Speaker 1: If you want to get the show early and ad free,
head on over to the Peak Kinyonas show dot com.
There you can choose from where you wish to support me.
Now listen very carefully. I've had some people ask me
about this, even though I think on the last ad
I stated it pretty clearly. If you want an RSS feed,
you're going to have to subscribe your substance or through Patreon.
You can also subscribe on my website which is right there,
gum Road and what's the other one, subscribe Star and
if you do that, you will get access to the
audio file. So head on over to the pekan yonasshow
dot com. You'll see all the ways that you can
support me there. And I just want to thank everyone.
It's because of you that I can put out the
amount of material that I do. I can do what
I'm doing with doctor Johnson on two hundred Years Together
and everything else, the things that Thomas and I are
doing together on kindinal philosophy, it's all because of you.
And yeah, I mean, I'll never be able to thank
you enough.
Speaker 2: So thank you.
Speaker 1: The pekan Yonashow dot com. Everything's there. I want to
welcome everyone back to the peaking Yona show, Filos is back.
Speaker 2: How you don't fil us?
Speaker 3: I am doing well. The world is on fire.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's uh trying times, trying times, but please let
us not talk about that, because I do 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, this is
World War three down to the United States has never
lost a The United States hasn't lost any equipment, you know,
or a THAD system in this whole thing where you're.
Speaker 2: Just like, all right, you're all retards.
Speaker 1: I don't need to I don't need to talk to you. Yeah,
I'll just keep talking to people on the ground that
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.
Speaker 2: And yeah, all.
Speaker 1: Right now they got that off my chest.
Speaker 2: Schwengler and Man in Technics. This is a book.
Speaker 1: I've read 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 one. I was like, Bilos, Yeah,
let's do this. So, oh what gave you this idea?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I mean, you know, when you look at men
and technics, it's in a lot of ways. It's a
book kind of out of time, and the book is
almost one hundred years old at this point, and Spengler
is obviously better known at this point in time for
Decline and Fall 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 the
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 in
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 fifties and sixties automobiles.
For you know, people my age, or kind of most
people in their twenties, thirties, forties, it's thinking about the nineties,
or thinking about For the zoomers, it's thinking about the
two thousands. And so there's this mentalit 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 one hundred 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 is 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.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and.
Speaker 1: 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 a bridge version of the Decline of
the West out there, but it is taking some of
the key elements of Decline of the West and putting
it into one hundred pages, so that, you know, people
who don't like to read eight hundred nine hundred page
two volumes, two volume sets can get the ideas that
Spangler is laying out.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, And when he was publishing this book, he had
become tremendously more popular than he was when he wrote
Decline of the West. He wrote that just after World
War One with the first volume, and by the time
he's publishing this in nineteen thirty one nineteen thirty two
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 eighty dollars looking up the Man in
Technics by Spangler 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 fifty 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.
Speaker 1: Yeah there's one. I'm looking right now. A Books has
one for eighty 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
for amazog and all the other major places.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, highly recommend it. I guess we can kind
of dive right in.
Speaker 2: So let me ask you a question real quick.
Speaker 1: Yeah, 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.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, on the one hand, it would
have been tremendously dispectful to the author and it's 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 secondary sources. You know,
if you're gonna have me on as a guest, it's
just worth the time and energy to do a good
job at it.
Speaker 2: And you did. All right, man, go ahead, get this off.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, very short book. In the preface, which is
only two or three pages. He is clarifying his position
from Decline 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 technics? Well, what technics
is is the tactics of living. So that's kind of
a strange, vague statement, So I'll just start with the
first chapter. Spangler starts off the book by talking about
how Pandora's Box was opened in the eighteenth century with
a fundamental skepticism about the meaning and value of culture,
and this eventually over time led to the twentieth 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 eighteenth century with these people like Rousseau
and the Romanticist movement and the book Robinson Crusoe by
Daniel Dafoe. 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 Spendler argues that
these moralizing tendencies, they don't actually consider the technical side
of early man's achieve achievements in existence. So in the
long nineteenth century where Spengler is born into, we have
a tripling of the global population and incredible technical logical 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 in. On one side of the nineteenth century where
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 nineteenth century, especially in the eighteen eighties with
a lot of Protestant movements popping up, is a the
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
nineteenth century, in the nineteen twenties and thirties, what's come
to rise in the culture is a skeptis 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 extremely anti human
ideology such as communism. This is a perfect exult. And
so so what's the alternative to sort of this endless
critique of culture. Well, we have to understand what technics is.
So what does tectics 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 purporsive 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 are 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 eighteenth and nineteenth 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 Nichean sense, a grim, pitiless, no quarter battle of
the will to power. So what is an animal then,
according to Spangler, 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 howard is. In the nineteen thirties,
the animal world was viewed with an anatomical treatment and
a classification system that was dominated entirely by the materialist
outbook Outlook. If you look at an old encyclopedia or
a museum of natural history, it'll just be autistically obsessed
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 they'll
get really infusing the prey animal. According to Spangler, is
the highest form of mobile life. Pray as a maximum
of freedom for self against others. It seeks to maximize
its own responsibility. The self can only win by fighting,
winning and destroying, and a herbitiv ore 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. Will the prey are
ruled by the ear insensibilities, their ability to listen and smell.
Predators are ruled by the visual. 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 that 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 Spangler, 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 and the
carnivore and the herbivore world. The herbivores, when they are domesticated,
they give up nothing. Herbifore destiny means that one is
base and cowardly, intrinsically 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 technics is that technics 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 Spangler,
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 as grand
in his doom. This inner form of his creativeness is
what we call culture. To be cultured, to cultivate something,
to suffer from culture. Mankind's creations are the expression of
this being in personal form.
Speaker 1: So one of the things another great essay of his
that people should read is Prussianism and Socialism, and he
talks about the different 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 not
giving up your individualism and becoming a deracinated unit.
Speaker 3: 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 eighteenth very early nineteenth century and
then basically provided steel from the Ruher area of Germany
for like two centuries, and it only formally went out
of business I think in the the book on it
was published in the late nineteen sixties. But the way
that the inventor struggles in Germany is very different than
an English inventor in England, which was you know, in
the seventeen hundreds, 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 Kryp
Steel Company, every single brilliant inventor 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 Spengel 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 Krupt company and also how
scientific geniuses are treated within Germany. To return, I found, Yeah,
go ahead, I found.
Speaker 1: I found the spot where he talks about Impressionism and socialism.
Speaker 2: He says.
Speaker 1: It was we ourselves who brought about the calamity, calamity
upon ourselves, with the preachers of cosmopolitanism and other treacher
treacherous elements allowing them into the culture. And he says,
we Germans, with our almost metaphysical will, are 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
is 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 diletancism. 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 Jena. He's just
talking about their deficiencies in sensing reality at this point,
and what the reality he's talking about. He's talking about
the reality of the attack of what's coming to destroy Prussianism.
Speaker 3: Right, so, 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, as 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 timeframe is
millions of years, separated by arbitrary catastrophes. To 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, and the archaeological record is exactly how
it is now, and therefore man must have been exactly
as we are in the past. Spengler says that what
makes us human our opposable thumbs, 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 Spangler.
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 there's
stone tools with the human 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 is 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 pre pre historic
man is the beginning of our tragedy. Because nature, death, calamity, starvation, disease,
it is always stronger than man's creations. 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 considerable number of millennia mankind is running around
doing the absolute basics chimps with sticks. But at some point,
which Spangler dates to the fifth millennium BC, we get graves,
we get clay vessels, agriculture, indications of travel. And Spangler
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 to some kind of utative
Darwinian adaption. Man himself is changing as the tools develop,
and these new techniques they also 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 constructing pens, and so every
sort of building, every sort of enterprise or endeavor, this
requires the preparation and transportation of material over distances. To Spangler,
this is a spiritual transformation called collective doing by plan
or 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 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 sheepherders.
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. So this connective doing by plan
is called an enterprise. 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 Stonehenge and these sites that are
scattered all across the world. They have capstones that are
weighing more than one 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 fourth thought,
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 Stonehenge,
this is two different things. There are two different kinds
of men. There are those who command and those who obey.
The existence. To Spangler 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 lad 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 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 individual that 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 lad 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 Spangler 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 seventy five pages into this book, three quarters
of the way through. So to Spangler, occasionally, since three
thousand 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 its significance, every year
has a special look to it. We have come since
three thousand BC to stone cities, to housing entirely artificial
living in it. There is society free from nature. The
hierarchy of classes nobles, priests and burger 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 Suton who helmet, we
have highly refined textiles, we have beautiful MASONRK. 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 artists, and the craft or the inventor of wealth.
And without an economic wealth, it 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 Resornamento,
the leading up to the Renaissance in Italy and these
city states. Look at the previous thirteenth, twelfth, and thirteenth
centuries of the way that wealth is getting concentrated before
the artistic generation of these beautiful master works 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 polls experienced every conflict of
these two between the twelfth century through the nineteen thirties
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 named some dates here between the rights of Faustian culture,
as well as the Vikings and their arrival in different lands. Now,
Spengler distinguishes between the 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 unpure
like unpractical curiosity. It'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.
So in the Middle Ages there's an advancement in the
mathematical methods with Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, and Matello in
the thirteenth century. The experimentum inim solemn certificate 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. 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, a gross
test a Western f law. A Western inventor developed a
theory of space as a function of light Petris peregrinus,
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. And you see this with stuff
like nuclear fusion and the way that 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 sive natura. By fifteen hundred,
a new Vikingism, which is started by Vasco da Gamma
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 technics 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 seen. 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 they're led no longer understand
each other. The enterprise in pre Christian millennia, so prior
to the life of Christ, require 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. The machine technics
that we have created is 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
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
twentieth century, a small group of Nordic blood nations Britain, Germany, France,
and the United States. They commanded this leader situation. They
commanded the machine technics. 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 technics.
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 summarize that kind of crazy sence. Basically,
our religion has become as unbounded with the machine technics
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 nineteen thirties. You know,
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 was very comfortable, but
now it's this just utter, miserable factory machine terror.
Speaker 1: You don't have to tell me I'm going tomorrow my condolences.
Speaker 3: By the time that our technics, 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 one hundred years ago.
It's very efficient. 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 in creative talents.
This is like the Chud book. We're in, like the
Chud section. Just so everyone 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 technics.
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 S. Bengler, 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.
Speaker 2: That is that right there. So ugh, yep, all right,
go on.
Speaker 3: The unassailable privileges of the white races have been thrown 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 technics, 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 technics 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's 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.
Speaker 1: It's you know, you mentioned a couple of times that
this was written one hundred years ago, and 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 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.
Speaker 3: Here one thing I found really interesting in this paragraph
because even though it totally advises against optimism, it never
advocates pessimism.
Speaker 1: It never it advocates work. Yeah, it advocates doing something.
Speaker 3: 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, and to leave it
all on the table. I mean, there's just spend so
many times. I mean I think of everyone from that,
you know, the guy in Brazil who just lives in
Florida now, and uh Bolsonarow 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 in 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 head
enough challenges to delay me. Ah, 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 in allusion, I mean, the allusion to Spangler
is very obvious. This uh, 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 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 duplicitous. 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.
Speaker 1: Well, it's also why it was given a way to
people who don't deserve it. And some may try to
make the argument that was done to try to improve
those other groups.
Speaker 2: No, that's not what it was done at all.
Speaker 1: 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 it will help spread commerce,
throughout the world, and those who benefit from commerce, and
those who benefit by not even partaking in, but by
controlling the mechanisms through which commerce has done. We've seen
this in the we saw this in the recent Epstein
Epstein Files, where he says, we make our money, we
don't work to make our money. Let the Goya and
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 Yeah, they didn't partake in the creation of.
Speaker 3: 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 civilizations. And
with your line recently about the nature of these sort
of parasitic people, he has a great line on the Dorians. Now,
I don't really know anything about the Dorians, but I'll
read this quote. The Dorians immigrated as ver Sacrum 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, theirs, 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
Decline 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,
is therefore obligated to preserve and increase his rank and wealth.
To him, the cause is elevated, and it is repreend 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, obedienism, 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 AA'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 name states and persons.
It robs agency of it, and also it pulls the
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 undergirding theme. But when he's complaining about rationalists,
he's writing about a sort of Marxism that's overwhelmingly dominant
in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and this is something
that Spengler understands. But is so I mean, 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 utilitarians, 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 essentially planned economy.
And once I heard that, it kind of flipped the
script in my head of the function of this state.
Speaker 1: 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 lack of a better term cronyism out. 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 it makes sense.
And I'm trying to think of what his what he
starts breaking down economics as economics is supposed to be
a tool, not to be all end all, and we've
basically gotten to the point where people judge their quote
unquote liberty and freedom, which really doesn't which are terms
it don't mean anything in in the grand scale of history.
As you know, they're econ how economics is. You know,
when you you could see this today with you know,
this war that's happening or what they what said about
said 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.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and it was. Yeah, I kind of think
about I mean, Spengler died in I think nineteen thirty six,
so he didn't really see this world metastasized. But when
I think about the stream that you and I did
on Edward Brenees. I think the way that this machine
technics 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 metaphors 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 Baujillard
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 pure 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, know that there isn't
even a single thought really about the strategic objectives. Otherwise,
in the week since this has started, they would have
come out and had like a schwartz Cough style press
conference on it, or they either would have announced a
strategic vision or they would have at the very least
tried 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 and 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 technics, and we are also captured
by it, not in charge of it, even with the leaders.
Speaker 1: 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 forty seven 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 three, 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 Israel does to Gazo
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 that are wrought by
something like this. And I don't think they even have
the ability to do that intellectually.
Speaker 3: 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 where you have to think
about second in 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 Iran Great Again with the flag
as it existed at the time of the shop, and
I ran into the guy driving. I didn't talk to him,
but you know, this guy is probably in his sixties,
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 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 ten 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 uh, 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 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.
Speaker 1: Well, the problem is is that we're under no misconceptions
that we know you have to propaganda for whenever you're
doing something like this, but you also have to have
a goal. Pete hag Set Pete hag Set's goal is
to rebuild the Third Temple. Benjamin at Yahoo'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 There
are too many factions participating in this who have their
own motivations. And then there, you know, are other people
who just want to see Trump succeed because they're cowards
and they're scared of the Left, 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
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 coherent about it.
Speaker 3: 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 and Hebrew
was making efforts to make inroads with the Golf 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 endgame 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 espionage within Iran for
nuclear programs by Masad in the early two thousands, 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, but we would not
precipitate any overt conflict to make that happen with Lebanon.
The biggest cultural touchdown at the time was Israel was
embroiled in that war between nineteen eighty three and two
thousand due to its own making, obviously, and it was
extremely unpopular with in Israel because it was a quagmire.
The line in Israel was that it was like in
to the American struggle in Iraq, that we were just
stuck there and getting bombed by Hesbelah 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 seventh thing, every single lesson that Israel has learned,
it has forgotten and it is going to I mean,
I really can't emphasize this enough. Like it is making
for its own self interests 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 frame it. Everyone's so caught up with the
Zionism that you know that like sober perception is just gone.
It's it's 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, Netlo 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 sunny state it wanted to
economically partner with, and that it pushed its endgame in Iran,
which was always stupid by its own standards, and that
you know, frankly, it's God. It's gotten a lot of
its young people killed for to know no reason, and
there's a lot of I mean, as I'm 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 uh, you know,
the optimistic part, the optimistic part and 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, like something
is going to just fracture and that will eventually force change.
And while we're building our own thing privately personally with
your 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.
Speaker 2: You know, when you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like I said before, when you say optimism is
cowardice out of context, you you know, people can right
rightly criticize you. But once you understand that, once you
embrace optimism, you're either relying upon others or you're abandoning
your your effort, 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
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, all.
Speaker 3: 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 a course of action. And I think,
you know, I've I don't know. I won't get too personal,
but it's lent and I'm reading my Bible, and 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, 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. 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 straight. There is no confusion
with him.
Speaker 1: The greatest decision I've made in a while in a
long time was to get off of social media for lents.
I haven't been off of I haven't been on social
media since le been on social media X or Twitter,
place book. Yeah, it's just it's I'm thinking so much
more clearly.
Speaker 3: Well, I find with and you know, who knows whether
it's just the cortisol thing or whether it's the short
term tension 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 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. I mean,
I think it kind of renders them inert to think
clearly and concisely about anything. And 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, uh.
I really try to just have no as philos Miscellaney,
just no social media presence, and uh 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 uh, 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 tuning 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 hospital for Ben Shapiro, like I
chose to do something a little bit harder and getting
baptized and committing to Orthodoxy. You know, I think I
think you have this mindset that uh, you know, well,
maybe it's not the most Christian thing in the world
to do to uh expose myself to the world's evil
into pravity, because there's always going to be this evil
into pravity and alienation, you know. And and this, this
exact form really existed in Spendler's time almost one hundred
years ago. And this is how Nazi Germany came about
was because of times like these. And you know what solved.
It was men taking a step back, organizing and uh
deciding to fix things. And that's uh everyone I know
and everyone I you know, these what's of people. You know,
you got to be in that same position. You can't
just sit back and just as optimism as cowardice. You
also can't sit back and just despare totally either.
Speaker 1: I think that's where we end it, alrighty, thank you Filos. Yeah,
I always enjoy it. I always get a lot out
of our talk. I appreciate you.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2: Pete