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

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

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.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekinez 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, you know, continental philosophy, something. that you study your whole life and you still struggle with. So I asked Thomas if he'd be willing to, you know, 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 Thucydidives of 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 lucidives are 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 a 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 Thucydides, which is going to dovetail into a discussion of Socrates, because obviously the Peloponnesian War is the reason why Socrates was executed. I agree with Sorrell. Socrates deserve 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 through Cicydides 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 Schovenhauer like Anisha like Heidegger, the right-wing kind of philosophers of 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 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 to the American situation.

We'll get into him, too, later on. and the conclusion one draws up and Kirk is that America is intellectually impoverished in some ways that's not a punitive take my

my background is really the only type of background that can be considered like ethnically American. I'm not trashing my own heritage um but I I think what I just said is indisputable

um 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 elite, of the elites from the Enlightenment onward,

the recurrent kind of right-wing assumptions and predispositions are a person-formers 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 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 including but not limited to the biological facts of the kind of limited preparateness

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 impose 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 identify what such of impulses should be encouraged and that which should be

discouraged by you know a system of punitive disincentives and material rewards but also you know there's an understanding that man must be availed to a

kind of moral education as well as like a racial education or an education in the ways of the Paulist if you want to invoke the classical conception in lieu of the kind of 20th century biological

conception this entails a certain epistemological modesty man's hubris both in grand terms that the culture bearing stratum is prone to

as well as in the base terms, you know, the, 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, of,

the social organization. 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. There's 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, nor esteem historical processes, and the role of the social organism in those processes as far as edifying man as an individual and in an 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. Okay? And basically everybody understands they'd accept 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 an animal. You know, it's incidental that the kind of subject of that depravity is, 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 gland. impulsions 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 when we're talking about human life, we're really talking about consciousness, okay? As a consequence of these things,

in terms of praxis, the kind of right-wing ontology, there's a basic assumption therein that institutions and patterned social formations and concrete sociologies are self-justifying. and the enduring quality of these things

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 ecclesiastical community, you know, whatever the primary subject is of the, of the of the particular disposition

ontological disposition you know so this idea this kind of like an 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 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 of the intellectual lazy.

among people who kind of abide this capital illiberal paradigm they say quote organized religion is bad it's like well what does that mean you know like what is quote organized religion you know as opposed to like disorganized religion as opposed to some sort of sociological anarchy where each man decides privately like what is the good that

that's not sustainable and it's not really what they're talking about anyway, because, you know, they're 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 of pragmatic cultivation, again, of impulse fulfillment. 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 supplement in ways that, you know, 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. 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 availed to such methods. So, um, there's kind of like a built-in, uh, they kind of built in an excuse for rationalizing their own assertions, um, even, uh, including even, you know, by resort to the methods that they privilege. Um, a belief that there's nothing inherently immoral or, uh,

value-loaded about prejudice is another consistent aspect of the rightest 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 force to be defended in some conceptual court whereby the standard of review is the degree to which, you know, they produce human happiness by their ability. to avail or preclude, you know, impulse fulfillment.

And the problem with that is that if you start breaking down these instinctive prejudices, you're basically, you're doing violence to the subjective acceptance of the concept of duty, 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 for a biological organism. And 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 communityitarian structure that's going to very much be defined

by their ethics and the prejudices that inform their ethics. And if the only guiding imperative is one of non-interference with impulse fulfillment, well, that's essentially a non-aggression pact that's largely unenforceable and that people are going to find ways to subvert and exploit. normally 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 rationalizing 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 his. historicism in the Finglarian 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 this profound distinctions between and within populations you know 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 population you know the prime symbols that constitute you know the 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 community 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, 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. Higse. I think what I'm on 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 motive. 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 an insidious 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 this is some grand moral ambition that the political authority should seek to realize.

And that's the real, that's the, that, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, 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, uh, conceptual, um, models. You know, there are the globalism. who prevailed in the Cold War. You know, their particular ideological paradigm of globalism prevailed. And there are people who wish to live 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 but the give me one second what kind of time we get okay you know and finally even, you know,

when you're talking about the perspective of Thucydides and adjacent, as we'll get into, though not, though Thucydides wasn't the standard bearer of the position that Socrates deserved to be executed. Again, he was Taz's a turn on those sorts of questions.

You kind of, 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 rightist 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 Moras as an example Maras was an atheist and I think he was more of a fascist than a reactionary even though like he he held out you know de Maestro 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 um so even people aren't devout Christians or Muslims um 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 are there people who don't really have a developed view of politics, And, you know, political matter is either concrete or theoretical.

You know, they, 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 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, and they think of like Joel Ostine. 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 some kind of historical shock.

You know, even people who make a priority of criticizing that kind of be an impulse towards you know, sweeping moral zealousness

as applied to public life and sociality at scale are pretty unconditionally committed to the understanding that you know without some sort of metaphysics there's not going to be

any sustainability to the 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 uh through the lens of uh whatever the dominant

religious theological strain has historically been within the culture you know and uh this part takes a symbolic psychology as well and the kind of stuff that carly young and and jasper's 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 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, you know, the world was divided between competing globalisms, even if there are, even if the, the real house of the elite or the nomenclature is a house divided, that will never be broadcast publicly and, you know, hashed out through some sort of discursive process that the body politics is available you as some you know key participant so I realize that probably went a little longer than I

expected but that's what we're talking about we're talking about the kind of philosophical basis bases of you know partisan political commitment you know and this is

why it's important not just in terms of cultivating intellectual rigor, but also in terms of, uh, in terms of praxis. You know, um, but that also invites the question, like, what, what is, what is political philosophy? Like political philosophy, and again, the origins of continental philosophy and the origins of at 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 and the then the air

to that the era 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, there wasn't a division, formal or conceptual in Athens, between, you know, oh, this is, this is religious philosophy, this is political theory, this is metaphysics, this is mathematics, there was just a singular philosophy.

okay um an essential to understand too is that there wasn't the concept of the state one of the weirder things to me and as we get into the peloponnesian war which is the only book that the cichydides wrote it also the peloponnesian war in my opinion from a hegelian perspective the peloponnesian war was within the culture cultural form of classical Greece and its civilizational cycle. That was the equivalent of what Nolty called the Iropaisian Berger 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 and Sicily was Athens-Staling read, and we'll get into what I mean by all this in the next episode. But, you know, Athens

basically became this hyper-capitalistic dictatorship that became exceedingly brutal towards people within the Greek race or Greek ethnos.

It standard bearers came to rationalize this sort of extreme violence at scale by resort to a paradigm of might makes right. And this kind of tautological sensibility of, well, now we're at war. It doesn't matter. 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, just 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 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 uh 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 had this kind of explosion of like academic texts you know kind of feed the these educational curriculums all 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 do 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. in the traditional view, of course, I know that people in the comments are going to say Socrates was the first political philosopher. You know, he was in the first 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 through Citadel. Okay, because again, what I mentioned a moment ago, Ducilius 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 midway take, and substantively they don't really understand the kind of core of 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 um you know and whether the other objection i'm sure would be that well neither niceties nor socrates surely there was philosophers who preceded them. Like, yes, obviously.

But, you know, the pre-Socratics didn't, 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 been civilizations in the Spanglarian sense, you know, 30,000 years ago, the record of which has been totally wiped away. Okay. But that's not, we're not speaking in 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, Thucydides 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 discreet dialogues about the political or the polis until the Peloponnesian war by lucidies 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,

you know, the science of the political, you know. And it was considered something of a faux pop, 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. military command structure and the way to wage the war or of the senior men in the political apparatus, like even if they, even if they had, you know, like a critical view of these things, it wouldn't really have occurred to them, you know, to kind of write about the sort of baser impulses 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 will say that like well

Cicidides was an embittered man so he's you know got he's kind of presenting the war in a light least favorable to his own country I don't think that's true because

specifically in some of the dialogues he's clearly resorting to a kind of Apologia in favor of Athens. The Spartans, interestingly, had come to blame themselves when the war was going badly for them. And Sparta won a Puric victory, okay? And I'll get into the, I'll get into the specifics of this, but the Spartans suit for war after the Athenian contingent, many of whom were actually living in Sparta because they were doing business.

They approached the Spartan Assembly, and they kind of laid bare 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 highest good

you know the highest good is you know to be remembered historically you know and there was some 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 crises.

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

the reason why people like Habsbaum like Sparta is because there was something in primitive terms. The Peloponnesa was not primitive in cultural terms at all. But, I mean, it's in technological terms. They did practice a kind of radical socialism. 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 an hour. I don't want to dive into the Peloponnesian War. We'll do that next episode. But I didn't cover as much I wanted to 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

actually acts is kind of bullshit I mean the censorious regime aside it's just kind of a bullshit platform but people should 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, is very hurried.

and a dear friend of mine and ours is coming to town tomorrow. I got to meet him at the airport and chaperone them around the city. And then we got symphony tickets on Saturday, a bunch of the Homeland Faction guys tonight. And plus I've also got, like, I got some long farm stuff. 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 Substick, you'll find a link to the Discord, you'll find a link to my telegram at long last I released the documentary from Utah it's anybody

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 Pekingana 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 going to how I organize my outlines in my mind and things.

So I'm going to try not to make this skater shot. If it ends up that 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 kind of 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 de Zenith in terms of these grand postulates and ethical imperatives that were presenting a challenge to what had been the consensus really since the to Westphalian peace to a greater, less to degree. Okay. And these thinkers were drawing upon the pre-Socratics for a reason. Okay, particularly if we're talking about, you know, Nietzsche Heger, Schopenhauer,

I'd include Fictin or two, you know, and today, the kind of reemergence of stuff like virtue ethics that a lot of the, a lot of the Roman Catholic, like 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 Thucydides, okay?

But the way Thucydides is presented, it's misunderstood. And I'm not, I don't just mean by like, I mean, there's the basic intellectual dishonesty among ideologues who ascribed to Enlightenment truisms and things. They kind of deliberately misconstrue 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 Thucydides.

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 there afore 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 Athens-Stalingrad, 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's, doesn't take, even a layman like me can discern lucidity as conveying, like, I was spared because 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 military, like Pericles, Athens, you know, there's some confusion, especially among people who aren't classics types. We're not talking about the Athens of the Iliad. We're talking about Pericles Evans, okay? That was probably the peak of civilization. You know, like, that's not some romantic mythos. I mean, I think that's basically an arguable.

Okay, these people, it's not like they didn't have any understanding of military science. It's not like an understanding of like physical science. It's not like they didn't have any understanding of, you know, the realities of, you know, the cold calculus of, you know, the cold calculus of military tactics and grand strategy. There weren't a bunch of like, they weren't a bunch of airy romantics sitting around saying, oh, we disdain rational understandings of military processes. I mean, that's preposterous. Okay, if they, if they were like that, they, I mean, nobody's like that. Okay, like even the Comanches weren't like that. I'm not, I'm not going to 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

through the lens of Sorrel, Dorsesrel and Pratun, I'm probably biased, but they're clearly making the case that Socrates deserved to be executed. And through

And they're getting that through from Thucydides account, even though Thucydides doesn't say that. So there's like a lot here, okay? There's the fact that moderns don't present Thucydides correctly. There's the fact that the ideological right is very much drawing upon classical, um,

integral ethics to, uh, assert its legitimacy and to present. you know, 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, it 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, there's better, there's more knowledgeable guys who can do that. But that's a starting point. You know, and like I said, if this becomes scattered shot, forgive me.

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 have to understand human societies. And the only way you can really understand human societies is by studying their behavior at war.

Okay. That's not some callow romanticization of war. But as Prothun pointed out later, is that 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 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, it's abstract 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 paradigm, we don't derive from military science. But, you know, that vicissities is obviously coming from a totally different place.

that Cicidities 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 um 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 constituted like a prime move on agent or agent of motion

that had ever occurred at least among the Greeks and you know that was that's that's not just a reference point but this was really the center of this was really the center of civilization you know it's not like there was a consolation of civilizations

all over the planet that were you know on the on the order of the Greeks I know people would posit the Chinese but they 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 purposes of historicism, and again, my, and I stand by this assertion, Cicidides was a proto-historicist, And a real sense, you know, that's that's not just, you know, extrapolating 20th century conceits to, like, Spanglerian 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 think of them today, or, uh, you know, 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 Greek mind, but part of that is because this war was nakedly political. That's why I like I compare it to, you know, the conflict cycle of 20th century Europe. You know, again, not, history does not repeat itself, but it should be familiar to the Spanglerians among the subs. You know, you can extrapolate 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.

But the three critical variables we can extrapolate from Cucydides' account of Peloponnesian War is the siege of Millos and the destruction of the Millions as a people. Okay. and the Mellian dialogues, which I'm sure is familiar to people who know the source material. Okay, that's the reason why it loom is so large in the bug. It's not just because obviously it's, it's incredibly, it's incredibly severe, but it was a critical event.

I'd say that it's not unlike a lot of the excesses perpetuated by the Third Reich. Although the causal nexus, obviously, was distinguishable. But in terms of the political significance of it and some of the repercussions, there is some common, there is some common, there is some, there was some common proverbial territory there. The disaster's assault on Sicily, which as I said, in my opinion, could be 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 causes of Belie, and how they rationalize their actions. This destroyed Athenian moral legitimacy.

They sacrificed their core virtues in an effort to secure and consolidate power political credibility, you know, which is key here. They didn't undertake these extreme measures and kind of openly eschew what was purported. their own core values. And they did this in the Spartan assembly. You know, when they were during, when, when, uh, Athenians, some of whom were residing in Sparta at that time, they went before the Spartan assembly and they were nakedly, uh, hostile in their, uh, Apologio, which was unprecedented. you know, and this wasn't just a flex to try and deter, you know, Spartan aggression and kind.

The conditions were way beyond that. This represented a real breakdown in the internal constitution of the Athenian cultural mind. Okay. And again, these dramatic and almost unfathomily, unfathomely, 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 in 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 Thermopyla or whatever like people have like Sparta is this like incredibly utopia. Like, Sparta was a mess. You know, and 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, this isn't, this isn't some, this isn't some model for high culture or,

or good, uh, statesmanship or anything. That's kind of a digression. But short story long, and I don't want to derail us with a 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 rival naval power. and they were an important member the Peloponnesian alliance, which was like the Spartan alliance. Okay. The Corinthians charged that Athens

was assisting a colony revolt, Corcura, 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 concern was 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 Peloponesis. That's why these alliances had emerged to begin with. It's not exactly clear why the Athenians felt specifically threatened by Corinth, but something Thucydides explocates and statements by the Athenian diplomatic cadre in Sparta as they stated their position before the Spartan Assembly was that the 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 too, 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 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 city the inhabitants of

Sicily were a a warrior race. You know, they were Indo-European. They weren't Greeks, but they were very closely related. Syracuse was a 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 went 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. Um, Athenians began slaughtering each other to try and fight their way to the sea. Um, it was, it was, um, a massacre that destroyed them. The, uh, which brings us to the case of Socrates. because again, there's nothing so simple-minded as 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 Proudoon or Sorrell suggests 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 an all probability, not afforded a proper defense, according to the strictures of justice, remedial justice, that 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? As if we're talking about, some 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, and what'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 that we're talking about is that in this way of life, I just mentioned, the household, the Paulus, Um, communitarian life, integral and 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. This is all tied together. Okay. And the household is basically the, the kind of training ground for how to be a good citizen. of the Paulus.

But to be clear, the Athenians had no concept of a state. That's a modern contrivance. Like, the Paulus isn't the state. It's not like the government of Athens. It's not even the city or the town. It, 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 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 um 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 carte blanche to bully his wife or treat his kids like they're slaves

or something you know um he has a 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, men and women and the children and 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 Paulus. You know, this stuff is instinctive.

This stuff is transcendent. These things can be recognized by resort to practical reason. You know, they're 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 hunting pigs. Or, you know, having a bunch of different women that he gets. pregnant and we he treats like a heron.

You know, we don't argue about like whether women would be happier, you know, like not, not being subjected to the authority of, of the household, because that's against reason and contradicting things derived from reason. There's violence to the concept of the good and, 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 Paulus at the epoch in which he lives and he's decided to exploit those things owingtoes need to be a contrarian or maybe it's ordained by

God that he do this but that doesn't have any bearing on whether or not he should be executed as a remedial measure because the honor of the Paulus demands it you know and this 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. Andy 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, that's not the case at all. The reason why it became so inextricably bound up with the, the continental political consciousness is because you know the alienation really in a 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 have been torn asunder by the modern age. And most modern continental philosophers had considered, you know, the kind of high medieval era to be the ideal. But these radicals. socialists and anarchists. These guys like Sorrell, these guys like Werner Sombart,

these guys like Trinoon, they were saying, no, no, no, no, no, it's Athens. And the trial of Socrates was an example of, you know, essential redemptive violence. And that's critical. you know Marx didn't invent socialism Marx and Lenin were social or Marx and Engels rather forgive them forgive me Marx and angles were socialist

because that was really the only animating paradigm that had any momentum you know like don't get me wrong like Das Capital it's incredibly internally consistent, but a lot of it is derivative. And I mean, 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 glibly obtuse for the sake of brevity, but, you know, I think everybody understands what I mean.

And I'm not sitting here like stumbling for socialists. 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, at reaching its conclusion. That's why, you know, the end of history became a rally and cried both of, you know, aglomergan and 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 sorrel you know and and the progeny of

serrel 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 whose 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 1,700 or something I mean there were people like that but they were irrelevant by 1918 you know that that tenancy died

on Europe's battlefields with, you know, 10 million um, 10 million European youths, you know. And that's important, you know, because like I said, I realize I'm hopping around a lot,

but, uh, it's essential to tie this stuff together. And if we don't, kind of as we go along, it just becomes so much trivia or some, or, you know, maybe an interesting discussion. but you know nevertheless not withstanding you know the the fascinations of it it's 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 tendency that again avails

you know 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-intellects, 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 you know that's not to say that that's not to say that people should embrace some sort of jake 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 as as bad as sentimentalizing them you know both through violence to the practical reason you know

and uh 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 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. You know, in fact, this is a concept that Nietzsche came back to a lot, is that you can't put justice in the hands of some bureaucracy because that's crude, that's anti-human, But also, a state apparatus isn't capable of realizing justice. Justice is implicitly sanguinary. You know, if somebody kills your brother or your comrade, 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 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 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 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

or early short 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. There's a totally different thing from, you know, punishing a helot who steals something.

Or, you know, healing somebody in the court doesn't pay their taxes. or, you know, in the case of something that's axiomatically literally 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 remedialial. 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 that's also like the ultimate and noblest 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 we're like Four minutes of the hour, man. Like, I'm going to stop now because I get, I was going to get into 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 working. 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 Substac. 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 there 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 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 make money off people. And if I was, I wouldn't be doing it $2.99 at a time. But the Discord server, you can get a link on the substack. And we got, that's been very active. I'm going to 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 7-7, number 7-E-S-Gram. You can get the link there through the substack as well, but it's,

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 they. but yeah, that's where you can find me. All right, Thomas, I can say for myself, and I'm sure I speak for everyone listening. Can't wait 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 Lucidities' 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 the civil society and the political organism in Athens and nor was there nor was there an Athenian state as we think of it civil society was the state you know and 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 Hagealians 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, So the fact that this man was executed.

like 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, beyond important, I think is essential. In conceptual terms, I think Sorrell and de Maestra are, Like the real, along with the Heidegger, I like the essential theorists of the ideological right. And of course, it's only that separates people so identified from conservatives. You know, 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 when you're talking about the radical right, when you're talking about the revolutionary imperatives that were part of the causal net, nexus of, you know, the European Civil War in the 20th century, you're talking about people are fundamentally at odds with conservatives. You're not talking about just like conservatives on steroids perurbially 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' trial and what the catalysts were for the proceedings. I think it's about the best analysis of it. You know, 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, you know, I'm an expert in an ancient in ancient philosophy because I never purport to be, but

there's a basic misunderstanding and what the people either view strategies 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 intelligentsia and obviously a lot of like capital l liberals as it's 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 we It 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. kinds of dummy conservatives pretending that they're sort of like race-blind managerial ideology where like 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 about a demos. A demos is a people. You know, 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 we're 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 an ontological absurdity.

Or more concisely, it's a logical fallacy. But anyway, the conventional education in Athens, it was preparation for war. Okay, like it's not to say that Athens are 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, 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, 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 are going to 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, and enrich the Paulus, 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 was 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, Athens at its cultural zenith in terms of the way the Athenians thought about themselves, you know, it didn't have an intellectual culture. And nor did not really have a bourgeoisie. And something else to consider, we'll give this in a minute. By the time of the Peloponnesian,

war you had this bifurcated sociology in Athens you had 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 that were rare you know in the in the in the paulus you know who they who they which they they could then, you know, curate and sell at immense profits. You know, when you had, you had this intellectual cast 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 Hoy Poloy and kind of look down on like the Yeoman farmer warriors is, is essentially, you know, inferiors. And, uh, and kind of brutish and

stupid people who were just kind of necessary to, you know, to put out proverbial and literal fires when they happened. You know, this was, uh, in apocal terms, it was kind of an issue of first impression that hadn't existed before, you know, and, uh, 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, 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 murderous Socrates, it just abused themselves with this idea that, you know, figures like Socrates, which is kind of like perennial. feature in Athens and the Athenians all just

started acting like a bunch of mean reactionaries and decided to go after the intelligentsia, which is kind of like the dummy court history view of it. One of the things that made Athens sort of first among the Greeks, the power political rival, but also the sort of absolute anemical force threatening the Peloponnesus 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 a 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 inimicus, you know, how you treat people within the culture and within the race. And the way you treat enemies from without is totally different. You know, and obviously it's a parallel there in the Westphalian paradigm. And they should be instinctive. But that said, the Athenians had proved that they alone, they have 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, Balsey 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, war affairs like a football game, or where, like, win-loss ratio is sort of the, the end-all, be-all of how you adjudicate

Marshall, valor, or even aptitude. But in a very pragmatic, parable sense, the fact that, the Athenians were the counterweight to the Persian Empire that afforded them a certain clout. If you require historical metaphor, it's why a lot

of people who otherwise despise the American system nevertheless join the alliance during the Cold War because the Soviet Union was dominating this planet. And that's an arguable. 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 Thucydides' own take, and Sorrelia acknowledges this too, like the trial of Socrates, it was incredibly demagogic. It was basically the case in chief against him, it was polemical, lander 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 hagiographies

that Plato was, even in his critical treatments of the man Um With Zinophon Zinophon'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 Zinirvon 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 the several virtues that were curated there

to the battlefield field and vice versa. 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 and command, if you were a man. But it was never diminished by some sort of 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 emerge. No. It was very clear of going to a xenophon 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 gametes together to make children. And it wasn't just, you know, okay, well, this keeps women from ending up in difficulties and it keeps men from acting like savages. There's none of that. Okay, it was an acknowledgement of those things, but that's because The ultimate good is virtue turning towards the heroic, and what derives from heroic things are, like, lesser, but no less significant goods that allow us to live like a peaceable and civilized life. You know, peaceable, obviously, 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. Zedophon's economic case 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 the literally the economics of the home and of labor and of warfare which makes each you know turns the household into

an educational apparatus for war and vice versa you know and to be clear within the Athenian understanding of equality anyone capable of liberty can grab basic military tactics, you know, and some men might only be fit if they lived a 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 their 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 stuff of a correct education. And in order to make it real or to bring it to life as a historical narrative, again, this is where stuff like, you know, Homeric epics come in. This also, this cultivates in people, you know, and understanding that the routine execution and necessary tasks, they'll view that as needing to tend towards excellence,

and they'll 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 of 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 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 this 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 large guests 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 Sorrel, not Thucydides, Nobody was claiming that, like, well, we existed in this kind of, we existed kind of amiss this, like, cultural zenith. And then Saugherty, he's the propagandist, subverted all of this and created these fractures within the organ, social organs, then the polis. No. Sorrell went on his way to acknowledge that the seed of the, of the, of the... these things, the seeds of Athenian demise had been sown, you know, generations before. But that doesn't somehow acquit Socrates, the fact that, you know, he went out of his way to

institutionalize these things, figuratively and literally, whether his intention was born a malice or not is an importance, nor is the fact that he was not some ultimate causal evil. There had to be some sort of repudiation of that tenancy and 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 a bit 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 it's really only as powerful as its ability to be conveyed over a chasm of time by deliberate documentation for posterity. You know, that's why the Athenians were so hung up on, you know, hero epics and things, obviously. You know, that's literally the source of, that's how virtue is conveyed, okay, by example of the word people derive that example. from well they drive it from stuff like Homer so yes that's taught logical but it also is internally logical um so the way to understand Socrates is the patron saint of intellectuals if you want to if you want to put a spit on it to make it intelligible to

you know modern minds um at the end of the day socrates understood why the physical side of life was important. But again, he said it's important in the same way that almost like a rote biological process is important. You know, if the polis is like an organism, this is the equivalent of

like eating and expelling waste and hygiene and things. You know, because what was truly good was the intellectual and the spiritual and fracturing that concept of an integral

rational soul that contains an aptitude for these things in equal measure that does violence to the entire cultural enterprise that you know had been curated over millennium you know um

so when you look at it like this like all things 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 and 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 monasticism although obviously like the conceptual and the literal vocabulary to and you know structure it that way didn't exist yet but um you know much as uh socrates you admonished his students not to

cross their quote you know cross their arms and laugh at the world he he did it's axiomatic that what the good 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 his 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 a curated superiority in these men they're not going to regulate themselves in that 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 go 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 the gym all day and like not having to deal with things they find stressful. Well, that's the equivalent of like what guys were doing and we're learning from Socrates. You know, it's like, okay, so I'm curating this like superiority in myself. you know, so I'm a superior man to these dumb soldier, 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 i didn't invoke 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 evadeable people in a way they can understand especially within a present context how things that otherwise would be like 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 outcomes, you know, and I'm not some kind of peace, 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 contemporaries of these events in question, or at least men who were 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 posit and they probably Hollywood, too, those among them who were aware enough to do so, that, you know, you need these kinds of ethical pole 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 wasn't, you know, and again, like this, the concept of a, of a human, there's not really an adequate way to translate it into consentpary 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, you know, 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.

You know, and again, 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 skull. 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 call him directly responsible for a chain of causal ability. like you would some infamous felon or something who you're accusing of killing somebody you know um and yeah like modern people would claim that that's a deliberate injustice

but modern people do this all the time and they do it in a really debased way that's why they do things like sending derrick chauvin to prison because he's some stand-in for this like this kind of like pretend archetype of of racial prejudice which in their secular human's mind is the ultimate evil and this kind of poor slob

George Floyd who died in police custody because he had all kinds of problems of a physiological nature he's some stand-in for this like victim population that exists in their imagination, you know, and so by acting out this kind of like pantomime, but where like an actual human being is, you know, sent to prison for life, that they view it as, like, cathartic. You know, and again, that's like, that's like far, far more debased than the

treatment as afforded sororities, but I can't take it seriously when people act like the Athenians were like somehow afflicted by this, like, man. badness, born of military defeat. So they just picked on salaries 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 honest. I wouldn't do that. But I think it's,

I think it was important to convey. Where were we? Oh, um, yeah. And, um, you know, intrinsic to, uh, intrinsic to,

to, to, to all of this. I mean, if you account for the, that literally the government of the polis, the men who had at the assembly, they were, you know, the adult male citizens who constituted the yeomanry in Homeric Athens,

you know, presumably things like a sound currency and fundamental fairness and a vigorous defense of the polis. but also a basically you know and again I realize we're speaking in and purposely idealized terms but who also like had you know kind of like modest needs and ambitions

you know the the economics as xenophon called it of the household and thus of the battlefield both of which are schools of command you know that that leaves a

virtue and 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 against 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, you know, philosophers and oligarchs can't. that they can't take you to war and win. And even the wars you are doomed to lose, along to the fickleness of Fortuna, 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 about an emergent political class or caste that, in categorical terms, is precluded from acting virtuously, and that's totally a cross-purposes with the classical motion of state, You know, and because intrinsic to, as I, as we talked about the kind of the new dynamic, I mean, I mean that in value neutral terms, it's in terms of the, the velocity of social life and, and its processes, you know, in Saudi's life, this kind of newly dynamic sociology was emergence. the guys who constituted

these guys were urban elitists you know they were the guys who they were the sons of businessmen or they were the sons of generals or you know men in command authority roles

who would become wealthy enough so their sons could pursue leisure you know these are the guys who taken power away from or when the process of actively subverting the sons 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, the natural constituency of, uh, a Socratic elite are going to be men like themselves. You know, and 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 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. It was like maybe they had a good head for mathematics. Maybe they understood architecture. Maybe they understood, you know, military science at the, in the way that McNamara did, who was, you know, in large measure their counterpart. But, um, a class of men whose job it is to literally be political managers. And like, that's it. You know, um, that's one of the things that killed the social. be a union.

You know, and again, I'm always making the point history does not repeat, but there's sociological permutations, only the limited numbers of variables within human power paradigms and social structures that do

reemerge. You know, a dedicated class of political managers, I go as far as I say it's almost axiore. dramatically inimical to the public good.

And like, it's different than an aristocracy. Like aristocrats wear many hats. And they're not, they're, it's just a different situation. And the traditional complaint about aristocrats is that they're glory hounds and that they're not particularly bright. Like they're guys who excel at warfare or they're, you know, people who kind of stand on ceremony quite literally. and the accoutrements of 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, reinter

his command role and be better for it. But again, Sorrell's take is that he absented himself before he became fully corrupted by the culture of Socrates's inner circle. Xenophon 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, 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 um i'm going to stop myself now because i want to move on a bit to a somewhat different subject matter and i can't cover that in five minutes i didn't think you could all right well um you got any thing to promote. What do we

Yeah, like I said, is it, is a documentary up yet? Yeah, yeah, so my stuff stuff, 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 going to drop more video too. That's one of the reasons 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 basically told everybody that I I mean, I recorded 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 make all this possible, so if I'm not being responsive and not dropping fresh stuff, I feel I open an 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.com. I'm on Tgram 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 Gab, I'm on Tigram, 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 is ill understood, ironically, because Plato's 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 commentators' 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 nichesians and nietzsche himself it owed you the kind of nihilism that in dialectical terms you know nietzsche 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 accept to when people refer to the regime as being cultural

Marxist. 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 adornel 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 this figure of a great

of a very destructive tendencies, intellectually speaking. You know, so that's something to keep in mind. I mean, there's plenty of, like, reasons to critique Plato from the right. But, 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,

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, 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

affirmation criteria. Okay. I'm sure people can argue that point. That's how I'm here to do. Okay. So, again, and I don't prefer to be a classical scholar, but there's a grand. total 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 such that there's an essential consensus, you know, and it has been for some time on what is valid and what is not. you know, we're going to stick to the dialogues that are accepted universally as being, you know, from the pen of Plato as you were. And 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 as him sort of ironically acting as witness so that no sort of discrete thought system can be assigned to him which i don't accept that you can interpret it as

um plato trying to kind of devise like a monument literally to his hero and his patron socrates persuasive. You can read it as, well, these dialogues were probably conversations and controversies and arguments that Plato himself had bore 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, 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, ethene, 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 prophetic 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 um and that's significant okay because i think that

some people have said well obviously you know his big concern was with the conditions surrounding the Peloponnesian war and he's trying to paint for us a picture of a culture and decline I don't accept that

I mean yes Athens was in precipitous decline then but when cultures are ascendant or when they're precipitously deteriorating, if you accept a Spanglarian 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 he didn't want his dialogues to be assigned to any sort of discreet 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 statues, you know, the figure in question is situated in high relief amid 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 purpose. 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 specific. specifically, Plato is hugely important. On account discreetly of three dialogues,

those are the Republic, the statesman, 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 assigned 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 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 and 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 Benereal 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 traditional. of statecraft 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 tenets 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 Plato. But moving on, the subject matter of the Republic at base is what constitutes justice, like the nature

of justice. The general theme is you know, what constitutes essentially like a good society and therein 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 approximately the Peloponnesian War. It's obvious that the subject matter in sort of broad terms is how do we restore political health to the polis? And again, some people like to interpret these three aforementioned dialogues as being born of a crisis modality. I don't agree with that. Like, yes, I don't disagree that that's from, 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, no, 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 absolute in all times, in all places. The conversation

in the republic that it opens with sovereignty he's talking to the Phafaloz Caffalos is like you know like 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, as a mastery in conceptual terms, if not if not in his own life. He has mastery of what constitutes the good, but what he can learn from Kefalo says,

what does 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 it. because it's not just the role

Syrodites plays in the dialogues. It's not just, I mean, again, a lot of people perceive that it's kind of like, oh, this is Plato's hegeography to Socrates. 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 Socrates 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 in 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, Khares, follows 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 somebody has received from another. You know, whether we're talking about in business, in personal affairs, in war and peace, you know, and sobrious 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, to either assist that man in his endeavors or to enrich him further would lead to, you know, unjust outcomes because of what he plans to do. You know, there's myriad conceivable outcomes or iterations, whereby this sort of

absolute poll star of just honesty and paying one's debts can't be said to constitute justice or the good subsequently as Gaphalos is savaged

in some basic sense by Socrates's rebuttal Paul Marcos who is a Gaffalo'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 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, they 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. Um, you know, and it should be, it should be clear that, you know, nuance is what, is what bridges the ancient past to the, to contemporary or modern conditions. Um, Paul Margoe says that, what constitutes the good in absolute terms is that which is salutary, okay? Not only do 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. and not just a remedial but spontaneous way, you know, that would assign not just material goods,

but relative power of a social and political nature in the most equitably efficient terms. And axiomatically, that would equate to a conclusion that extremely few people would be able to determine widely across, you know, caste and discrete circumstance, like what constitutes like an equitable distribution of these goods. You know, and that would seem to imply, again, either some sort of enlightened dictatorship or some sort of. some sort of cadre, which in contemporary terms would, or 20th century terms, specifically, would suggest some sort of, you know, party apparatus that is rendering these decisions.

And again, that's the wrong way to look at it for a lot of reasons. But it's also even in, even within the bounded rationality, even within the temporal window of when this discourse is taking place the conclusion of Socrates slash Plato

neutralizes any interpretation of this as communist or fundamentally egalitarian and we'll get to that in just a second with Socrates rebuttal is basically, is that, yes, that would tend to imply the rule of the philosophers. You know, and when we're talking about any discrete polity,

we've got 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 analysis that of Polo Marco is from his father to follows. the follows

it seemed to imply that his opinion is linked in his mind with the view that well injustice is bad because there's bad karma that attaches to it and

inextricably bound up with that is the fact that after death bad things will befall the soul as well as the living the sentence of the man who is prone to this sort of bad

action Um Polon Argos This plays no role in his Take on this Um His view that Justice must be

salutary Both to The giver and the receiver Is strictly a worldly calculus Um 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. Paul America'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 Sattery's 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 Polypennesian War, and that, you know, the sort of transgressions actually perceived the legislatories 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. is, you know, and it's not for me to say, like, 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 it after reading the Republic of the posterity played out in mind was for all time. And that's remarkable. But moving on.

sorry I'm buried under wires but yeah so I mean if we understand in its simplest terms the the just man gives to his friends what is good for them

and the just man helps his friends himself and his paul is by, you know, only acting to harm those who are his enemies in public and political terms. Socrates then, he starts invoking these loose 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 in the post-enlightenment moderns do. 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 polis, 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's going to facilitate the good. Um, you know, and, uh, obviously, too, if we're reducing this to personal criteria, which Polargos alludes to by version of the fact that he's not as sophisticated, either as his father of Ghalos or Socrates. You know, there's some individual men who aren't really capable of benefiting from justice. You know, even if they are people who we share fellow feelings for, and even if they're not bad men in, you know, objective terms.

So, like, again, these kinds of mechanistic criteria can't really be applied to the human condition. And that's actually a very kind of proto-Christian understanding, obviously, and throughout the blue, dialogue, 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 platonic rationalizations for things. I'm not sure they fully realize that. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm not, I've

got a lot of love for Roman Catholics. I'm the sectarian minority on the ground. Like, not just here, but with the fellows that click up with, you know, they're overwhelmingly Catholic, onto geography, and other things. But, you know, this is highly significant. And 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 Athens to Christiandom and Faustian civilization, if you will, with the caveat that again I'm not any kind of classical scholar or anthropologist. but I if you bear with me

I'm not talking about the subs and everybody I think I 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

Philomarkos is the conclusion that, well, owing to what I just stated, about Socrates' understanding of sort of the epistemic aspects of what constitutes 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 you know, 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 that's not really the best way to think of it. Because Plato more than anybody, because he's immersed in

in the life of the Lyceum and whatever, like Plato doesn't Plato's not saying so he can discern his own views on the good life and

on what is politically sound. He's not saying that you know Socrates is the greatest demand, 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, Nietzsche famously said

that, you know, the coming 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 think of as a culture bearing stratum, you know, and, and, 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-concernal. aware of, you know, the manner in which conceptual ethics and historical mandate deteriorates over time as people simply take the configuration of the polis for granted. and believe that, you know, justice in truly cosmic terms, you know, whether we're talking about, you know, in the midst of the Peloponnesian war, a bunch of Athenian assemblymen resigning themselves to the fact that, well, this is in the hands of Fortuner of the gods, or whether we're talking about, you know, today where people just have this kind of faith in, um, People have this kind of faith and 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 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 cowls 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. 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 crisis of morals

in the modern state you know 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

fundamentally important. But moving on. You know, Socrates goes as far and again, this is key because, and this is, you know, again, I realize I'm coming back a lot to Carl Popper, who was a very

very sinister personage, but 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 his 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, we can plan society, if not down to the most minute, discrete detail.

We can basically plan in economic and sociological terms 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 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 talk about scientism. You know, people like Popper weren't talking

about science. They were talking about beliefs and these sort of a mythological postulates, which is ironic because they're all 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 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, you know,

acquire absolute knowledge. So, you know, this is just a recipe for tyranny. because the only way we can know anything is to 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, it's like playing one of the old role playing games where it's like you're fighting a hydro 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

who goes around saying like oh well religion is dead and now you know we understand that these progress impressive poshlets were correct.

People like that are totally out of touch. I mean, just like an objective term. They're 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 is the Cold War. was ending was that it was it was it was negately theological imperatives that were taking down the socialist community of nations as they called themselves but the way to understand

things these days amidst a globalism aside from the fact that the primary loci resistance are in in places that are are animated by by theological principles like for really for better or worse what everybody thinks about this the Russian Federation they view themselves as being a vanguard of Christiandom against a profoundly evil secularism you know dido like Daral 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 um 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 were 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 ascent political culture that specifically. banned literally a continent into you know something that was coherent

and in line with their own peculiar vision of what constituted the good and 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 uh there's a lot here and we'll uh

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 regards you know the uh the Christianization of of the continent

without getting ahead of ourselves. But yeah, we'll 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 frees and stuff. I want to find us a short form, like, chat home where I can also, like, live stream. Discord is kind of 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'm going to continue with our Saturday 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, Connoissellive 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.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 a, you know, our friends like Pete here 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 do a biweekly current event show with Jay Burton called Radio Free Chicago. Yeah, 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. 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, will 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, 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, 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 ideology of the political monoculture of globalism. and Hobbs is ill understood by people

like some people view him as this kind of tepid reactionary who's just making concessions to what became Enlightenment chivalis you know other people view him as sort of a theorist of

of crisis actors neither of those things are really true you know um 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 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 neolist 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. 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 therefore had been considered general knowledge was bifurcating, but it hadn't fully been, the verbal schisms hadn't fully ossified yet. So basically, when Hobbes says geometry, he's talking about mathematics, theoretical and practical, and he's talking about physics. Okay. 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 therein. it's brutally pragmatic. And Hobbes goes even further and suggests that moral evaluations are basically extrapolated from these kinds of instinctive things of a pragmatic nature. And the kind of progeny of 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 attention. 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 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 science, basis of political philosophy, 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 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 constitute the body politics. and make no mistake, and Hobbes'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, you know, which is significant. It's not, it's, in essential ways. The, in other words,

I was looking for the right way to describe this. Machiavelli, he viewed the Aristotilian model as aiming too high. You know, when in fact politics is base and the political realm, which is

a discrete steer of human activity, the currency of it is violence at the end of the day, and it is power activity in ontological terms. Hobbes' view was really that of the mathematician. And again, like, Habeasian geometry is basically

proto-analytic philosophy. And Hobbs wasn't concerned with whether it was too lofty ambition to curate virtue within the political. His view is that it's nothing 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 arguing 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's 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

But people have this idea They're like, oh, that's like liberal stuff So what's like for pussies 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 um 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 the men who were like naturally fit to command and the natural slave. But he didn't do that because he thought that like 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 and 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 therefore had been, you know, 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 Habesian 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 as a human behavior or identifying

what the sources are of passions that translate to violence of a political nature. You know. So what Hobbes suggests in lieu of

you know, both what Plato did in the Republic as well Aristotle did in the Nicomacian ethics and the politics by saying that, you know, philosophy, if we accept that philosophy as a science and that politics is within that penumbra, and thus is, you know, like a subcategory of that scientific discipline that, you know, there's one or two ways to proceed with identifying what are the bases of human action you know, individually or collectively.

One of those ways is what 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 Resolutive 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 praxis of political science has to line up with the theory of human action you know and um 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, you know, in the polis 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 detainees. into a kind of superficially dignified brutishness that, you know, simply it dresses up nakedly ambitious violence as, as some sort of noble endeavor, you know, and how do we accomplish these things?

well, inculcating people with a kind of civic responsibility that makes active citizenship 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 preparatory. and waging war against or deterring external enemies. We're only talking about essentially how to manage civil society and generate what we know of as,

you know, a functioning state where, you know, not aggression is what reigns between the otherwise animized individuals who 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, and of course, there's a... What I think of as, if we can think of, to draw an impurg analogy, if we're going to think of Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence, as kind of his

counterpart to cons categorical imperative kind of that hubbizian 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, Hobbes would say, well, every rational man

possesses passions of one sort or another, he can identify what, you know, within the parameters, the boundaries 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, there's serious problems 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 Habesian description of the state of nature. You know, Schmidt viewed the first community as the folk community. That's the pre-rational, um,

identitarian criteria. However, you know, Schmidt also said that Hobbs was the greatest political scientist who ever lived. You know, and, uh, I, 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 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 potulets and these analogies pop up again and again, you know, in all kinds of discrete sources. So it's not, it's not, it's a, It's not just a matter of kind of developing a conceptual picture or the history of political theory or something. It's important to read Hobbs for all kinds of reasons. So, you know, and I go as far to say two, and I'll move on in a minute. 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 and is a science. 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 the total sense. But, you know, and by, but also by looking into oneself, you know, there's predictive,

that's really your only, like, moment to moment living model of a human mind where one can overcome the barriers of, you know, the 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. a moment model in your own mind. And that's not navel gazing. That's not you know,

um, 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 discreet 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 why or whether you like the Las Vegas readers, you know, and this is key also. You know, you've got to look at the political as a discrete domain of human activity, you know, and this is another thing that separates Hobbs from contemporary liberals, that they don't understand this. You know, those that did in the past outright rejected that, but I, you know, that 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, human behavior is primarily a mechanistic psychology of the passions, okay, as applied to the political. Those are the forces that pre-rationality animate him. You know, now, of course, man being capable of reason, he'll devise rational ways and calculated ways to again, like, sate the hunger's figurative and literal the borne of these passions

but the core animating principles and phenomenon are what, so to speak, pushes him from behind. You know, it's not the product of like rational contemplation. You know, and how one ranks

the objects of this passionate covetousness that's going to vary from man to man you know and again like any given man's constitution, education, social standing this tends to obscure things to some degree

but not really because anything that is realizable in the political realm you know again our currency is violence there's not infinite ways to configure violence to

derive some sort of of war capable of sating anything on the spectrum of 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 an 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 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, so subtly also, to be clear, Hobbs 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 qualified, he's qualifiably agreeing with the Separatic and the top 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 essence is of sovereign authority. You know, if the political is the economy of violence, and that's all 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 the Leviathan itself or himself

because the Hobbs understanding the state apparatus and sovereignty as concentrated like literally in a man or in a person he believes this is fundamental but we're not there yet but you know and he'll he gets into the the 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, 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 compliment to Theoretum. is what matters.

And Hobbs go further in positive, too, like, how do we even know, like, why people are abiding what Leviathan represents? Like, even if they say that they believe in, you know, the king, or they believe in king and country, or they believe the emperor is, like, a divine 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

speak. You know, so that's important, too, when people, you know, again, I, obviously anybody who 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

it's also not as debased as something like Bentham, who I think, and this is a subject of another discussion, kind of reduced man to almost like a bovine, you know, or, um, reduce man almost like a talking animal or something.

But, you know, um, where 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, but it's, we're talking about like one kind of narrow domain of human activity. You know, like Hobbes' business isn't, or wasn't, you know, describe,

like the human condition in absolute terms or, you know, describe what it's like a good life or something like that. So that's something to that should 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, there were rebuttal that Hobbs from kind of all quarters or the attempt to rebuttal is, you know, well, okay, fine, you know, if there was no even if you accept that there was no kind of like

first society and, you know, like man is born to the state of nature. Like, what does he say? he's being positive here, that there was some just like global state of savagery. Hobbs actually wrote specifically on this in anticipation of those attempts at rebuttal, and what he said was really interesting. Hobbs didn't, Hobbs made it clear, he never, 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, in 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 for all the criteria of political order but you know there's there's just as many other places you know that exist you know

in conditions of splendid anarchy and 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 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, um, society. like there you go and this is what we used to be and um you know that's uh that's fairly persuasive you know the problem as i said is what the problem is that it becomes taught a lot of 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 who, 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 psychology that are probably heritable. And beyond that, the whole

kind of equality of violence, there are some men who are fit for command and some who are not. My example is Democratic Camp of Chia. You know what the community 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 Camer Rouge is now like the permanent government 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. Like, 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 discreet action unto itself, not related to command from originating from a source that he was authoritative. And anybody who doesn't recognize that doesn't really, doesn't really know about man. you know and uh i suppose the counter rebuttal to that is that well people are just educated from 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 that the 20th century is a living laboratory of slave revolts 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

then 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 a slaughtering of the master class, a cast, especially in the beginning of the century, is that why they had to switch over to the intense social engineering so that they at least had this quote-on?

unquote 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 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. And I don't just have a discreet fascination with the extreme violence of their system.

But Paul Pot, you know, aka Celeth Tsar, he was actually a very learning, guy, unlike somebody like Mao, who was an idiot. They took to its logical extreme, you know, the understanding of revolutionary praxis as the only way to realize true communism is you've got to eradicate all potential competitor modalities because that's the only way it can flourish.

Because you've got to eradicate the understanding of value as money, or you've got to 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 the master elements of said 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 like why it is possible and take like people from diverse um actually diverse not diverse as like a regime buzzword from diverse places and situations you know and make them competent in these processes and sciences, you know, and then install them, like, in these key, like, powerful roles, you know, and that'll, 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 of, like, the dictatorship of the czar and, and these, like, landed aristocrats. You have, like, the, dictatorship of the guy who runs like, you know, the McCoy and Grubish 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 no this thing as a headless leviathan. And that's part of why Hobbs' 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 deracinate 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 czar,

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, such that there was in Moscow, it was like a tiny percentage of the body politic. No, the Soviet Congress, The Sovietism is weird. The way it developed is weird. And the fact that it happened there is weird. You know, 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 Soviet Union as it existed. They also forget that the Soviet Union at its 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 is 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's overrun Europe and, you know, devastated any resistance, be it in, like, Japan or the Islamic world or Africa or anywhere else. So Mary is basically this island amiss like a hostile, like colored world of the communist leviathan. I mean, that's people like born after, you know, the 1980s, like, or the 1970s, really, they don't understand that. Or they might intellectually, but they don't like really understand it. You know, yeah, it'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. forms and as I kind of restructure my online presence, so, you know, 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 as 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 Enoch, 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. As far as they say, they worship Leviathan. Leviathan was the embodiment of the world's soul that 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 41,30. 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 kneel 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 the beast of the land. He's depicted either as an elephant, behemoth is, or this kind of chimeric monster. And Zimuth, is Lord of the Air. Zizz is a giant terror bird. Kind of like a cross-me-a-griffin and a terradec.

Okay, so in earliest creation, these monstrous, massively powerful, chaotic, almost little crafty and creatures, they rolled over certain aspects of creation, but then they were ultimately subjugated by God and literally made to heal,

and they were turned into kind of almost pets. But this makes sense. that an Englishman would would view the absolute sovereign the most great and terrible thing as Leviathan because obviously the sea encapsulates great Britain and it's the source of its power

even back then and something that was going to subjugate and crush even the mightiest warlords and would be sovereigns and self-annointed messiahs it very much tracks with kind of the psychology of the people negative to Britannia, that it would be the sea monster. You know, but that's, but the key, 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. Now, this seems that there's an over-emphasis on fear emanating from the essence of the sovereign. It's not an accident because that's the essence of sovereignty. is 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. To Hobbs, 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. have 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, you know, part of what contributes to one's own self-preservation and enrichment is to facilitate permitting others to do the same. You know, 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'll You'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.

this 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 is 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 age and 65. Locke drew upon a lot of Hobbs' political ontology, but he frankly softened it and also his view of the social contract at totally

different parameters. But, 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, you know, some men are by nature, you know, more worthy to command and others, you know, axiomically worthy to serve. He rejected that based on the economy of violence. And that in the Habeasian state of nature, which precedes political order, 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, contain 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.

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. 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 it can't just be a perfunctory thing that's acknowledged in passing or by, soaring 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 keys within the parameters of sovereign authority, this has to be

acknowledging 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 in 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 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 and 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, 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 you know who ignores these things you know 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, how can this geometry of politics be sustainable if there's no true moral framework and disincentive? There are disincentives, though. you know again what constitutes and virtue in political terms is do not do one to 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 um is barbarism um under a veneer of 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. And 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 it's ubiquitous, but that's not powerful enough. 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. You know, in short, the essence of sovereignty is visible power, contra invisible powers. you know and um 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, Hob is overly concerned with the internal situation and the

body politics ability to come to consensus without violence because you know, that 30 years war and the War of Three kingdoms was what set the tenor for this you know so he was uh 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 that's what facilitates security um and

ability to defend against enemies of alienage and foreign threats. Like 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 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 to 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 um the uh and this is why and this is important because it's another issue of first impression a key to hobbs's um 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 and what the sovereign owes the body politic, this all rests upon, to this a day, the abstraction. of legal personhood, but an essential postulate of Habesian politics, political theory, is that this must be an actual person. And that, again, 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. earth, you know, at Xeneth. 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 correct.

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, you know, who the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, 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 his 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, 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 forego 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-watergate because that's basically what's being alleged. You know, and 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 obtuse, but, you know, the point is valid. you know and that's why it's not an accident and it's not some contrivance of a

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 from Hobbs to the founding of the United States states is more proximate and in conceptual linear terms direct than people think. Okay. And also what preceded

Hobbs' identification of a geometry of politics was an understanding whether, again, whether I or any other man accepts this or not, was an understanding that was extant at the time of Leviathan being devised and written that there was a science of the law and, you know, a science of equity. You know, so Hobbs is defining the social contract in legal terms.

and the Commonwealth was defined in terms of legal personhood and Hobbes takes it a step further and you know again 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 go. Okay. So the social contract is the basis of political order, facilitated by sovereign authority, you know, which can only, which can only be derivative of, you know, a consensus among the body politic. and the criteria for who and what 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 abstracted terms.

But we'll probably have to get to that next time. The social contract has two components, according to Hobbs. One is a covenant. Each member of the body politic, the initial founding act of, you know, 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 politic. 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 as a thing. authority. That's that's that's that's tyrannical but it's also a logical fallacy. That's not how it works. You know, um, or a sovereign deciding that he wants the body politic to include more people than it does, you know, based on criteria that will not be accepted by the actual body politic. You know, again, that's, that's not as a tyrannical dictat, but it's also, it's also at odds, it frustrates the purpose of the entire procedure. And it, 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 covenant and the compact between each member of the body politic 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 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 managing. you know it begs the question as to what what ratio constitutes a tipping point into civil war but um that's somewhat tautological you know a consensus is uh kind of like what's purposes of the social contract is probably kind of like what's the supreme court said about pornography, like, you know it when you see it. 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 properly within the scope of sovereign authority based on a sectarian objection you know 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 matters of religious belief you know not because he's the pope or not because you know, he has any legitimate authority to regulate men's inner witness and their consciences. But if people arrive or if people take on, you know, a sectarian belief structure,

contra the majority, you know, that you're sowing the seeds of civil war. And you're allowing yourself as part of the my mind. 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 element into the body politic. And again, a sovereign can't surrender his sovereignty that's, that's, you know, 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, Hobbes is not talking about, rather, 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 the 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 and people confuse those things

especially because one of the reasons why the what I think it was the conceptual syntax of political theory in the 20th century and were 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 of 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, you know, and to exploit these sorts of divisions. It's all those things, but it's more than that. You know, it's, and one of the reasons why I view the return of general religiosity is a correct.

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 moral education should be emanating, obviously. You know, in the absence of that, consciously 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. storm sort of thing but um but yeah we'll get next time we'll get into hobbs's um view of of christ and things but um 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, Hobbes 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 some sort of psychological or metaphysical whole that, you know, possess of a collective will. This is important. Okay. and this is one of things that defines the angle sex and tradition, contra that of the continent. To be clear. Hobbs absolutely believed in precise remedies,

contra sovereign authority. You know, but he viewed these things, 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 an engineering of 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, Hobb was one of the most disciplined and methodical, 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 has to be sustained for it to hold any merit. You know, so even if you reject the substance of these postulates, there's really no other criteria that could sustain the paradigm. you know, other than this kind of mathematical model that almost parallels Newtonian physics, if that makes any sense. I'm going to end it here. It's right about 55 minutes, and I'm going to change gears a bit. I hope this isn't going on too long again. I'd want to discuss Anglophone philosophy and a continental philosophy series.

But as we move on, you'll see why I did this. And I didn't want to start talking about, I don't want to 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 it 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 Hobbs.

Yeah. No, like, Gophrig's a great, a great guy, a great thinker. Like, he's, I, I really get a lot out of his, out of his scholarship. Yeah, no, that's a good point, man. I should dig that book out and like refresh my record, like, I read it years ago, and it's, it was awesome. I read after liberalism lately, which is, I mean, all, all Gophrig's stuff is compelling. But, yeah, I, thanks for reminding me of the Schmidt book. I'll dig it up.

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 comment was, I'm glad that my friends are getting younger and my enemies are getting older. Yeah, there's some, yeah, yeah. No, I sympathize. I mean, Gophrie really is old. He's like 383. He's 83. Yeah.

And he's still going, which is great. But no. even in my own life, I see that axiom kind of coming to fruition. And yeah, I take some pride in this. Awesome. Yeah, yeah. Just plug your substack and anything else and we'll get out of here. Yeah, my online home is substack.

It's Real Thomas 777.7.7.com. That's like where all the magic happens and all the felonies happen. but um i'm uh 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 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 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 gonna like pin the link

where everybody can find it on the substack and stuff and um you'll be able to find my other social media platforms through substack and I'm restructuring and rebuilding my web website in coming weeks. So, 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, see, and you shall 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 stream 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, man.

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 how. 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 intelligent. And I think we have a good rapport, like I do and they do.

our subject matter concentrations are different but they dovetail and yeah i i owe both of those guys a tremendous debt man john slaughter too he wrote a great book um yeah i mean he's a great dude too but um and he's he's every bit as intelligent as these other guys but i'm very much a i'm very much a like a theoretical guy and baby and Josh Neil um really kind of compliment um my subject matter concentrations so yeah no that's tremendous man thank you for that endorsement uh yeah we can yeah this weekend's busy but we can reconvene anytime next week and continue this series we will thank you thomas appreciate it yeah man likewise i want to welcome everyone back to the the Picaniano 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 Machiafew. 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, I think. 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 Machiavili was arguing as an Italian Catholic, and like all Italians and really all Roman Catholics, there's a same. there's this tension between Athens and Jerusalem as philosophical poll 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 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 phenomenalogical process of war and peace and where it emerges. Whereas that Clausus is writing about like how war is waged and how you accomplish victory conditions within the domain of political realities or it's like comparing a book on physics to like a manual 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 are outside the scope right now, but I'll get into what 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, um, conflict that seems to never end. You know, um, but there's also to, um, there's also represented by the Haas and Machiavelli, too. You know, when did the modern state emerge? Was it Crommel's protectorate?

You know, the Republic he created, literally, after killing a king? Or was Ferdinand and Isabella Spain, like the first Wusphalian 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 your criteria are. and it depends on what constellation of historical factors you privilege. But that's why it's important to kind of discuss Machiavillian Hobbs and also Spinoza. But so, you know, I don't place the same emphasis on Spinoza. Not because he's not important, but I'll get into why when we reconvene 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 philosophy, you know, why am I talking about English

mathematicians turned 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 Machiavelli wrote

in the prince that's so important it's what the impetus was for him writing it, I think, is what's significant. And there's a certain naivety, I think, to a lot of academic types as well as people who 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 was exclusively committed to these kinds of highfalutin ideas of like an elevated morality and discerning what, you know,

magnanimous virtue is. 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 act.

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 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, discreeting. 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 it 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, axiomatic. 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 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, um, 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 it's 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 they were a civilization and profound

decline by the time but that's often the case that kind of in the twilight or at least you know post 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 this zenith of

cultural production as it were that, you know, they have a kind of detached perspective. Well, still been very much insinuated into a culture that although in precipitous decline is really much like a living form of life

the Nigamaki and Aevex it's totally unambiguous in its definition of virtue Erosel defined what he called the crowning virtue as magnanimity

Magnanimity 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 aesthetical commitment. It's kind of like Bushito with the added layer of, you know, a rigid intellectual discipline overlaying it. That's an imperative 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 is what we would instead are 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 forgo, for example, he's not going to forego material wealth or an interest in women or, you know, he's not going to live as some kind of hair shirt or live like John the Baptist or something, but he's not going to place some due value on these things. You know, and Aristotle's really, 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 a cultural milieu from which Aristotle was speaking. you know and it's uh again the aristotelian model of human psychology and kind of human essence

is a highly integral so the understanding is that you know there's not 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, I think of Napoleon, Muhammad, Pramwell, Edolf 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 stottle he would probably say that a man like me is is far too mired in the business of like high politics you know um at at the expense of other things which is probably true. But

one of the objections I have the people who try and adopt the kind of pagan mindset I don't mean goofballs who you know take trips to Stonehenge and

like run around naked on the solstice or something. I mean people like Ellen DeBenwa who seem to think you can take on some sort of mindset of class lines take what do you can't do that. It's not only work. You know, and I, you can kind of create an intellectual pastiche of the way people thought within that cultural framework, but you can't really immerse yourself in it.

It's not possible. I think what's interesting about that is, 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, and it's like this make-believe identity of deraiccated people who are like race idolaters and one of the things. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Well, it's also, I mean, we're beginning a little about topic, but it's like, I don't understand like why they care about Zionism. It's like, well, 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 aesthetic 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, you shouldn't care about what they think, or you shouldn't care that they oppress you or other people.

You know, but yeah, no, that's a subject worthy of the dedicated discussion. But there's a, I make no mistake. I mean, there are, this isn't, people misunderstand

this is a resilient paradigm, kind of the same way misunderstand in the Gians post-Christian ethical orientation. Like, Erissel 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, like, 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 Cropsey book on political philosophy, and Leo Strauss is a problematic theorist, but he did produce some great scholarship, a value-neutral sort. You know, the first prophet that presaged the arrival of Christ was Isaiah.

I mean, if I 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 for him, 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 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 world. 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. 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. They 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 has 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 involved the name, or they think the colloquialism has some actual definitive weight. So they think, oh, Machiavelli is this like unscrupulous guy rubbing his hands together and talking about plotting against people and institutions. That's not. Machiavili 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 moralist, 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 brink. the brutal reality is a 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 Machiavellian than is the Hobbes. okay even though people like john locke they try to invoke the language of hobbs while hanging all this sort of moral content on uh the thought experiment or the conceptual model of the state of nature

you know but it was very superficial i think i think people like locke are incredibly overrated but this is important because you know um it's not to do that's not to It's just kind of like linear progression from, oh, Machiavili to Hobbes, the Spinoza, to, you know, Kant or whatever. And it's also, again, like Machiavelli, he actually represented the opposite tendency of what people associate him with. You know, it, you know, and it's something to, there is a parallel that's interesting. thing because both houses and Machiavelli came out of what could be considered you know how the uninsful progeny of of uh the 30 years of war

the conditions that created it and obviously in the UK they were hit especially hard even though the even though great Britain um 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 Cromo was a great man he was a hero in the Carlisle sense and in 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 bourges 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 Caesar Borja

would 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 Staircraft as a executive crisis actor. You know, and I think people don't necessarily realize that. and aside on the fortunes of the of the polis of 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, you've got to be prepared for that if you're a magnanimous man or if, you know, if you're any kind of man worthy of the office or the station. But that does tend to insinuate a sort of moral seriousness into the subject matter. I think that goes about saying.

But that's, um, it's important. to 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 you know, and the

last thing I'll say of the kind of comparative direct comparative analysis between the two men. You know, again, Marketville'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, uh, 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? In Hobbes' 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 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 counterargument 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 Hobbs if you approach Habizian. theory like Schmidt did. And, you know, you don't even need to go as far as to posit, well, this is, 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, and I reread the 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 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.

I mean, my people are ruthless as fuck, but it's something there's something frightening about like a Spaniard or an Italian crisis actor

on the warpath and there's a kind of genius for the economy of violence and some of Italians I think and I stand by that but in talking about the case of Caesar Borgia

Moggi really makes clear well, you know, a prince at all times, he should appear manly, you know, morally upright, brave, pious, you know, a religious believer in control his faculty 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,

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 that's how every prince but that's the tradeoff for the great wealth and power and esteem of prince enjoys honor

earth, but that also, I mean, everybody has their cross to bear. Like every man no matter how, you know, like lowly in his worldly station or how elevated, the cross that Prince bears is that he's going to have to do horrible things.

Okay? To protect his people, to protect the Paulus, to defeat his enemies, to guarantee 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 Harkonen 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 the large part, Caesar, Borgia. He's kind of like a cross between like Caesar Borgia and Stalin. But Borja was made commander of the papal armies by his father, who was the Pope. Pope Alexander, the 6th.

The papacy at that time wasn't as Alexander. They were a highly reliant on mercenaries. And Machiavelli was going to come back to this point that mercenaries are shit. You know, you've got to have men who are, well, will

die for the polis, or die for the state. Interesting Machiavelli is one of the first political theorists that took him invoke the term state. But you know, you can't, in all these, like, mafia movies, there's like this bastardization

of the query. Like, is it better to be like feared or loved. You know, that's not a query in my it's obvious it's better to be like revered like if people fear you and the men under your under arms fight for you because you pay them like it's you're gonna 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 who like men obey under pain of

mortal jeopardy or because you're paying them, you're going to be murdered at first opportunity. You know, but bringing it back the Orsini brothers

who were very much insinuated into the French court. There were these kind of like mercenary aristocrine. you know um and uh the pope by a real problem okay because he depended on these guys

for their battlefield aptitude you know and their ability to kind of finesse interstate power political concerns and intrigues like as the you know kind of the 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 then underway was romagna so what caesar borgia did was he basically promised the rassini brothers that if they break with the french court when he conquered romania you know he He both pay 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 pacify Romagna.

That's laughable. Well, what Caesar Borgia did was he hired this guy who was a notorious ghoul, really, named Romero de Orico. Ramiro de Orico Maggiavoli referred to him literally as a beast Okay, and in Dune You know the Beast Rabon? This is exactly what Baron Arconin does

Remiro de Orico He goes to Romagna and he starts Utterly brutalizing people You know He slaughters people wholesale He doesn't give a fuck You know And

Caesar Borja let this continue for months on 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 borgas says i'm going to liberate romania and i'm going to cut this brute orko in two and that's exactly what he did you know just like baron harconin uh his big plan was to deploy beast, Rabon to Iraqis, and Rabon 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 Heracles or like Caesar, you know, this, like, great man who,

who not only, not only was like a great warlord and a real man, but, you know, a liberator who who killed the monster, who killed the beast who was enslaving us and brutalizing us. You know, and Machiavelli, he says, like, Caesar Borges doing that. He's like, that was an incredibly brilliant thing to do, and it was. Like, Machiavelli didn't say, like, Cesar 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 Borge ultimately came to a bad end

but he guarded his father's dynasty and posterity and this was a tenuous position too. I mean he was he was 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 Maguavoli suggests that this was a good thing, you know, and in fact,

if anything, the there is another board that are kind of synonymous with this literally like incestuous kind of palace intriguing and this 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 great people. It's not just because they make the best food and really cool sports cars and produce pretty women. I mean, I like all those things, too, but, you know, they really do have, like, a genius for for politics of this really sanguinary sort. But, um, we're coming up on an hour. I'm going to, we'll wrap up

Machiavelli and get into Spinoza next time if that's okay. Sounds good to me. Tell everybody where they can find you right now. Yeah, I'm a... Jade Burn and I just dropped into episode of Radio Free Chicago. That seems to be popping really good.

My home right now is Substack. It's Real Thomas 777.7.7. at subset.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 a rumble. It seems like a natural fit for us. I've been playing around 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. There's an announcement of my substack and my Tgram, then there'll be like a link to it. But yeah, that's, I'm in the process of reconfiguring my content, but the substack's 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, like, videos, there's my podcast, there's a bunch of like 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 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 done, 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 it seems short, that's why. So forgive me for that. So it's 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 about

20 years before Hobbs. And he's, Hobbs 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 Grotus, really, everybody from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to HLA Hart, 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. Grotis 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 war and peace, which is as magnum opus, will notice, too, that Carl Schmidt owes a debt to Grotius. And there's something peculiar in America, because on the one hand, I mean, I'm convinced the American judiciary is quite,

literally a positori 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 illiterate. 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 I 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 uh it's like somebody who who can't master high school algebra holding forth on

as an MIT lecturer and like advanced 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 the people who propose these kinds of things, they invoke kind of like a bastardized legal positivism to sort it up. You know, and then

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 this sacred thing while acknowledging that legal positivism is basically an empirical and pragmatic enterprise. And that's one of the contradictions, I think, that is going to prove fatal to this increasingly decrepit ideological consensus that's reigns since 1933. I mean, I see it's happening all over the place because 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 uh this isn't a uh superficial thing that uh it's got a new laptop i'm still kind of figuring out i'm sorry let me i'm trying to open this fucking window there we go um but yeah the law the law of war in peace uh grodius uh was most active in um the early 17th He was born in 1583. And, yeah, the law of war in peace was his most significant work. And again, this proceeded Hobbes' body of work by about 20 years. Now to be clear, too, 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. will okay but again grodius conspicuously distinguished his enterprise from that of aristotle you said this there isn't a science of politics there's a science of a law wherein you know order can be imposed on political impulses which are often pre-rational and although predictable and cyclical and you know arguably um um conducted within parameters of bound irrationality, particularly at zenith of the expression of these impulses, which is the state of war,

that doesn't mean that there's some underlying science to political behavior or the manner in which nations conduct each other in their efforts to survive and perpetuate their existence and capture power. from their rivals, but the law, however, it can be understood through, you know, the lens of a 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 had 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 it 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 30 years of war was very anarchic. But there's some, there's like an apoccal significance in terms of the development of Europe's intellectual significance.

intellectual heritage that, you know, is the reason for this. I'm convinced. You know, it's something that would require a way more thorough investigation. But the central premise of the law of war and peace and Grotius' entire body of work is the idea that man is by nature a rational and social animal. Okay. That doesn't mean that everything man does is derive 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 Hobbes. Okay. Almost certainly Hobbs read a lot of Grotius, you know, different as they were in terms of their suppositions on political ontology. but you know it's uh grodius conspicuously too he attacked the the classical idea of conventionalism

and classical natural right as distinguished from Thomas's natural right you know which is basically an Aristotelian model um which as we got into an earlier episodes it suggests not just that

it's a just positive 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 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,

Cornettis 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 Grotius of 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 they're 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 Grodius' 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 avarice, 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 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 cast of jurists or by you know resort to pious reflection on

you know, the conscience of the inner witness or by you know, the study of scientific principles that, you know, seem to suggest a harmonious order to the universe, you know,

be it physical properties or the metaphysical permutations of, you know, valued judgments and things. You know, consequently, there is no 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'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 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 I 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 an undergrad because I realized

as I bumped up again and again against this kind of peculiar sort of bastardized claim that cloak itself in the language of positive law, yet it was returning to 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 leads to some, you know, any such person trying to lay claim to Grotius or lay claim to the mantle as his heir. But, But, yeah, so what jumped out to me first and foremost was, you know, this is Oliver Rundle Holmes and HLA Hart, and that's, you know, where they, that's where all the great legal positivists, or legal realists would, you know, that would be their starting point. So that's important.

Interestingly, too, Grotius, he aimed to impeach stoicism as well as Epicureanism and a lot of his dialogues where Cerniatis is like a main character and that that's not accidental Cerniette'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 that 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 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 sort of 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 the but he also, 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 contemplate. a posterity beyond himself, whether it's his nation or his tribe or his direct lineage. You know, it's not, it's not self-preservation 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, of higher, you know, the capacity. You know, the past either reason and in a way that, you know, sets them 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 one is 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 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 should take notice, there's nothing in this situation. 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 claimed that, well, you know, Grotius describing the essential nature of man like vesting 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 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 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 they're 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, to, um, to be a, um, to be a, um, um, to be a,

bring it back, Grotius' description and his impeachment of the concept of natural right as conventionally understood that's the key to understanding since his conceptual paradigm.

It's in relation to this conception of man as a rational and social animal that any any any any any notion of right and any concept of political society or be understood um 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 posulets 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 mendus 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 Athens, but 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 am not, I'm not limited in the subject matter in a way that can substantiate that partial it.

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 see if you steal it 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 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. 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 theorists 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 that's, an artificial paradigm you know or it's just an incorrect way of understanding what's

under discussion um 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 from which, you know, the social organism derives in terms of its structure and, you know, the behavioral modes 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's 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 a 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 commit, 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 or something 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's 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 a 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. The 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 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 the 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 are 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 lower than me. You remember this too. There used to be this really impassioned discussion and opposition to the death penalty.

elite 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 the egalitarian argument which is what's arbitrary and capricious who gets executed but then there's uh they they'd invoke uh this kind of pragmatic argument that well if a capital

if capital punishment isn't adequately functioning as a deterrent then it can't be justified and that's really not precedent in terms of why men are put to death you 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 Maestra said you know the essence of 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 if some sort of gilded you know impossible

but such that there is precedent I mean granted the 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 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 and these functionaries saying they want to ban guns but that's not that's not going to happen you know and I got mixed feelings about 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, you know, developed, differs from contemporary perspectives, is because it's completely at odds with the idea of human rights as we would think of it.

You know, 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 house. 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, there's a connection.

between Marx and Hegel, you know, that doesn't mean that Hegelianism is truly, you know, the ethical forbear 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, 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 in 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. But it's important to clarify and not just because I'm interested in depriving the regime of credibility in terms of the intellectual precedent that it claims to be the

heirs to but i think that's important too or appropriate obviously but that's not um the kind of linear view of historical processes is insidious for the similar for similar reasons you know it 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 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 themselves to this subject matter, you know, like I am.

It's, uh, there's also, and this isn't as developed, at least, uh, in Grodius's 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 demands higher rationality and, the social organism that encompasses and is the product of that capability. The kind of unexamined aspect of that is that which obliges the men to act correctly, not just to refrain from doing things that violate the public trust. and the, you know, confidence is in the essential aspects of the social organism and political society. But, you know, there's a natural sanction that must attend 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 moral

you know and that warrants the kind of deeper dive I've got my own thoughts on that but I I've got a I'd have to delve deeper into some of Grotius is 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 of incoming 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 much as, he sought to distinguish himself from political theorists. I think that that owes more to just that.

I think you wanted to make it clear that he wasn't suggesting some overall theory of politics. He was suggesting a science of the law which had anthropological and psychological aspects that were, explanatory of the human condition within this narrow domain of human activity. You know, that domain being, you know, within political society. I don't read into that some sort of blanket repudiation of you know, Aristotelian political ontology. But again, 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 of 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, um, 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 continue 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 um Calvin and um and Martin Luther if that sounds agreeable man it's your show study both of them at length look forward to it yeah yeah that's great yeah all right man I hope this was worthwhile to the subs well it all 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 talk about the law, like unless you're literally talking about, you know, unless you're talking about, you know, and it's 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

I like all of Rundle Holmes you know I came to the point that the law has 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 the sort of like learned science of ethics. You know what I mean?

That spins things off and all kinds of sophistry and tautological, you know, nonsense. But it's, yeah, it's... one also too i mean there's just uh there was a it's kind of remarkable too like this the uh like the the 15 16 and 17th centuries you had there's like the politics of europe were incredibly complicated you know and you still had uh you know like sectarian matters

were still having a huge impact on on war and peace question and also 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 um yeah it's really fascinating to contemplate but yeah we'll uh we'll continue this series in earnest and yeah I 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, uh, 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 mine phaser 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 on 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, 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 Pekanino 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 it's really sick. As I think, I shout it out on my T-RAM. we're going to deal with Hegel 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 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 really much 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 paradigines 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. Hagel in my, other than Hobbs, Hagel 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 Hegel, 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 dealing fundamentally with, you know,

a metaphysical tradition that you know, 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. Hegel wasn't, he wasn't some, he didn't have some idolatrous view of the state. He didn't view the state of some 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 on. 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 his own mortality and his desire to create enduring structures and to bring formal and symbolic things that he holds to be sacrosanical. sanct as well as practical things that are prosaic and related to mere survival is take here as 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 state is something that we should revere at all. Like what he's saying is that politics and political life of which the state is the subject matter, you know, is the instantation of man's inner cycle. 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 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 it 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,

where, whereby remedial justice is premises, on self-help and where private actors are primarily responsible for what here to for in the modern era has been the exclusive domain of public authority. We're still talking about state crap. We're still talking about a kind of state. A state is literally that, like, a present sense experience of deliberate political authority derived from

you know an ongoing historical process that we can interpret through our faculty for for 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 doing a basic

inflexibility of the current system you know that and that's something that people need to remedy you know but um so there's uh you know hey and and finally before I get into like the meat of this uh 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. Because most people haven't read Hale. Because it's, um, I mean, to me, I don't think it's particularly arduous, but if it's not your subject theory or your research

concentration, you know, it, it can, it can seem daunting to to take to take on a study of Hegel. 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 are elements of the philosophy of right.

I'm going to butcher this pronunciation. But the original title, the German title, is Grunin de Philosophy Desrext. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. It's a tome of almost pure theory. And I'd say complementary to elements of the philosophy of Wright, where his essays on then contemporaneous government and process as a government that

he viewed as an extricably related to 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 male citizen of majority who wasn't, you know, in a workhouse or a jail. But, you know, this was, both of these, despite being discreet, and temporally situated

in peculiar in particular ways both of these kind of bodies of essays you know they were singular and thorough examples

of Higalian praxis but again conceptual modeling and praxis within the Higalian 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-thomist 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 is clear really from the moment that somebody takes on a study of Higalian. thought. There's echoes of this in his stuff on the hard sciences as well as metaphysics

in the science of logic and the encyclopedia of the philosophic sciences. Hegel talks about a universal history that is the product of

eternal reason the cunning of reason and the revelation of this process, you know, whereby man can apprehend it. And, you know, through his capacity, his own 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 in their methodology. That I'm not making an argument like some of the Von Misesians do. And that, you know, modeling is a fool's errand and impossible. Like, it absolutely is possible. It's just that the criteria and the inputs that are being employed aren't. aren't the correct ones. That's somewhat tangential, but that's important to understand. Essential to Hegelian thought

is the concept of Scytlishkite, literally ethical life or ethical order. The concept of Ziplishkite 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, it's the domain of monastically cloistered, you know, churchmen, you know, and according to a lot of enlightenment theorists, this is incorrect because it's not pragmatic and it's somehow divorced from the reality of statecraft. 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 praxis 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 in 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 psychological

cloister of inner life, such that the experiences that participates 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, 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 um manners and morals are one way to understand Ziplichshite Zitlichich

Kite Um In other words, the life of the state is really the life of the culture constituted of individuals and their devotion to a discrete way of life

bound up with manners and morals which themselves derived 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 with, and it gives him a training and an education and habituates him to the

manners and morals of his culture or is race. And these things that's, you know, this, this is a, an educational mechanism and a and a means of imbuing people with cultural competence, but these institutions themselves, you know, derive from the psychological inner lives of people who are the constituent elements of that culture. You know, so it's a total. 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 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, this should be obvious, I think, but I think many people don't fully understand the kind of constituent elements of that perspective. you know, in order to develop a full conceptual picture. So there's, so to Hegel, there's an ontological and an existential significance to political order, you know, and in 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. The, uh, it is true, you know, and again, like any, any, any, any, any praxis, you know, derives from an astrological 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

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 in conditions where human minds can perceive the process that is underway. You know, and those participate in the dialectical, you know, the phenomenon of of higher dialectics.

Okay. Um, you know, so there's not intrinsic moral content to the state other than what

you know human and discreetly and cultural and conventional practices and morals you know

bring to it in this kind of reciprocal cycle of development you know um 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 statecraft, that's what Hegel 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 um you know that's that that's the only that that is all that's the only thing that can be the subject matter of this process You know, as per praxis, you know, the state is a reality, 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 lives his life and thinks his thoughts. you know, it's the means by which the individual man is 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 really. reasonable within his, you know, moral and political and thus historical consciousness from what is pre-rational and merely, you know, derived from the passions. Now, the mere appearance, again, in realization of the divine, of a providential phenomenon,

of the mind of God. That's not to say that God's will is 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 ending itself. you know, it's a process of man's capacity to reason and, you know, God's will in the affairs of man. 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 Hagle 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, um, 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 talent to saying that you don't believe in gravity, you know, like Wiley Coyote does.

you know, Wiley Coyote claimed, or he's ignorant of gravity, so he's, like, he walks off a cliff and he's, like, walking on nothing. And then he 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, utopians tend to view political matters. You know, um, philosophy can't go beyond the reality. 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.

size the 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 statecraft 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 applied to the Higalian paradigm of a Gothic cathedral where there's this enormous complexity within its architecture that nevertheless is incredibly harmonious. 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 Maistre echoed this in, in, in, in moral, moral and aesthetical terms, which is really interesting. But, um, that, the historical process, you know, the political theorist needs to, and the informed laymen alike, needs to, approach this 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, 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 nor 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, um, that that speaks for itself. You know, you don't, and that that's why a lot of people, too, misconstrue or misunderstand Hagle as 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 than that we would exist in a state of complete stasis or man's simply 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 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 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 that's true that's the way to understand it you know it is the 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 a understood from on the conventional timeline, I guess, you know, 5,000 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 province, the province, 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 a 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 of the theater, if you will, of 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,

um, categorically and axiomatically, you know, state craft and the praxis of political order is a process of creative destruction. You know, and this is, the state reflects

the mind and soul 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 degree, 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, which is for his own. way of life to flourish and endure perennially while repudiating the similar wish, will, and impulse within his enemy, within the heart and mind of his enemy. You know, and this is neither good nor bad. This is simply what he is. you know and i mean such that there is

a moral aspect to it okay to remove to remove that catalyst I mean what what what would there be like a a culturalist society of sleeping people like figuratively and literally like 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, 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, 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 literally senile.

You know, and 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 thereof. That was so characteristic of, you know, the brief kind of triumphalist era of the Clinton 90s until, you know, 2001. You know, I think that that's why the vestigeal aspects up at 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, I know, well, and it's also, too, here, the, this, and this is important, and this is, uh, Hobbs, um, this is, this is, this is, there's a parallel in Habeasian thought here, too.

The, the, the, the original conflict, kind of the, the original, you know, um, The original conflict paradigm that is prior to the state is the conflict between master and slave. Okay. And in Hegel's formulation, this kind of setting of the stage of the primordial stage with, you know, the master's slave dichotomy. in the Hegelian formulation, 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, 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 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 of vanity or the desire for recognition

and posterity and power. What we think of as clout. And secondly, the fear of violent death. You know, um, but there's a unique

characteristic in the master slave paradigm because it doesn't end with the victory of the master and his ability to corral his slave into

this paradigm of servitude. This is a dynamic process in Hagellian 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 slavehold in society the first societies were were based on war. And 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 devote an endless series on discussing the various aspects of slavery. Okay. And what its origins are. 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 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 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 Christ. Christianity too. And like a lot of people don't understand that either, you know, and the, 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, um, great antiquity version of like a no- savage myth or something.

And it's not, it's not, it's not some moral claim about, you know, how the, the wretched classes or 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, and, within this classical paradigm of of masterhood and slavery like we're not talking about a guy sitting around sipping boat drinks and wearing like wine shirts

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 an essential, there's an essential function that both the master and the slave perform. You know, without,

either one, the cunning of reason would not have been possible, you know, and higher life, you know, of which the political is kind of both the most sanguinary and, and, and, and, um, 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, 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 um and i'm i submit too like i one of the reasons um you know and this is one of the things that it is actually pure it's one of the few things that marxists are 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 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 Higalians in this sense. You know, and plus two, like it's arbitrary. Like people like 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 restoration wages where, like, 20% of men die on the job. Like, that's, that's okay.

You know, it's, um, there's like an arbitrariness to this kind of feign moral outrage that additionally, like, impeaches any legitimacy. But, um, 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 You can do my law-in-form stuff

You know that we got an active chat there It's real Thomas 7777.7.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 as I kind of 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. seek and 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 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 may have, 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 O'No show. Thomas is here and we're doing part two, Hegel, Continental Philosophy series. 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 the epistemic assumptions of historicism, and Hagle's political ontology, like what he what he insists is the purpose of the state as well as its psychological you know um constitution that can't that can't be extricated from you know things that are discreetly you know related to

um 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 this 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 a dialectical process in history, but, but, But it really has nothing to do with a Hegelian paradigm, other than in the most kind of loosely structured capacities. You know, so if you're talking about Hegelianism, 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 priori or by appeal to, you know, abstract universalisms and things. You know, and that's kind of what I wanted to get into today, to today. like I said before I went live I'm still shaking off some fatigue and some symptoms of this virus I can't seem to shake so the subs please forgive me if I repeat myself or if I seem a little bit out of it

you know I I um I um I try to make sure that I I always deliver properly. I believe where we left off last time was I believe I

raised the matter of Carl Schmidt very much along the debt to Hagle in describing the state as being fundamentally born of conflict. You know, not just conflict external to the 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 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 the 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 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 talks about recognition, he's really talking about participation and things that are, you know, transcendent and historical terms. You know, what Aristotle talked about is, you know, the magnanimous man, he has a basically aristotle. 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,

um, and to accomplish this process, uh, of recognition, um, you know, men will risk their,

their life, their wealth, their reputation and even their life. Um, so it becomes a mortal struggle. Um, 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 characteristics that define it, you know, will submit to the superior,

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 caste 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, singularly 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... First of all, that's an exception anyway, but regardless, it doesn't say this desire. 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

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 Hegel 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 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, what 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, 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. 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 hegelianism. And you can't talk about Hegel's account of what precedes you know, the formal 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 reach Spangled, and I know a lot of the young guys do, and that's great, the debt that he owes that 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 why is Hegel important from a partisan perspective, well, that's why. and there's two the 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 Hagel identified these two tenancies 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. Object of 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. Basically, what Hegel's getting at is that these sacrifices incoming 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 be 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, can come to full forish. And again, as we talked about last time, Hegel's not talking about the state as 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 um 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 uh the historical community that it encompasses you know in other words it's 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 of the Greeks much as, you know, they deserve to be praised,

and much as high culture was perfected in abject capacities 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, or organically, spontaneously, and immediately, you know, Spangler made the point that in these Athenian freezes, you know, it's always, it's always a sensuously present body, you know, of like a warrior or like a farmer or of like, you know, a beautiful woman, but they're always standing in front of nothing, you know, it's like there's, there's not, there's not, like, there's not like a historical past and future and 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 yeoman, you know, as a slave. you know, like as a as a craftsman, you know, education should be for military service and the demands of citizenship, you know, and the household should be,

you know, essentially a school of command and obedience. You know, there's no thought given to the subjective, what gives rise the subjective liberty, you know, and the desire for recognition and the flourishing of these impulses and imperatives. You know, to be a good Athenian is to be in the habit, literally, 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's, 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, you know, which is exactly why Socrates found himself. I mean, I think, I generally hear 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, you know, 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 assuming 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 believe the natural world revealed itself to man on grounds that

you know being in 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, you know, 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. Noose, noose, a rational soul. This axiomatically finds expression through fellow feeling within the polis and between people's constituting the demos, the body politic,

in the Heidegarian view. And that's a Hegelian point, too. You know. there is no the polis doesn't emerge because it's 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 active agent, you know, and through higher reason, he literally creates this paradigm so that, you know, all higher values and a recognition can come to fruition, you know, and that is the process of state craft, literally. That is the origin of the state. The That was a bit tangential, but I think it's important. Hegel, bring it back, Hegel contrasted Athens with Rome. He cited Rome's frailty of essentially

a constellation of mirror causes within the body politic. 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, 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 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 the level of private persons like formally equal with one another you know within the class they found themselves you know possessed a formal rights um in common but the the only thing that held them together was this kind of like extract 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, 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 creates a repository of active nihilism, you know, and there's a very real danger of all such states, um, 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. equality, well 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 the perspectives outside of those promulgated by the minority cadres who constantly the state itself that basically renders everything else oppositional to the state like every other modality of thought i mean that's where we're at now you know obviously i mean people aren't being slaughtered en masse like in in jacob and france or um the soviet union but that 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 just some cliche of like Old Wright types or of, you know, midwit libertarian guys. Like 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 abide this kind of Alan Bloom, Carl Popper like stupid on purpose, sort of you know superficially persuasive but you know kind of

intellectually impoverished viewpoint held out as as pragmatic. It's not just guys like that. It's you know, it's, it's, there's people who are more reasonable and learned, you know, and a common, who represents a critique of, of Hegel as well as, it's being this kind of authoritarian brute. That's, that's the wrong way to, that's the wrong way to characterize Hegel. Hegel was adamant that, um, it's, it's, it's, it's an absolute moral imperative that the state

recognize the liberty inherent to minds capable of higher reason, you know, derivative of Logos. And, you know, he considered an absolute imperative that the state recognized that, you know, Logos is the source of discrete, these discrete and individual ambitions, you know, within human minds. but by no means does this suggest that this must or should

lead the procedural democracy you know 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

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, are their concerns. You know, he, he said that, he said that that's abject nonsense. You know, like, again, like, really all the the state owes to people in this regard is an acknowledgement, you know, of, um, of, uh, the liberty inherent to Logos in the minds of people so capable 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 upon him a kind of augury about power political affairs, you know, or he's a brilliant analyst, you know, and Hagell he won't even further, he said, the possible, you know, the potentiality, at least in abstract terms, um, for each man to potentially become member of the governing class or, uh, you know, or like the higher judiciary or anything like that, you know, that, that still doesn't confer upon him a right to be heard. Um, or for authority to, you know, somehow defer to his opinion as

if it had some sort of merit. You know, if in fact he has aptitude for such things, you know, he will rise to that office and, you know, a natural authority will accrue based on his 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, this balancing between the general will and the subjective mind, you know,

the grave, grave violence is done to this you know kind of necessary unity and balancing of these essential aspects 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 the Galilean theory

with with any kind of like liberal theory of government you know and this is why Hegel's kind of consummately modern European

philosopher you know before every European theory is modern European theory of statecraft prior to the day of defeat because there aren't a more like European three is a 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 Carwell cult iterations 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, um, it isn't really premised on anything. You know, um,

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 I got for Hegel. I'm going to speak more on this, but then we'd, um. 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 accountantal political theory. You know, we'll talk about Aquinas and then we'll cover Martin Luther and,

Calvin and um yeah that's what i was thinking for the next episode if that's it real sounds good all right um let everyone know where they can find you yeah um i'm retooling my website with um with the help of a dear friend of mine who assists me with things relating to it um you can access it now although bear in mind it's a work in progress it's Thomas 777.com is number 7-H-M-A-S-777.com Otherwise, right now, you should visit my substack. That's where most of my content is,

especially pod content and longer form stuff. It's real Thomas-777.7.substack.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.