The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1343: Spengler's 'Man and Technics' w/ Philos Miscellany

Episode Date: March 15, 2026

91 MinutesPG-13Philos Miscellany has a YouTube channel in which he reviews rare books.Philos joins Pete to discuss Oswald Spengler's "Man and Technics"Philo's YouTube ChannelPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete'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 am doing well. The world is on fire. Yeah, it's trying times. trying times but please let us not talk about that because i do and i do enough of that privately i don't you know talking more about it publicly especially when you know you have retards out there who everything from the you know the this is world war three down to the united states has never lost a um the united states hasn't lost any equipment or tech you know or a thad system in this whole thing where you're just like, all right, you're all retards. I don't need to talk to you.

Yeah, I'll just keep talking to people on the ground that are feeding me information. And I'll trust them over your Fox News watching ass or MSNBC watching ass or whoever you're watching. And yeah, all right, now they got that off my chest. Spangler and Manon Technics. This is a book I've read, oh, God, at least three times. And I know they said Francis Parker Yaki always carried a copy of it with him everywhere he went. And something I wanted to talk about for a long time. And you just mentioned it out of the blue. And I was like, Vilos, yeah, let's do this.

So, you know, what gave you this idea? Yeah, I mean, you know, when you look at men and techniques, it's in a lot of ways, it's a book kind of out of time. And the book is almost 100 years old at this point. And Spengler is obviously better known at this point in time for Declan and Fall of the West. But when understanding Spengler, there's really far more of a historical anger, just beyond the grand meta narrative and theories about different aspects of high culture. And the quote most famously that comes out of this book is the quote about the Roman soldier. which we'll probably wrap up the stream with. The reason that I kind of like him

and he got me down an interesting path is that we live in an extremely rationalist, materialist, very atomized individual age where you never think of yourself as part of a culture. And even if you're on the right or you're in our side of things, you kind of tell yourself, well, high culture, our culture is dead.

extinct and what everything we do revolving culture nowadays has to be kind of waxing nostalgic or thinking very sentimentally about you know for the older generations it's 50s and 60s automobiles for you know people my age or kind of most people in their 20s 30s 40s it's thinking about the 90s or thinking about for the zoomers it's thinking about the 2000s and so there's this mentality that culture as we understand it just doesn't exist. And, you know, on the one hand, that disconnects us further. But on the other, it alienates us from what it means to be human. And what Spengler does an excellent job of in this about 100-page book is explaining the link between mankind and culture,

and especially tying it into the early development of humanity as a force. rather than as some extremely straightforward understanding of linguistic development or mass communication or dividing everything up into a million different disciplines where the archaeologists never talk to the anthropologists. The vision that Spengler lays out in this book is kind of the best explanation that I can see of how culture developed in mankind. Yeah, yeah, and I've heard it described, and it's not exact, but basically it is decline of the West in a very short form. There is an abridged version of Decline of the West out there, but it is taking some of the key elements of Decline of the West and putting it into 100 pages so that, you know, people who don't like to read 800. 900 page two volumes two volumes sets can get the ideas that spangler is laying out yeah absolutely and when he was publishing this book he had become tremendously more popular than he was when he wrote to

clan of the west he wrote that just after world war one with the first volume and by the time he's publishing this in 1931, 1932 for the first American edition. He's very widely read in Nazi Germany. And the book was actually frequently printed enough in English and popular enough that you can go right now if you are so inclined to buy a first edition for about $80 looking up the Man in Technics by Spengler title. You can find first editions out there. Pete, I know you have one. I sold mine to an OGC member for the sticker price of 50 bucks. So it is very attainable to get a copy of this book and you can easily read it in about two hours. Very short, very manageable, and very thought-provoking. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confuse. and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster.

The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. Yeah, there's one.

I'm looking right now, A-Books has one for 80 bucks. And, yeah, there's all sorts of, I guess because it is out of copyright, people have done their own versions of it. They're all over Amazon, of course, Amazon and all the other major places. Yeah, absolutely. Highly recommend it. I guess we can kind of dive right in. So let me ask you a question real quick. You sent me notes that you took on this, and at the beginning you said no AI was used in this document. That's an inside joke, right? I mean, you know, on the one hand, it would have been tremendously disrespectful to the author and his work to do that.

But, you know, on the other hand, you know, I don't see much merit in just hallucinated results and garbage or the incorporation of secondary sources. You know, if you're going to have me on as a guest, it's just worth the time and energy to do a good job at it. And you did. All right, man. Go ahead. Get us off. Yeah. So a very short book in the preface, which is only two.

or three pages. He is clarifying his position from the clan of the west. He states this explicitly. And the way to summarize this book in a sentence would be, the destiny of man can only be understood by dealing with all the provinces of his activity simultaneously and comparatively. And first thing we have to understand when looking at it is what the hell is techniques? Well, what techniques is is the tactics of living. So that's kind of a strange, vague statement. So I'll just start with the first chapter. Spengler starts off the book by talking about how Pandora's box was opened in the 18th century

with a fundamental skepticism about the meaning and value of culture. And this eventually over time led to the 20th century view that the entirety of viewing culture as world history was a problem. So we sort of discarded it. And we can see the ramifications of that even today. Going back to the 18th century with these people like Rousseau and the Romanticist movement and the book Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, the original man, so the individual man alone in nature, is a peaceful and virtuous creature. until the culture of civilization comes along to ruin him, to corrupt him, to make him ambitious about money. And Spengler argues that these moralizing tendencies, they don't actually consider the technical side of early man's achievements in existence.

So in the long 19th century where Spengler is born into, we have the tripling of the global population. and incredible technological advancement. And there's also very little warfare. These people that are complaining and writing about culture are very steeped in it. They're kind of unaware of the water in which they swim it. On one side of the 19th century were these idealists and ideologues who were anti-realist and concerned with high culture. But on the other side is English materialism,

and that prioritizes utility as the only, legitimate element of culture. This is the basis of utilitarianism, the factory worker, the material good, the creation of machinery. Materialism and viewing reality is absent of any real metaphysics. It's distinguished, according to Spengler, by its lack of any imaginative power. The picture of the future that they generate by the end of the 19th century, especially in the 1880s with a lot of Protestant movements popping up, is an imminent earthly paradise that excludes states, wars, laws, religion, hate, or any kind of superiority between mankind. But as Spengler asserts, the only constant that would be produced from such a hypothetical world would be unending comfort and boredom, appalling boredom, he says, throughout all of time.

And if this occurs in real life, only murder and suicide will result. And by the time Spengler is writing this book after the 19th century, in the 1920s and 30s, what's come to rise in the culture is a skeptist rather than a sentimentalism. So that's a general skepticism towards any kind of culture, a certain irony. If you look at the cultural movements of the flapper or of extreme, anti-human ideologies such as communism. This is a perfect exult. And so what's the alternative to sort of this endless critique of culture? Well, we have to understand what techniques is. So what does tactics mean? Again, it's the tactics of living. And this is not to be understood in terms of the day-to-day manner of people performing a series of actions. It's just kind of how you do something. in the course of human events. And to make that philosophical,

every time that someone struggles with a problem, this is a purposive activity. Spengler thinks that this in itself, this way that humans approach problems, is overlooked especially in the study of prehistory. So man's early development, an animal, Spengler argues, does nothing but struggle. They struggle for food, they struggle for reproduction,

and they really only fear death in the moment that they are killed. Our destiny, our human way that we go through life, it dooms us to certain situations and views and actions. Unlike the world of Rousseau and the romanticists in the 18th and 19th century, there are no men in themselves, men as an isolated, atomized, dare I say, libertarian moment. There are only men of a time, place, or race. The battle is life in the Nietzschean sense, a grim, pitiless, no-quarter battle of the will to power.

So what is an animal, then, according to Spengler, if it is not enacting this will to power? And how does that then relate to culture? Well, he writes about extensively, man is a beast of prey. And everywhere that you can see this, in our lives, in fairy tales and proverbs, you can see the fact that for mankind, ideals are cowardice. In the 1930s, the animal world was viewed with an anatomical treatment and a classification system that was dominated entirely by the materialist outlook. If you look at an old encyclopedia or a museum of natural history, it'll just be autistically obsessed with, with categorizing things, sterilizing things.

And in the world of medicine and natural history, a system of static and optically appreciable details is present and wholly constructive of that world with no room for any kind of agency. The alternative to this system is unsystematic. It's an unsophisticated way of living and coexisting with natural life. And as a side note, whenever Spengler is talking about prey and predator, he says beasts of prey instead of predator. So I'm just going to say predator for the whole book because otherwise it'll get really confusing. The prey animal, according to Spengler, is the highest form of mobile life.

Pray has a maximum of freedom for self against others. It seeks to maximize its own responsibility. The self can only win by fighting, winning, destroying and a herbivore is by its destiny a prey animal now where does cleverness where does agency come into being well that's with the predator this almost human sense belongs exclusively to predators well the prey are ruled by the ear and scent abilities their ability to listen and smell predators are ruled by the visual play prey flees away from something and predators go towards something. They seek a target visually, and for a predator, this creates a world picture.

Because the predator uses its vision, the world is its prey. It is because of the fact that humanity is a predator, that culture has come into existence. Now, it sounds a little esoteric and it is, so to reinforce that idea. For the strength of an individual soul, a herbivore, a prey animal will gather together in large numbers as a herd. The less one needs others as a predator, the more powerful one is. A predator is everybody's foe, and they don't tolerate an equal in their territory. This is the root, according to Spengler, of the royal idea of property. Property does not mean owning or having something or even purchasing land. What property is fundamentally is the sovereign right to do as one wills with one's own.

And this distinguishes between what is ethical behavior in the carnivore and the herbivore world. The herbivores, when they are domesticated, they give up nothing. Herbifor destiny means that one is base and cowardly, intrinsically, as a positive quality of their being. But mankind demands and belongs to the carnivore class that strives through power, victory, and sovereignty. So, of course, what is man? What is the earliest man? Well, man is not a simpleton. They're not inclined for natural goodness. They're not plebeian, and they're not stupid. Man has always wanted all throughout its existence to be master. The unique fact about human techniques is that techniques is largely independent of the life of the species of humanity as a whole.

This is the only instance in all the history of life where an individual has freed himself alone from the compulsion of the herd of humanity. And according to Spengler, one has to meditate long upon this thought if one is to grasp its immense implications. Man has become the creator of his tactics of living. This is his grandeur and his doom. This inner form of his creativeness is what we call culture, to be cultureed, to cultivate. something to suffer from culture. Mankind's creations are the expression of this being

in personal form. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio.

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And he talks about how different the Prussian is, the Prussian spirit. And one of the ways he talks about the Prussian spirit is that the Prussian spirit has a sense of belonging to something large, man belongs to something larger than himself. and that's what he works towards. And he contrasts it between the English. And he says at this point, the English have just become financialized. Everything is about finance. Everything is about the individual. Everything is about how I'm going to do for myself to escape my Englishness, basically.

So that's a little simple. I know that we're talking about some, you know, advanced concepts here, but one of the ways that you can think about what he's saying is, is that he's talking about belonging, but not giving up your individualism and becoming a deracinated unit. Right. And later in the book, he touches upon the Germans. And I was reminded when I was reading it of the Krupp Steel Company in Germany, the one. that was founded in the late 18th, very early 19th century, and then basically provided steel from the rur area of Germany for like two centuries. And it only formally went out of business. I think in the book on it was published in the late 1960s. But the way that the inventor struggles in Germany is very different than an English inventor.

In England, which was, you know, in the 1700s, the world of the bridge builder of the steam engine, of the earliest trains. This is a savant who, through sheer force of will, invents and creates something brilliantly outside of any constraints from anything. He's allowed to run wild with this idea. But in the Crop Steel Company, every single brilliant inventive. who is going through the process over time of refining and improving the steel product, basically the Prussian state the entire time is trying to suffocate the industry. It's this bizarre angle where, and Spengler even backs this up later on in this book, where he says the Germans hate their inventors, which I never would have thought of ahead of time,

but the more that I think about that instance, I'm certain that Spengler would have been aware of the Krupp company and also how scientific geniuses are treated within Germany. To return it, yeah, go ahead. I found, yeah, I found the spot where he talks about Impressionism and Socialism. He says, it was we ourselves who brought about the calamity upon ourselves with the preachers of cosmopolitanism and other treacherous elements. allowing them into the culture. And he says, we Germans with our almost metaphysical will, our stubborn and selfless determination, our honest and enthusiastic patriotism. This will of ours is by its very nature a handy weapon for any external enemy with the practical sense of the English.

It is a precarious compound of political ideas and aspiration, one which only the English are really capable of mastering and implementing. For us, despite all our passion and self-sacrificing zeal. It has led to political dilettantism. Its effect on our political existence has been disastrous, poisonous, suicidal. It is our invisible, it is our invisible English army left by Napoleon on German soil after the Battle of Jenna. He's just talking about their deficiencies in sensing reality at this point. And the reality he's talking about, he's talking about the reality of the attack of what's coming to destroy Prussianism. Right.

So to understand more of the genesis of culture, we know that man is an inventive carnivore. There is nothing else in this world that is equally capable of both touch and action as the human hand. And while the prey animal regards the world theoretically of what might happen, the hand of man commands it practically. Spengler argues that this must have happened in a single moment like a flash of lightning. And he aims to disprove the evolutionary process. Evolution, as Spengler writes, is slow and phlegmatic. It's a series of alterations and it appropriately suits the English nature of how reality should be slow, plotting, exhaustive. The time frame is millions of years separated by arbitrary catastrophes. Des Spengler, the human skeleton, as we know it, with the skull shape, with the

nature of the opposable hands. This simply appears in the past, in the archaeological record, is exactly how as it is now, and therefore man must have been exactly as we are in the past. Spengler says that what makes us human are opposable thumb's hand, our upright gate, our head position on our neck. This is not something that could have developed piecemeal like a jigsaw puzzle. The whole thing just suddenly is a cohesive unit. It is not humanity that undergoes catastrophes and mutates. It is world history itself external to the existence of man that mutates over time. And this hand really is critical for Spengler.

The unarmed and unapplied hand is useless. It requires a weapon for it to become practical, useful. So when mankind develops and picks up a tool, the tool takes the shape of the hand, and the hand takes the shape of the tool. This is why in the archaeological record, you always find tools of some sort, even if they're stone tools, with the human hands.

hand. Man is also the only animal that selects and crafts the weapon. And so with this, you have the liberation from the compulsion of its animal nature. Man comes into being. So this is different than just a chimp picking up a rock and using it. An animal has to, I mean, a man has to think ahead of what they're going to do. And so when they craft a tool, they're doing a deed. Well, animals have like, baseline activity. What mankind is doing is a deed. Man does watching cause and effect of how a fire starts, but unlike an animal, only man can plan out a process of starting a fire. And so every work of primitive man in this mold by being planned out and executed is artificial and unnatural. It is estranged from nature. And so because that's the baseline and the genesis of man's soul creating

culture, it continues to strive forward and its alienation from all types of nature. So every technical process that man undergoes is an art. There's archery, construction, war, being a priest and prophesizing, governing mankind. These are all arts. And this in prehistoric man is the beginning of our tragedy, because nature, death, calamity, starvation, disease, it is always stronger than man's creation. therefore all great cultures that develop are eventually defeats. The fight against nature is ultimately hopeless, but it has to be fought to the bitter end. And so now that man has an armed hand and man can plan, man then begins to do something new in culture, and that is speech and enterprise. So for a considerable number of millennia, mankind is running around doing the

absolute basics, chimps with sticks. But at some point, which Spengler dates to the 5th millennium BC, we get graves, we get clay vessels, agriculture, indications of travel, and Spengler disagrees with classifications of objects such as mesolithic, paleolithic, neolithic, of incremental development over time, because what's not changing here is necessarily the equipment, just as some kind of mutative Darwinian adaption. Man himself is changing as the tools develop. And these new techniques, they all, in a critical way, they presuppose each other's existence. When you tame an animal, you now have to have cultivated food for it. And you also have to require, you know, constructing pens. And so every sort of building, every sort of enterprise or endeavor, this requires the preparation and

transportation of material over distances. Despergler, this is a spiritual, transformation called collective doing by plan. Before man had lived his own life, but now we require something for communication. How do you communicate your plan to other people? Similarly to the flash of lightning discovery, speaking in sentences must have also come very suddenly and decisively. Sentences were prefigured by eye movements, voice, and hand gestures. The fundamental error of romanticism and the rationalists when they think about what a sentence is, is that a sentence expresses a judgment or a thought in isolation. Scholars are surrounded by books and they're constantly reading and researching into their own thoughts and writings, and the thought itself becomes an object of speaking. Yet beyond speaking, there is a hearing.

Beyond a question, there is an answer. And so what a scholar or a scholar, or a, very rationalist person would view is that the origin of speech is a monologue, but speaking itself isn't a monologue. It's a reciprocal way of understanding conversation between several persons. Monologue only has the properties of judgment and declaration, but mutual conversation between men has the command, the expression of obedience, the question, and the information or negation to that question. These are very brief sentences. Do this. Are you ready? Go ahead. Words as designations of notions are only products of the object of the sentence. So a seafaring coastal tribe that has to fish all day is going to communicate differently than the village of sheep herders. The object of speech,

the original object, therefore, is the carrying out of an act in accordance with intention, time, means in place. All speech initially, all human communication proceeded from the thought of the hand. I want to do this with my agency and my physical prowess. Therefore, I have to communicate it.

This episode is brought to you by Spreaker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now. I'm editing audio.

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This speech and enterprise have the same relation as hands and implement. So man, the predator, insistently, consciously aims to increase his superiority far beyond the limits of his bodily powers. So if you notice, the first thing that happens in early Neolithic society is they build these megaliths like Stonehous. And these sites that are scattered all across the world, they have capstones that are weighing more than a hundred tons. And there's this kind of ridiculous question of why did they do this? Well, I think, and according to Spengler, I would argue he asserts the same thing. The reason that these structures exist in their form and their variety and the prolificness of them is that it's a representation of how much forethought and an enterprise that society had present at its capacity, and therefore it was the highest form of culture.

So planning out and carrying out a task, like let's say building Stonehench, this is two different things. There are two different kinds of men. There are those who command and those who obey. The existence to Spengler of this is a plain fact and admitted by everyone, even though some people will just bullshit you and tell you that this is not the case. But genius in this sense, planning something like Stonehenge is literal raw creative power. The talent of building it in its exercise in a different way presupposes genius, but not necessarily vice versa. So this enterprise that now exists once man builds these early structures, well, for both the leader and the lead, it's an immense loss of freedom. They could become spiritual or intellectual members of a higher unit bigger than themselves. So eventually this forms the state.

The state, this relationship between the leader and the lead, it is the internal order of a people for its external purpose. Politics is a temporary substance for war. And the state has to exist because piracy is as old as nomadism, wherever there is a, peasantry, there is an enslavement by the peasantry to a warlike nobility. In the early tribes, the individual mattered little or nothing. When trouble came to a society, the entire group would die. This is the extinction of the we. The frontier, even the intellectual frontier of this unknown, is the mortal foe of the will to power. And in setting up these societal endeavors, the more powerful, the more competent a leader of a society gets, the greater the need of executive hands.

So instead of killing all of your hostile tribes, you begin to enslave them. This is the origin of human slavery, which, to Spengler, must be precisely as old as the enslavement of animals. In general, these tribes will multiply downwards. Over time, there are fewer and fewer leaders, but more hands, more laborers. The exceptional man, the righteous Lord over this tribe, is far removed from any concept of ancient individual freedom. Only here is the righteous Lord, the individualism that is a reaction against the psychology of the masses will exist. And so there begins to be this relationship between the leader and the lead. Hate.

Hate is the most genuine of all race feelings for the prey animal. But it also presupposes respect for the adversary. They are envious of the leader. And to alter this fact where similarly the leader has contempt for the lead, to alter this fact of human relations is simply impossible. So believe it or not, we are now four-fifths of the way through this book. So if the points leading up to this have seemed rather simple and obvious, it's because Spengler is building to this final thesis.

And the final thesis is culture. the last act, the rise and the end of machine culture. We're now 75 pages into this book, three quarters of the way through. So to Spengler, occasionally, since 3,000 BC, there have been high cultures. The tempo of the rise and the fall of cultures has been that of the final catastrophe. In the way that we view and understand time, every decade has a significance. Every year has a special look to it. We have come since 3,000 BC to stone cities, to housing entirely artificial living.

In it, there is society free from nature. The hierarchy of classes, nobles, priests, and Berger are an artificial gradation of life against the background of mere peasantry. And what do they do? What distinguishes these classes? Well, luxury, wealth. And this is something that I found very thought provoking from him. What is luxury but culture in its most exacting form? What are the cultural artifacts that we have from ancient society?

We have the Sutton Who helmet. We have highly refined textiles. We have beautiful mason work. This is not a mass instinctive prey culture. This is wealth, ostentatious, loud, and boisterous. And that is generating culture. It's not thinkers in ivory towers. it is the doer, the generator, the artisan, the crafter, the inventor of wealth.

And without an economic wealth that is concentrated in a few hands, there can be no wealth of art, thought, elegance, or the luxury of the world outlook. Look at the Reesornamento, the leading up to the Renaissance in Italy and these city-states. Look at the previous 13th, 12th and 13th centuries of the way that wealth is getting, concentrated before the artistic generation of these beautiful masterworks has to exist. That is the development of culture. And conversely, economic impoverishment also brings spiritual and artistic impoverishment. And so this Faustian culture, as we understand it, it presents the victory of pure technical

thought over these massive problems. Our Faustian culture is not necessarily the last culture, but it's certainly the most powerful, passionate, and tragic, due to the inward conflict between its comprehensive intellectuality and the profound spiritual disharmony that it's experiencing in any given time. So to Spengler, nobles, warriors, adventurers, they live in the world of actual fact. They suffer destiny. But alternatively, the priest, the scholar, and the philosopher live in the world of truths. So they think and causality. Faustian culture between these two poles experienced every conflict of these two between the 12th century through the 1930s when he published this. History according to Spengler, the way that it plays out in the Faustian world,

is one sequence of efforts to get resolution between these two primary orders. So, of course, Well, how does this actually manifest? What's something more specific about it rather than just this big meme where Spengler and Faustian culture just kind of floating ethereally? Well, Spengler names some dates here between the rise of Faustian culture

as well as the Vikings and their arrival in different lands. Now, Spengler distinguishes between the warrior Viking, I think it's the drenger, of the blood, and the Vikings of the mind. With boldness and hunger, there are no idle and unpractic curiosity that's present in these other civilizations, like the Chinese, the Indian civilization, the classical Greek civilization, and the Arab civilizations, even among their savant class. Uniquely, in the Faustian, every theory that's thought up by a Faustian savant is from the outset a working hypothesis, which needs not be necessarily correct. but only practical, and it aims to make the secrets of the world serviceable to definite ends. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading

condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones.

Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. So in the middle ages, there's a... an advancement in the mathematical methods with Roger Bacon, Albertus, Magnus, and Mitello in the 13th century. The Experimentum Inum Solum Certificat is the stratagem of intellectual prey animals. They claim in their discoveries that their desire is to know God, but they actually strove to master the forces of inorganic nature, which is the invisible energy that's manifested in all that happens. So this is where you get a huge amount of religion mixed with all sorts of

different metaphysical concepts that are not Christian. This is where you get like everyone being some sort of, how do I put this? I don't want to say like a Gnostic because it's not necessarily what they believe, but they're basically just doing all sorts of heretical practices. Black magic stuff like this um in faustian science alone there is dynamics physics appearing the greek science is static with algebra and geometry and the arabic science is alchemy or the magical combination of ingredients uh gross test a western a western inventor developed a theory of space as a function of light petrus peregrinous a theory of magnetism and the Copernican theory of the solar system was foreshadowed by a resume.

So what is man, Faustian man doing? Well, they're kind of tired of enslaving plants, animals, and slaves to serve him. That's just too easy, and Faustian man is too good at it. Man wished now to enslave and harness the very forces of nature to multiply his own strength. And so the highest aspiration, even to this day, you see this with stuff like nuclear fusion and the way the Faustian man has a utopian idea. We never forgot the idea of perpetual motion. And the success of perpetual motion is the final victory of God or nature. Deus Sivay Natura. By 1500, a new vikingism, which is started by Vasco da Gama and Columbus is

underway, a new man arrives in the Faustian West to replace this monastic mind. This new man is the priest of the machine. With the coming of rationalism, the belief in techniques almost becomes a materialistic religion that supplants in the rationalist mind, the Trinity. In reality, the inventor's passion really has nothing to do whatsoever with its consequences, same with the explorer. It is his personal life motive, joy and sorrow, the effect of what they're doing, the effect of this technological advancement, it's never foreseen. And so all great discoveries and inventions, they are springing from the delight of strong men in victory. They are expressions of the man's personality and not of the utilitarian thinking of the mass, who are merely spectators.

The number of hands that are involved in these endeavors, as society and Faustian society grows, expands and becomes more complex, must always increase over time. The leaders and their lead no longer understand each other. The enterprise in pre-Christian millennia, so prior to the life of Christ, required the intelligent cooperation of all concerned. Yet now the hands work at things which the real role in life, even affecting themselves, is now entirely unknown to them and in which they have no share. Due to this, the spiritual barrenness causes bitterness to the gifted and born creators. And this is the spiritual impoverishment of Faustian man, that not every man will be the leader, will be the head. of the organization will be the inventor the trailblazer lesser men according to spengler will no longer see nor understand that the leader's work is the harder work and that their own life depends on its success they merely sense that this work makes them happy and this is why they hate them so we are now at the close of the book here in reality fast forwarding to the world in which we live

of the machine techniques that we have created as this Faustian system, they've developed out of the power of the heads or the hands. We are at the summit. The last decisions are taking place. The tragedy of Faustian man is closing. Every high culture is a tragedy. The history of mankind as a whole must play out this way.

As the macrocosm of man against nature rose up, So now too does the microcosm of machine revolting against Nordic man. The Lord of the world is becoming the slave of the machine, forced to follow its course with minimal agency. At the start of the 20th century, a small group of Nordic blood nations, Britain, Germany, France, and the United States, they commanded this leader situation. They commanded the machine techniques. The degree of military power that they generated was dependent upon the intensity of industry, and countries that are industrially poor are poor all around.

America, as a successor to the English, rates its inventors the highest in status, but Germany, paradoxically, rates them the lowest, despite the intense competence of the German inventor. It is the tragedy of the time that this unfettered human thought can no longer grasp, its own consequences with these techniques. Technics has become as esoteric as the higher mathematics which has its uses, but the physical theory has itself refined its intellectual abstractions from phenomena to reach the foundation purely of human knowing. So to like summarize that kind of crazy sentence. Basically, our religion has become as unbounded, with the machine techniques as these early scholars understanding higher mathematics.

And intellectually, our intellectual thinkers of this age have become so close to the pure foundations of human knowing with the brute reality of ontology and getting just autistic about the structure of logic itself that we've defeated everything within this. We don't even really know why we're doing it anymore. And that is why the machine is taking over. The machine that we invent, they are beginning to defeat their own purposes. So in Spengler's time, he talks about the invention of the motor car, which by the 1930s, initially it was an improvement to the carriage, you know, to give freedom to people to go and to rapidly cross quick distances and it aimed to expedite, but also to refine our travel.

Same thing with aviation. But eventually it just becomes stifled. We're stuck in traffic. We're delayed. Our existence is ruled by this machine. Same thing, I would argue. He doesn't mention this, but I would make an exact parallel to the airport. Flying used to be this romantic and enlightening experience, which is very comfortable,

but now it's this just utter miserable factory machine terror. This episode is brought to you by Spreker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen, Apple Podcasts, Sprester, Sprester. Spotify in about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads,

meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. You don't have to tell me I'm going tomorrow. My condolences. By the time that our techniques, but these machines exhaust themselves, we're also not going to be free of it because there's going to be some other improved way to continue the machine.

So the Faustian thought today, and Spengler, you have to understand, he's writing this almost 100 years ago. It's very pricient. The Faustian thought begins to become sick of machines. A weariness is spreading, a pacifism of the need to do battle with nature. Men are returning to forms of life simpler and nearer to nature. Men are fleeing the great cities. They are becoming hateful to them. Boy, are they becoming hateful to cities nowadays. Strong and creative talents.

This is like the Chud book. We're in like the Chud section, just so everyone understands that. This is like the based core of the apple here. Strong and creative talents are turning away from practical problems and the sciences towards pure speculation. Occultism, spiritualism, Hindu philosophies, and Gnosticism. are on the rise casually in our mass society. The flight of the born leader away from the machine is beginning. The tension between work of leadership and work of execution has reached the level of catastrophe. The work of the hands in society is entirely without significance.

The mutiny of the hands against their destiny against organized life itself is beginning. The most serious symptom of the collapse is, treason to techniques. The immense superiority of Faustian civilization was based on an uncondested monopoly of industry, the role of every other people group in the world, so all the third worldists, according to Spengler, was to provide material for it, but only the white engineers knew how to facilitate this process. But here we're at the fatal mistake. Instead of, I'm glad you got banned off YouTube for this one, instead of keeping this knowledge to themselves, the white peoples complacently offered it to all the people of the world, to the astonished homage of Indians and Japanese, who were delighting in the pleasure of the white man and their ignorance and throwing away their Faustian core.

The unassailable privileges. That is that right there. So, God. Oh, yep. All right, go on. The unassailable privileges of the white races have been threw. away, squandered, betrayed. Where there are resources, according to these non-Faustian races, there is hopefully, optimistically, a new weapon that can be forged against the heart of Faustian

civilization itself. The exploited world is beginning to take its revenge on the lords. This is the real and final basis of the unemployment that prevails in the white countries. It is no mere crisis, but the beginning of a catastrophe. Faustian techniques to a Faustian man are not just an activity to be engaged in or even the culture itself. It is a spiritual need. It is an account of its victories.

But techniques for the colored races is but a weapon in their fight against the Faustian civilization. So what do we do about this? This is the famous line from Spengler. I'm just going to read this in its entirety because there's no way to get around it. This is what Spengler says we must do in this time. Faced as we are with this destiny, there is only one world outlook that is worthy of us,

that which has already been mentioned as the choice of Achilles. Better a short life, full of deeds and glory, than a long life without content. Content, I mean, not content, ridiculous. Already the danger is so great for every individual, every class, every people, that to cherish any illusion whatsoever is deplorable. Time does not suffer itself to be halted. There is no question of prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice. We are born into this time and must bravely follow. the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in

Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from a man. And that is Man in Technics by Oswald Spengler. It's, you know, you mentioned a couple of times that this was written a hundred years ago. And, you know, especially in this last section, it's so applicable to today. You know, this is why, this is why Yaqui was so, you know, Why, when you read Imperium, you're basically reading a,

somebody who has absorbed Spangler and is looking forward. And I guess it's why sometimes when you're reading Imperium, it feels like he's basically talking to you at this moment in time and predicting things that are going to happen. And, yeah, yeah, the optimism is cowardice line, is always, it doesn't make any sense when you take it, when you take it out of the context of the full quote here. One thing I found really interesting in this paragraph, because even though it totally advises

against optimism, it never advocates pessimism. It never. It advocates work. Yeah. It advocates doing something. And so, and it makes very clear what you're supposed to work against. And I think, I mean, you would have to be kind of blind to be listening this and not be aware who the enemy is. But also, why it's a problem to just hope for the best.

because the enemy of Faustian civilization is not as passive as this. They are more than happy to use our own tools against us. And that, it's a big picture thing. It applies not just to Indian bots on Twitter or visa scams or to a series of just endless cultural or political betrayals, although that's definitely the most visible form, but it explains a sort of uniqueness to Faustian man's life, that it's not just the goal of the Faustian man's life is not to just accumulate resources, I think.

It is rather to just spend the resources to exhaust the bank, to put all effort out there, leave it all on the table. I mean, there's just been so many times. I mean, I think of everyone from that, you know, the guy in Brazil who just lives in Florida now and Bolsonaro and a lot of these other, you know, you see this repeating pattern, Nigel Farage is a similar one. You see this thing where they, you know, they claim to represent this spirit and this force until they just quit. or until they chicken out. And I think those individuals and that way of thinking of all just be on side with this movement

until it's no longer convenient for me or until I had enough challenges to delay me, that is the sort of optimism as cowardice that he's referring to in this passage. And I think that the way that he also frames things as an illusion. I mean, the illusion to Spangler is very obvious, this just purely being intellectual. You know, I suffer from this as well, just being an avid reader and a collector of books. I get very caught up in how great it is to incorporate and understand and read all these right-wing ideas. or to consume a great podcast, but it's not for a purpose. There's no deed that's generated.

You're not this brain in a vat. You know, you are a man with an implement against the world and that ability to have enterprise. And when I think of especially, shout out to the OGC for what they do, the way that the OGC is organizing itself is exactly what, must be done to fight this because similarly Spengler is not advocating. Yes, he brings an example of a Roman soldier, but if you notice, that Roman soldier doesn't die in isolation. He's waiting to be relieved by his unit. So the honor there is actually a group honor. That soldier does credit to his unit. So there is a lot of notions, I think, with honor that tie into the speech, the communication, the enterprise.

I mean, setting aside the fact, I mean, I'm a Christian, so to be Christian means to have honor and to have honesty and to represent yourself plainly and to not be afraid, to not be deplicitous. I mean, I think these are things that cannot be taken from a man. And make no mistake that I think the non-Faustian groups are just never, never going to stop until every Faustian accomplishment has been taken. This episode is brought to you by Spreker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives,

and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones.

Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. Well, it's also why it was given away to people who don't deserve it. And some may try to make the argument that it was done to try to improve those other groups. No, that's not what it was done at all. It was done. So, and it's mentioned in here, one, to give power to those other groups to, destroy, turn around and destroy the Faustian, but also it was a way of profit.

It was pure profit motive for some that they will be able to control this and they will be able to benefit from it because it will grow commerce. It will help spread commerce throughout the world and those who benefit from commerce and those who benefit by not even partaking in commerce, but by controlling the mechanisms through which commerce is done. We've seen this in the, we saw this in the recent Epstein files where he says, we make our money, we don't work to make our money. Let the goyam do that. That's exactly why these things would be given over to people who don't deserve them, who didn't build them, who didn't And they didn't partake in the creation of it.

Right. And Spengler, actually, there's a separate source. I mean, if you enjoy this stream and if you've looked at the book and you want more, there's a book out there, which is a collection of Spengler's previously unpunished notes called Early Days of World History, Reflections on the Past, where he just goes, it's just a collection of what would have been a future work on prehistoric civilization. and with your line recently about the nature of these sort of parasitic people. He has a great line on the Dorians.

I don't really know anything about the Dorians, but I'll read this quote. The Dorians immigrated as Veracrum, as a sacred spring, a group of young men expelled from the tribe to conquer new land and found a new tribe there. Men's house, as they came alone, was therefore homosexual, which the native population did not know at all. These people adopted the language of the subjugated, the women. This is this later Dorian group. It is ridiculous to infer the origin from their language. And he cites as an example of this homosexual, feminized group without family as,

Two examples to him are Jews and Haitian Negroes. So very interesting. And he kind of pairs this with a series of other quotes about Indo-European language families. Their similarities, their overlap. He's a series of great quotes on how people groups come about, that the Greeks are not a people. There's the Spartans, the Thebians, the Germans were not a people. but they were the Prussians and the Austrians. They are fighting units in the stream of history. And what fights as a singular unit is a people. And so the core of a people group is the crew.

Any war party that goes out on land or sea contains the genesis of a people group within itself. And this is a really fascinating one that adds a lot of context. If you're not up for as much Meta History as the Clown of the West. Highly recommend the book Early Days of World History, even though it's a collection of quotes. He talks about the soul. This is a great one. Let's see.

There are two kinds of egotism in the soul, that I am valuable to the culture and that I am valuable to myself. That is posh and base. In world cities, the second one prevails, bread and circuses. In the old lineage, you have Rome, England, Prussian, the nobility. The aristocratic attitude values the personality according to its value for the cause, the status, the Lord, I serve. Whereas the democratic one wants to ensure everyone the enjoyment

of their person. This is the opposite of duty, of any attachment, of actual freedom. The aristocrat feels obliged by attitude, action, and form to serve the cause to which he belongs. He is therefore obligated to preserve and increase his rank and wealth. To him, the cause is elevated, and it is representation. The intellectual nobility lives himself for pleasure and only imitates the noble. The proud solitude that the intellectual has purely represents a lost cause. The aristocrat demands with the clear conscience, self-evident submission obedience, because the cause lives in him.

The extreme opposite is the worldview of the urban rabble, from the rich to the unemployed, enjoyment at other people's expense. So just banger after banger in this quote in this book. There's also quotes on sacrifices. He has a whole section on the Bible. Although I haven't had time to go as much into it. It's a very interesting book. And it sort of escapes this Anglo-critical autistic view for categorization.

I mean, I read some of Toynbee when A's book, Prophets of Doom, came out. And I just found it, it was so systematized. It was this kind of lifeless history. I think it's not good to read these sorts of anthologies that are just a series of names, dates, and persons. It robs agency of it. And also it pulls the real genesis of culture out of that thing, rendering it kind of inert. And one interesting thing that he talks about also in this book, it's kind of like this undergranting theme, but when he's complaining about rationalists,

he's writing about a sort of Marxism that's overwhelmingly dominant in the 1920s and 30s, and this is something that Spengler understands, but is so, I mean, we, in our modern times, we throw the word Marxist around a ton, but Spengler was dealing with actual Marxism. And so the rationalists that he's criticizing these base utilitarian and,

He's criticizing them as the antithesis of culture. And I think it's a very powerful technique. It's much different than, say, like a Milton Friedman, capitalism versus socialism, stupid debunking. I mean, I think it was, I don't know whether it was Carl or someone else said it. But I heard on a podcast recently that the United States is a centrally planned economy. And once I heard that, it kind of flipped the script in my head of, the function of this state? Well, yeah, I mean,

is it essentially planned economy and has it been from the start? Well, I mean, you'd have to look at what you're looking for is you're looking for, for lack of a better term, cronyism throughout. You know, you also have to look at some of the motivations for the foundation of the country

and many of them were commercial. So, yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. And I'm trying to think of what he starts breaking down economics as economics is supposed to be a tool, not a be-all end-all. And we've basically gotten at the point where people judge their quote-unquote liberty and freedom, which really doesn't, which are terms that don't mean anything. in the grand scale of history as, you know, how economics is. You know, when you, you could see this today with, you know, this war that's happening or what they, what Bondi said about, said when, when being questioned about Epstein.

Well, you know, the Tao, the Tao. this is how people view freedom and liberty. And they don't think freedom and liberty existed before the Enlightenment. And all freedom and liberty was before the Enlightenment was responsibility. Oh, yeah. I kind of think about, I mean, Spengler died in, I think, 1936. So he didn't really see this world metastasized. But when I think about the stream that you and I did on Edwards,

Bernard Bernays, I think the way that this machine techniques manifests itself today is in the generation of public relations and the perception of things. And so while that used to be tied to consumption of a product, now it's just this entirely metaphysical view that we're enslaved to. And I have like a similar mindset on Spengler in the same way with the way he views his own machine techniques with how we look at consumption. I mean, specifically thinking about this Iran War, everything the administration has put out has been, it's not even self-referential. It's just a series of basically kind of tweets in human form.

This is something I've picked up on throughout the Trump administration is the content without substance that is persisting. It's showing that these people in the administration and power are kind of enslaved to this generation of how they're received by the audience. You know, so I know that Bojilar had this whole thing of the Iraq War didn't take place because it was simply this watched information on television that was very carefully curated and presented to the American people and that unless you were in a very specific family, you had no direct impact to anything with the Gulf War. It was a peer media event. I think we've

seen almost the enslavement of American culture to this where our culture is kind of participating in the Iran War against its will, even in the administration. You know, there isn't even a single fought really about the strategic objectives. Otherwise, in the week since this has started, they would have come out and had like a Schwartzcoff-style press conference on it, or they either would have announced a strategic vision, or they would have, at the very least, try to cover their assets. They're not even really capable of either of those two things. They're just kind of, all they're really capable of doing is, like, feeding this content machine around glorifying warfare itself. So I think the Iran war,

did not take place, but also the prevalence of AI in a lot of the footage, the prevalence of bots, the spin, the AI generated news articles, even the nature of this political system and also this war. It is also machine techniques, and we are also captured by it, not in charge of it, even with the leaders. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio.

If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Sprinker distributes it everywhere people listen, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. Yeah, pretty simple examples. I was out in public and I heard a boomer say they were glad that, you know, that we were doing this

to Iran because they've been at war with us for four. 47 years and I'm like, okay, well, you just heard that on Fox News. And then you have other people who are like, you know, this is going to start World War III. And this is, well, you're listening. That thought when it came into your mind, if somebody put it, unless somebody put it there. So there is barely an original thought about this war, about what's happening. because if you're not talking to people who are actually experiencing it, you don't know what you're talking. You don't know what you're hearing.

You know, you hear Pete Hegseth said today that, you know, well, maybe one of the reasons why a girl's, a school was hit was because they were firing missiles from there. Well, I mean, anybody who pays attention to what is. Israel does to Gaza whenever they kill civilians, he's just repeating what they say. There is nothing. This isn't a war. This is a gigantic meme. No one, even the people prosecuting it, have any idea of what they're doing, of what's actually happening.

And they may think they do, and they may think they're doing well by, and they may even know that they are putting propaganda out there. But they truly don't understand what is happening because they've never stood back and calculated all of the consequences that are wrought by something like this. and I don't think they even have the ability to do that intellectually. I mean, in a Christian sense, if you make your business being a public face, speaking to an audience and just lying, you can't go into your private life or your strategic state of mind or you have to think about second and order consequences and not lie to yourself. It's going to be a reinforcing process. And it's also something where each producer of content is marketing to their own audience.

So I sent you a picture privately of I was at the gym and this guy on the back of his SUV had a printed out piece of paper that said, make you Ron great again with the flag as it existed at the time of the Shah. and I ran into the guy driving. I didn't talk to him. But, you know, this guy was probably in his 60s. And I was just thinking to myself, what goes on in this guy's head is like this fictitious idea of Iran and this fictitious idea of America.

And like, this guy could not be more alienated from your average Iranian person on the ground right now in that country. This is why I have a fundamental problem with diaspora. groups because they're whether they're Jewish, whether they're Indian, whatever, they're all really fundamentally alienated from their own culture. Like this Iranian, like make Iran great again. Well, first off, that's just a totally ripped PR point from the Trump administration. Secondly, when was Iran great? What do you want to return it to? Because it can't be the Shah. That was artificial. and it can't be ancient Persia because that's, you know, too far away from modern times and technology.

And also, what image would Iran have to be made into for you to leave your diaspora and return home to that country? And I feel like in that alienated sense, everyone politically is in that similar boat. We're all sort of chasing this dragon of wanting someone in power. one of these leaders to tell us what we can't manifest externally in the world and which they themselves have totally lost control over. I think, especially with the Iran War, not to talk too much about it, but America has 10 victory conditions. Iran only needs to survive. That's all they have to do. And some of the language that has come out of the administration is, it's It's incoherent and it's psychotic and it lacks all elements of Christian mercy and justice.

I mean, if this war had to be fought, I mean, if it really had to be fought, it could have been fought in a different manner, but it's not being fought. Like, just to, just to freaking say it, this war is being fought in an Israeli manner by the United States. That's the biggest problem with it. The tactics, the strategy, it's not an American fought war. It's an Israeli fought one. Well, the problem is, is that we're under no misconceptions that you, we know you have to have propaganda. for whenever you're doing something like this.

But you also have to have a goal. Pete Hegsett's goal is to rebuild the third temple. Benjamin Netanyahu's goal is Greater Israel. Donald Trump's goal is his legacy or what, I don't even know what it is. It's not to help the American people because this doesn't help the American people. So how do you do something when the people who are prosecuting it all have different motives for doing it?

There cannot be any accomplishment because there's only accomplishment if you're all working towards the same goal. And nobody's work. There are too many factions participating in this who have their own motivations. And then there are other people who just want to see Trump succeed because they're cowards and they're scared of the left. And that's basically, or they're just followers. They're just followers. They want a king. They need a king.

And they think that that's what Trump is, even though he's going to be out of office in three years. It just doesn't, there is no, it's not coherent. There is nothing coherence about it. And it's very, I mean, what's strange to me, and this is like my personal perspective, like I lived there in Israel for several years as a Jew. And the Israel that I lived in, in Israeli media, in Hebrew, was making efforts to make inroads with the Gulf states. There hadn't been any conflict. for a little bit with the Palestinians. They were considering more concessions. They were doing more trade and business with the Gulf states, but also, you know, Iran and Lebanon were viewed as end-game scenarios, basically that this would be the last domino that would have to fall.

But also that it was a very unobtainable objective that the instances of, of espionage within Iran for nuclear programs by Mossad in the early 2000s, but also the, you know, the earlier war in Lebanon, these were treated as historical cases that were to be avoided. That essentially, yes, according to Israel in that time, Iran could not get a nuclear weapon, we would not precipitate any overt conflict to make that happen with Lebanon. The biggest cultural touchstone at the time was Israel was embroiled in that war between 1983 and 2000 due to its own making, obviously. And it was extremely unpopular within Israel because it was a quagmire.

The line in Israel was that it was akin to the American struggle in Iraq, that we were just stuck there and getting bombed by Hezbollah. and it was just a disaster that we could not win a ground invasion in Lebanon. And it would seem that since I have lived there, and really not much has changed, not the political powers in Israel domestically, not their relationship internationally, not even the man in charge, but only really with this October 7th thing, every single lesson that Israel has learned, it is forgotten. And it is going to, I mean, I really can't emphasize this enough.

it is making for its own self-interest the worst possible series of decisions it could possibly make, even ones that it advised itself against just a few years ago. That's the part that is really mind-blowing to me, is it's not only incredibly stupid, but it's just everyone in Israel knew, This is why you shouldn't do this. And then it's just like this societal spiritual amnesia. I don't even know how to how to frame it.

Everyone's so caught up with the Zionism that, you know, that like sober perception is just gone. It's very strange. And it sucked the United States in with it. And there's no objective. And I don't know. you know, Netanyahu is not going to live forever. And, you know, Israel is going to have to persist in this region of the world that it made alone. With, you know, armaments and assistance from the United States, you know, it's going to have to contend with the fact that it alienated every Sunni state it wanted to economically partner with.

And that it pushed its endgame in Iran, which was always stupid by its own state. standards. And that, you know, frankly, it's gotten a lot of its young people killed for, no reason. And there's a lot of, I mean, as an Orthodox Christian and, you know, a huge problem, obviously, with the bombing of churches, with the killing of priests, with the intense disregard for human life, rules of operation, AI targeted systems. as well is just overtly demonic.

And really, I can't think of a more evil form of warfare. And it just would seem that, I don't know. We always have these on such a pessimistic note, Pete. But, you know, the optimistic part, the optimistic part in view that I have, it is cowardice, I suppose, to quote Spangler. But it's that things are so, fucked up that it cannot persist like this going forward. Something geopolitically or in the energy market or in the broader economy or in the relationship between the generations of people in

the United States. Something is going to just fracture and that will eventually force change. And while we're building our own thing privately, personally, with the old glory, club and outside of it, you know, that's really all the time and attention that we can spare towards the chaos in the world. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple.

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you might as well publish it. You know, when you, like I said before, when you say optimism is cowardice out of context, you know, people can rightly criticize you. But once you understand that once you embrace optimism, you're either relying upon others or you're abandoning your effort or your, you're. or you're slowing your effort down or you're not punching through the enemy. You're not punching through the obstacles

and you're going to keep on going. You know, you can't cross the Rubicon and set up camp on the other side. You have to keep going. That's just exactly what we have to do at this point. And, yeah. relying on other people, especially people who make decisions to take massive actions without contemplating all of the consequences or risks inherent in them.

You can't rely upon those people. They're not, they don't possess a high culture. I'd argue they don't possess any culture at all. Right, and we shouldn't be living. We shouldn't have to live moment to moment. The Chinese have this kind of model where they'll look a half century or a century out into the future. And in our short-term society, we are really only thinking day-to-day. And what's terrifying to me about it is that our leadership also appears to somehow be thinking day-to-day of how to

proceed with the course of action. And I think, you know, I've, I don't know, I won't get too personal, but it's, it's Lent and I'm reading my Bible. And I, I'm very happy that I read this book with you for this stream because it took my mind off sort of the insanity of social media. and also, you know, there's always time for the Psalms. There's always time for just trying to view a world in a different way that's just full of just a little bit fewer lies. I think it's good for you.

I mean, I just think there's so much bull that is circulating around since this war started. It's important to keep your head on straight. and Spengler definitely says it's straight. There is no confusion with him. The greatest decision I've made in a while in a long time was to get off of social media for Lentz. I haven't been off of, I haven't been on social media since let's start, been on social media X or Twitter, Facebook. Look. Yeah. It's just it's it's I'm thinking so much more clearly. Well, I find with and you know, who knows whether it's just a cortisol thing or whether it's

the short term attention span thing. But with Instagram, with Twitter with these services, they, I just notice it is it's like curated and maybe it's the cognitive warfare thing too. you're just angry and you're miserable and you're seeing stuff where if you saw it in public you would get violent and i think that taking people right up to that red line of violent impulses and depressing content um i mean i think it kind of renders them inert to think clearly and concisely about anything and uh You know, it's like you scroll on Twitter for a minute and you just see horrible stuff. And it's like, I don't know, how is this making me happy or beneficial? I mean, you know, as a guest on your stream, I mean, I guess, I really try to just have no,

as Phyllos Miscellany, just no social media presence. And on my YouTube channel, I get these, like, huge comments from people. And I know that I'm doing something right because, And I've seen this in, you know, really anything in this side of things. Like the way that people sit down and think about things and write stuff out, it's, we're not just doing it for the cloud of the money. If there was, if, if, if I wanted the clout or the money, I would have stayed Jewish and compromised on my principles and done Hasparov for Ben Shapiro.

Like, I chose to do something a little bit harder. and getting baptized and committing to orthodoxy, you know, I think you have this mindset that, you know, well, maybe it's not the most Christian thing in the world to do to expose myself to the world's evil and depravity, because there's always going to be this evil and depravity in alienation. And this exact form really existed in Spengel. time almost 100 years ago.

And this is how Nazi Germany came about. It was because of times like these. And, you know, what solved it was men taking a step back, organizing, and deciding to fix things. And that's, everyone I know, and everyone I, you know, these sorts of people, you know, you got to be in that same position. You can't just sit back and just as optimism as cowardice. can't sit back and just despair totally either. I think that's where we end it.

All right. Thank you, Phyllis. Yeah, I always enjoy it. I always get a lot out of our talk. I appreciate you. Thanks for having me on, Pete.