The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1211: Continental Philosophy and Its Origins - Pt. 4 - Plato w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

63 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 starts to talk about Plato.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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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 Pekingona show. Thomas is here. We're going to pick up the series on Continental Philosophy, part four. Go right ahead, sir. yeah i i wanted to dive in today i mean we're we're going to dive in today too is uh plato plato is ill understood ironically because it was really the foundation of um of uh the western canon

okay um famously the postmodernist you know if you know we're talking about um not not just Nietzsche but, you know, Heidegger Schopenhauer, everybody, all 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. In the case of the Nietzscheans and Nietzsche himself, it owed to the kind of nihilism that in dialectical terms, you know, Nietzsche believed was the inevitable, you know, outcome of platonic discourse. Other people, however, most notably Karl 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 assault on on Western metaphysics.

Okay, so that's one of the reasons I take exception to it. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why, and I promise I'm not going on some primrose path tangent. But that's one of the reasons I take exception to when people refer to the regime being cultural Marxists.

Like, they're really not. Like, do cultural Marxists exist? Like, yeah, there's a minority of partisans who essentially abide, like the kind of stuff that Gramsian 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 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 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 statements by the putative declarant is difficult. And I'm not a classical scholar, and nor would that be our mission anyway in terms of this series.

but so when I speak of what's accepted as you know indisputably according to the commonly accepted criteria of classical scholarship when I declare what's accepted as the platonic dialogues I'm abiding what is you know the mainstream sensibility derivative of the aforementioned criteria okay I'm sure people can argue that point. That's not what I'm here to do. Okay. So, again, and I don't prefer to be a classical scholar, but there's a grand tool of 35 dialogues and 13 letters that have, at various times, been assigned to Plato as the source. Okay. Some classical scholars doubt if any of the letters, contrary the dialogues, are genuine. So we're not even going to deal with those because that's a whole complicated controversy right there. And it doesn't really cut to the crux of what we're talking about substantively anyway. But the platonic dialogues is such that there's an essential consensus, you know,

and has been for some time on what is valid and what is not. you know, we're going to stick to the dialogues that are accepted universally as being, you know, from the pen of... Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th

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Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland Great to see you back at Spegg Savers Okay, could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep, D-E-A-L-S? Yeah, D-E-A-L-L-S deals

Oh right, yes, our black Black Friday deals are I catching, but the letter charts over here. Oh, sorry. At Spec Savers, we've got all sorts of unmissable Black Friday deals, like up to 70 euro off one pair of designer glasses. Offer ends on 7th of December 2025. Conditions apply. Ask in store for details. 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 discreet thought system could be assigned to him, which I don't accept that. You can interpret it as Plato trying to kind of devise like a monument literally to his hero and his patron, Socrates. or what I think is most persuasive, you can read it as, well, these dialogues were probably conversations and controversies and arguments that Plato himself have borne 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, of, you know,

Athenian cultural and intellectual products, but also the kinds of people, the kinds of men who would be receptive to, you know, kind of a discursive process. And interestingly,

in all the Platonic Dialogues, he's very clear about where this is taking place in terms of venue. Okay, this is Athens. This is Socrates' pontificating. you know but he there's 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 the reasons that should be fairly obvious. But I think, um, I think he didn't want his dialogues to be assigned to any sort of discrete historical epoch within the broader paradigm of, you know, the 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 the sensuously present individual body, like perfectly proportioned. And, you know, in one of these freezes, or, one of these sculptures or statuary, you know, the figure in question is situated in high relief amidst 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 presently. 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 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 assign to him arguably all those partake of political subject matter but uh those relating directly and unqualified of the political or the three that i just mentioned okay um the subject matter of the republic, which is most significant in terms of political ontology, as well as in terms of ethics, what constitutes a good society, and thus, you know, like a good polis. And again, to be clear, there was no concept of state in Doric Athens. You know, arguably, and this is about 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 venereal disease Hansen, because I think that's more appropriate. But, like, neocons especially have like a fetish for this, like declaring that somehow they're the heirs to the Athenian tradition of state,

craft or you know america is a post 93 america is the heir to this like grand philosophical tradition of government that's totally off base like arguably what they are positing is uh the court tenants of uh you know good not just good government but in ontological terms what constitutes the political arguably that's the opposite of what was being posited by by Plato but moving on the subject matter of the Republic at base is what what constitutes justice

like the nature of justice the general theme is you know what constitutes essentially like a good society and therein you know like what is what what is like a good citizen you know within that society um and there's various interlocutors who uh 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.

Okay. It's obvious that the subject matter in sort of broad terms is how do we restore political health to the Paulus? You know, and again, some people like to interpret these three aforementioned dialogues as, you know, being born of a crisis, modality. I don't agree with that. Like, yes, I don't disagree that 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 universal in scope. I mean, universal in terms of being cross-culturally applicable or being egalitarian. I mean, that these are absolutely partialists.

They're not, nobody is suggesting not the characters within the dialogue nor uh 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 these are rare conditions and this is an essential sort of emergent remedy no they're saying that in absolute terms what's being proposed here is is um is absolute in all times and all places and all places places. The conversation in the Republic, it opens with Socrates he's talking to Caffalo's. Caffalo's 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. You catch them in the corner of your eyes. I. Distinctive, by design. They move you even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range.

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28th to 30th of November Lidl, more to value Great to see you back at Spex Savers Okay, could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep, D-E-A-L-S? Yeah, D-E-A-L-S. Deals. Oh, right, yes, our Black Friday deals are I catching, but the letter chart's over here.

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He has mastery of what constitutes the good. But what he can learn from Kefalo says, what is it like to be very old? You know, what does it like to have your perspective over, you know, over time and over many phases of as we'd think of it as historical development

and things of this sort. So that's what Siretis could conceivably learn from him. Because not just the role Siretys plays in the dialogues. It's not just, I mean, again, a lot of people perceive this kind of like, oh, this is Plato's

hegeography of Sariis. 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 on 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 Khafalo's? Well, sovereign 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, Kefalo essentially declares that, well, what virtue is is always telling the truth. Okay. And the way we can distinguish justice from injustice is essentially by,

this sort of primitive integrity. Okay. He seems to imply that just as this 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 sovereignty is a rebuttal of that is like, well, telling the truth, and returning another man's property isn't always just. You know, there's nuances here, especially in times of war or crisis. You know, it's not simply reducible to these things. And there's times, for example, where it's necessary to,

not just in the case of children or easily excitable classes of people, and not just helots, it's important to invoke fictions or lies for the greater good. Or there's times where one might owe a man a debt of honor or money. But, you know, it's why to 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 Caffalo's savaged, in some basic sense, by Sartre's rebuttal, Polamarkos, who is a Gapha's son, like takes up the mantle. And what he suggests is often interpreted falsely as a kind of, to represent a kind of primitive communism. You know, like, if we could say that

Karl Popper's punitive interpretation of, of Platonism, is that it's quasi-fascist in terms of its elitism, you know, people on the other extreme, but equally prone to punitive critique. 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 bloodonic dialogues are the progenitor of political theory in the West, but that's not what I'm talking about. You know, and it should be clear that, you know, nuance is what, what bridges the ancient past to the contemporary or modern conditions. Paul Margoe says that what constitutes the good in absolute terms is that which is salutary, okay? not only do they give her 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 causes 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 ablation 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 a set of principles that can calculate these things in not just a medial but spontaneous way, you know, that would assess.

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 cadre, which in contemporary terms would, or 20th century terms, specifically, would suggest some sort of 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 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 communistic or fundamentally egalitarian. We'll get to that in just a second. What 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 in political terms, okay? Can't be reduced to postulates abstracted from concrete circumstances. And furthermore, You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design, they move you, even before you drive.

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The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. Great to see you back at Spegg Savers. Okay, could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep. D-E-A-L-N. Yes. Yeah, D-E-A-L-S. Deals.

Oh, right. Yes, our Black Friday deals are eye-catching, but the letter chart's over here. Oh, sorry. At Spec Savers, we've got all sorts of unmissable Black Friday deals, like up to 70 euro off one pair of designer glasses. Offer ends on 7th of December 2025. Conditions apply. Ask in store for details. One of the things that separates the president analysis that of Polo Merkel is from his

father Caffalo's. Caffalos would seem to imply that his opinion is linked in his mind with the view that, well, injustice is bad because there's bad karma that attaches to it. And inextricably bound up with that is the fact that after death, bad things will befall the soul, as well as the living descendants of the man who is prone to this sort of bad. action. Polon Argos displays no role in his take on this.

His view that justice must be salutary both to the giver and the receiver is strictly a worldly calculus. Furthermore, reducing it from any sort of a egalitarian paradigm that's absolutely, you know, applicable according to what is presumably

universal paradigms of inequity that are common to all human societies. Polamarko's opinions tempered by the understanding that one should ultimately be guided by helping one's friends and harming one's enemies. in political terms. Again, this has been, 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. Um, and Socrates agrees with that. And Socrates openly states that that's what can be understood to be civic responsibility. is the fellow feeling one has, not just for, you know, their family and their friend, 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 Paulus, 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's 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 were 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 described. greatly 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, Socrates is not long for this earth. You know, and certainly Plato as somebody who was bearing witness to the events of the Polyponnesian War, and that, you know, the sort of transgressions actually perceived that led to Socrates being availed to punitive justice

and ultimately executed. He wasn't just guarding the record, as it were. He was transcribing these things and creating these narratives. And it's not for me to say how much of this was creatively confabulated.

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 after reading the republic of the posterity play with it in mind was for all time and that's remarkable but um moving on sorry i'm buried under wires But, yeah, so, I mean, if we understand, in its simplest terms, the just man gives to his friends what is good for them. And the just man helps his friends himself and his polis by, you know, only acting to harm those who are his enemies. in public and in 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-enlightment 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 key. and cultivated understanding of what's going to facilitate the good. And obviously, too, if we're reducing this to personal criteria, which Polamargos alludes to by virtue of the fact that he's not as sophisticated, either as his father Caffalo's or Socrates. You know, there's some individual men

who aren't really capable of benefiting from justice. You know, even if they are people who we share fellow feelings for, and even if they're not

bad men in, you know, objective terms. So, like, again, these kinds of mechanistic criteria can't really be applied to the human condition. And that's actually a very kind of proto-Christian understanding, obviously. And throughout the platonic dialogues, there's

a lot of that. You know, I made, and this isn't I'm not being punitive at all, but one notices, especially among Roman Catholics, there want a lot of the time to invoking

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 ready for huge savings will mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because

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But, you know, this is highly significant. And we'll get into Aquinas in coming weeks in this season. 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 Christendom and Faustian civilization, if you will, with the caveat that again I'm not any kind of classical scholar or anthropologist. But I, it is. 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 secondary dialogue between Socrates and Palomarchos

is the conclusion that, well, owing to what I just stated, about Socrates's understanding of sort of the epistemic aspects of what constitutes, you know, a good citizen, really the only men who can sort of stand in the absolute judgment of the polis and sort of curate these,

ethical remedies at scale are, 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 really the best way to think of it. um because plato more than anybody because he's immersed in in the the life of lyceum and whatever like plato doesn't playtow's not saying um so we can discern his own you know views on on the good life and and on what is politically sound he's not saying that you know So Socrates is the greatest man, or that philosophers are the greatest of men.

It's almost tantamount to what Nietzsche said about, you know, the messianic personage in historical terms, not theological to be clear, who would be aware of the fact that all preceding value systems were mere horizons of a conceptual nature. You know, Nietzsche family said that, you know, the calming, um, redeemed. 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 constitutive. 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, what constituted good life and what constituted a civic morality. but obviously Plato was talking about what we'd think of as a culture bearing stratum, you know, and that required a more complex and kind of complete understanding of, you know, historical phenomena and processes. But, you know, I think, and again, people welcome to disagree. We're not talking about philosophy, quote, philosophy of kings. We're talking about a culture very extratum that is self-consciously aware of, you know, the manner in which conceptual ethics and historical mandate deteriorates over time as people simply take. the configuration of the

polis for granted and believe that 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 residing themselves to the fact that well this is in the hands of Fortuna or the gods or whether we're talking about, you know, today where people just have this kind of faith and, people have this kind of faith in like endless material prosperity, whereby if uncertainty is by way of technological innovation and the regularization of commerce and things at scale, you know, well, you know, we can 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 affrontaliener prosperity you know were derivative of reason and that means that you know it would be self-defeating for anybody to step verbally or literally outside of those things or try to sabotage them. You know, this is a very real thing. And it's not just, it's not just affluenza or the malaise of, you know, success or whatever people like to assign, whatever cause people like to assign to a crisis. crises of morals in

the modern state or as they extrapolated those same phenomenon to Asian conditions in trying to interpret what exactly was underway during the Peloponnesian War you know this is this is fundamentally important

but moving on you know socrates goes as far and again this is this is key because and this is you know again i realize i'm coming back a lot to carl popper um who was a very sinister personage but uh they keep 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 plan society, if not down to the most minute, discrete detail. you know, we can basically plan in economic and sociological terms, you know, to eliminate the most egregious injustices. And, you know, one of the reasons why all these people like Plato and all these Christians and all these, you know, conservatives, one of the reasons why, you know, they were unable to improve upon, you know, human well-being was because they were operating according to. myths that weren't falsifiable. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th

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scientism. You know, people like Popper weren't talking about science. They were talking about beliefs and these sort of mythological postulates, which is ironic, because they were whole, they were whole. their whole raison d'etro is going on declaring that everybody else was sort of taken in by this

retrograde mythology. But, like, scientism isn't science. What scientism is, is it's a belief structure based on certain scientific postulates, which, from there,

you know, the adherence of this declare that, well, the only way of knowing is truly, you know, the 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, acquiring absolute knowledge. So, you know, this is just a recipe for tyranny. Because the only way we can know anything, thing is through this methodology that, you know, was just aforementioned.

And there's so many problems with that. It's almost difficult to discern where to begin. It's like, it's like playing one of the old role playing games where it's like you're fighting a hydra or something with like a thousand hit points. And it's like which head do you try to cut off first? You know, but people find that superficially really persuasive. That is changing now, I might add. I'm the first to point out that anybody

who goes around saying like oh well, religion is dead and now we understand that these progressive poshulets were correct. People like that are totally out of touch. I mean, just like an objective terms. I've spent all their time on Reddit

or they haven't read a book of fresh vintage in the last 25 years like nobody believes in that anymore and that's dead like whether anybody likes that or not that's totally dead like the current paradigm

I mean first of all one of the things that shocked everybody as the Cold War was ending was that it was it was nakedly theological imperatives that were taking down the socialist community of nations, as they call themselves. But the way to understand things these days,

amidst a globalism, aside from the fact that the primary loci of resistance are in places that are animated by theological principles. Like for better or worse, whatever many things about this. The Russian Federation, they view themselves as being a vanguard of Christiandom against a profoundly evil secularism. You know, ditto like Darul 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, you know, that's this entire sort of, it's not just that Roman Catholicism became this formative, you know, aspect of continental Europe that Plato sort of

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 synchronism of Christianity of the kind that, you know, the Mervorindians and 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, um, acceptance, the syncretism between

Platonism and the early Roman church. You know, and it wasn't just a matter of men who coveted power and the ability to sort of mold like an nascent political culture that spanned literally a continent into something that was coherent and coherent and in line with their own peculiar vision of what constituted the good in human life at organizational scale. You know, it was way more historically situated than that, and frankly, profound. But, yeah, it looks like we're at right about an hour, man. If that was rambly, forgive me.

Like, it's, there's a lot here. And we'll, uh, I'll be more focused, uh, in the next episode. And we'll, we'll get into kind of more of what's significant about Plato, um, especially as regards, you know, the, uh, the Christianization of the continent, um, without getting ahead of ourselves. But yeah, we'll, uh, 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. Have you had another incident with another platform? I mean, Discord nuked us. I kind of anticipated that. The Discord thing was an experiment. I know Discord's run by like gay furries and stuff. But 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 really used them before. But I'm going to continue with our Saturday night streams. This Saturday, I'm probably just going to stream from Substack and I'll shout it out tomorrow when I decide where I'm going to shout it out from. But I've got a bunch of the fellas I've been suggesting other platforms. forums 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 just had a busy week like preparing for the ogc kind of believe and you know working on my manuscript and other things but i promise i'll have it figured out by this weekend in a semi-permanent capacity but yeah the best place to find me my online home is substack it's Real Thomas 7777 that's substack.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 Instagram.

I'm, uh, you know, um, our friends like Pete here and, and like Jay Burton, they're kind of to offer me a platform regularly. But, you know, I've got my own podcast. and I 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 this is a period of transition, forgive me for the fact that things are kind of up in the air. But it's, I promise this will be for the best, man. And in the coming days and weeks, like, will be more accessible.

All right. until part five. Thank you.