing of the discrete individual will and the particular interest therein. And allows those things to find full expression in the fact of the citizens' duties to the state in direct proportion to the individual rights he is allowed. I mean, to unpack that a little bit. You know, basically what Hegel's getting at is that these sacrifices incumbent upon the discrete, subjective, ego, you know, born of will and passion, the state as the instantation of reason, you know, the aspects of those things that demands the sacrificed 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, can find full, full forish. And again,

as we talked about last time, Hegel's not talking about the state that's some 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 of these things, you know, and that it's 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, 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 are the Greeks, much as, you know, they deserve to be praised and much as high culture was perfected. and abject capacities, you know, in Pericles, Athens, the Greeks failed on grounds at their cultural form, their psychological and moral orientation, their political ontology.

It didn't permit or acknowledge subjective liberty and the freedom that attends it 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 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. that 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 Thucydides 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, um, as a craftsman, you know, um, 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, um, the, um, the, subjective, what gives rise the subjective liberty 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 be habituated of living and dying for the fatherland 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'd be viewed as lowly, you know, it'd be viewed as related to personal well-being and, you know, that kind of thought isn't worthy of a slave, or, alternatively, it'd be viewed as subversive, you know,

And as a subtle way of attacking public morals, which is exactly why Socrates found himself. I mean, I think, I generally agree with Sorrell. 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 even his critics acknowledged that

you know the but at the same time you know Hegel 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 doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But, um, you know, the, uh, and this is significant, I'm, I'm jumping around a bit, but this is significant to Heidegger's critique, too. Um, because Heidegger mirrored a lot of that critique. Um, Heidegger 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 pre-Socratics through Plato, was basically that, like, man as, like, part of the natural world, you know, is intrinsically capable of accepting these revelations. but through Logos, the world opens up to him

to exhibit a deeper reality than beasts could perceive. You know, but Dysine, as Heidegger referred to it, it's still fundamentally passive, you know, in this capacity. What's critical

to Hegel and Heidegger, in contrast, is that, you know, they reject that entirely. Man on grounds of Logos, he finds himself situated within a discrete political ontology. And owing to 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 wolf or 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. um noose a rational soul this axiomatically finds expression through fellow fueling within the polis and between people's constituting the demos

the body politic in um the Heidegarian view and that's a Higalian point too you know um there is no the polis doesn't emerge because of this kind of like accidental revealing within, you know,

the conceptual horizon of man's being going to Logos, whereby then, you know, the better man realize, you know, we've got to educate men to be heroic, you know, and, and abide, you know, with the fatherland who cires of them. No, there's a very, man is an, an, an, an act. agent you know and through higher reason 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 um the uh that was a bit tangential but I think it's important Hagle bring it back Hagle contrasted Athens with Rome he cited

he cited the Rome he cited Rome's frailty is essentially um a constellation of mirror causes within the body politic um contra the

Athenian situation in Rome individuality, the subjective individual will. It was absolutely recognized, both abstractly 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 conspicuous consumption or, you know, neo-imperialism. They're approaching it the wrong way.

A lot of laws cause historians are wise to this, incidentally, like even if you don't accept that perspective. The Roman political ethos, it basically degraded all individuals to the level of, the level of, of private persons, like formally equal with one another, you know, within the class they found themselves, you know, possessed of formal rights in common. But the only thing that held them together was this kind of like abstract commitment to, you know, your 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 an 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 populates relating to at least nominally individual rights and concerns you know um so consequently and taken to logical extremes the abstractness

of equality and their purported absolute moral imperative of facilitating the free expression of individual wants and desires the demand for recognition but again in 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 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 becoming an instrumentality of terror owing to the fact that the very

the aforementioned abstractness and inability to define equality while at the same time suggesting that formal equality are these kinds of formal rights, individual rights, attending citizenship. you know, are, is the, is not just the highest imperative of the state, but also the only tie that binds between these discreetly situated individuals. That basically renders all political perspectives outside of those promulgated by the minority cadres who constantly the state itself.

That basically renders everything else opposite. positional 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 en masse, like 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. And only idiots say that it does. But there are predictable outcomes.

within, you know, common paradigms, you know, owing to the limited number of variables that can possibly constitute, you know, political life at scale. You know, so this is a real thing, and it's not, it's not just some cliche of, like, old right types or of, you know, midwit libertarian guys. They're actually right about that when they point out that this, like the cult of equality is more susceptible to becoming a terror instrumentality than, you know, a more conventional mode of government. That's very true. You're running the people, and it's not just post-war liberals who, you know, abide this kind of Alan Bloom, Carl Popper, let's see. stupid on purpose, sort of, you know, superficially persuasive, but, you know, kind of intellectually impoverished viewpoint held out as, as, as, as, as, as, as, it's not just guys like that. Um, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

a, a critique of, of, of haigel as well as, as, it's being this kind of authoritarian, brute. That's the wrong way to to characterize Hegel. Hague is adamant that it's an absolute moral imperative that the state recognize the liberty

inherent to minds capable of higher reason. You know, derivative of Logos. And you know, he considered an absolute imperative that the state recognized that Logos is the source of these discrete and individual ambitions within human minds

but by no means does this suggest that this must or should lead the procedural democracy 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

has some share or stake in deliberating or deciding on political matters, you know, on grounds that all individuals are members of the state. So, thus, its concerns are their concerns. You know, he said that that's abject nonsense. You know, um, Like, again, like, really all the state owes to people in this regard is an acknowledgement, you know, of the liberty inherent to Logos 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 statecraft.

the individual person, you should only be taken into account politically so far as he occupies a 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 a ponderance. him a kind of augury about power political affairs, you know, or he's a brilliant analyst, you know, and Hageley won't even further, he said, the possible, you know, the potentiality, at least in abstract terms, um, for each man to potentially become a member of the governing class or, uh, you know, or like the higher judiciary or anything like that, you know,

that still doesn't confer upon him a right to be heard. Um, or for authority to, you know, somehow deferred his opinion as if it has some sort of merit. You know, um, 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 service as 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 violence is done to this you know kind of necessary unity and balancing

of these essential aspects that suggest any sort of any sort of egalitarian ethic needs to reign in terms of procedural democracy you know so that's kind of

that should put to bed any notion that you can reconcile Hegelian theory with with any kind of like liberal theory of government you know and this is why Hegel's

the consummately you're a modern European philosopher you know before um every every European theory is modern European theory

is statecraft prior to the day of defeat because there are no more like European theories of statecraft after 945 I mean that's not a partisan take like it does not they don't exist you know you've got

you got these like cargo cult iterations of um of um of um the of the American regime you know in occupied countries.

And then you have this kind of bizarre managerialism in the UK that isn't really premised on anything, you know, other than a loose and diluted mythology that, you know, they have some legacy moral authority on grounds that, you know, they were an American lackey. during the Zionist and communist war in Europe. Yeah, that's what all I got for Hegel. I'm going to speak more on this, but then we'd be here all night. I'm probably going to have just some concluding thoughts on the next episode on Hegel. And then we'll, like I said, I wanted to do a theology episode because it's essential.

I mean, that's important stuff anyway, but I think it's critical to include that in any discussion of continental political theory. You know, we'll talk about Aquinas, and then we'll cover Martin Luther and Calvin. And, yeah, that's what I was thinking for the next episode, if that's a real one. Sounds good. All right, let everyone know where they can find you. Yeah, I'm retooling my website. with the help of a dear friend of mine who assist me with things relating to IT. You can access it now, although bear in mind it's a work in progress. It's Thomas 777.com.

It's number 7-H-M-A-S-777.com. Otherwise, right now, you should visit my substack. That's where most of my content is, you know, especially pod content and longer form stuff. It's RealThomas777.7.com. And from there, there's links to my Instagram, my telegram, and things of that nature. All right. Until the next episode.

Yeah. Thank you, man.