The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1207: Continental Philosophy and Its Origins - Pt. 3 - The Trial of Socrates w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

60 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas continues a series on the subject of Continental Philosophy, which focuses on history, culture, and society. He talks about the trial of Socrates.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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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 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 lucidity's 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 Sagittes. So the fact that this name 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, I thought beyond important, I think is essential. in conceptual terms

I think Sorrell and de Maistra are like the real along with Heidegger I like the essential theorists of the ideological right and of course that's only that separates the people so identified

from conservatives you know and we'll get into that later like as as we get into Bible theology which at least we need to discuss for one episode because 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 and I've written extensively on this, that when you're talking about the radical right, when you're talking about the revolutionary imperatives, that

we're part of the causal nexus of the European Civil War in the 20th century. You're talking about people are fundamentally at odds with conservatives. You're not talking about just like conservatives on steroids proverbially or something. You're talking about totally different tendencies and arguably ones

that are actually opposite one another. And nimical to one another rather. But I think Sorrell So, Cyril's description of what happened at Socrates' trial and what the catalysts were for the proceedings, I think it's about the best analysis of it. So for context, that's what I'm drawing upon. And people who find some of these points of emphasis familiar, that's why they were. 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 had long past that was like in college. But, you know, just for context so that, you know, people and get some sort of idea that I'm trying to punch up on my weight and suggest that I'm an expert in an ancient philosophy because I never purport to be. But there's a basic misunderstanding and what the people either view Socrates 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 a sort of like a favorite sort of shivalet there is oh there's this brutish militrish militarist regime and they they were just scapegoating intellectuals who of course were their

natural betters that's the wrong way to understand it for a lot of reasons and you know Athens underwent this fundamental sociological change in a very punctuated way you know and the goal what was viewed as the 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 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, is like that would be viewed as preposterous. Like that wouldn't even occur to anybody because it's an ontological absurdity.

So that's a problem too when you get these kinds of dummy conservatives pretending that they're sort of like race-blind managerial ideology where like there's this kind of fetish fetishization of procedures

is something like legacy of the Athenian culture. That's ridiculous. You know, and to distill it down, and I'm not just playing word games here, this actually matters. Democracy, the word demos is the core of it. There can't be a democracy lot of demos. A demos is a people. You know, and the way to think of it as a nation, you know, or like a tribe.

It doesn't, 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 were 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 preparation for war but in psychological terms

what was viewed as the good was what was most virtuous what was most virtuous was what was heroic and obviously you know the most kind of mortally significant context where

these kinds of heroic virtues can be realized as warfare so if you're going to like educate Athenian men women, you know, the women who manage the household and the men who guard and serve and and defend and enrich the pallis, you're going to teach some things like Homeric epics. You know, you're going to teach some 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. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design, they move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plug-in hybrid range. for Mentor, Leon and Terramar.

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relax in our exquisite accommodations. Step outside and be captivated by the wild Atlantic surrounds. Your five-star getaway, where every detail is designed with you in mind. Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump-Dunbeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbiog, Kush Farage. On the whole, um, 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 didn't 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'd 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, in the, in the paulus, you know, who they,

who they, which they could then, you know, curate and sell at immense profits. You know, when you had 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-Poloi and kind of look down on like the Yeoman farmer warriors is essentially, you know, inferiors. And kind of brutish and stupid people who were just kind of necessary to, you know, to put up proverbial and literal fires when they happened. you know, this was in apocal terms it was kind of an issue of first impression that hadn't existed before, you know, and obviously

Marxist's historiography was one of the things that Sorrell was responding to, viewed this as sort of like the first emergence of like a primitive class consciousness, but not primitive in terms of the cultural nuances of Athens, but primitive in terms

of the sociological architecture. which, you know, obviously compared to, like, the modern age, there was just, like, a lot less moving parts, so to speak. You know, so, um, the first thing one has to do in dealing with the trial and murderoussocrates, it just abused themselves with this idea that, you know, figures like Socrates, which is this kind of like perennial feature in Athens, and the Athenians all just, you know, started acting like a bunch of mean reactions. areas 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 inimical force. threatening the Peloponnesis was the Persians. Then this is one reason why we got into earlier. It wasn't just the Athenians that lost their proverbial honor and cultural soul. In the Polynesian War, the Spartans made 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 have proved that they alone, they, they, They had the necessary power and power projection ability and sophistication in military science.

They could wage great wars against the Persians and actually win. And the Persians for a long time were afraid of them for this reason. Okay. And people forget, too, like, Balzy and heroic as the last stand at Thermopylae was, like, the Spartans lost. okay and like i'm not going to sit here and pretend like warfare is like a football game or where like win loss ratio is is is sort of the the the end-all be-all of how you adjudicate martial valor or even aptitude but in a very pragmatic power political sense the fact that the athenians were the counterweight to the persian empire that afforded them a certain

cloud. If you require historical metaphor, it's why a lot of people 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 Sorrell acknowledges this too.

Like the trial of Socrates, it was incredibly demagogic. It was basically the case in chief against him, it was polemical slander and sort of holding forth by his accusers. in a way that was offensive to any rational understanding of due process. But again, that's not the point. Nobody that I know of is claiming that Socrates was some conventional criminal defendant, that his rights were scrupulously honored, and that under ordinary circumstances,

he's the kind of man who should have found himself hailed into court. and put in the ultimate penal jeopardy. That's not what we're talking about. He was a stand-in for a moral sickness and cultural decrepitude that had taken root in Athens, and he was the standard bearer of this conceptual horizon that approximately caused the... 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 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

um 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. Other man. With Xenophon, Xenophon's big contrast was he said, look, he's like in Homeric Athens. I mean, if we can think of it that way, there is an integral understanding of virtue.

again, like the kind of one citizen cast, although there was like diversity within that cast, you know, of status and ability and intellect and everything else. But kind of the singular function was a citizenry of Yale and farmers who were also soldiers. And Zinovon posited that, well, the way these men manage the household, you know, and taught their children and treated their wives, this was sort of the, this was sort of like a school of command. And transposing that virtue and, you know, the several virtues that were curated there to the battlefield and vice versa,

you know, this is how Athenians learn to be honorable, and this is how they learned what it is to be heroic. So there was a practical aspect to this sort of civic education in the school of life in command, if you were a man. But it was never diminished by some sort of base and pragmatic view of it. Like, well, this is how you learn to sort of treat people equitably so that there's not tensions emergent. No. It was very clear 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 gammy together to make children and then it wasn't just you know okay well this this keeps women from ending up in difficulties and it keeps men from making like savages there's none of that okay there was an acknowledgement of those things but that's because the ultimate good is virtue tending 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 artisie within the culture. You know, it's good, it's not good to be peaceable without. Um, and this becomes important if one is going to subject Socrates and Socratic methodology and the substance of his paradigms to a punitive critique.

So Xenophon's Economicus can be viewed as kind of the seminal statement It's kind of like the Although obviously Xenophon was a student of Socrates He's writing about pre-Socratic virtues So bear with me Xenophon's Economicus is really sort of

The pre-Socratic and what is describing equivalent of Aristotle's politics. Okay, and again, I'll stand by that, although I'm sure a lot of classical scholars will scoff at that. But the entirety of the dialogue, or the exposition, rather, it draws a parallel between

literally the economics of the home and of labor and of warfare, which makes each, you know, kind of turns the household into an educational apparatus for war and vice versa. You know,

and to be clear, within the Athenian understanding of equality, anyone capable of liberty can grasp basic military tactics. You know, and some men might only be fit 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, this is the stuff of a correct education. And, um, 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 ethics come in. You know, um, this also, this, uh, cultivating. and people, you know, and understanding that their routine execution and necessary tasks, they'll view that as needing to tend towards excellence, and they'll try and cultivate that on themselves. So this in turn then becomes like the building blocks of what facilitates truly heroic action.

You know, and heroism is, partakes off and derives from and also makes possible, you know, the highest version. you. So there's this sort of organic harmonious feedback loop, ideally to everything people do in their lives and labors. And, you know, the emergence of an intellectual class that kind of scoffs at this and looks down on it as the sort of stuff that, you know, appeals to simpletons. or, you know, men who view themselves as too clever or too superior to willfully submit to the command of another. This is the effect of sabotaging the entire system because people start marking themselves out from that. The entire basis of it collapses. because then what emerges is this kind of like cast consciousness within the Paulus. 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 gas

because we're the ones who, you know, we're the ones who provide the wealth and the capital. you know, to sustain the 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 Socrates, the propagandis subverted all of this and created these fractures within the organ, social organs, then the polis. No.

Sorrell went out of his way to acknowledge that the seed of the, the seed 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 another 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 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,

but where do people derive that example from? while they drive it from stuff like Homer. So, yes, that's taught logical, but it also is internally logical. So the way to understand Socrates is the patron saint of intellectuals. If you want to put a spit on it to make it intelligible to modern minds. 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, like, 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, you know, the intellectual. and the spiritual, and fracturing that concept of an integral, rational soul that contains an aptitude for these things in equal measure, you know, that does violence to the entire cultural enterprise that, you know, had been curated over millennium. You know, 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, uh, heterosexual love is basically just you know, a kind of

wrote physical act necessary for procurricular. creation, you know, in harmony within the household, again, too, is just sort of like, you know, something that lesser men can find satisfaction from in and of itself. You know, this is an example of kind of like early, like monasticism, although obviously like the conceptual and the literal vocabulary to, you know, structure it that way didn't exist yet. But, you know, much as, uh, much as, uh, Socrates admonished his students not to cross their cross their arms and laugh

at the world. 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 is 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 virtuous 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 police,

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 going to the gym or learning to fight or like bodybuilding. But they're doing it basically, they're becoming obsessed with the physical, but they're doing it to retreat from the world.

They're doing it for the sake of like hanging around 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, like superiority in myself, you know, so I'm, I'm a superior man to these dumb soldier, yeomanry types, as well as these vulgar businessmen. But you know what? I'm, I'm going to spend my time, you know, discoursing with Socrates and with my peers,

or my peers, but my peers are only the people who are worthy of my intellect. I'm not going to involve myself in the dirty business of politics or the dull, you know, vulgarity of business. you know, that's, and that's really destructive, you know. And to be clear, I didn't invoke the example I did to, like, pick on people or something. I understand why guys do that. But, you know, it's, I think it's important and invader people in a way they can understand, especially within a present context, how things that otherwise would be, like, very worthwhile pursuits of self-improachers. improvement, it can become something that's very destructive, you know, especially in, especially in times of

real kind of spiritual disorder. 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 neck. I mean, I'm very, very, very far from that. But the kind of stuff people find most offensive about hypermodern warfare, you know, like the logic of the body count, nutrition strategy where you literally calculate 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 people and even you know contemporaries of these events in question or at least men who were obituated into the culture that was the progenitor of these things you know like like Xenophon and like Thucydides did they have like an idealized view of these things yeah, they probably did. But again, I'd posit, and they probably would too, those among them who were aware enough to do so, that, you know, you need these kinds of ethical poll stars

and this kind of enduring model of what is virtuous in order to even devise, you know, some ideal 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, it's not really an adequate way to translate it into contemporary vernacular, but, you know, 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, um, 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 soccer. but he was the standard bearer of this phenomenon. And this is probably pretty far outside the scope, but one of the main functions of the penal law, as it's traditionally understood, is the sort of symbolic logic that attends a human sacrifice. And, you know, by executing the man, assuming it's for a political reason.

It's because you repudiating what he's the standard bearer of. It's not because you'll hold him directly responsible for a chain of causal events. Like you would some infamous felon or something who you're accusing of killing somebody.

You know, 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 Derek 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 the ultimate

evil and uh 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 standing for this like, for this like victim population that, that exists in their imagination. You know, and so by acting out this kind of like pantomime, but where like an actual human being is, you know, 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 of horse. Saudis, but I can't take it seriously when people act like the Athenians were like somehow afflicted by this like madness born of military defeat

so they just picked on Socrates for no reason It's like you fuckers do this all the time You do it in the most childlike stupid way That was polemical I said I wouldn't do that but I think it's I think it was important to convey Um Where were you?

Oh um Yeah and um You know Intrinsic to to to all of this I mean, if you account for the fact

that literally the government of the police the men who had up the assembly they were, you know, the adult male citizens who constituted the yeomanry in Homeric Athens you know

presumably things. 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

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

both of which are schools of command. You know, that leaves of 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'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 that's something vulgar and materially quantifiable

as one would calculate provis on an abacus quite literally and in case the intellectuals again, you're talking about people who probably have an active disdain for the kind of civic mythology and virtue ethics that animate the majority of the body politic. Either way, you're talking about a hostile elite. and even if you weren't you know philosophers and oligarchs can't they they can't take you to war and win you know and even the war is you are doomed to lose going to the fickleness of fortuna material conditions or anything else but these are not men who are going to cultured,

to be 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 across purposes with the classical motion of statecraft

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 terms. It's in terms of the velocity of social life

and its processes. In Socrates's life, this kind of newly dynamic sociology was emergence. The guys who constituted Socrates students, these guys were urban elitists.

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 become wealthy enough so that their sons could pursue leisure. You know, and these are the guys who've taken power away from or when the positive act, at least subverting the sovereign authority

of the Yale menry. And, you know, again, there's an axiomatic contempt there for the majority. You know, and again, we're talking about Athens. We're not talking about like a modern egalitarianism. You know, we're talking about people who are actually worthy of formal equality. You know, this was a very bad thing. You know, so the natural, the natural constituency of a Socratic elite are going to be men like themselves. You know, and, you know, a system like that.

stands to reproduce itself in perpetuity. You know, there was something to this, too, like in the... I'm not suggesting that these guys were... had the same level of cultivation or something, obviously, but when you look at the nomenclature of the Soviet Union, like post-Stalin, you know, when the kind of barefoot peasants, like literally he was a barefoot peasant,

like Cruz Jeff 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 of their counterparts, part. But a class of men whose job it is to literally be political managers, and like, that's it. You know, that's one of the things that killed the

Soviet Union. You know, and again, I'm always making the point history does not repeat, but there's sociological permutations only to limited numbers of variables within human power for the and social structures

that do reemerge you know a dedicated class of political managers I go as far as I say it's almost axiomatically inimical to the public good

and like that'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 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 project. 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 of a man who could absorb Socrates' teachings, but then go back into the world, reenter his command role, and be better for it. But again, Sorrel's take is that he absented in 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 to the school of command that was, that's what, you know, that civic life represented for Athenian men who were capable of liberty and equality in a formal sense. But that's not realistic.

You know, my layman's interpretation, and in classical studies, I'm very much a layman, is it's another example of the exception proving the rule. but I'm going to stop myself now because I want to move on a bit to a somewhat different subject matter, and I can't cover that in five minutes. I didn't think he could. All right. Well, you got anything to promote? What do we? Yeah, like I said, is it, is a documentary up yet?

Yeah, yeah. my substack it's uh check out thomas tv man like it's uh it's the uh skinwalker ranch adventure yeah it's been it's been popping pretty good like people seem to have really liked it um and i'll uh i'll put it back on the main page if if there's demand for it but yeah anybody anybody can access it who's a subscriber man um i'm gonna i'm gonna drop more video too um that's one of the reason I'm going off 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 like make all this possible. So if I'm not being responsive and not dropping fresh stuff, I feel I want an explanation. Plus many of you are my friends. But yeah, I'm going to be dropping subsdex. 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.substack.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 there, 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. Yeah, I'm on Gab, I'm on Tgram, I'm on Instagram, but yeah, my home base is subsistak. So yeah, that's what I got. Awesome. All right.

So part four. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, buddy.