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Jan. 28, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:23:56
One of the Greatest Books of All Time
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Hey guys, welcome to Left, White, and Right.
I am your host, Gregory Hood.
I am here, as always, with Chris Roberts, and today we will be talking about meditations by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and about the influence of stoicism generally, which, Chris, I think you'd have to agree is increasing, you say?
Yeah, uh, yeah, I mean... I mean, it seems like there's a new stoic, like, bestseller on the New York Times list every other week.
And it's become sort of this pop psychology thing for businessmen and everything else, which, I mean, I guess that's true in the sense that the emperor himself was obviously a deeply practical man.
I mean, as you were telling me about the circumstances in which he wrote Meditations.
Right.
Which is while he was leading a war against Germanic barbarians, a war which he won quite decisively, as a matter of fact.
Yeah, it's interesting that Stoicism is getting something of a resurgence and we needn't be purists and just come to oppose it just because it's starting to get popular now.
I mean, I think a big part of its renewed popularity is because Stoicism and meditations in particular is uh basically you could say a considerably less trite form of of zen and buddhism.
I mean it's kind of it's kind of zen for the white man and its focus on sort of mindfulness and living in the present and these sorts of things have all become very very fashionable in pop psychology and sort of best-selling self-help kind of stuff yeah but all of I mean but so much of it is is ancient.
I mean, Marcus Aurelius beat a lot of these people to the punch by some 1700 years, you know, well before any of these people on, you know, were appearing on TED Talks.
about, you know, the importance of, you know, coming to, you know, coming to accept the inevitability of change and that that's okay and these sorts of things.
I mean, this wisdom has been with us for a long time.
And again, Marcus Aurelius delivered a lot of these, you know, adages and sort of nuggets of wisdom with a kind of gravitas and seriousness that is really lacking in the books you'll find in Barnes & Noble in the self-help section.
Yeah, particularly, I think it's Ryan Holiday, who's sort of like the Stoicism guru right now, and he'll be quoting, you know, Martin Luther King and all this kind of stuff in his books and everything else.
And I think one of the big takes I got from Stoicism is how to meet a tragic fate heroically.
It's just in a lot more pragmatic, down-to-earth form than you'll see in a lot of these things, because he was not a teacher.
He was not writing this for anybody else.
He probably couldn't have imagined that people would still be reading his words a thousand years from now.
I mean, he was writing this essentially to himself.
These were his notes, and he wasn't like a leading polemicist of the philosophy or something like that.
So you're not even getting, strictly speaking, the most intellectually elite of this school.
You're just getting probably its best-known practitioner.
Yeah, I think that's fair to say.
Well, and it's funny that you note that he was writing this for himself.
The most literal translation from the Latin that it was written in is actually to myself.
Translating it to meditations came later, and it used to also simply be translated as Thoughts.
And in Spanish, that's still generally what it's translated to in Latin America and Spain, simply pensamientos, which just means thoughts.
I mean, this was his personal prayer journal, which, I mean, you really have to be a profoundly influential human being for your personal prayer journal to become, you know, something that's publicly sold.
The other person that comes to mind for that is actually Flannery O'Connor.
You can buy her prayer journal as well.
But anyway, I digress.
Well, I mean, she was an artist, and that's a fundamentally different temperament than... Okay, he was emperor, but he was essentially a politician, and he was... At this point, you're dealing, obviously, the last of the five good emperors, to talk a little bit about Marcus Aurelius.
Uh, he fought wars essentially his entire reign.
Uh, there was never a point where Rome was particularly safe, but he won all of these wars.
And he also fought internal dissent and had to stamp out a rebellion.
And of course, he's kind of best known for, unfortunately, for handing off power to his biological son, uh, Commodus, who of course was a catastrophic ruler and arguably set the empire on the path to destruction.
But a lot of these things that he's writing about, he's dealing with betrayal.
There was a particularly strong plague that gutted the Roman Empire, which obviously he couldn't have done anything about.
There were, as with everybody back then, there were all sorts of family tragedies just because of how precarious life is.
And so this idea of constantly being dutiful, this idea of constantly conducting himself, as he writes, as a man and as a Roman, It comes from this place of deep pessimism, where it's almost the Sisyphean task of he's every time he thinks he's got the state in order, some new catastrophe comes.
And it's about how to handle yourself in these kinds of deeply depressing, never ending, Trials that just come again and again and again and it doesn't seem that you can ever get ahead of it I think that's one of the reasons people were sort of seizing on it now is because There's this sort of vague atmosphere of crisis, but nobody can really put a name on it You know like people understand I think it's some gut level
That the West is dying, just as I think people might have understood at the tail end, or even at the heights of the Roman Empire, that the process of decline was inexorable.
And so the question is, how do you conduct yourself during this period?
The interesting thing, I think, about Aurelius is he talks a lot about the gods and he talks about, which I think was the stoic belief at the time, people having a shared part in the divinity.
You know, this idea of like one, one love would be like the hippie way to phrase it, but there was a deeper sense of a unity of all things, right?
I mean, in rights, how mankind was meant for cooperation and everything else, but at no time.
Did he even question his idea of duty or question his idea of masculinity or how to conduct oneself?
There are a lot of key assumptions in stoicism that I think today's model can't even take for granted.
Like, you know, people used to say, like, conduct yourself manfully.
I've seen that in some of the translations of some of this.
What does that even mean in today's world?
I mean, there's a million TED Talks on that kind of a subject.
But and also this idea that he writes about the duty to everybody on Earth and this cosmopolitan idea.
But at the same time, a lot of people see this as sort of a precursor to some of the things about Christianity, but he was one of the persecutors of the Christians.
At no point could he be considered friendly to it.
Uh, and he certainly didn't have any misgivings, at least none that he committed here, about waging wars to defend the empire and protect borders, uh, over differences that I'm sure a lot of today's people who consider themselves sort of neo-Stoics would consider arbitrary.
That because, you know, we're all one, we're all in this together and we shouldn't even think about these political duties.
Well, Marcus Aurelius was an emperor and I think the reason that he, his writings have importance Even if they are not necessarily the most intellectually coherent concepts in terms of like how best to explain stoicism, but you're looking at a guy who lived it.
You're looking at a guy who actually went through all these trials and everything else and the fact that he was an emperor and the fact that he handled the polity with all sorts of different people and had to deal with all sorts of internal challenges.
I think that's why it's it's actually better to read this than Maybe some of the more academic Stoics who could explain these ideas more comprehensively.
I think it's better, you know, they say that the Greek way was philosophy and the Roman way was engineering.
So the Greeks would say something along the lines of, how do we know anything?
Whereas the Romans would just build a road straight through it and say like, no, like what you can actually do in this life is what matters.
And I think that pragmatism is why this book is so beloved.
I realize that was kind of a long thing, but that was... I mean, I think that's why it matters, and that's why it's worth everybody reading this, and also why it's better to read this than any modern stoic thing.
Yeah, I mean, or at the very least, read this first before you touch on any of the new stuff.
The source material is always better, but people often have the excuse of the source material being really dense and really hard to comprehend.
but you don't have that excuse with Marcus Aurelius's Meditations.
It's not like, you know, it's forgivable to read like an abridged version of,
what, like the Wealth of Nations, you know, because that book is just so.
Right, right, or Capital, or whatever.
And how many Marxists have actually read Capital and you're like looking through these charts
about coal production in England or something like that?
Yeah, I was.
It's not, I mean, it's a dry read.
I was actually in a Marxist reading group back in the day, and we tried to read Capital together.
And we lasted, I think, three or four meetings before we just sort of informally disbanded, because everybody had just given up and stopped showing up.
But Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is an extremely easy read.
I mean, there are dozens of translations, and all of the translations are easy to read.
It's it's really distilled.
It's really straight up because again Aurelius was writing to himself.
I mean, it's they're they're sort of notes It's not they're not these lengthy sort of allegories and it's not it's not really thick cut philosophy Yeah, he also mocks a lot of the people.
I mean one of the things at the beginning he talks about is You know, one of the classic things is you should begin every day with a feeling of gratitude.
He talks about that.
Uh, he, there's a kind of a famous passage where he talks about during the day, I'm going to meet all these people who essentially are going to annoy me, but I should, I should forgive them because they don't understand what good and evil are.
And I do understand.
So therefore I can tolerate their nonsense.
That's a very imperial way of looking at things, but a lot of it is just so modern and you even see the, We think of classical liberalism as something that was sort of an Enlightenment idea, but, you know, this is from early on.
He's thanking different people in his life, different influences, and then at one point he says, I received the idea of a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed.
I learned from him also consistency and undeviating steadiness in my regard for philosophy and a disposition to do good and to give to others readily and to cherish good hopes, et cetera, et cetera.
And this idea that like already during the height of the empire, freedom of speech was seen as good in and of itself.
That there was this idea that you still had this faith in reasoning your way to the best possible outcome.
And that even an emperor should strive to maintain freedom of speech.
I mean, Marcus Aurelius was more liberal than a lot of the people who call themselves liberals today in terms of devotion to open expression.
But at the same time, this didn't shake his belief in the foundation of the state, and it didn't sway him from doing his duty.
I mean, it's sort of...
It manages to be both pragmatic and not cynical, which I think is really, really special and really unique.
And I think the passage you sort of summarized about not really letting frustrating people frustrate you is a really good example of that.
It's something he talks about at multiple points.
throughout Meditations.
I think how many people on Emperor would probably get annoyed by every day, people asking favors and wanting special positions and, you know, will you pardon so-and-so and that thing?
That's, yeah, that's right.
One of his passages, again, that he writes about frustrating people is from Book 7.
Right, Meditations is divided into 12 books in the kind of classical sense of a book being a chapter.
Right.
It is man's peculiar distinction to love even those who err and go astray.
Such a love is born as soon as you realize that they are your brothers, that they are stumbling in ignorance and not willfully.
That, in a short while, both of you will be no more, and above all, that you yourself have taken no hurt for your master reason has not been made a jot worse than it was before.
And that too is like, again, this is zen for the white man.
People can frustrate you, but that actually makes no impact on your own internal goodness or your own ability to reason logically or to think clearly.
It actually, long term, has no serious impact on you.
It's obviously something that's hard to internalize, but it's worth keeping in mind.
Well, it's especially important for white advocates.
I mean, the simplest thing that if you were saying like, well, what is the biggest thing that a lot of people are going to take away from this?
It's essentially not to lose your mind over things you can't control.
That if you don't have control over a thing, you shouldn't worry about it.
And I think that This is relevant to us now and it actually puts us in a better position now during the pandemic and everything else because.
If you've been in this movement for any length of time you've seen a lot of crazy stuff over the last couple years right and you've seen.
People come and go and you've seen the people who have given up on the whole thing or flipped or people who have.
Try to explain their way out of it or say I didn't really need it and everything else but then you also look around and realize that a lot like vast majority of people are still here and if anything you have more people who are coming in now because they understand things and one of the things I think you just have to get through your skull if you want to last and it's something that took me a very long time to internalize myself is that it's not just a question of not obsessing about what you can't control but You have to cultivate an almost active indifference to it.
And that's a hard thing to do.
I mean, you have to actually... Indifference isn't quite the right word.
It's acceptance.
It's an acceptance of imperfection, an acceptance of being out of control.
Indifference is a little too...
Nihilistic.
That's moving from stoicism to cynicism.
I guess the indifference that others are going to do evil.
And it's not necessarily your burden to take on, that you just have to understand that other people are imperfect and they will fail, but this isn't something to take into yourself and turn it into a grand indictment against the human race, or against life itself, or something like that.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's relevant way beyond the movement for white advocacy and American nationalism.
Yeah, but I think it's important because people who are coming in now Like, you know, there's going to be all sorts of craziness in the media and whatever else.
And if you just kind of like, well, that's what they're going to do.
And that's how it is.
You're going to operate a lot better than constantly going nuts about it.
I think one of the biggest problems Americans have generally is that we're all.
Not us listening to this, hopefully, but we in the broadest sense, we're all being drafted into these grand political battles and we're all drafted onto a particular team and fed propaganda about, you know, what we're supposed to be freaking out about, who our enemies are, who we're supposed to hate, who we're supposed to love, what we're supposed to forgive.
And then we're thrown into these political battles that we actually have no influence over.
And so you have people, you know, having confrontations in the street or screaming about masks or whatever else.
And I think so much of it is just because technology has sort of given us the ordinary person, the assumption that we can control our environment at all times.
I can change the temperature in my room, but with a verbal command, you know, like that kind of thing.
And this idea that something so primitive could come back.
And affect our lives and the idea that there's not actually an answer that there's not necessarily some simple rules or a pill you can take and you'll be fine has a lot of a lot of Americans to just crack mentally.
They always talk about you know what's radicalizing people and if we take that term not in the political sense but just in the sense of extreme irrational behavior.
I mean I think what's radicalizing people now is it has nothing to do with race is just sort of.
The constant media need for more and more scandal, more confrontation, more conflicts that people can be put into, where you're basically keeping people on a war footing all the time for an unwinnable war.
And people can't operate that way.
I mean, you just can't operate like that 24 hours a day.
You'll lose your head.
And I think that's why a book like this is important now, because I mean here's a guy who had supreme responsibility who dealt with problems that in many ways are very similar to our own in terms of disease in terms of political instability in terms of a change in culture in his day of course with Christianity which was a subversive creed for the empire at that time undermining the idea of.
The Emperor as something between the people and the gods or whether the gods existed at all.
And there wasn't just one God.
And yet going through all of this, he still had no, but this is how you conduct yourself.
This is how you keep yourself.
You keep like a core of who you are and you're not just thrown about because I mean, I think this is also in the Inferno.
Those those who are constantly doomed to sort of be swayed by these demoniac winds.
And they can never settle.
They can never be at peace.
They never really are.
They're always the product of somebody else's emotional tantrums or being swept around by others.
And just to be able to operate in any way in a media-dominated society like this, especially if you're going to be operating as a white advocate, I mean, to some extent, you have to be a stoic.
You have to internalize at least some of these concepts.
And whatever your conception of the divine, and certainly I think Aurelius leaves a lot of room for that, you have to have this idea that you're performing a duty in furtherance of some sort of a sacred order.
And for him, that was the state, that was the empire.
Although, I mean, do you think that this is one of the failings of the book, that it's sort of spiritually empty?
I mean, after all, Whatever we say about this guy, within a century or two, the entire empire is going to be swept by a religion that he himself was persecuted.
Whoa, okay.
So you've, per usual, said, you know, about a million things.
But the most important... I mean, is this book spiritually empty?
No, I mean, I do not...
I do not think that in the slightest.
In regards to the most recent chunk of your monologue, per usual, Aurelius has a pretty good one-liner on it, which is, withdraw into yourself.
Our master reason asks no more than to act justly and thereby to achieve calm.
and focus on that it's not for Aurelius as emperor it was about the state it was about imperium but i i don't think that you could read meditations and think and call it a statist book or something it's it's much much more about the internal you know it's and it's much more about how your environment Can't just sort of, you know, kick you around in demonic winds or what have you, so long as, like, your soul is readied and your master reason knows what is up and what is down, and that that's what you need to be doing.
Another famous passage from it is, uh, why do we seek to run from the evil of others, which is impossible, but do not seek to run from the evil within us, which is possible.
It's very It's very self-focused in that way.
As opposed to, you know, in regards to the spirituality of it, Aurelius was kind of the first guy to sort of use the concept of what the orthosphere calls non, G-N-O-N, which is God of Nature or Nature.
There is, you do detect in meditations that Aurelius is not like whole hog convinced That the pagan staple of gods that the Romans worshipped are undoubtedly real, but what he is absolutely convinced of is that nature is real and there's something spiritual about nature and that we are a part of that natural spirituality.
So he kind of does, he sort of does this merging of the two of You know, maybe these particular gods that we worship, you know, are really explicitly there, or maybe they're in the trees, and they're in the sea, and they're in the wind, and either way, we need to be respectful of the fact that we are kind of an integral part of nature, and nature is an integral part of us, and that that in and of itself is a kind of religion.
It's sort of natural integralism, which I do think is very legitimate. I mean, I think I've mentioned
this before on this podcast, but for me, you know, as sort of a frustrated agnostic, I guess, the
times I feel most spiritual have always been in nature, like on coastlines
or in mountains or deep in woods.
I mean, it's there where I think it's really easy to feel the presence of something much, much greater than yourself, but that you are obviously also a part of.
Man is undeniably part of nature.
But something to think about in regards to reading this book, and you were talking about how You know, people are radicalized because they think they can control everything and all of these media scandals.
Everybody thinks it's their duty to bring about the good, that there is this sort of end point of goodness.
There are these really concrete goals that will magically solve lots of problems, whether that's everybody wearing masks or it's nobody getting the vaccine, these kinds of things.
And like you were talking about, we all Like it or not, I ended up getting drafted into these huge, huge fights over these things, many of which I care nothing about.
I'm not a big culture war guy, I care about race.
But to that end, I'd like to talk a bit about Aurelius' axioms, which are actually sort of described well, bear with me on this one, in Lynn White's famous essay, the historical roots of our ecological crisis.
He writes, and I'm going to quote at length, like Aristotle, the intellectuals of the ancient West, he means Greco-Roman, denied that the visible world had a beginning.
Indeed, the idea of a beginning was impossible in the framework of their cyclical notion of time.
In sharp contrast, Christianity inherited from Judaism not only a concept of time as non-repetitive and linear, but also a striking story of creation.
Later on, White continues, The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture.
It has become fashionable today to say that, for better or for worse, we live in a post-Christian age.
Certainly the forms of our thinking and language have largely ceased to be Christian, but to my eye, the substance often remains amazingly akin to that of the past.
Our daily habits of action, for example, are dominated by an implicit faith in perpetual progress, which was unknown either to Greco-Roman antiquity or to the Orient.
It is rooted in, and is indefensible apart from, Judeo-Christian theology.
He goes on a bit after that to talk about Christian heresies such as Islam and Marxism.
And what he's getting at is, you know, the linearness of Christianity and how that affects how we see everything, whether we are believers or not in the West, I think is dead on.
And this is something that is not present in Aurelius at all, because he himself was not a Christian and he was not in a Christian world at all.
I mean, when he was emperor and he was growing up, Christianity was a small weird kind of fringe religion that was not much respected.
And so much of the advice in meditation, and so much of what Aurelius has to say, only makes sense
when you remember that he's not thinking linearly. He's thinking of man, and man's
conflicts, and man's struggles, as being part of just sort of the cycle of nature, right?
Like, you know, the water cycle or a crop cycle or something like that.
Yeah, the traditionalist conception is that history is cyclical, and so... Right, and he's not... he's not looking... his advice for us and for himself in the Stoic philosophy is not about how to reach this one point at which point we are better or super transcendent of something or which then everything becomes perfect.
There isn't this moment that he's reaching for, there isn't this obvious goal.
The advice is all about coming to terms with the challenges and frustrations that come with being In the cycle, in the cycle of nature, and again, like I was saying, you know, nature is the gods, and the gods are nature, and it's not, you know, there isn't this point where, you know, the apocalypse is going to happen, or, you know, Jesus's second coming isn't there.
We're not all waiting to die and then be judged permanently by a law, etc.
It's all very cyclical, and this can be hard to Again, I mean, this is why I quoted from Lynn White, it's the linearness of how we think about everything is so ingrained in us that it's challenging.
It's so hard to even talk about how we can think of things in a different way, but it's super implicit throughout meditations.
And I think that also is part of the reason why Stoicism is seeing this resurgence.
Is that because, you know, almost no Americans have weekends anymore and we don't have breaks from anything because, you know, our smartphones and email and social media, our lives are starting to feel kind of more cyclical.
We don't have these obvious start points and end points, Monday morning and Friday afternoon, that our parents even had, you know?
And even just the change to the American economy, if it's just not that simple of You know, you get a job that your dad had in the same town, and then after a few years you buy a house and you get married and you have kids, and then there are these well-defined points of achievement, and that's it.
Things are a lot more complicated now.
One might even be tempted to say that this is this type of philosophy that a society in dissolution begets.
That is, I mean, one of the things that he really takes for granted are certain ideas of justice, philosophy, masculinity, duty.
Even good and evil are superior and inferior.
For example, at one point he says, you know, what is it then which is able to conduct a man?
One thing and only one philosophy.
But this consists in keeping the daemon within a man, daemon being, you know, the helper, the superior spirit, not demon in the way we would use it today.
free from violence and unharmed superior to pains and pleasures doing nothing without purpose nor yet falsely or with hypocrisy not feeling the need of another man's doing or not doing anything and besides accepting all that happens and all that is allotted and goes on this idea of acceptance and not being dependent on what others do is arguably more necessary now because I mean, it's your, your outrage and your emotions at this point are essentially a product, right?
You go on social media and they're trying to get clicks and they're deliberately using misleading headlines and they're deliberately using sensationalist language and they're deliberately putting things in the most dire terms possible.
And so to have any kind of a sense of perspective, you have to, you have to have something that will let you integrate and organize your thoughts and how you're going to experience this reality at the same time.
Even when you're talking, I mean, one of the things about this is that he's using words that we would, I think anyone in this movement would understand.
And I think most people would understand, but you certainly couldn't get away with it in an academic setting to say something like, oh, conduct yourself in a superior matter pains.
I mean, defend that in a modern university, where they would be asking stupid questions about, well, how do you know if you're, like, really in pain, and what does pain really mean, and everything else.
You know, we're just going to deconstruct everything down so there's nothing left.
And that's part of the reason.
It's just like, well, no, we know what these things mean.
We don't need to write 600 pages.
Okay, let me get a little meta here.
I mean, to your sort of imagined annoying deconstructionist in an academic setting, I mean, it's Aurelius himself who would be like, you just pay no attention to this person.
This guy will in no way affect meaningfully the way you understand things profoundly.
Yeah, exactly.
That's exactly right.
Which is, yeah, which, I mean, is right.
That is what Aurelius would say, and it is right, and that Aurelius was correct to note that.
You really don't need to get that worked up about these sorts of things.
Like, at all.
I mean, especially once you leave college.
Leaving college is great, man.
I mean, it's all over.
You don't have to deal with any of that shit anymore.
It's a lot of fun.
Something else I wanted to note is, in addition to his dual concept of God's nature and how much it's integrated, is the ancient Greek word for happiness literally meant a good God within.
And that was certainly something that Aurelius was aware of.
And this again touches the idea of God is in nature, and as such, God is within us.
Happiness is a good God within.
What is a good God?
A good God is strong, a good God is just, and a good God is in control of himself.
A good God is not somebody who's about to fly off the handle, and a good God is not somebody Whose emotions get commodified on social media by any means.
Right, when you read passages where, "...if thou workest that which is before thee, following right reasons seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract thee," good advice for writers, "...but keeping thy divine part pure, as if thou shouldst be bound to give it back immediately, thou holdest to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to nature, with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy, and there is no man who is able to prevent this."
Yeah, it's so beautiful.
Right, and it cuts through everything and you have to kind of have that as a creed.
And this is, again, to agree with you.
I mean, I think that he does have a concept of transcendence here when you start talking about things like heroic truth and the idea of a divine spirit that you keep pure and that you don't let the masses or whatever else drag down because it's something within you.
That said, I mean, we are dealing with a fundamentally different spiritual model here.
The idea that there was not a, or not necessarily at least, a personal God who was going to save us.
And so now that we think in such terms, even if you don't consider yourself a Christian, you've probably been so imprinted by that religion and the way it's shaped our culture that you still subconsciously think in those terms.
I mean, this is why I think it's so hard for people today to think of the idea of duty, the idea that there are certain things that you have to do because you're born to it, because it's your station, because it's what's within you and what is self-evidently true.
Once you start coming up with the idea of like, well, no, what really makes a person good or bad is whether they agree with a particular theology or whether they're going to have a particular savior come and get them.
And once you start working toward that, That is a really big break between modernity and the ancient world.
And even the people who I think hate Christianity the most tend to, they have that same evangelization spirit, it's just for, you know, perverted heretical ends.
But the idea of a moral crusader in ancient times just seems somewhat ridiculous.
I mean, I suppose there may have been some, and there were a lot of different philosophies that said you should only eat these things, or you should only focus on these things, but the idea of a liberal community organizer in ancient Rome, or something like that, the idea that you would have somebody, you would have annoying philosophers trying to deconstruct everything, but the idea that you would define your life through some vague social crusade, and that that would somehow Justify your presence on the earth or something like that.
That just seems so foreign because they took for granted that you were here for a purpose and you had a station and you had work to do.
And so you didn't have to, like, torture.
I mean, to a certain extent, there was a confidence that the ancients had because they knew they knew themselves for what they were.
Whereas now, especially as, you know, post Nietzsche, God is dead, at least in the dominant culture, if not for A lot of Americans, this idea of what we're here for, this idea of who we are, this idea of, do we even have a real identity?
Like those are all open questions now, but back then I think people just normally understood it because they never saw themselves as alienated or different from creation.
It's an interesting point.
I mean, I think, yeah, one way to think about this would be, Certainly the Crusades, which were very much justified on evangelizing grounds, even though that wasn't the word used at the time, or even a lot of the exploration of the New World and conquering Indian tribes of spreading the gospel and Christianizing savages and all of these things.
But in the Greco-Roman time, I mean, Imperium conquered nearby regions, not to evangelize, but simply because they wanted it.
They wanted the territory, they wanted the resources, and they wanted the glory.
And it was much more It was much more terrestrial.
It was a lot more materialistic, not in the sense of buying plastic at the mall, but in more of the Marxian sense of, you know, we are invading you because we want your material goods, not because we think it is a moral imperative for you to know our gods.
You know, that is something that comes much later.
And again, with the Stoics, especially if you have a Stoic outlook, it is really profoundly irrelevant if anybody around you is practicing It's interesting that earlier you brought up the famous myth of Sisyphus, which is of course the poor Greek fellow who was condemned to an eternity of pushing a boulder up a hill, and every time it reaches the top of the hill it just rolls back down.
It's like talking about race and IQ on Twitter or something like that.
Well, here are some studies.
Well, I'm not going to read them.
They're still wrong.
Why are we talking again?
Setting Twitter aside for a moment, one book that really made a big impact on me was Albert Camus's monograph on the myth of Sisyphus.
Albert Camus was a French existential philosopher who wrote in the 1940s up until his death in 1960, I think, on the dot.
But at any rate, Camus was an atheist, and his take on the myth of Sisyphus was that a good existentialist had to imagine Sisyphus happy and smiling, doing what he could, you know, as he pushed this boulder up and down, that it was all futile and absurd, but that you could still find kind of meaning in the labor of it, meaning in the challenge of it.
And I've always thought that that was a very interesting perspective, and ever since, I've always tried to kind of look at every philosophy, and not a few theologies as well, and ask myself, you know, okay, so what would their reinterpretation of the myth of Sisyphus be?
So like, for example, for the myth of Sisyphus for Muslims, it's, well, don't worry, because what you're doing is pleasing to Allah.
So it's not futile, it doesn't suck.
This is what Allah wants, and it's just as simple as that.
For most Christians, it's that Jesus walks beside Sisyphus as he goes up and down, and that keeps it from being true condemnation, that keeps it from being true hell.
For some, it's also, for some Christians, it's also that there's also an end.
Jesus will also, yeah, eventually, you know, save you, save you from it.
We don't have to get into that, but it's sort of both for a lot of Christians.
For Friedrich Nietzsche, it's the fact that the idea that you're condemned to this fate forever presupposes gods who are dead, and don't worry, keep at it, eventually you will actually get the boulder to sit atop the hill once you just become an ubermensch.
And I think for Stoics and for Aurelius, it's that what Sisyphus needs to remember is that what he is doing is a key part of the totality of nature.
That's exactly right.
It's his model for society too, which is also why he justifies, I guess what we would call now structural inequalities, but I don't mean it in a racial sense.
But just in the sense that there are different social classes, but this is actually good because they're necessary for the well-integrated part of society.
From his writings, and again, this wasn't propaganda, right?
As far as we know.
Furthest thing from, really.
Right.
I mean, if it was propaganda, it was pretty successful because we don't think of it as such.
But if we take the party line that these were his private writings, he did not consider himself the superior of a slave, say.
Except perhaps on the basis of wisdom or knowledge of what is good and evil at the same time He was no egalitarian and It's interesting to me the quote that I always loved from this book was nothing happens to any man Which he is not formed by nature to bear.
I've said that about our entire race actually but what immediately precedes that and which alludes to a lot of the radical egalitarians we've talked about in the past was To seek what is impossible is madness, and it is impossible that the bad should not do something of this kind.
This is precisely after he says that it is necessary that there be different classes in society, because this is the only way it's able to integrate and work together.
And I think that this idea, if we talk about a never-ending struggle that can't possibly end, if we want to go back to the Boulder and Sisyphus for a second, I'd say what egalitarian existentialism I guess would be was you're pushing the boulder up and the fact that it's failed every single time before doesn't matter.
It's because there's like a wrecker or somebody that you can't see at the top who's pushing down on the boulder and preventing you from getting it up there.
That's interesting.
Right.
But we would say... It's only condemned to this because of white man hegemony.
Well, yeah, insert whatever it is.
I mean, a hundred years ago, you would have said the capitalists.
I mean, we talked about Jack one day.
And in the Iron Heel, where he has this sort of socialist, almost Ayn Rand type John Galt character who can just overcome anything, but is also a communist.
He's going on and on about how, like, the capitalists control this and the capitalists control that.
Now it's white man, a hundred years from now, it might be some other stupid thing.
But the larger thing is still there, that when presented with a tragic fate, there are different approaches to it.
You could, you can allude to divinity, you can allude to this is just how the way things are.
I think the ancients would just say that man's fate is tragic, but necessary part of the cosmos.
The Vikings would kind of come off with this sort of cult of death type thing where you take joy in the struggle and you laugh at death as it comes, and the fact that this is all futile is actually sincerely funny.
Like, you should actually laugh at this.
It's not like a dark joke.
It's actually hysterical.
You know, I think what egalitarians would say is that it's just impossible that man has a tragic fate, or it's just impossible that there are certain problems that are inherent.
There's always got to be an explanation.
There's somebody who's artificially preventing us from where we need to get to be.
And that's why I think Aurelius' writings are important from a political perspective, because here's a man who, in many ways, sounds like a modern.
In terms of his cosmopolitanism, in terms of the laws should be equal to everyone.
I mean, this is classical liberalism before the Roman Empire was Christianized.
Yeah, nothing is new, right?
I mean, this is one of the other big things.
It's just to realize that whatever grand idea you think you've come up with, somebody else has thought of it before.
Here he is in this position of ultimate responsibility and very conscious of this feeling of responsibility and duty.
And everything he's putting down is an admonition.
And everything he's putting down are reasons why he has to take up this duty.
But the idea of questioning the duty itself, he's already kind of worked that out.
It's unquestioned.
And that I think is the biggest thing moderns don't have.
Yeah, I think you're right about that, but I do think you're casting a little too much pessimism or fatalism on Aurelius.
I mean, again, for the Stoic view of the myth of Sisyphus, the fact that pushing that boulder up and down forever is an integral part of the natural order keeps it from being a sad fate.
It is because it is integral to the natural order that it is not a sad thing.
And I think for him, perceiving that as a sad fate means that you're doing it wrong.
I think for him that makes much sense as saying that plants are sad because they're not as
tall as trees, which is unfair.
It just sort of totally misses the point of, like, nature has ordered these things very purposefully.
There are obvious reasons.
There are reasons integral to the natural order as to why trees are taller than plants, and that doesn't make trees better than plants.
It simply makes them taller, and that's just the order of everything, and that once you accept that order, your sort of, any sense of kind of aggrievement that you might have with your lot in life will go away, essentially.
And this is actually what Christ taught somewhat in terms of social roles.
And if, you know, give to Caesar what is Caesar's, slaves obey your masters, all that.
Well, and in regards to your quoting him on pain, another passage on that he notes that It starts, of pain, if it is past bearing, it makes an end
of us.
If it lasts, it can be born.
The mind holding itself aloof from the body retains its calm, and the master reason remains
unaffected.
As for the parts injured by the pain, let them, if they can, declare their own grief.
Again, with Sisyphus, what Sisyphus is doing, pushing that boulder up and down, in no way
affects the kind of heights of logical reasoning and philosophical purity that Sisyphus can
achieve internally.
Sisyphus can achieve that regardless of what he's doing.
It's an interesting contrast to Confederacy of Dunces when we talk about, because in some ways what he's talking about is the importance of a rich inner life, right?
The idea that even if you're in Objectively terrible circumstances if you're a slave if you're being tortured if you've been defeated and you are now a captive You are still you your mind is clear.
You can still find contentment.
You can still find peace because What they can do to you is not They can't get inside you right the the superior spirit within you the real you I guess you could say or the highest Version of you which which he identifies with reason is
still beyond their control But with some of the other books and thinkers we've talked
about I mean there are some challenges to this and Confederacy of dunces with
Ignatius Riley we see how How you can do that wrong? Yeah
It's not Engaging with the world listen or if you're or self-delusion
and the other thing I was gonna say was or will in 1984 and this gets into the whole media dominated culture
of today which is that they actually can get inside your brain that they end
Actually can reshape you and that it is questionable how
How much autonomy does a person have to define themselves and what they see as their highest self?
Because if you're experiencing all these terrible things and you don't even have a sense of identity to cling on to, how can it be born?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I get that.
There are a few, pretty usually there are a few things.
I mean, I don't, so Ignatius Riley in a Confederacy of Dunces is, I mean, I mean, Marcus Aurelius would not look at Ignatius, and I
mean, Friedrich Nietzsche also would not look at Ignatius and be like, yeah, this guy's doing it right.
I mean, for both, and especially for Aurelius, so much of Stoicism is about building self-discipline and about doing
purposeful things.
And Ignatius Riley has basically zero self-discipline, you know, whatsoever, and does not do purposeful things.
He does really self-indulgent things, the most obvious one being just chronically masturbating, right?
You know, Aurelius is also, you know, and so many of the ancients cared about what you put into your body, and they viewed that as really important.
Yeah, Ignatius Riley wouldn't Right, and Ignatius Rellius is not doing that.
He's pretty self-indulgent in that way, too.
Yeah, he's just constantly eating these hot dogs.
And Rellius talks about this, you know, how he was taught carefully.
And again, the idea of getting up and beginning with gratitude,
and beginning his own inner meditations of gratitude to individual people for the gifts they've thrown.
Ignatius Riley is the least grateful brat of all of us.
Exactly, exactly.
I'm sorry, we're making this book sound bad.
I know most people don't like reading books where the protagonist is insufferable, but there's this strange lovable loser quality to him.
I still do recommend the novel, even though the protagonist is not a model of stoicism.
Now, in regards to what happens to Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984, torture is really hard for any philosophy.
like, yeah, torture is really hard for any philosophy. We are all made of flesh and blood.
There is, no matter what philosophy you have, or theology as the case may be, we do all grapple
with the unbearably uncomfortable fact that we can be tortured to such a point that we will condemn
anything and everything we ever believed. We can be made to betray people and ideals that we hold.
If you're Christians, I would especially recommend The Japanese novel Silence, which was the basis for the Martin Scorsese film of the same name.
Yeah, it's a brilliant film.
The novel is even more incredible.
It really digs into that.
I mean, in 1984, it's much more political.
You know, I know they're doing a new version of that with a trigger warning, right?
And like a female main character.
Are you serious?
Of course.
No, no, they're really doing it.
Well, this kind of gets to one of my points, though, is that a lot of the things that the emperor here is would Say are self-evidently good.
We understand this, and I think a lot of people, I still think most Americans even now in their gut understand this.
But to our ruling class, let us say, either because they're cynically manipulating us and deconstructing everything or because they really believe their own nonsense.
Even something as like justice or truth or having an individual core that can't be broken by the outside.
All of that is under attack now.
I mean, we've gone from 1984 being sort of the archetypal leftist book against authoritarianism to now it's a dangerous thing because we really need to be monitoring what people read and say.
Because of what it could lead to.
I mean, there's a line, and again here, this is, I mean, this is the emperor in an imperium that theoretically had no limits beyond custom and, as far as we know, the unwritten Roman constitution.
And yet, what is he saying?
He's saying that in a good state, The good, the basis of the state is that what it can do for the citizens and if no harm is done to the state, then no harm is done to any citizen.
And if a citizen does harm to the state, you need to explain to him why he's wrong.
You know, he's not saying crucify them until they fear the mention of your name.
He's saying, no, we're going to, we're going to explain like why you actually shouldn't rebel against the empire because we're all in this together and we're like different parts of the same body and everything else.
But yet, he still had the assumption that he could take that, and which most people, even Christ himself, shared, which is that the state itself is something almost sacred.
Like, you have to protect it, you have a duty to do it.
Now, even these broad-based concepts are gone.
And this is why I think some of the stuff that he writes about in a more existential way are important too, because ultimately, In today's age, if you're looking for the ultimate answers about why are we here?
What is our duty?
How do we respond to injustice, particularly injustice being done against our people as a nation, as a race?
I quote here, Alexander the Macedonian and his groom by death were brought to the same state, for either they were received among the same seminal principles of the universe, or they were alike dispersed among the atoms.
Consider how many things in the same indivisible time take place in each of us, things which concern the body and things which concern the soul.
And so thou wilt not wonder if many more things, or rather all things, which come into existence in that which is the one and all, which we call cosmos, exist in it at the same time.
What he's essentially saying is that you have to have a sense of proportion with all of these things.
And that there are some answers, there are some questions that we may not know the ultimate answers to, that we have to take on faith.
That quote you just read I think actually goes a long way to answering your point about torture and how humans can be tortured to a point where they will inevitably betray Their ideals and their loved ones.
I think for Aurelius, that's similar to the fact, and he talks about this, that one day your house can burn down, or there can be a natural disaster of some kind, and your entire world will be turned upside down, and that there's nothing you can do about that, so you need to be at peace with it, and that what's more is that disasters of that kind don't have a moral content.
That's something he actually talks about explicitly in the meditations, is that both good and evil people get a total mix of blessings and curses from nature.
It seems to be given out kind of randomly.
And because that is the case, we know to not read moral judgments into natural tragedy.
And I think that the same way, you know, if you and I lost everything in a hurricane, that wouldn't be a sign from the gods that we were wrong.
It's the same reasoning applies that, you know, if you or I were tortured into becoming, I don't know, Southern Poverty Law Center employees, That also is not actually that different from a hurricane.
It wouldn't mean that we'd always been wrong, or that we'd never really meant it, or that we were just unforgivably weak human beings.
It's, again, it's part of Aurelius's thesis that we're all part of nature, and I mean, what's the joke of nature being the ultimate fascist?
I mean, it's, you know... Yeah, there's no equality.
Yeah, rough stuff is going to happen, and I mean, we...
The fact that we view ourselves, or would like to think of ourselves, would like to say to ourselves, you know, no matter how much they tortured me, I would never betray anyone, is a testament to how much we want to see ourselves as being more than nature.
But again, you know, if you tortured an animal, that animal would do absolutely anything and everything to end that torture, and we are the same way.
And that's not immoral when an animal does anything and everything to end that pain.
It's the same thing for us, right?
Argues that a person should be the same at all times either in happiness or even in the extremity of grief as in the death of a child the essential not essentially he Explicitly says that a person should be constant in all these things so I think that For some reason I'm blanking on the name, but the one of the Not John McCain, certainly, but one of the other people who was shot down during the Vietnam War famously, I'll look it up as I'm talking here, famously held out under torture for years from the Viet Cong and was inspired by stoicism, did not turn in fellow prisoners, did not sign what they were trying to make him sign and everything else.
I believe he received the Medal of Honor.
There is a certain Sure.
War that I think Aurelius would say.
Yeah.
Should it be able to be changed?
Sure.
It's just a question.
But and he is writing as a soldier and living as a soldier and waging these wars and winning
these wars at the same time.
He's also calmly writing this down.
Yeah.
You know, it's one thing to write this down.
It's another thing to be going through it.
And I mean, maybe we can we can posit that there's a certain point at which everyone
will break, but stoicism allows you to endure it for longer.
It allows you to defend the real you, the authentic you as strongly as possible to build
a fort around your mind.
And you kind of need this now, I think more than ever, because I would say on every single, I think it's called a shepherd's tone, which is that tone that goes up and up and up and up, but never quite ends.
And so it just kind of drives you crazy and makes you feel on edge.
That's sort of, Modern life, I mean, it's it's a Shepard's Tone that just kind of keeps going and you're getting more and more agitated And they're doing it on purpose and by they I don't mean like leftists or you know political I'm talking to everybody here it's simply in the interest of everyone for ratings or whatever else to constantly be portraying conflict and constantly be making things be as confrontational as possible and as
Disruptive as possible.
And if you don't have something to hold on to throughout all of that, you're going to get ripped apart because our entire society seemingly has been designed that way.
Okay.
I figured out how to, how to sort of, how to, how to reply to this kind of torture thing and Aurelius's concept of, you know, this, this sort of permanent state, I guess.
What I think Aurelius is getting at is that, okay, you and I both, Each of us has one sibling that we love to pieces.
I think you and I could be tortured to the point of claiming that that's not true, that we actually hate this sibling, but internally that wouldn't be true.
We could not be tortured to a point to stop feeling that.
That's not something, the same way if a hurricane couldn't change the reality of that emotion, right?
And the problem with the Winston Smith analogy is that 1984 is an entirely political book.
It really doesn't deal with spiritual questions at all.
I know everybody loves it, but it's actually worth remembering that C.S.
Lewis didn't think it was that good precisely because he thought that the characters in it were these flat, sort of two-dimensional What they get Winston Smith to do after torturing him is to say three fingers is four fingers, or whatever the numbers are.
It's not something much more profound than that.
And again, I would actually direct people to the novel Silence, and about how one Christian's faith is affected by torture.
And how that Christian is made to think about the difference between genuinely changing your mind and performatively, publicly changing it to end pain and suffering.
So I do think, you know, that permanence that Aurelius talks about, of like, I can permanently love my own, you know, my sibling, Regardless of what's really going on around me or what's happening to me That's something I always have with me and that's I think that's really important and really meaningful I and I like that Aurelius stresses it.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, that makes sense.
And I also wanted to Reference the person I was talking about and I really apologize because he's somebody that is a true legend everybody should know about Vice Admiral James Stockdale who was shot down over Vietnam and Was Stoic considered himself one wrote about it master of my fate.
He called it and that was what Kept him together during years of torture in Vietnam and kept him from being broadcast as propaganda or betraying military secrets or anything else I Believe and I apologize if I'm wrong.
I'm sure someone will correct me in the comments.
I believe he was the highest-ranking naval Officer to be shot down During the Vietnam War.
Good for him.
I mean, that's, that's awesome.
That's, that's epic.
That's incredible.
It's profoundly admirable.
I can say, you know, in my own life, I have been, you know, when danger strikes and you get that, that fight or flight, uh, reaction, you know, I have surprised myself in, in both directions.
I mean, it's really, it's really easy for humans.
I think especially men.
To have these very grandiose notions about what you would do in a fight or in some kind of conflict or under torture, and that when you're actually in those situations, it is really different.
Yeah, it's hard to be the same in the midst of the death of a child or something else that he references here, either physically or emotionally.
As another great philosopher, Mike Tyson, once said, everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face.
Yeah, there is an element of that here.
You know, yeah, and I think anybody who's been who's been in a fight or even just been beat up really, really understands that.
I mean, something that really surprises people when they get mugged or are getting, you know, kicked on the ground is how many people almost immediately just start begging for their life or apologizing as if they've done wrong.
Because again, it's just your instincts will just immediately overwhelm you.
And it's not always What comes out of you is not always very heroic, as much as you might want it to be.
Yeah, it's never happened to me.
I did react to mugging once, but I got away from being mugged.
And I did this because I had read it on the internet beforehand, where somebody came up and was like, give me your wallet, and I confused them by asking where the nearest McDonald's was.
And he just automatically responded, and I just went, okay, thanks.
What?
It just kind of ran off, and I was like, it worked!
Like, the guy realized, like, wait a minute, but, you know, I was already across the street.
That's the closest I've had to getting, you know, a group beating or something like that.
I mean, I've definitely been in some hairy situations, certainly.
That's hilarious.
But I've never seen the end of one of those things, but it does make you question.
I mean, yeah.
I guess I'll say, I mean.
How would you hold up under something like that?
Sure.
This is, you know, this is embarrassing, but we'll, but we'll go for it because it really illustrates my point.
When I was in high school, I was a freshman and a senior of a different race was picking on me and he got me in one of those holds where he got one of my arms behind my back and was twisting it upwards.
That's how you start doing jiu-jitsu, man.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And he got me in one of those positions and he pushed me up against this chalkboard and the great thing about that position is if the person who has you in it keeps tugging your arm up, it
breaks. I forget which bone precisely.
But he got me in that position and I could feel that something was seriously wrong with my arm,
and I knew enough to know that he could break bones in that arm really easily at that point.
And that guy instructed me to lick the chalk off of the chalkboard, and I totally did it,
because that was better than having my arm broken.
And I mean, definitely in a void, it would have been way more honorable to refuse and just, you know, get an arm broken.
But that's not what I did in that precise moment.
And he did let me go after I licked up some chalk.
I didn't have to clean the whole board.
But it's still profoundly humiliating.
I'm obviously not proud of that.
But again, in those exact moments, it's...
You know, it's just surprising.
I've also really surprised myself by... There's been more than a few occasions where I was in a heated conversation with somebody and punched them sort of before I realized what I was doing.
Like, it just happened, you know?
And that is kind of like the inverse of my chalkboard story.
It was just like, whoa!
Yeah, we were on the other side of that equation.
I did not realize I was that mad.
And then you've got the other person and that...
You see it on the other side we've got that person begging you and everything else and you're just like, well, I mean, the thing is, before we get into this too much, but I think the overall point here is that.
To be a stoic means to have command of these things where nothing occurs that you aren't in control over.
The question is, is that is such a thing truly possible, particularly at times of emotional and physical extremes?
I would suggest that this book is valuable because we're all subjected to an extremely emotionally unstable environment and you have to have a certain way of dealing with all this information and, you know, frankly overt hatred that's being directed at you because you're white without losing it or without just, you know, just to operate normally.
I mean, we're seeing a lot of people who I guess would be considered well-adjusted or quote-unquote normal.
And they're destroying themselves in the media by going on tirades against, like, fast food workers or attacking people or whatever else.
At the same time, I mean, we also need to have a certain amount of humility and back away from self-aggrandizement, where you basically say, like, this is the ideal, but the question is, can I live up to that ideal?
And until you've been tested, you don't really know.
Yeah, but with that, I would say, don't, you know, When you're tested in extreme situations and you fall short, don't get down on yourself for being a hypocrite or something, and don't measure your success by the most dramatic instances in which you did or didn't live up to an ideal.
I think that's really kind of a cop-out.
Putting scenarios in extremes can be illuminating, but there is just sort of this limit to it.
I mean, this is something that always comes up whenever I argue about gender and sex ideology with liberals.
It's something they always bring up, right, is, well, there is this infinitesimally small number of people who are genuinely born with both sexual organs, and it's like, But that really does not do anything to negate the fact that we are essentially, you know, a bi-gender species.
There are really just two biological species.
And the fact that there's this tiny, tiny extreme where that's not the case doesn't...
It doesn't really do anything to change that.
It's sort of the same thing with stoics.
I would recommend that you all read meditations and get what you can out of it, but don't not do that just because you think that even after reading it you still might crap under torture.
That's just not a useful way.
Of thinking about these things, and I mean, it's a great way of being really hard on yourself needlessly, right?
I mean, it's the same with, you know, kicking bad habits.
I mean, you know, continue to try, even if you cave and indulge in that bad habit occasionally.
Don't just permanently indulge because you slip up once or twice, right?
You know, it's just crazy.
Yeah, you can't lose the ideal.
I'm also, I mean, I'm a big believer in negative reinforcement, but I think it's actually good if you're like super hard on yourself.
But I mean, I think that the more the healthier way, I think, to carry this to conclusion, I think the healthier way is to internalize this sense of duty.
This is something our boss talks about.
And that we do have a certain fate because we are at this time, we are at this place, and we do have a moral obligation to Do all we can with the tools we have.
And you could say, well, aren't you assuming what's good and bad?
Aren't you assuming what's just and unjust?
And it's like, no, I know it.
I mean, that's one of the things the emperor says is that you can't be bitter about against other people's judgments, but that's because you have a better understanding of these things than they do.
And that may sound like an arrogant thing to say, but if you're going to have, if you're going to stand up for anything, at some point in your life, you have to say, no, I'm right and you're wrong about this particular thing.
I will keep my mind open to new arguments, but that's not going to prevent me from speaking the truth with the best evidence that I see it.
That's also not going to stop me from fulfilling my duty to uphold that truth.
I think that's sort of the imperial code.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, so now is the part where I throw some trivia at you.
Are you ready?
Oh God, here we go.
I wasn't briefed on this.
Yeah, Greg always wants to do like a play-by-play of our show before we start recording and I always insist that we not do that.
So I can do stuff like this and it's fresh and authentic.
So are you aware that Friedrich Nietzsche criticized Stoicism?
Yeah, yeah.
You really are an Isha scholar, because most people think he just criticized Christianity, but he criticized just about all sort of religious views.
I think it's actually an interesting passage.
It's quite brief.
It's from Beyond Good and Evil.
I can read a good chunk of it here.
Go for it.
You desire to live according to nature?
Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words!
Imagine to yourselves a being like nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain.
Imagine to yourselves indifference as a power, How could you live in accordance with such indifference?
To live is not just endeavoring to be otherwise than this nature.
It's not living, valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavoring to be different.
And granted that your imperative, living according to nature, means actually the same as living according to life, how could you do differently?
Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be?
In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you.
While you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage players and self-deluders.
Reminds me a lot of... I always butcher his last name, but Joseph the Monster wrote about the world being an altar of blood, where you have infinite savagery in nature, and the greatest killer of all is man, who Tortures animals and then puts them on his dinner table essentially and Again, if you were to look at the world from a if you could balance the scales pain would clearly outweigh pleasure, right?
I mean, I think there's something for Bronze Age pervert the The pleasure an animal feels from eating another animal is nothing compared to the pain that animal feels which is being eaten right at the same time I mean, I guess this is where you get the distinction between, you know, active nihilism and passive nihilism.
The question is, like, how do you respond to this?
I mean, even if you were to assume that nature is indifferent, and this is where I think the emperor would say, but it's not.
I mean, we've got a disagreement on first principles here.
I think maybe a lot of neo-Stoics would say it's not.
I mean, a lot of neo-Stoics would say it is indifferent, but this is the best way to respond to it.
The original Stoics, most of them, Had a different conception of nature and that would be the response to it, but I would say from where we are now.
In many ways, it actually strengthens the idea of internalizing a heroic ideal internalizing a sense of duty and then thinking your life sort of.
I mean, for Nietzsche to become... I mean, for Nietzsche's ideal of the Übermensch, I mean, you absolutely have to see yourself as completely above nature.
I mean, there's no way you're going to be a perfect Nietzschean Übermensch if you are kind of at one natural world.
But there is no Übermensch.
That's the point.
I think that's one of the things about him that is misunderstood.
You know, man is a rope over an abyss, and he posits a new ideal that should be served, but he's not saying you, by reading this book, are the ubermensch.
I think a lot of 17-year-olds get that.
I think maybe I did when I was like 17.
Like, oh, I'm the ubermensch, but no, he's saying that you should have a sense that you are serving this higher ideal, but you're not that ideal.
I mean, it's a secular version.
You're the beginning at best.
Well, it's a secular version of your righteousness is as filthy rags before God.
I mean, whatever your, you know, to look at yourself with the great contempt is a lot different than seeing yourself as somehow above everything else.
And I think you have to begin with this idea that, and to quote Nietzsche again, I think this was him, but you know, those who command must first learn to obey.
You have to know how to conduct yourself in ordinary life in a positive or active fashion in the midst of this cruelty, in the midst of this pain, in the midst of this indifference.
Be true to yourself.
Be true to your ideal.
You have to be able to do that before you can even think about transcendence or becoming something greater.
Yeah.
And I think there's not.
One among us who, you know, there's no Napoleon Bonaparte, like, striding the earth right now.
There's no world soul that we can all point to and be like, yeah, this is the guy, this is who we're all gonna follow.
I mean, we're gonna have to build this thing from the bottom up.
Right.
That's why I think, as paradoxical as it seems, the advice of an emperor is probably the best place to begin, because this is how you live life as a term of service, and this is how you can go forward and do productive things, even while you're still
struggling with some of the big concepts, like God or the gods
and the nature of good and evil.
Yeah, I mean, Nietzsche would hate this, of course, but I do think you can actually kind of
make a composite between some of Nietzsche's writings and some of the Stoic's writings.
I mean, I think, you know, like for me, I mean, one of the ways I always kind of think about it
is I really do value what Aurelius says about, you know, making sure that we think of ourselves as part of nature.
And I think we should really keep that in mind when we're, you know, extracting resources from nature and polluting it, right?
But, but Nietzsche is right about transcending nature when it comes to things like, you know, building spaceships and colonizing Mars and these kinds of things, you know, or even just, you know, conquering nature, conquering death through advancements in medicine and technology, you know, those are kind of Ubermensch-oriented things, right?
Apollo 11 is certainly up there for, like, a Nietzschean, Faustian ideal in the West.
And that's definitely— There's definitely a— Apollonianism, essentially.
It's definitely a component of transcending nature to that.
I mean, that's what's impossible, right?
Man on the moon.
But we did it, which is awesome.
So, like, I'm kind of, like, with Nietzsche on that, of, like, we've totally got to leap above nature.
But again, with Aurelius, I mean, you can't really— Be a stoic and then look around at what we do to the environment and be okay with that at all, you know?
But it's, you know, it depends on the goal.
I mean, it's like, you know, transcending, you know, transcending nature for something awesome is great, but, you know, just raping nature just kind of, you know, just to make a buck.
For the sake of consumerism, yeah, for some plastic stuff that you don't actually need.
But again, that's one of the things he addresses too, is that you don't need all this stuff that you think you need.
Yeah.
I mean, the way, the book I'm working through now, and I hope we'll get to do it at some point, but this is probably going to be a while down the line because it just came out, is A Handbook for Dissidents, the Spiritual Testament of a Samurai of the West by the late Dominique Venner, who talks about stoicism as a beginning but has his own ideas because he certainly was not contempt, or content with what he saw as kind of a contemptuous modern culture that didn't offer anything to anybody.
And I think that's maybe that's the best way to end it was that stoicism and the Emperor's writing specifically because obviously you can find more sophisticated and academically serious stoics even from the ancient days.
And there's a whole new modern school if you want to get into that.
I'm like serious stoicism, not like the pop culture stuff.
But.
I mean I can't help but see it just as a beginning like this is what you should learn first if I could design the education system like this is what kids would be learning first.
This is where you begin you have these certain duties you learn to serve you learn to take positive action you learn to.
Doubt a little of your own infallibility, as Ben Franklin said, and have openness to new ideas and compassion for the mistakes of others, but you still have a duty to do regardless of what you think about any of this.
And it's only once you've learned to do that that you can start taking the big jumps to different ideologies or try to aspire to something greater.
I think the problem now is that everybody left and right thinks they're the Übermensch and that the ideas they've come up with are The first time anyone's ever come up with anything and that they really are super special and their Facebook group or Tinder profile really is different than everybody else's and blah blah blah when actually like no, I mean.
Maybe we're all part of some grand divine nature, but you're actually not that important in the grand scheme of things.
Nietzsche actually addressed this.
In Beyond Good and Evil, he makes fun of the anarchists and socialists in the 19th century, and he talks about how they think they're so cool and that they're such rebels, but that they're just total losers.
I don't have the quote in front of me, unfortunately, but it so totally applies to so many people I've crossed paths with over the years.
That's a good one to end it on.
Basically, he teaches you, the emperor teaches you how to conduct yourself in the modern world, whereas a flippant understanding of Nietzsche just makes you a self-deluded loser, whether you're of the Ignatius J. Reilly variety or of the unnecessarily complicated progressive ideology variety.
You can call yourself an anarcho-syndicalist communist or whatever you want.
You're just a leftist.
All your complicated stuff doesn't matter.
You're just on Twitter.
Your mental disorder is not actually a personality.
We have gone long, but I do want to encourage people to take a crack at this and hopefully it'll be... I got to it late in life and I think I would have handled a lot of situations a lot better if I
had read this first.
I wish I'd read it much earlier too.
And I would go so far as to say, you know, as a father and as somebody who's got more on the way,
this is something when your kids are getting to that age, you know, before being a teenager,
maybe this is the kind of thing you want to put in front of them and say, like, this is how
one of the greatest men of his age conducted himself. And these are not
crazy in-the-air theological lessons.
These are very practical things, and you can learn from them, too.
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