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It allows me to basically put out an episode every

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Speaker 2: Thank you.

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Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingana Show.

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I'm here with Thomas seven seven seven. How are you doing, Thomas,

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I'm doing well.

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Speaker 2: Thanks for hosting me. There's kind of a lot to

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address today, but that's my fault, going to how I

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organize my outlines in my mind and things. So I'm

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gonna try not to make the skater shot. If it

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ends up that way, police, I'm gonna ask I'm gonna

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apologize in advance. There's a feting things going on here,

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because I want to tie together how kindIn philosophy relates

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to the present, and anything that relates to the present

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obviously relates to the twentieth century. And we're in the

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counter Enlightenment, reached the diseith in terms of these grand

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postulates and ethical imperatives that we're presenting a challenge to

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what had been the consensus really since the Westphalian peace

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to greater less your degree, okay. And these thinkers were

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drawing upon the pre Socratics for a reason, okay, particularly

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if we're talking about you know, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Chopenhauer, id

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include ficta in there two, you know. And today the

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kind of re emergence of stuff like virtue ethics that

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a lot of the a lot of the Rowan Catholic

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comrades will will know what I'm talking about there. All right,

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that's very Aristotilian. But Aristotle represents a complicated paradigm. Okay,

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but political theory starts with thucidities. Okay, But the way

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through Cities is presented, it's it's misunderstood. And this I'm

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not I don't just mean by like I mean there's

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the basic intellectual dishonesty among ideologues to ascribe to Enlightenment

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truisms and things. They kind of deliberately misconstrue stuff because

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you know, they practice their own sort of dishonest for

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visionism with respect to the intellectual heritage of Western civilization.

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But there's military science types as well as a lot

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of people who kind of came out of Cold War

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academ they just don't understand Through Cities and the way

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they present it is this is the first example of

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you know, military science and political realism, because through Cities

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is saying that, you know, falling back upon you know,

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the pre eminence of Athenian virtue and this integral philosophy

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that there toford be there afore had been kind of

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the the conceptual framing device if any philosophical treatment of

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war in peace. He's doing away with that. That's not

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what he's doing. What he's saying is that he's saying

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Athenian civilization has fallen, and so as Sparta, but obviously

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is concerned as Athens, and he's saying it's fallen because

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this is what we abandoned. I'd go as far to

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say that he blames things like the plague which hit accident,

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which hit Athens, concomitant with the Peloponnesian War which went

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on for decades, the war I mean, and the catastrophic

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defeat at Sicily, the Sicily expedition was was Athens Stalingrad? Okay,

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Like history doesn't repeat itself, but there are patterns and

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there are data points that we can extrapolate from politics

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and political configurations that particularly states at war. Okay, the

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Sicilian expedition destroyed Athens and reticent as thucidities is he

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clearly thinks that Athens, that's like the wrath of the

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gods that like Athens, abandoned virtue and this was their punishment.

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They were destroyed like we were destroyed, and Thucydides was spared,

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you know, And it's clear to me, I think if

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you I'm not like a classics guy, I don't I

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don't read Greek or anything. You know, I'm a twentieth

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century political theory guy. But it doesn't take like even

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a layman like me can discern thucydities is conveying like

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I was spared because you know, it was ordained for

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me to you know, to to ah tell his story

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for posterity, you know, and for the bete of it

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of future generations. This is how our civilization fell, That's

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what he's saying. Okay. And there's also blind spots in

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you know, I the Athenian uh military like Pericles Athens.

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You know, there's some confusion, especially among people who aren't

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classics types. We're we're not talking about the Athens of

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of of the Iliad, We're talking about Pericles Athens. Okay,

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that that was probably the peak of civilization, you know,

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like that's not some romantic mythos. I mean that I

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think that's basically an arguable Okay. These people, it's not

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like they didn't have any understanding of military science. And

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it's not like they're a understanding of like physical science.

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It's not like any understanding of you know the realities

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of of uh, you know, cold the cold calculus of

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of military tactics and grant strategy. They weren't a bunch

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of like, they weren't a much like airy romantics sitting

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around saying, oh, we disdain rational understandings of of military processes.

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I mean, that's that's preposterous. Okay, if they if they

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were like that, they I mean, nobody's like that. Okay,

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Like even the Commandchees weren't like that. I'm not I'm

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not bring shade the command Cheese, but they were obviously

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a comparatively primitive warrior pride, you know, who prized individual

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valor over you know, complex infantry maneuvers and things. But

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you know, so I want to talk about Thucidities and

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going to continue that, you know, through Cidities thinks that

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it's through the lens of Sorel Garde Sorell and uh prod.

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Whom I'm probably biased, but they're clearly making the case

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that Socrates deserve to be executed, and and they're getting

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that through through from the Thucidities account, even though Thucidities

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doesn't say that. So there's like a lot here, Okay,

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this is the fact that moderns don't present throcidities correctly.

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There's the fact that the ideological right is very much

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drawing upon classical integral ethics to assert its legitimacy and

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to present uh, you know, its values in a way

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that is not just precedented historically, but that can be

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said to represent an ideal it actually was extant and

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that was the progenitor of, you know, in the European civilization.

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And also this is the starting point of political philosophy,

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which to me take it takes precedent because that I mean,

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that's that's what my wheelhouses. I'm not really qualified to

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talk about other aspects the Cononell tradition. I mean I could,

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but I I there's there's better, there's more knowledgeable guys

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that can do that. But that's that's a starting point,

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you know. And like I said, if if this becomes scattershot,

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forgive me the basic the only The Peloponnesian War is

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the only book through Syndes ever wrote. And yeah, I mean,

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obviously it's a book about warfare and a war and

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a political paradigm that was theretofore unprecedented. But what you

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can extrapolate from it generally is that, uh, to understand

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the nature of a man, you can only understand humans,

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you have to understand human societies. And the only way

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you can really understand human societies is by studying their

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behavior and war. Okay, but that's that's not not not

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that's not some callo romanticization of war. But as pro

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June pointed out later, as that Surrell which is a

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peculiar relevance to us for reasons I just explicated, warfare

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is bound up with Man's if we're talking about, you know,

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people capable of high culture, warfare is bound up with

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Man's concept of beauty. It's bound up with his conceptions

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of honor. It's bound up with his understanding or immedial justice.

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You know, his his entire kind of the prime symbols

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of the culture that he that he that that has

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nurtured him, you know, all these things. You know. That's

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why I'm always making the point that really the Germans

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only contribution into enlightenment thought was Clousowitz, and Klaus was

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a great battlefield commander, and there's some truth in what

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he wrote, but it's it's abject nonsense that is postulate that,

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you know, warfare is this rational process that is just

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you know, diplomacy, but by violence like that's that's nonsense.

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That's enlightenment nonsense, you know. And it's not an accident

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that the German contribution to uh, that rationalist paradigm, we

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don't derived from military science. But you know that the

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cinity is obviously coming from a totally different place it, uh,

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the sinity is really in the opening paragraph of the

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Peloponnesian War, he tells his readers that, you know, he

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documented it from the beginning. He began commanding forces during

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the doomed Sicilian expedition, but he began writing from the

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yonset of hostilities because he said that this was this

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is a war unlike any that there has ever been. Okay,

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he referred to it as the greatest motion that ever

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afflicted or ever impacted, like the Peloponneses. Like well, that

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translates as in real terms, is the this is the

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most significant catalyst or historical variable or like prime constellation

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of causes that constantly like a prime move agent or

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agent of motion that never occurred at least something of

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the Greeks. And you know that was that's that's not

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just his reference point, but this was really the center

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of this was really the center of civilization you know,

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it's not like there was a consolation of civilizations all

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over the planet that were you know, on the on

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the order of the Greeks. I know people would posit

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the Chinese, but they they were very different and obviously

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there wasn't contact, you know, in in any meaningful way.

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The uh, there's three critical variables in the Peloponnesian War

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that for purposes of historicism, and again my and I

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stand by this assertion. Thucydides was a proto historicist in

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a real sense. You know, that's that that's not just

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you know, extrapolating twentieth century conceits to like spangal Arian

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paradigms to cities. The only way to understand people like

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Spangler is that this is what they were drawing upon.

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This is the intellectual heritage, the most significant data points

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as we think of them today, or you know, critical

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battlefield events which as through Cynity's next bolicates, these battlefield

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events were indistinguishable from political ones. I mean, part of

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that is a function of the Greek mind, but part

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of that is because this war was nakedly political. You know.

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That's why, like I compare it to uh, you know,

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the conflict cycle of twentieth century Europe. You know, again

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not history does not repeat itself, but that should be

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familiar to the Spanglarians among the subs. You know, you

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can extrapolate paradigms because we're talking about a limited number

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of variables and outcomes. Because we're talking about human beings

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organized politically at scale, and we're talking about armed conflict.

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There's not infinite permutations there. Okay. But the three the

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three critical variables we can extrapolate from the cdity's account

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of Pelponnesian War is a siege of Milos and the

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destruction of the millions as a people, Okay, and the

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Melian dialogues, which but the Milion dialogue, which I'm sure

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is familiar to people who know the source material. Okay.

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That's that's the reason why it looms so large in

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the book. It's not just because obviously it's it's it's

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incredibly it's incredibly severe, But it it was, it was

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a it was a critical event. I'd say that it

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uh I, I'd say it's not unlike a lot of

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the excess is perpetuated by the Third Reich. Although the

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causal uh nexus obviously was distinguishable, but in terms of

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the political significance of it and some of the repercussions,

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it's that there is there is some common there is

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there is some common uh proverbial territory there the to

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day after the assault in Sicily, which as I said,

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in my opinion, can be thought of as as the

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Athenians stealingrad in some ways and concombinant with both of

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these things and the entire kind of raison deetra as

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the Athenians themselves presented it, what presented the causes of

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belie and how they rationalized their actions. This destroyed Athenian

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moral legitimacy. They sacrificed their core virtues in an effort

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to secure and consolidate power, political credibility, you know, which

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is key here. They didn't take to undertake these extreme

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measures and kind of openly issue what was purportably their

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own core values. And they did this in the Spartan Assembly,

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you know, when they were during when Athenians, some of

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whom were residing in Sparta at that time, they went

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before the Spartan Assembly and they were nakedly uh hostile

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in their apologia, which was unprecedented, you know. And this

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wasn't just a flex to try and deter you know,

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Spartan aggression and kind. The conditions were way beyond that.

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This represented a real breakdown in the internal constitution of

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the Athenian cultural mind. Okay, and again, uh, these dramatic,

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these dramatic and uh, almost unfathomably, unfathomably brutal decisions that

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they rendered. These weren't difficult decisions in the heat of

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military crises. These were very calculated and the end result

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wasn't to capture immediate battlefield advantage. It was quite literally

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to not sacrifice credibility moving forward. And what was viewed

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as is then approximately permanent conflict paradigm, you know, And

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the Spartans fell on their own sword and kind. It's

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in response to that when the Spartans directly intervened. Finally,

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the Spartans allied, they cultivated alliance with Persia, and for

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centuries afterwards, speaking of the Spartans was to utter an

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obscenity because they allied with, you know, a racial enemy

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of all Greeks. You just don't do that, you know.

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And here's another parallel, in my opinion, to the European

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conflict paradigm of the twentieth century. That's why it's ironic

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to me that people act like I mean, I guess

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00:21:08,519 --> 00:21:12,799
it's because of that silly movie about Thermophyla or whatever,

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like people have like Sparta, Is this like incredible utopia?

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Like Sparta was a mess, you know, and it uh,

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it was authoritarian, it was short sighted, it was anti philosophical,

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and you know, they they became traitors of their own kind,

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you know, like this this isn't this isn't some This

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isn't some model for high culture or or good statesmanship

253
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or anything. But that's that's kind of a digression. But

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short story long, and I I don't want to derail

255
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us to a blow by blow of the pelop an

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Asian War, but some kind of some kind of context

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00:22:07,240 --> 00:22:16,799
is appropriate, Like essentially the speaker, the Peloponnesian War basically

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began as like a war of proxies, and the the

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intrigues around these initial decisions were a murky and I mean,

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as is pretty much always the case within complex and

261
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highly scaled conflict paradigms. The Athenians were subjected to an

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accusation by Corinth, which was a rival naval power, and

263
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they were an important member that the pelop Anesian Alliance,

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which is like the Spartan alliance. Okay, the Corinthians charged

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that Athens was assisting colony revote A Corkira in a

266
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sea battle against them. I'm in a been furnishing with

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technology and weapons and uh know how in order to

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wage the war. The Corinthian diplomats, they're big concerns that

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this is inevitbly going to provoke a general war, which

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they believed was coming in any event, owing to ah

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what amount to do an arms or race throughout the Peloponnesees.

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That's why these alliances had emerged to begin with. It's

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00:24:06,880 --> 00:24:13,599
not exactly clear why the Athenians felt specifically threatened by

274
00:24:13,720 --> 00:24:20,759
corinth but something through Citides explicates and statements by the

275
00:24:20,799 --> 00:24:32,559
Athenian diplomatic cadre in Sparta, as they stated their position

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00:24:33,720 --> 00:24:41,240
before the Spartan Assembly, was that the only way that

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Athens can truly thrive and be secure is if it

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has an absolute advantage in the ability to deploy and

279
00:24:51,640 --> 00:24:55,240
apply force. And even if that makes slaves of all

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other Greeks. All men covet power because all goods, tangible

281
00:25:02,160 --> 00:25:10,400
and metaphysical derived from power. So that means that fallen,

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00:25:10,559 --> 00:25:17,240
as the Athenians may seem, this is an inevitability, and

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00:25:17,839 --> 00:25:22,799
to say otherwise is to lie. And it's better to

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00:25:22,920 --> 00:25:26,440
admit that you wish to make slaves of other Greeks

285
00:25:27,200 --> 00:25:33,359
than to lie before your equals. That's tatological, and it's

286
00:25:33,400 --> 00:25:37,480
very tortured, and it was very on Greek at the time.

287
00:25:37,599 --> 00:25:42,960
It's a you know, but reading between the lines, and

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00:25:45,039 --> 00:25:49,279
Thucydides subtly makes this point too, although he doesn't break

289
00:25:49,400 --> 00:26:00,400
his reticent narrative voice. Well, the Athenians are really saying

290
00:26:00,480 --> 00:26:04,279
is that there's some sort of crisis afoot that can't

291
00:26:04,319 --> 00:26:10,000
really be explicated, you know, and wars and rumors of

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00:26:10,079 --> 00:26:20,119
war are you know, being whispered by the gods and

293
00:26:20,599 --> 00:26:29,759
mental like you know, war arise like the seasons. Something

294
00:26:29,799 --> 00:26:39,880
apocalyptic is before us. And you know, Fortune is a

295
00:26:39,960 --> 00:26:51,279
fickle mistress and she only grants her affections to you know,

296
00:26:51,359 --> 00:26:57,000
the men who are most willing to to dare to

297
00:26:57,079 --> 00:27:02,319
take what they must in order to you know, guarantee

298
00:27:02,359 --> 00:27:09,119
their continued dominance. I I'm say there's some classics types

299
00:27:09,160 --> 00:27:13,519
who would think I'm over simplifying things, and they're probably right.

300
00:27:13,640 --> 00:27:18,319
But again I really stipulated or not any kind of classics,

301
00:27:18,759 --> 00:27:32,000
professor as ah. As things deteriorated in theater and threats

302
00:27:32,519 --> 00:27:42,279
translated into active warring. You know, the Spartans UH, through

303
00:27:42,359 --> 00:27:48,359
secret diplomacy, you know, made it clear to their league

304
00:27:48,640 --> 00:27:55,039
Peloponnesian League partners that they would intervene at the opportune moment,

305
00:27:58,279 --> 00:28:03,359
which ultimately came during the ill fate of assault on Sicily.

306
00:28:05,160 --> 00:28:11,559
But before that, the slaughter of the millions happened. And

307
00:28:11,640 --> 00:28:14,960
for contexts, and we'll move ahead from this historical backdrop

308
00:28:15,000 --> 00:28:26,519
in a minute or background, the Millians occupied an island

309
00:28:26,559 --> 00:28:32,519
in the A, G and C, which was actually neutral.

310
00:28:34,640 --> 00:28:44,559
It was UH the one island uh in UH accounting

311
00:28:44,599 --> 00:28:49,519
for the technology at the time in UH operational striking

312
00:28:49,599 --> 00:29:00,000
distance of the enemy heartland that the Athenians UH didn't

313
00:29:00,039 --> 00:29:11,440
directly controlled. They demanded UH that the Milians UH surrender

314
00:29:12,640 --> 00:29:20,839
or face devastation. And again these were fellow Greeks. The

315
00:29:21,039 --> 00:29:27,319
uh Milians refused to capitulate, probably because they realized that

316
00:29:27,359 --> 00:29:32,160
they were doomed anyway and they want to do, you know,

317
00:29:33,759 --> 00:29:40,200
die as men. The Athenians slaughtered all of them and

318
00:29:40,240 --> 00:29:44,960
sold the women and children into slavery. They shocked the

319
00:29:45,039 --> 00:29:51,000
conscience even of the Spartans, you know, because again, treating

320
00:29:51,039 --> 00:29:56,480
people within the culture that way, we're talking about an

321
00:29:56,519 --> 00:30:00,359
equivalent of the Westphalian consensus. There's certain li mind you

322
00:30:00,359 --> 00:30:10,000
didn't cross, you know, and that Thucydides uh is clear

323
00:30:12,680 --> 00:30:18,839
subtle as it maybe conveyed that this is what doomed

324
00:30:18,920 --> 00:30:21,480
the Athenians as a race, as a as a people,

325
00:30:22,599 --> 00:30:25,599
you know, this is what brought the plague upon them,

326
00:30:25,680 --> 00:30:31,240
literally the plague under their house when they assaulted Sicily.

327
00:30:35,160 --> 00:30:42,759
The the the the inhabitants of Sicily were a warrior race,

328
00:30:43,160 --> 00:30:47,640
you know, they were into European. They weren't Greeks, but

329
00:30:47,680 --> 00:31:00,000
they were very closely related. Syracuse was a the Athene

330
00:31:00,279 --> 00:31:04,119
were very gravely concerned they were going to pivot to Sparta.

331
00:31:06,079 --> 00:31:10,319
They preemptively assaulted. Their assault caused them to pivot towards Sparta.

332
00:31:12,039 --> 00:31:18,880
The Athenians laid siege to Syracuse. This lasted for months.

333
00:31:20,119 --> 00:31:22,839
When the Athenians set about to reconstitute, owing to this

334
00:31:22,920 --> 00:31:31,960
quagmire they'd found themselves in, the Spartans assaulted in a

335
00:31:32,480 --> 00:31:44,559
coordination with the Sicilian natives. They slaughtered the Athenians. They

336
00:31:44,640 --> 00:31:48,079
chased them literally back to the sea. During the Athenian retreat,

337
00:31:48,759 --> 00:31:53,240
the Athenians are trampled by their own men. Athenians began

338
00:31:53,319 --> 00:31:55,480
slaughtering each other to try and fight their way to

339
00:31:55,519 --> 00:32:04,359
the sea. It was it was a massacre that destroyed them.

340
00:32:07,119 --> 00:32:20,279
The which brings us to the case of Socrates, because again,

341
00:32:21,839 --> 00:32:28,119
there's nothing so simple minded as a suggestion from Thucydides

342
00:32:29,480 --> 00:32:36,160
like ironic, subtle, direct or indirect, that Socrates somehow caused

343
00:32:36,960 --> 00:32:45,200
this sort of malaise and moral depravity that led to

344
00:32:45,240 --> 00:32:49,880
the destruction of Athenian civilization like Nor would Pradhun or

345
00:32:51,359 --> 00:32:55,440
Currell suggest that what Socrates was was he was the

346
00:32:55,480 --> 00:33:01,599
standard bearer of a way of being, you know, and

347
00:33:03,759 --> 00:33:08,400
he was a bad man, okay, But more than that,

348
00:33:08,759 --> 00:33:13,519
he was a standard bearer of this way of being

349
00:33:13,680 --> 00:33:19,759
that was nakedly and catastrophically deleterious to the Athenian way

350
00:33:19,799 --> 00:33:28,039
of life. So by executing him, the Athenians were repudiating

351
00:33:28,799 --> 00:33:33,799
their own corruption as a race. Okay. Yes, the trial

352
00:33:33,839 --> 00:33:41,160
of Socrates was beset by bad procedure and probably by

353
00:33:42,880 --> 00:33:49,279
perjured testimony, and Sodrates wasn't all probability not afforded a

354
00:33:49,359 --> 00:34:00,359
proper defense according to the strictures that of justice. Remedial justice,

355
00:34:00,720 --> 00:34:05,839
you know, are universally accepted by men capable of higher reason,

356
00:34:06,839 --> 00:34:10,400
and the Athenians certainly qualified. But that isn't really the point.

357
00:34:11,639 --> 00:34:14,719
The issue with the trial and execution of Socrates isn't,

358
00:34:14,960 --> 00:34:18,320
you know, was Saari's given a fair trial? As if

359
00:34:18,320 --> 00:34:23,159
we're talking about some hapless poor man or something accuse

360
00:34:23,199 --> 00:34:26,639
of an infamous crime. Like the question is that sareis

361
00:34:26,679 --> 00:34:30,039
deserved to die or not? And where you follow that

362
00:34:30,119 --> 00:34:37,800
question essentially tells us where you fall politically. The process

363
00:34:37,880 --> 00:34:42,840
is incidental in this case. The way to understand the

364
00:34:42,880 --> 00:34:49,079
significance of a Socrates and what he was doing violence too,

365
00:34:49,559 --> 00:34:57,960
by way of his intellect and his discourses. The way

366
00:34:58,000 --> 00:35:05,280
to understand what the Cidity is suggesting constituted the Athenian

367
00:35:05,679 --> 00:35:09,639
ethical soul. The way I understand what people like cREL

368
00:35:09,760 --> 00:35:21,840
and Pradune and Schopenhauer and Niche and Heidiger and all

369
00:35:21,880 --> 00:35:30,000
of these counter Enlightenment thinkers like, the essence of what

370
00:35:30,000 --> 00:35:37,519
they're talking about is really ontological. You know. That's why

371
00:35:37,519 --> 00:35:39,239
I like, in the first episode, I think I just

372
00:35:39,320 --> 00:35:42,400
talked about like the values, like this being an issue

373
00:35:42,400 --> 00:35:45,800
of values, not not in the way that's just talking

374
00:35:45,840 --> 00:35:51,000
about cloak we elite in like American media politics or something,

375
00:35:51,119 --> 00:35:54,840
or not not in terms of practical reason a that's

376
00:35:54,920 --> 00:35:58,320
part of it. You know, it's a whole kind of

377
00:35:58,599 --> 00:36:06,239
way of life and way of being and conceptual structuring

378
00:36:06,280 --> 00:36:15,480
of the world, you know, the classical Athenian view. The

379
00:36:15,519 --> 00:36:19,079
common threat that we're talking about is that in this

380
00:36:19,119 --> 00:36:28,119
way of life I just mentioned the household, the police,

381
00:36:28,400 --> 00:36:35,360
communitarian life, integral conceptual paradigms of justice and beauty and

382
00:36:37,400 --> 00:36:40,440
honor both you know, masculine honor as well as you

383
00:36:40,480 --> 00:36:45,679
know what constitutes you know, honor and a woman. This

384
00:36:45,760 --> 00:36:53,000
is all tied together, okay. And the household is basically

385
00:36:53,119 --> 00:36:56,880
the kind of training ground for how to be a

386
00:36:56,920 --> 00:37:01,519
good citizen of the Poulas. But to be clear, the

387
00:37:01,559 --> 00:37:06,079
Athenians had no concept of a state. That's a modern contrivance.

388
00:37:06,239 --> 00:37:09,559
Like the police isn't the state. It's not like the

389
00:37:09,599 --> 00:37:14,679
government of Athens. It's not even the city or the town.

390
00:37:15,800 --> 00:37:19,360
It The only really way to think about it in

391
00:37:19,480 --> 00:37:30,719
modern terms that approaches the conceptual depth of it in

392
00:37:30,760 --> 00:37:33,280
any way is it think it is like the nation

393
00:37:33,760 --> 00:37:37,400
or like the race or the country, if you will. Okay,

394
00:37:40,039 --> 00:37:46,480
and the kind of core tenants of it are instinctive

395
00:37:46,639 --> 00:37:57,719
prejudices and judgments. Okay, you know what is just, what

396
00:37:57,920 --> 00:38:03,559
is beautiful and most significantly like what constant duty like

397
00:38:03,719 --> 00:38:09,480
obviously the Athenians and in the Romans, you know, inherited

398
00:38:09,480 --> 00:38:13,960
this from them. They believe very strongly in a concept

399
00:38:13,960 --> 00:38:18,119
of the pat They're familiars, you know, so, I mean

400
00:38:18,159 --> 00:38:21,559
the father, the patriarch is the absolute lord of the household.

401
00:38:22,119 --> 00:38:24,599
But that doesn't give him carte blange to bully his

402
00:38:24,599 --> 00:38:27,159
wife or treat his kids like their slaves or something.

403
00:38:28,360 --> 00:38:32,840
You know, he has a he has a reciprocal duty

404
00:38:32,880 --> 00:38:34,880
to his wife and children, just as they have a

405
00:38:34,960 --> 00:38:41,239
duty to obey him, you know. And from there, you know,

406
00:38:41,480 --> 00:38:43,639
men and women and and the and the children, and

407
00:38:43,639 --> 00:38:46,559
that of their progeny. You know, they they learn how

408
00:38:46,559 --> 00:38:50,159
to they learn what their duties are and what constitutes

409
00:38:50,199 --> 00:38:53,599
a noble life as as part of the paulas you know,

410
00:38:55,559 --> 00:39:03,119
this stuff is instinctive, This stuff is transcendent. These things

411
00:39:04,039 --> 00:39:09,840
are can be recognized by a resort to practical reason.

412
00:39:10,760 --> 00:39:13,360
You know, they're not the it's not the it's not

413
00:39:13,400 --> 00:39:16,719
the result of some elaborate discourse, and this isn't something

414
00:39:16,719 --> 00:39:20,519
we debate about. But we don't debate about whether, you know,

415
00:39:21,159 --> 00:39:25,199
a patriarch would be happier, like you know, running around

416
00:39:25,199 --> 00:39:30,280
with his friends and hunting pigs, or you know, having

417
00:39:30,320 --> 00:39:32,199
a having a bunch of different women that he gets

418
00:39:32,239 --> 00:39:36,519
pregnant and he treats like a harem. You know, we

419
00:39:36,559 --> 00:39:39,239
don't argue about like whether women would be happier, you know,

420
00:39:39,360 --> 00:39:44,079
like not not being subjected to the authority of the household,

421
00:39:44,800 --> 00:39:51,519
because that's against reason and contradicting things derived from reason.

422
00:39:53,159 --> 00:39:55,599
It does violence to the concept of the good and

423
00:39:55,599 --> 00:40:00,119
and and cuts us off from it. Okay, so, oh,

424
00:40:00,760 --> 00:40:05,519
anybody who attacks these institutions is basically attacking the good,

425
00:40:05,639 --> 00:40:09,639
and that means that he's a man who either can't

426
00:40:09,639 --> 00:40:13,199
live among civilized people because he's a miscreant and he's

427
00:40:13,239 --> 00:40:20,920
just trying to cause difficulties, or you know, he's something

428
00:40:20,960 --> 00:40:30,480
of a degenerate personality who recognizes certain frailties in the

429
00:40:30,519 --> 00:40:34,679
constitution of the police at the epoch in which he lives,

430
00:40:34,920 --> 00:40:37,920
and he's decided to exploit those things owing to his

431
00:40:38,000 --> 00:40:42,119
need to be a contrarian, or maybe it's stordained by

432
00:40:42,800 --> 00:40:49,360
God that he do this, but that doesn't have any

433
00:40:49,400 --> 00:40:55,719
bearing on whether or not he should be executed as

434
00:40:55,760 --> 00:41:02,239
a remedial measure because the honor of the polists, you know.

435
00:41:02,719 --> 00:41:09,360
And this because undoubtedly the question will be raised. And

436
00:41:09,400 --> 00:41:11,480
also this is part of the purpose of this series.

437
00:41:13,960 --> 00:41:17,000
What relevance is, it's head of the present day. I

438
00:41:17,159 --> 00:41:22,320
just told you people like Sorel were the standard bearers

439
00:41:22,360 --> 00:41:31,679
of this notion, you know, and trod Hun interestingly, he

440
00:41:31,800 --> 00:41:35,360
coined the term anarchism, and he was the first political

441
00:41:35,440 --> 00:41:39,599
theorist to call himself an anarchist. And he was a socialist,

442
00:41:40,760 --> 00:41:44,519
but he held out what I just described as the ideal,

443
00:41:46,039 --> 00:41:55,719
you know, And this is important. This is a bit

444
00:41:55,760 --> 00:42:00,280
of a digression. I mean, we're gonna get to socialism

445
00:42:00,320 --> 00:42:07,000
as an ethical postulate later in this series. But this

446
00:42:07,159 --> 00:42:12,719
idea that socialism is axiomatically some sort of paradigm of

447
00:42:12,800 --> 00:42:20,440
class warfare or you know, materialist reductionism, or that it

448
00:42:20,960 --> 00:42:23,760
or that it's woke like that, that's not the case

449
00:42:23,800 --> 00:42:34,400
at all. The reason why it became so inextricably bound

450
00:42:34,480 --> 00:42:43,400
up with the continental political consciousness is because you know,

451
00:42:45,119 --> 00:42:49,400
the alienation really the post Wasphalian order. I mean it

452
00:42:49,440 --> 00:42:53,280
reached an intensity during the Second Industrial Age, obviously where

453
00:42:53,320 --> 00:43:00,039
class war became a reality. But the enterprise was the

454
00:43:00,079 --> 00:43:06,039
philosophical and political enterprise was to repair the social fabric

455
00:43:06,360 --> 00:43:12,480
that have been torn asunder by the modern age. And

456
00:43:13,440 --> 00:43:24,679
most most modern continental philosophers had considered, you know, the

457
00:43:24,760 --> 00:43:29,920
kind of high medieval era to be the ideal. But

458
00:43:32,800 --> 00:43:39,920
these these radical socialists and anarchists, these guys like Currell,

459
00:43:40,039 --> 00:43:44,840
these guys like Werner, Sombart, these guys like Pradune. They

460
00:43:44,840 --> 00:43:51,039
were saying no, no, no, no, no, it's Athens. And the

461
00:43:51,119 --> 00:43:59,760
trial of Socrates was an example of you know, essential

462
00:44:00,079 --> 00:44:09,320
them to violence. And that's critical. You know, Marx didn't

463
00:44:09,360 --> 00:44:13,559
invent socialism. Marx and Lenin were social or Marx and

464
00:44:13,599 --> 00:44:18,519
Engels rather forgive them, forgive me Marx and Engels were socialist,

465
00:44:18,599 --> 00:44:26,760
because that was really the only animating paradigm that had

466
00:44:26,760 --> 00:44:33,760
any momentum. You know, like, don't get me wrong, like

467
00:44:34,079 --> 00:44:43,800
dos capital it's incredibly uh internally consistent, but a lot

468
00:44:43,840 --> 00:44:47,960
of it is derivative. And I mean, any any playable

469
00:44:48,039 --> 00:44:51,400
theory that is anything other than you know, a pure

470
00:44:51,440 --> 00:44:59,519
thought experiment, the practice of it as postulated is going

471
00:44:59,559 --> 00:45:03,119
to be like derivative, okay, because it's gonna partake on

472
00:45:03,199 --> 00:45:09,920
the zeitgeist and it's gonna build on a discursive foundation.

473
00:45:11,159 --> 00:45:15,880
You know. And I've noticed, even among educated people in America,

474
00:45:16,639 --> 00:45:21,679
there's this idea that there was no concept of state socialism.

475
00:45:21,760 --> 00:45:25,159
But then Marx and Engels wrote a book. I mean,

476
00:45:25,199 --> 00:45:29,159
I'm I'm being liberally obtuse for the sake of brevity,

477
00:45:29,280 --> 00:45:32,280
but you know, I think everybody understand what I mean.

478
00:45:33,320 --> 00:45:36,760
And I'm not sitting here like stumming for socialism. I'm

479
00:45:37,639 --> 00:45:41,960
I'm very much I'm very much an American, and I'm

480
00:45:42,039 --> 00:45:47,800
kind of reddeck Is, okay, I mean kidding aside. You know,

481
00:45:49,639 --> 00:45:53,360
I'm the kind of person Russell Kirk was talking about,

482
00:45:54,760 --> 00:45:58,199
you know, in Roots of American Order. You know, I'm

483
00:45:58,239 --> 00:46:00,239
the last person who's gonna sit here and say that,

484
00:46:00,960 --> 00:46:03,280
you know, yeah, we we really need to we we

485
00:46:03,360 --> 00:46:06,159
really need to abide state socialism to write the ship.

486
00:46:06,280 --> 00:46:08,760
You know, let me go vote for Bernie fucking Sanders.

487
00:46:09,119 --> 00:46:11,039
I mean, anybody reads my content knows that's not the

488
00:46:11,039 --> 00:46:15,719
way I think. But the European situation is very very different,

489
00:46:16,599 --> 00:46:20,159
you know. And even if it wasn't, you know, these

490
00:46:21,639 --> 00:46:28,760
these thinkers that we're talking about who represented the counter

491
00:46:28,920 --> 00:46:34,400
Enlightenment in the twentieth century, you know, which I think

492
00:46:34,480 --> 00:46:40,400
is the twentieth century was the Enlightenment enterprise at its zenith,

493
00:46:41,039 --> 00:46:46,199
at reaching its conclusion. That's why, you know, the end

494
00:46:46,239 --> 00:46:51,320
of history became the rallying cry both of of you know,

495
00:46:52,079 --> 00:46:56,239
angle American progressives and of and of communists, you know,

496
00:46:56,280 --> 00:47:00,320
because like their goal is to end history, and the

497
00:47:00,440 --> 00:47:07,159
reaction and the revolt against that wasn't some sort of

498
00:47:07,239 --> 00:47:12,840
reactionary conservatism that was dead. It was people like Currel,

499
00:47:14,000 --> 00:47:19,239
you know. And and the progeny of Cerell was Mussolini

500
00:47:19,320 --> 00:47:26,119
and Adolf Hitler and and and the Falange and the

501
00:47:26,159 --> 00:47:31,760
Iron Guard. The Iron Guard is more complicated. But these

502
00:47:31,840 --> 00:47:38,519
these these these thinkers and these partisans who whose conceptual

503
00:47:38,559 --> 00:47:42,360
horizon derived from these thinkers. They wanted they wanted to

504
00:47:42,360 --> 00:47:48,880
create an alternative modernity, you know, not they didn't. They

505
00:47:48,880 --> 00:47:51,880
didn't want to turn the clock back to to you know,

506
00:47:52,000 --> 00:47:56,400
seventeen hundred or something. I mean, there were people like that,

507
00:47:56,480 --> 00:48:00,440
but they but they were irrelevant by nineteen eighteen. You

508
00:48:00,480 --> 00:48:08,239
know that that tendency died on Europe's battlefields with you know,

509
00:48:08,760 --> 00:48:18,159
ten million, ten million European youths, you know, and that's important,

510
00:48:18,320 --> 00:48:20,239
you know, because like I said, I REALI wasn't hopping

511
00:48:20,280 --> 00:48:23,679
around a lot, but uh, it's essential to tie this

512
00:48:23,719 --> 00:48:26,519
stuff together. And if we don't, kind of as we

513
00:48:26,599 --> 00:48:29,559
go along and it just becomes so much trivia or

514
00:48:29,920 --> 00:48:32,800
or some or you know, maybe an interesting discussion, but

515
00:48:33,880 --> 00:48:38,880
you know, nevertheless that we're notwithstanding you know, the the

516
00:48:39,000 --> 00:48:42,400
fascinations of it. It's it's just a discussion about, you know,

517
00:48:42,599 --> 00:48:49,119
what people thought in some ancient, dead civilization. But moving on,

518
00:48:53,639 --> 00:49:01,519
key to this kind of paradigm of Athenian virtue was

519
00:49:01,559 --> 00:49:06,280
a certain anti intellectualism. Now what we mean by that

520
00:49:06,480 --> 00:49:11,880
is just that, you know, we don't mean some hostility

521
00:49:11,960 --> 00:49:16,679
to learning about the world or some hostility to a

522
00:49:16,760 --> 00:49:23,719
moral education, but intellectualism is a discreete tendency that again

523
00:49:24,440 --> 00:49:31,480
avails you know, the subject matter of practical reason to

524
00:49:31,559 --> 00:49:37,639
some punitive cross examination. You know that it can't withstand

525
00:49:38,599 --> 00:49:41,360
owing to the fact that you know, these things are

526
00:49:41,400 --> 00:49:57,599
pre rational judgments. And the rallying cry, particularly of social

527
00:49:57,639 --> 00:50:03,519
democrats and Weimar, was you know, fascists or pigs, and

528
00:50:03,599 --> 00:50:07,880
they're they're anti intellectual, you know, horror of horrors. They

529
00:50:07,960 --> 00:50:17,039
burned books, and that's very very specious, and as presented,

530
00:50:17,920 --> 00:50:23,800
especially in the present, it's intellectually dishonest. But it's not

531
00:50:24,079 --> 00:50:37,519
entirely incorrect. You know. That's not to say that, uh,

532
00:50:37,920 --> 00:50:40,400
that's not to say that people should embrace some sort

533
00:50:40,400 --> 00:50:43,360
of Jacobinism of the right, or is it to say

534
00:50:43,440 --> 00:50:49,360
again that you know, Pericles Athens was some kind of

535
00:50:49,400 --> 00:50:53,840
combination of of a weight Rome and and their Spartan

536
00:50:55,880 --> 00:51:01,960
racial cousins. You know. Obviously, like the strength of Athens

537
00:51:02,039 --> 00:51:06,119
was that it was a very complete cultural form, and

538
00:51:06,559 --> 00:51:16,519
they had a remarkably vigorous philosophical heritage. You know. But

539
00:51:18,360 --> 00:51:24,320
this tendency to intellectualize things, as a matter of course,

540
00:51:24,440 --> 00:51:30,719
is as bad as it's sentimentalizing them. You know, both

541
00:51:30,760 --> 00:51:38,000
do violence to the practical reason, you know, and reason

542
00:51:38,920 --> 00:51:43,960
logos isn't isn't rationality or rationalism in some ways it's

543
00:51:44,000 --> 00:51:48,880
the opposite of that. That doesn't mean it's irrational, but rationalism, okay,

544
00:51:50,199 --> 00:51:54,679
and the way that we think of it, and this

545
00:51:54,760 --> 00:51:57,239
plays under the idea of justice as well, and this

546
00:51:57,360 --> 00:52:05,039
is critical justice and the classical conception. It's not it

547
00:52:05,039 --> 00:52:11,159
doesn't derive from social conditions or like material circumstances. It's

548
00:52:11,159 --> 00:52:15,039
not an ideology or either it's not, it's not some

549
00:52:15,239 --> 00:52:20,559
mechanism of social planning. You know. In fact, this is

550
00:52:20,599 --> 00:52:28,199
a concept that Nietzsche came back to a lot, is

551
00:52:28,239 --> 00:52:30,599
that you can't put justice in the hands of some

552
00:52:30,719 --> 00:52:40,199
bureaucracy because that's crude, that's anti human. But also a

553
00:52:40,280 --> 00:52:46,159
state apparatus isn't capable of realizing justice. Justice is implicitly sanguinary.

554
00:52:46,239 --> 00:52:52,400
You know, if somebody kills your brother or your comrade,

555
00:52:54,880 --> 00:52:58,199
you don't have you don't you don't have some judge

556
00:52:58,199 --> 00:53:02,079
who doesn't know you, doesn't know your family, doesn't know

557
00:53:02,159 --> 00:53:05,519
your comrade, doesn't know your enemies may not even speak

558
00:53:05,559 --> 00:53:08,360
your language in a real sense, sometimes in a literal

559
00:53:08,440 --> 00:53:14,079
sense anymore, you know, because that's not a subject matter

560
00:53:14,199 --> 00:53:18,800
he can apprehend. And that's also not what justice is.

561
00:53:19,840 --> 00:53:21,920
You know, we don't we don't. We don't execute men

562
00:53:22,039 --> 00:53:28,840
because according to according to some modeling paradigm where we

563
00:53:29,000 --> 00:53:32,280
develop the right inputs, you know, if you execute men,

564
00:53:32,400 --> 00:53:37,280
then that people are such and such percentage less likely

565
00:53:37,400 --> 00:53:40,800
to do bad things. That's not what justice is. That's

566
00:53:40,800 --> 00:53:44,920
some sort of social planning that partakes of some like

567
00:53:45,039 --> 00:53:53,920
loose concept of remedial measures for the sake of, you know,

568
00:53:54,639 --> 00:53:59,880
sustaining some sort of base stability in a highly scaled

569
00:54:05,280 --> 00:54:14,880
political order, where the moral consensus is abstracted from concrete things,

570
00:54:15,920 --> 00:54:23,880
either owing to historical accident or ideological imperative, or the

571
00:54:24,280 --> 00:54:31,880
sheer scale of government and the primet of it's authority,

572
00:54:32,199 --> 00:54:35,920
or some conspiracy evolve three. But it's not it's not

573
00:54:36,320 --> 00:54:40,239
justice in the way that it's traditionally thought of. Like

574
00:54:40,320 --> 00:54:43,519
what the what the Athenians would have thought of as

575
00:54:43,960 --> 00:54:50,280
sort of a model of criminal justice would be the

576
00:54:50,360 --> 00:54:55,480
kind of stuff that vigilantes do in Northern Ireland, or

577
00:54:55,519 --> 00:54:59,199
that they did in the American South, or that you

578
00:54:59,239 --> 00:55:04,639
know in in medieval Europe or uh Or or or

579
00:55:04,639 --> 00:55:09,519
early show A Japan. You know, the kind of privilege

580
00:55:09,559 --> 00:55:14,159
that nobleman had to demand satisfaction from somebody who offends

581
00:55:14,159 --> 00:55:18,039
against him or his family or you know, the order

582
00:55:18,079 --> 00:55:26,119
that he belongs to. That's a totally different thing for

583
00:55:27,039 --> 00:55:32,599
from you know, punishing a helot to who steals something,

584
00:55:33,880 --> 00:55:40,239
or you know, healing somebody in the court doesn't pay

585
00:55:40,239 --> 00:55:47,519
their taxes or you know, in the case of something

586
00:55:48,320 --> 00:55:55,480
that's actuematically literally sanguinary, you know, again, like it can't

587
00:55:55,480 --> 00:56:00,639
be said to be justice if there's some impersonal bureacracy,

588
00:56:01,880 --> 00:56:07,119
the purpose of which is that it's blind to the circumstances,

589
00:56:10,599 --> 00:56:18,480
you know, devising some sort of remedial measure to assuage

590
00:56:19,239 --> 00:56:29,079
the likelihood of violent retribution outside of a legal code

591
00:56:29,840 --> 00:56:35,480
that itself is devised to guarantee predictability of outcomes, you know,

592
00:56:35,559 --> 00:56:37,519
And they're a buddle of that would be like, well,

593
00:56:37,599 --> 00:56:40,639
look at somebody like King David. Okay, but King David

594
00:56:40,760 --> 00:56:42,840
was just that he was a king, and he was

595
00:56:42,920 --> 00:56:49,199
a king of a discreet population of people who was

596
00:56:49,280 --> 00:56:52,920
bound to by things like tribal allegiance. And that's also

597
00:56:53,039 --> 00:56:59,880
like the ultimate and noblest oblige, you know. So it's

598
00:57:00,119 --> 00:57:06,679
not it's not actually the rebuttal if anything, it substantiates

599
00:57:09,000 --> 00:57:19,320
the claim about you know, classical uh conceptions of justice.

600
00:57:20,599 --> 00:57:22,880
I only got we're like four minutes of the hour, man,

601
00:57:22,960 --> 00:57:27,679
Like I'm gonna stop now because I get I've got

602
00:57:27,800 --> 00:57:30,239
to get in the trialiscratehes itself, and that's gonna take

603
00:57:30,239 --> 00:57:30,840
a long time.

604
00:57:32,320 --> 00:57:36,840
Speaker 1: Yeah sounds good. Sounds good. Tell people now where they

605
00:57:36,920 --> 00:57:41,800
can they can find you since you've been banished off

606
00:57:41,800 --> 00:57:43,559
of X for the twenty fifth time.

607
00:57:45,719 --> 00:57:49,039
Speaker 2: Yeah, X is shitty. Man. Then it's stupid and.

608
00:57:51,880 --> 00:57:54,760
Speaker 1: It's it's not even what I mean, it's slop. Now,

609
00:57:55,400 --> 00:57:58,760
it's a bunch of to make money, you know, by

610
00:57:58,920 --> 00:58:02,519
posting questions, Oh what do you think about? What do

611
00:58:02,599 --> 00:58:05,559
you think about the picture of this thing and everything,

612
00:58:05,599 --> 00:58:07,840
and they're just trying to make money with engagement and

613
00:58:07,920 --> 00:58:09,760
it's just ridiculous.

614
00:58:10,960 --> 00:58:13,239
Speaker 2: No, so we're gonna have and moving forward. I don't

615
00:58:13,280 --> 00:58:15,800
I want to go off on a big tangent about

616
00:58:15,920 --> 00:58:20,840
the current situation with censorship and things, but I it's

617
00:58:20,920 --> 00:58:23,039
not it's not a good platform aside from the I mean,

618
00:58:23,039 --> 00:58:26,960
they always terrorize me, but on this, aside from notwithstanding that,

619
00:58:28,239 --> 00:58:30,639
but the best place to find me my my home

620
00:58:30,880 --> 00:58:34,239
online is substack, which I think substack really is a

621
00:58:34,320 --> 00:58:39,000
good platform. I actually don't ever violate to os any

622
00:58:39,039 --> 00:58:42,440
of these platforms, So I mean it's not but they

623
00:58:42,559 --> 00:58:46,719
never threatened me or try and take away my ability

624
00:58:46,800 --> 00:58:51,159
to reach you know, my friends and stuff on substick.

625
00:58:52,039 --> 00:58:54,079
But that that's where my that's where a lot of

626
00:58:54,119 --> 00:58:56,599
my longer form stuff is. That's what the podcast is.

627
00:58:56,719 --> 00:59:00,079
That's where like all kinds of ship is. And I

628
00:59:00,119 --> 00:59:05,159
got pretty active, so it's real Thomas seven seven seven

629
00:59:05,239 --> 00:59:08,519
at subsect dot com. I set up a Discord server,

630
00:59:09,159 --> 00:59:12,840
and the fellas and and females they they've made it

631
00:59:13,039 --> 00:59:17,000
like really pop. So that's that's going really well. I mean,

632
00:59:17,039 --> 00:59:18,719
like I said, not because I'm mean, it's because of

633
00:59:18,960 --> 00:59:23,599
the people who joined it. It's behind a paywall by necessity,

634
00:59:24,760 --> 00:59:27,599
otherwise we would have been gone already. The cheapest you

635
00:59:27,639 --> 00:59:30,000
can say to that is two ninety nine a month. Okay,

636
00:59:30,159 --> 00:59:32,320
so I said it to ninety nine a month. I'm

637
00:59:32,400 --> 00:59:34,519
sorry about that. I'm not trying to like make money

638
00:59:34,559 --> 00:59:37,480
off people, and if I was, I wouldn't be doing

639
00:59:37,519 --> 00:59:44,000
it a time. But the discord server, you can you

640
00:59:44,039 --> 00:59:48,039
can get a link on the substack and uh we

641
00:59:48,199 --> 00:59:51,199
got that's been very active. I'm gonna start this past week.

642
00:59:51,239 --> 00:59:53,000
I had some of our comrades in town and I

643
00:59:53,119 --> 00:59:58,199
was just very busy. But this week I'm gonna I'm

644
00:59:58,239 --> 01:00:01,840
gonna I'm gonna get more active im discord and start

645
01:00:02,159 --> 01:00:06,320
experimenting with live streams and stuff. But we got a

646
01:00:06,360 --> 01:00:12,639
t gram channel. It's Thomas Graham seven seven seven number

647
01:00:12,679 --> 01:00:16,119
seven h A. S. Graham seven seven seven. You're gonna

648
01:00:16,119 --> 01:00:19,159
get the link there through the substick as well, but

649
01:00:19,360 --> 01:00:22,039
it's it's easy to find if you just search for it.

650
01:00:23,280 --> 01:00:29,519
I'm also on Instagram, you know. With that, that's I'm

651
01:00:29,639 --> 01:00:32,360
changing by necessity kind of the way i can figure

652
01:00:32,440 --> 01:00:37,000
my content. So just like, bear with me, but you'll

653
01:00:37,000 --> 01:00:39,039
always be able to find me on substack. I do

654
01:00:39,159 --> 01:00:41,800
have a website, but it needs to be updated and

655
01:00:43,760 --> 01:00:45,920
I'm I'm gonna try and get that done after I

656
01:00:46,000 --> 01:00:50,639
get back from OGC in make. But yeah, that's that's

657
01:00:50,639 --> 01:00:53,119
where you can find me, all.

658
01:00:53,079 --> 01:00:57,519
Speaker 1: Right, Thomas, I can say for myself, and I'm sure

659
01:00:57,559 --> 01:01:00,960
I speak for everyone listening. Can't wait till part three.

660
01:01:01,360 --> 01:01:03,480
Speaker 2: Thank you, that's great. Thank you,