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April 3, 2015 - Davis Aurini
15:54
Aurini's Insight: Men Worth Quoting

My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ Requested videos: http://www.staresattheworld.com/aurinis-insight/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.clipconverter.cc/ Credits: I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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This requested video comes from Brandon, who asks that I introduce several historical figures who are worth quoting.
That I explain where they came from, what they believed, and allow that to show why it is that I like quoting from these fellows.
So I've picked six of them, men that have not only influenced my thinking, but that have very much influenced all of Western thinking.
And for the first one, we're going to go all the way back to the Roman Empire.
We're going to quote Marcus Aurelius.
Now, Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor.
Nicole Machiavelli described him as the final of the five good emperors that followed the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
That's the Julius Caesar and his descendants.
There are five good emperors that followed after Nero, and Marcus Aurelius was the last of them.
Now, he was a Stoic philosopher, and the Stoics focused upon self-control and reason and maturity.
His book, Meditations, is an excellent piece of advice for any young man, and it's no accident that the website Return of Kings frequently posts articles quoting from his work.
He is a very inspirational figure.
And the quote I've selected to best sum him up, it's actually not a direct quote from him, because the one downside to understanding Marcus Aurelius is that his writings were mostly in Greek, if I recall correctly.
He personally attributed his erudition to the fact that he did not go to public school, but was homeschooled mainly with Greek tutors.
And so meditations, I believe, was written in Greek.
And the translations are not perfect.
But the quote I'm about to give you, which perfectly summarizes his approach to reason and rationality and coming to understand the universe in a manly way, was actually from the film Silence of the Lambs.
And it goes as follows.
First principles, Clarice, simplicity.
Read Marcus Aurelius.
Of each particular thing, ask, what is it in itself?
What is its nature?
What does he do, this man you seek?
Next up, we have St. Augustine of Hippo, the foremost theologian of Christianity.
In fact, some have even said that all Christian theology is St. Augustine.
Everything else is but a footnote.
Now, St. Augustine is a figure that I find very fascinating, very attractive, because of where he was coming from.
Augustine lived during the fall of the Roman Empire, a time not too dissimilar from the time we find ourselves living in.
Society was crumbling, social trust was down, marriage was falling apart, children were not being had in sufficient numbers, women were in the workplace with their own version of feminism, and there were bachelor taxes being implemented.
And so Augustine, as a young man in this declining civilization, he was a degenerate like the rest of us.
He partied, he drank too much, he whored about with his degenerate friends when he was going to school in Carthage.
And one of his famous prayers at the time was, Lord, grant me peace and salvation, but not just yet.
At the age of 31, that was when Augustine converted to Christianity.
And this is when he started studying.
He studied the New Testament at the time was largely just a collection of stories.
It was a bit of advice here and there on how to live your life, but it wasn't laid out in a systemic, sensible way.
And so Augustine's the man that did that.
His book, Confessions, is one of the most influential in Christianity that lays out the specific doctrines.
He was a Neoplatonist in his thinking, and so he took these wild and woolly statements that Jesus had made and laid them out in a sensible and coherent manner that could be interpreted.
So for Constantine, this is the quote that I've chosen to kind of sum up who he is.
What does love look like?
It has the hands to help others.
It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy.
It had eyes to see misery and want.
It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men.
That is what love looks like.
If St. Augustine were the father of Christian theology, Thomas Aquinas would be his biographer.
Writing centuries later, Thomas Aquinas ultimately became the author of Thomism, which is a fundamental value of the Catholic Church.
And in fact, you can argue that it is really the antecedent, the precursor to the entire scientific method.
Now, where Augustine was a Neoplatonist, with Aquinas, we start to reintroduce Aristotelian philosophy into the Western tradition.
See, he wrote many critiques and many analyses on Aristotle, and this eventually led him to the belief that truth is truth no matter where you find it.
It doesn't matter if it's coming from a pagan, does not matter if it's coming from a secularist.
Truth is truth.
And this is really the core doctrine to Christianity.
That Christianity is not a thuggish religion.
It's not a form of paganism which forces itself upon the world, but that it's a constant quest to understand the nature of God, to understand the nature of the self, and to understand truth.
And that logic, rationality, all of these things are necessary, not just in a Christian context, but outside of a Christian context as well.
So Aquinas, really, you can credit him with leading to the foundation that would eventually lead to the scientific revolution.
And as for quotes, well, here's a couple for you.
The existence of God and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason, are not articles of faith, but are preambles to the articles.
For faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected.
Nevertheless, there is nothing to prevent a man who cannot grasp a proof, accepting, as a matter of faith, something which in itself is capable of being scientifically known and demonstrated.
If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.
John Locke.
John Locke was an English doctor and political philosopher.
He is credited as being the father of classical liberalism, the idea of equality under the law, of freedom, many of these values that libertarians espouse.
Now, you can't mention Locke without mentioning his equal opposite, Thomas Hobbes, where Locke opined that the fundamental nature of man was reasonableness and decency.
Hobbes argued the savage state of nature, where absent a government, everybody was vicious and cruel and nobody can trust each other.
Hobbes argued that we needed a leviathan, a state, to force us to be good.
Locke argued that the social contract would naturally arise in between people.
Now, I personally consider that both of these two philosophers are wrong in equal opposite directions.
Certainly, if you look at the state of nature, it's not as vicious as Hobbes described, but it's certainly not the paradise of the noble savage.
Nonetheless, Locke was very influential in creating our modern systems with constitutions, with the laws that are consistent with one another, with the goal of maximizing the freedom of everybody in the society.
And so, while I don't agree with him completely, he is certainly a very important figure in the development of our modern political philosophy, and he has a lot of intelligent things to say.
And so, this is the quote I've chosen from him regarding what the purpose of law is.
The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.
For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.
Now, H. L. Mencken.
If any of you folks out there haven't read H. L. Mencken, you are doing yourself a disservice.
H. L. Mencken was a brilliant writer from the beginning of the last century.
He is incredibly witty and effervescent with his prose.
He is very suspicious.
No, he despises populism and takes a very dim view of democracy itself.
He's very conservative, but also very light-hearted.
He is not the stodgy Tradcon by any means whatsoever.
In fact, one of his best books is titled In Defense of Women.
Now, I've seen a few people misinterpret that title, thinking that if he's writing a book called In Defense of Women, then he must be some sort of feminist apologist, nothing of the sort.
The reason he titled the book In Defense of Women is because that implies that women need to be defended for their many, many, many, many faults.
And so he writes the entire book justifying and defending women for having all of these incredible flaws with them.
The guy is absolutely hilarious, and the best part is, because of when he was writing, most of his books you can find for free on the Gutenberg project.
So this is my favorite quote from Mencken, and in fact, it's my start screen on my computer, is this quote.
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.
Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable.
And so, if he is a romantic, he tries to change it.
And even if he is not romantic personally, he is very apt to spread discontent amongst those who are.
And finally, we have Robert Heinlein.
Now, Robert Heinlein was one of the grandmasters of science fiction.
He is one of the big three next to Asimov and Clark.
And he's a figure I absolutely love.
And I think that most of you out there as well, anybody in the Manosphere, anyone interested in neo-masculinity, will just love Heinlein's writing.
Now, it needs to be said that Heinlein honestly is not the best writer out there.
He tends to have three characters that he keeps reusing and just putting different names on them.
Him as a young man, him as an old man, and his wife Ginny.
Heinlein combines the best of the greatest generation, but also some of its worst.
You can see how this masculine spirit, this intelligent, responsible drive of a guy that was an engineer and a guy that served in the Navy, and yet also a precursor of many of the hippie-lefty ideas that have been degrading civilization.
This is the guy that one year wrote Starship Troopers, which was basically his rejection of the beatniks that were criticizing the Korean War.
He wrote that, and then he wrote Stranger in a Strange Land, which became the go-to book of the hippie movement.
He was a complex man who was very realistic, very scientific, very engineering-focused.
In fact, one time for a short story of his, him and his wife spent the entire day doing mathematics to try and calculate an orbital velocity that would get you into orbit of the moon.
Just for one paragraph in his story to make sure it was scientifically accurate.
And yet he also had a lot of interesting ideas about how the family should be formed, how society should go, etc.
He's the guy that popularized the statement, tanstaffel.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
But as for quoting him, I'm going to use his quote on what he thinks the nature of man is.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
specialization is for insects.
So Brandon, thank you for your support.
I hope you found this video informative.
I hope all of you did.
And if there are any other great quotable figures that any of you folks can think of, please leave a comment describing them and giving one of their quotes.
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