The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1202: Continental Philosophy and Its Origins - Pt. 1 - Introduction w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

62 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas begins a series on the subject of Continental Philosophy, which focuses on history, culture, and society. It was the prevailing philosophy of continental Europe in the 20th century.Thomas' SubstackRadio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump Dunebeg. Search Trump Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunebiog, Kush Farage. If you want to support the show and get the episodes early and ad-free, head on over to freeman Beyond the Wall.com forward slash support. I want to explain something right now if you support me through Substack or Patreon. You have access to an RSS feed that you can plug in to any podcatcher, including Apple, and you'll be able to listen to the episodes through there. If you support me through Subscrib Star, Gumroad, or on my website directly, I will send you a link where you can download the file, and you can listen to it any way you wish. I really appreciate the support everyone gives me. It keeps the show going. It allows me to basically

put out an episode every day now, and I'm not going to stop. I'm just going to accelerate. I think sometimes you see that I'm putting out two, even three a day. And yeah, can't do it without you. So thank you for the support. Head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanuenae 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 is 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, it used to be a unitary discipline. When a discreet political philosophy branched off from that, in my opinion, that owed to the Peloponnesian war and Thucydides was the first political philosopher, in my opinion. West Point types, traditionally, as well as in the Cold War, like strategic studies and political science types, they put a premium on Thucydides. I think they misunderstand him.

They like to claim lucidity is with the first political realist. That's not true. I understand why they think that, but it's not just the superficial reading of

owing to his 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 our ourselves into discussion by talking about lucidies which is going to dovetail into a discussion of Socrates because obviously the Peloponnesian war is the reason why Socrates was executed

I agree with Sorrel Socrates deserved to be executed that's 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 with Thucydides and then dovetail into Socrates on the next episode.

But I think I should start with something of an explanation as to why political philosophy is important. and basically what the political right, like how it is situated with respect to these sorts of intellectual tendencies. And this gets complicated, too, because a lot of the later right-wing philosophers,

you know, like Schovenhower, like, Inesia, 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 I'm going to draw out some Kirk is that America is intellectually impoverished in some ways. That's not a punitive take. my background is really the only type of background that can be considered

like ethnically American. I'm not trashing my own heritage. But I think what I just said is indisputable. And anybody who knows the subject matter wouldn't disagree.

There's some basic assumptions. Epistemic priors, as I think, of them. Conceptual biases, if you will. Like, essential characteristics to the conceptual horizon of the political right

loosely defined. Contra, the majoritarian perspective of the elites from the Enlightenment onward. You know, the recurrent kind of right-wing assumptions

and predispositions are a person forms of belief. human imperfection. Okay. Like even true kind of secular right wingers, you know, like out and out

fascists, who, uh, 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 Tulleric terms. you know, and that's arguably one of the reasons why tendencies like national socialism and fascism, you know, sought to intervene selectively with respect to both the biological stock of the racial organism, as well as elevate the cultural competence, the body politic. that wasn't for lack of ability to identify other political projects to dedicate their energies to. 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 accepted from inception.

Owing to that, man is a social organism even more so than any other species. You know, even to a biological reductionist, this is clear, okay? Just in pragmatic terms. Empirically, it's obvious. This can be grounded in a religious doctrine of original sin as an explanatory mechanism, or it could be argued entirely in secular grounds as I just enumerated, you know, including but not limited to the biological facts of the kind of limited preparedness and, you know, lack of complete instinctual mechanisms for survival at scale, you know,

So the right accepts that this kind of moral imperfection or this kind of maladaptive tenancy intrinsic to man, qua man, requires both certain restraints imposed at both convention and institutions, but also it requires a curated sociology. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design.

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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. One of the sources of the ongoing tragedy of the commons is you know, the common man's impulse to gratify his ego, you know, whether it's through, you know, coveting the wives of his fellows or subjugating principle to profit, you know, and

enrichment at the expense of the social organism, you know, there's an understanding among the right, whether you're talking about, you know, conservatives, revolutionaries, radicals, fascists, national socialists, you know, sectarian partisans who have, you know, originally theological view, this understanding that epistemological modesty as a restraining mechanism of hubris, but also as a correct aesthetic posture, you know, A man who believes nothing precedes him and who doesn't understand, no respect, nor esteem historical processes, and the role of the social organism in those processes as far as edifying man as an individual and in his individual capacity as well as a component of a 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 that except liberals. You know, and I make this point to people a lot, especially when they try and morally condemn their critics by saying, you know, who are you to judge somebody for, say, being gay? It's like it's not, the issue isn't what people are interested in doing in terms of sexuality. The issue is that, for example, to be gay is to take on a social identity rooted around what you do with your penis. And that basically means you've abandoned Logos and decided to live like some kind of animal.

You know, it's incidental that the kind of subject of that depravity is sex. it could be any number of other things you know and when you confront people with this they'll give you like a dumb look either because they know you're right and they have no rebuttal or because you might as well be speaking

Chinese because to them you know they basically view the highest good as ceding these kinds of glandular impulses and finding ways to gratify egoistic desire

often but not exclusively biological and mitigating the pain that exhumatically 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 and perpetuating the survival of the social organism. You know, whether that's the race or the nation or the or the ecclesiastical community, you know, whatever the primary subject is of the particular disposition, ontological disposition. You know, so this idea of 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 L liberals mean when they talk about happiness. They're talking about impulse fulfillment. That that's not a legitimate regime. That's not how we judge institutions, according to practical reason, is whether they're making people happy or not. I mean, yes, obviously there's institutions that are destructive,

but generally, though, cease to exist because there's an anthropic reason, because if these institutions were truly destructive, they wouldn't endure for millennia because they'd be doing the opposite of what they're supposed to do. You know, like, this is obtuse, but as a counterfactual, like, suppose it was an institution that encouraged men to get drunk and beat their children. Like, how long do you think that would last? You know, I mean, like, it's... That's why, kind of the zine and the intellectual laziness among people who kind of abide this capital 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 they're, ops are, you know, they just characterize it as grounded in in this kind of faux like layman's understanding of science

or a pragmatic cultivation, again, of impulse fulfillment. And it's tautological too. Because they'll claim that, well, if you deprive people in the capacity to fulfill these impulses, they'll become

antisocial and they'll seek to 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 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 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 there's kind of like a built-in, they kind of built in an excuse for rationalizing. their own assertions, including even, you know, by resort to the methods that they privilege. A belief that there's nothing inherently immoral or value-loaded about prejudice is another consistent aspect of of the rightest conceptual paradigm. Air grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area

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inculcated by habit that basically become instinctual okay and hume on somewhat different contextual bases made essentially the same argument okay we're talking about customary moral rules that derive from practical reason that again um needn't be availed to some punitive cross-examination you know or some or forced to forced to be defended in some conceptual court whereby the standard of review is the degree to which they produce human happiness by their ability to avail or preclude 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, individual men are not going to live their lives in isolation. So how they treat others and how they partake of community benefits and how they seek to engage with that humanitarian structure. structure that's going to very much be defined by their ethics and the prejudices that inform their ethics. And if the only dieting imperative is one of non-interference with impulse fulfillment,

well, that's essentially a non-aggression pact that's largely unenforceable and that people are going to find ways to subvert and exploit and earn to enrich themselves at the expense of the communitarian enterprise. So axiomatically, that's self-defeating. Beyond that, too, 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 historicism in this benglarian sense because it's somewhat more accessible at least in superficial terms historicism is both fundamentally right wing and it's also an essential

aspect of a rightist epistemology you know the understanding that human groups differ. There's, you know, there's this profound distinctions between and within populations. You know, yeah, there are certain universals

that owe and derived from the human condition, you know, but the understanding that the developmental cycles of discrete races and cultural groupings and population. And, populations, you know, the prime symbols that constitute, you know, the symbolic psychological aspects of these human groupings, you know, the customary prejudices, the conception these people have of themselves, you know, the sorts of activities that, uh, 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 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. Higsett. I think what I'm calling, like saying communists or hiding under his bed, like some 1950s John Bircher or something, because that's fucking retardant. But I do think we can speak, of a communistic mode of thought, or Jacobin, if you prefer, or, you know, there's a concrete conceptual bias that I'm describing. And, you know, I think invoking terms familiar rather than

esoteric or more constructive in describing it. But, you know, that's an insidious, that's beyond an insidious tendency in that 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 things of a historical nature for their own sake.

You know, it basically precludes human happiness. 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. that's the real that that that's the that's the that's the that's the essence of the 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 globalists who prevailed in the Cold War, 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.

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expertly crafted seasonal cocktails and dance the night away with DJs from Love Tempo. Brett take infuse, amazing atmosphere, incredible food and drink. My goodness, it's Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at Guinness Storehouse. Get the facts be drinkaware, visit drinkaware.com. 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, you know, when you're talking about the perspective of Thucydides and adjacent, as we'll get into, though not, though Thucydides wasn't a standard bearer,

of the position that Socrates deserved to be executed. Again, he was taciturn on those sorts of questions. But you can kind of tease out what he thought of these things, just kind of like you can with, you know, reading Machiavelli as well. But intrinsic to rightest epistemology is a belief that religion is essential, if only for utilitarian reasons. You know, make the point again and again,

I hold out Charles Maras as an example. Moros was an atheist. And I think he was more of a fascist than a reactionary. Even though, like, he held out, you know, de Meister was obviously his primary influence. So he held out the monarchy and in particular the Roman church as essential aspects of the French as a people. And, you know, the, and as a racial organism.

you know, that could coherently be said to exist historically, you know. So even people who aren't devout Christians or Muslims, they, I believe it's basically impossible to be, to be right-wing and be anti-religion. So, like, when people talk that way, they're either, they're either professional liars and shills, who are trying to kind of corrupt the conversation at scale, or by poisoning discourse, or other people who don't really have a developed view of politics and political matters, either concrete or theoretical.

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, their only experience of religion is going to some mega church, their mom dragged them to or something, you know, or when they think of religion, they think of like Joel Osteen. You know, I don't know exactly, because that way of life is kind of alien to me, conceptually. But, you know, you know, the uh if for another reason um even uh even right wingers who are critical of this kind of zealous religious enthusiasm

that's that can be characteristic of uh the body politic when you know they're they're agitated by some crisis or or some kind of historical shock you know even people who make a priority of criticizing that kind of plebeian impulse towards, you know, sweeping moral zealusiness as applied to public life and sociality at scale are pretty unconditionally committed to the understanding that, you know, without some sort of metaphysics, there's not going to be any sustainability to the to the political organism. You know, and really the only way

that can be intelligible in, you know, the, after the 17th century or so, you know, what's failure, obviously, is my poll start here, is through the lens of whatever the dominant religious theological strain has historically been within the culture.

You know, and this part takes a symbolic psychology as well and the kind of stuff that Carl Jung and Jaspers and people like that got into, that's a bit outside the scope. But, you know, one of the reasons why I come down very strongly on people who try and fall back on this kind of Darwinist perspective while claiming to be right wing there because that's not, that doesn't track

you know and the only reason people think that that perspective is something like a rightist perspective is because there's such an absolute bully pulpit

until recently for elite opinion, which is monolithic in the managerial state. And even if there are divisions therein, in a system like ours, or in a system like the Soviet system was when the world was divided between competing globalisms, even if there are, even if the imperial house of the, elite of the nomenclature as a house divided that will never be broadcast publicly and you know hashed out um through some sort of discursive process that the body politic is available to as some you know key participant so i realize that probably went a little longer than i expected but that

that's what we're talking about we're talking about the the kind of philosophical basis of, you know, a partisan political commitment, you know, and this is why it's important, not just in terms of cultivating intellectual rigor, but also in terms of, in terms of praxis, you know, but that also invites the question, like, what is, what is political philosophy? Political philosophy, and again, the origins of continental philosophy, and the origins of all things that characterized the European cultural mind were derived from ancient Greece, you know, classical Greece. You know, the zenith of which was the reign of Pericles just before the Peloponnesian War. you know then the air to that uh the air 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 lucydides was the first political philosopher now this is somewhat to be clear there There wasn't a division, formal or conceptual, in Athens, between, you know,

oh, this is religious philosophy, this is political theory, this is metaphysics, this is mathematics. There was just a singular philosophy. Okay. And essential to understand, too, is that there wasn't a concept of the state. One of the weirder things to me, and as we get into the Peloponnesian War, which is the only book that Thucydides wrote. It also, the Peloponnesian War, in my opinion, from a Hegelian perspective, the Peloponnesian War was within the cultural form of classical Greece and its civilizational cycle.

That was the equivalent of what Nolty called the Iropayshan Burger Creek. the European Civil War, you know, 1914 to 1945. It destroyed both Athens and Sparta. It destroyed classical Greece as we know it as a historical phenomenon. The Athenian assault in Sicily was Athens-Stalingrad. And we'll get into what I mean by all this in the next episode. But... Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest.

We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4.Northwest. Employers, did you know you can now reward you and your staff with up to 1,500 euro and gift cards annually, completely tax-free.

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Book now at giddlestorhouse.com. Get the facts be drinkaware, visit drinkaware.com. you know Athens basically became this hypercapitalistic dictatorship that became exceedingly

brutal towards people within the Greek race or Greek ethnos it it's 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 mean and the and the and the and the podium war went on for almost 30 years

but the kind of rationalizing potology was it doesn't matter that this war was unjust because now we're at war and we've got to prosecute it to the fullest extent um 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, There was no state in Athens or Sparta. You know, and you'll find some translations, particularly stuff, kind of from the zenith of what I think was like junk academia from like the 50s to the 80s when it became really cheap to print books.

And you have this kind of explosion of like academic texts. You know, kind of feed these educational curriculums all in sundry. You'll find translations where they say, oh, the. Paulus means the state. It doesn't. A loose translation, it'd be like the nation or the country or like the race. I think that's a more appropriate term, but there was no concept of, okay, this is the Paulus, but there's a permanent bureaucracy that kind of manages, you know,

tensions between, you know, different blocks and the body politic and you know these guys are responsible for levying taxes and you know this 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 when he was of a 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, in the assembly.

You know, really the modern state, as we know, you can't talk about the state as we conceptualize it until after Westphalia, in my opinion. So,

you know, you might as well be talking about, um, you might as well be talking about, um, I was 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, um, excuse me, the, uh, on the traditional view, of course, I know that people in the comments, um, are going to say Socrates was the first

was the first political philosopher you know he was in the first um the first you know work of political theory was Plato's the Republic bear with me on this

I'm I'm going somewhere with this when I identify Thucydides okay because again what I mentioned a moment ago Ducydides was the first discreetly political philosopher. That's why, like I said, these military science types,

particularly during the Cold War, identified him as 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 Ducydides' ontological claims, but what they are right about is that, you know,

the first purely the first pure political philosophy is the cities the Peloponnesian War Plato like his teacher Socrates and like Aristotle who succeeded 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 Nicarbaki in ethics is as much a political work as the politics.

But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. You know, and whether the other objection, I'm sure, would be that, well, neither Niceties nor Socrates. Surely there was philosophers who preceded them. Like, yes, obviously. But, you know, the pre-Socratics didn't inform, um, it didn't, 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, there may have been

civilizations in the Spanglarian sense, you know, 30,000 years ago that the record of which has been totally wiped away. Okay, but that's not, we're not 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. The Peloponnesian War, the book, I mean, Thucydides book, we're running away to get into the meat of it.

We'll do that in the next episode. But the core of it is, again, the Citadies 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 society.

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 everything from everything from. atoms to you know the world itself or the ocean or whatever okay there wasn't even accounting for like discrete dialogues about the political

or the polis until the 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 humans 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. Air grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation, closes on the 25th of November. Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash Northwest. Employers, did you know, you can now reward you and your staff with up to 1500 euro and gift cards annually, completely tax-free. And even better, you can spread it over five different

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It was something that wouldn't have occurred to people, even people, even learned men of high breeding in Athens or Sparta, who had something of a punitive view of the military command structure and the way to wage the war or of the senior men in the political apparatus. Like even if they had, you know, like a critical view of these things, it wouldn't really have occurred to them, you know, to kind of write about. the sort of baser impulses that animate individual men within these structures. It wouldn't really have occurred to anybody to draw a kind of punitive portrait of the polis which nurtured them in decline. okay now Thucydides obviously the punishment generally for a commander who

lost a war was death okay Thucydides was such a great man he was spared and he was banished okay so there's some scholars who'll say that like well Thucydides was an embittered man

so he's you know got he's kind of presenting the war in a 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 epilogia in favor of Athens. The Spartans, interestingly, had come to blame themselves when the war was going badly for them.

And Sparta won a Puric victory. Okay. And I'll get into the, I'll get into the specifics of this, but the Spartan suit for war after the Athenian contingent, many of whom were actually living in Sparta because they were doing business there. They approached a Spartan assembly, and they kind of like laid bare that they attended to, continue on their course of conquest, no matter what the human cost, um, 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 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 were some of the learned men in Sparta subsequently viewed this as a safe. facing a face saving measure by the Athenian delegation

that was an invitation to arbitration in lieu of warfare while letting the Spartans save face because they were being de facto insulted. Ducydides says that's not true. He said 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 of Sparta as this like base society. Sparta was all fucked up. You know, like it wasn't, like, you know, 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 Habsbom like Sparta is because there was something in primitive terms. The Peloponnese was not primitive in cultural terms at all. But, I mean, it's in technological terms. They did practice a kind of radical socialism. I trust me, people would not, like 21st century guys, I think their right wing would not have liked living in Sparta. okay but um yeah we're coming up by about on an hour um i don't want to dive into the peloponnesian war we'll do that next episode but um i didn't cover as much i want to do here i'll try and pick up the pace next time um but yeah that's um i hope that people found this that to be worthwhile awesome can't wait until

the next episode um well considering that uh twitter is doing what Twitter does to you. Where can people find you? Well, I got a Discord server now. And I've got a bunch of other cool things going on. I mean, my home is always substack. And I'll always be on social media because you have to have a presence there. But I think social media is kind of, and especially,

especially acts is kind of bullshit. I mean, there's censorious regime aside. It's just kind of a bullshit platform, but people could come to my substack. It's real Thomas 777.substack.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 harried and a dear friend of mine and ours is coming to town tomorrow i got to meet him at the airport and chaperone him around the city and then we got symphony tickets on saturday

a bunch of the homeland faction guys and i and plus i've also got like i got some long farm stuff i got a i really do need to complete because i owe it to other people but so now it's going to be the discord channel's hopping go visit it and use it but I'm not going to be I'm not going to be real active with new stuff until next week but yeah, go to 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 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 until part two I look forward to it thank you Thomas yeah thank you man