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Feb. 7, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:13:05
Albert the Absurd
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Hey guys, welcome to Left, White, and Right.
I'm Gregory Hood.
I'm here with my co-host Chris Roberts.
Today we will be talking about Albert Camus, one of the existentialists who is probably the most relevant to our current situation right now.
Yeah, it's difficult to know where to actually begin with Albert Camus.
The man was a continent unto himself, but since Jared Taylor got confused about this, I suppose I should note that We're not talking about Renaud Camus, the guy who coined the concept of the Great Replacement.
And they are in fact in no way related, something I was curious about for a long time, but it is actually just a total coincidence of the name.
Anyway, as Greg said, Albert Camus is considered one of the great existentialist thinkers, Which is interesting, because Camus himself was not crazy about the label existential.
He much preferred the term absurdist, because he thought existence itself was absurd.
He was really influential, especially with his novel The Stranger, and his sort of, what you could argue is sort of an accompanying philosophical tract, which is called The Myth of Sisyphus.
Both were published in 1942.
I remember just in my own life, Camus was one of the first literary figures When I was a teenager that I pieced together, you know, was like cool to know about, and that held true in college as well.
He's really never gone out of fashion, and I think The Stranger is sort of basically required reading for precocious and at least relatively unhappy teenagers throughout the West, which in and of itself I think makes it worth talking about.
The biggest misunderstanding of Camus and his philosophy, however, is that he, like all the other existentialists, is considered to be You know, very sad, and that he had a philosophy that was completely devoid of any sort of, you know, hope or comfort.
You know, existentialism supposedly meaning that everything is pointless and that, you know, nothing is meaningful whatsoever.
Camus was basically of the exact opposite opinion.
He thought that life was ridiculous, or better put, absurd, and that there was no real escaping that absurdity, but that it was Very, very possible to find meaning in all of it, and that's something he dedicated his life to.
Something I always like to point out to people is that Camus was active in the French resistance to Nazi occupation, and it was while he was active in that resistance that he was writing all of these classic books in Absurdist or You know, what's generally considered to be existentialist thought, even if he himself wasn't crazy about that label, which, I mean, what more proof could you possibly need that he felt there were things within this life that were absolutely worth fighting for and believing in and protecting?
I mean, he was a very morally oriented guy.
He was not in any way a nihilist.
Something else he cared a great deal about was the situation in Algeria.
as he himself was what's called a pied-noir.
Sorry to all of you Frenchmen listening who are rolling their eyes at my terrible pronunciation, but that is a Frenchman who was born in Algeria.
And Greg, I know you specifically really wanted to talk about his writings on that issue.
Yeah, I mean, Camus is usually lumped in with the French left, especially with Existentialism almost being taken as it's almost equated with leftism at this point.
Yeah, the way people talk about it, which is not really true.
And one of the things that makes Camus so great is you might even say that he was a conservative with a small C in the sense that he always prized attachment to the local, to the concrete, to the things which actually exist as opposed to creating a utopian progressive scheme in the head.
And then destroy everything, you know, let justice be done, even though the heavens fall.
He specifically condemned this idea.
Yes, he was explicitly a reformer, not a revolutionary.
Right.
I mean, he wrote about that.
I mean, he said that writing about Algeria, he said the French fact cannot be eliminated in Algeria.
And the dream of a sudden disappearance of France is childish.
And then he also said, of course, the Arab masses cannot be canceled out either.
But he thought that there was a legitimate right to the French presence in Algeria, because you got to remember, this was considered part of France.
This wasn't a colony.
This wasn't a territory.
It was as much a part of France as Paris was, I mean, at that time.
And what ended up happening is a lot of the people he was associated with in intellectual circles, Through themselves behind the FLN, which was the Algerian terrorist campaign that you could argue drove the French out of Algeria and.
They so simplistically supported it that it turned into a kind of form of self hatred where it is actually moral to hate yourself for being French.
It is actually good to wish for harm to come to your people because.
The French are to be defined by their colonialism, by their presence in Algeria, and anything which wipes that away is justified.
I mean, one of the things that, much like the partition of India, once the French left Algeria, let in motion a huge tide of bloodshed of hundreds of thousands of people dead.
Nobody particularly cared about it because the whole point of getting the French out of Algeria was basically to take, to use rage against the white French.
And the idea that people really cared about the Arab masses, I mean, that got dismissed right after the French left.
One of the things that Camus wrote, and I thought this, you know, this would come from almost a Burke-ian sentiment, is he said, quote, if anyone still thinks heroically that one's brother must die rather than one's principles, I shall go no further than to admire him from a distance.
I am not of his stamp.
And even though He moved leftward as they discussed the Algerian issue.
He never cut himself off from his relatives there.
He was never willing to condemn his family.
He was never willing to tolerate torture or terrorism or all these other things that cafe intellectuals in Paris had convinced themselves were great fun.
And there was a certain I think he had a certain contempt for these people that he was surrounded by who Really weren't living in any real sense.
They were just kind of captured in this world of abstractions.
But Camus' writing, both the way he lived and also the way he wrote, everything is about the concrete.
Everything is about the local.
Everything is about the real.
And that's his solution to the problem of absurdity.
Not some grand crusade, but basically the simple pleasures of life and family and experience.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
It's worth jumping in here talking about those café intellectuals of in the early days when that scene was sort of getting started in the 1940s with all of these underground anti-Nazi plays.
That's when Camus, that's when and where Camus met the other titans of that intellectual clique, most famously Jean-Paul Sartre.
But once World War II ended, Sartre and basically everybody else became communists,
which I think is a really bizarre stance for an existentialist to take. I mean just in the
abstract, if your philosophy is all about you know, individual autonomy and the quest for liberty and
freedom and you know, self-expression and all of these things,
To jump from that to defending Stalin, which Jean-Paul Sartre did do, really just cannot be... I don't know how you can do that, but they did do it, basically everybody, but Camus did it, and Camus wrote very explicitly About how, you know, he was against German concentration camps and as such, he was against Russian concentration camps.
And that was, you know, and that was the long and the short of it.
And that was blasphemy to the scene he was in.
Yeah.
And also and also he he had a real contempt for people who there's there was in his notebooks, he found a Russian emigre who had said, what a delight to hate one's native land and to log for its collapse.
And he called this the intelligentsia and the totalitarian interpretation of the world.
He also wrote, you know, we could have used more or less less joyfully resigned to the their country's misfortunes And I want to one other quote here He says when one's own family is an immediate danger of death One may want to instill in one's family a feeling of greater generosity and fairness, but let there be no doubt about it One still feels a natural solidarity with the family in such mortal danger and hopes that will survive at least and by surviving have a chance to show its fairness So I'm not trying to say that he was really a conservative or that he was really on our side.
This would be similar to claiming George Orwell was a man of the right when he clearly was not, but there was, he had a consciousness of himself, not just of being French, but being white and belonging to a particular people.
And even if he disagreed, With what that people had done, he didn't actively hate his own nation.
He didn't actively wish it harmed.
He didn't actively wish for his relatives to be destroyed to show his adherence to some moral principle.
And as you point out.
One of the biggest problems with.
I'd say the bulk of French existentialism is.
The simplistic version of what they believe is life is absurd.
You have to create some cause to give your life meaning and we're just going to seize on.
communism just because.
Yeah, well, because it was there, right?
Right.
It was there and it was anti-Western.
Right.
And it's just sort of this self-hatred transformed into a hatred for everything you come from
because you've convinced yourself that life has no meaning.
And even if you say, okay, life has no meaning, I don't understand how it follows that therefore you must adhere to this far left ideology, which objectively is failing before everyone's eyes.
Because at this point, nobody could have any illusions about what the Soviet Union represented.
And yet the French existentialists threw themselves behind this.
And it's hard not to regard it with contempt as something of just an affectation.
And I think Camus saw this because Everything that he writes about, everything he discusses, is something that exists in the here and now.
It's not just living with your fantasies.
Yeah, it's dead on.
And your comparison of him to George Orwell, I think, is also really, really on point.
Orwell and Camus were not somehow right-wingers or, you know, identitarians or anything, but they were both extremely critical of kind of pie-in-the-sky left-wing intellectuals, and both of them were astounded As to how many of those leftist intellectuals after World War Two became just complete head-over-heel apologists for for the gulags and everything and they wrote they wrote against it With with great moral clarity.
It's again with you know, Camus shied away from a lot of different labels, but he's often considered to be something of a humanist and I do think regardless of what he thought that that that label really works for him and Because what he was really most interested in was mitigating suffering.
It's like suffering alleviation whenever possible by small increments.
And that's part of the reason why He didn't take super partisan sides in things like the conflict in Algeria, as he wanted just generally there to be less death.
He wanted there to be less conflict.
He wanted there to be less strife, less poverty, all of these things.
And to just fully side with one party as opposed to the other was really not going to reach that end.
If you become a partisan, well then, yeah, the end will always justify the means.
And Camus didn't want to have anything to do with that.
It's interesting as well that, you know, as I noted, Camus fought in the French Resistance during World War II.
But when the war ended, there was one French intellectual named Robert Brasilich, who had been a really open collaborator with the Nazis.
And he was put to death for treason shortly after the war.
And Camus was one of the people who signed a letter of opposition saying that this guy should not be put to death because the war was over and we all need to just move on.
We shouldn't be looking backwards and killing people sort of retrospectively.
And John Paul Sartre did not sign that.
Sartre was actually really happy that this guy was killed, which is amusing because Sartre Was only sort of loosely associated with the French
resistance during World War two Camus was a much more active participant
But he felt that you know his side had won which was good and that now it was over and again it gets back to this
harm reduction that Sartre
Was just not Interested in in the yeah, we'll have we'll have to do
another one with Sartre, but it's hard Not to read about Camus and not feel an intense contempt
for Sartre Well, and again this kind of gradual realization
They're like the more you look into this guy the more you read the primary sources the more you you get away from
what your teacher Said about him and you actually say okay. What did this guy
have to say for himself and you read someone like Sartre and you realize
This he's just not that smart. I mean, there's nothing there's nothing there
It's all, it's the caricature of the liberal intellectual isn't a caricature.
This is, this is all he was.
It's right there.
Yeah.
And he, in 1965, you know, he's, he was writing that you, as a part of the French nation, you had to be constantly engaged in what he called perpetual self-criticism and his circle talked about Essentially opting out of the French nation because of the return of the Gaul who by this, you know, obviously was the French resistance during World War Two, but later on he was like a Trump type figure.
I mean, he was the one that fueled the May 68ers, right?
He was this right-wing guy who represented eternal France and this was evil.
A lot of leftists believed, unfortunately a lot of right-wingers did too, that he was going to save French Algeria, which of course he did not.
It was all an affectation.
It was all, we're taking a stand against the country that we belong, not because we have some sort of deep seated moral principles, although we say we do, but basically just to differentiate ourselves.
I mean, I think a lot of Sartre and his whole circle, everything they did was sort of, they had reasoned themselves into the point of saying life is absurd.
And the only way they could justify their own existence is by saying, well, because I realized this, I'm better than all these other people who surround me.
Whereas Camus, who actually came from the people that these intellectuals were so casually condemning to torture and death and terrorism, was saying, no.
Even if we're in this position where we don't fully understand our existential plight, even if we're in this position where we don't fully understand what life is, at least we can say these concrete bonds are good.
These simple pleasures are real and good.
We can work to alleviate suffering, not just excuse it in the name of political slogans, which, you know, these existentialists who tore themselves apart about the meaning of life, had no criticism whatsoever for the most embarrassing
propaganda claims of the dumbest leftist movements on the planet.
Yeah.
Well, again, with the Orwell comparison, just like Orwell loved England, but wanted it to
change, Camus loved France, but wanted it to change as well.
But there was none of the sort of virtue signaling.
There's none of the self loathing.
And there was none of it.
And there was no, there was no cultural Marxism to either Orwell or Camus, which again, is
something Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who was also part of the same kind of theater
clique in 1940s Paris, all got into, right?
It's just you know, everything.
Yeah anti-colonial everything needs to be anti-racist Well, she was the one I mean Yeah, go ahead.
De Beauvoir said, essentially, I'm just trying to find the exact thing, the result of the referendum, this is after de Gaulle's return to power in 1958, the result of the referendum had severed the last threads linking me to my country.
And it's just, it's hard not to see it.
One election can just totally change your connection To a land, to a culture, to a people, you know, that it just takes one vote where you don't get your way, and then that's it.
Well, that's sort of the essential thing about a lot of these existentials, and I'm not including Camus in this, because I think he actually did grapple with these issues in a serious way, whereas Sartre and his circle just didn't, and I'm not impressed by anything they had to say or write, but this isn't very different from the type of stuff you'd see from the
George W. Bush days, where an election would go a certain way and some rich actor or
whatever other worthless member of the entertainment mouthpiece would essentially say, oh,
well, I'm leaving the country.
Right.
I'm moving to Canada.
Right.
And of course, you know, they always want to move to a whiter country, incidentally.
And they never actually do.
That's right.
They just sit there and complain and talk about how they're not a part of this.
There's something different.
but they never actually leave.
And at a certain point, when you see the way they reason, when you see the philosophy of life that they seem to have, they really are just a negative.
I mean, there's no, there's nothing that they actually stand for.
It's just sort of a condemnation of everything around them and a vague support of anything that's hostile to it.
Right.
And I think that's, I think, again, I think they supported The Soviet Union and Stalinism just sort of by default because it was there, because it made them feel alive.
And that may be flippant and that may not be very serious, but I just don't consider these people to be serious intellectuals.
I don't think they're thinkers.
The consequences are serious.
The intellectual reasoning is not very serious, right?
Like there's no there's no point in engaging with these people, whereas I think there is a point in engaging with Camus because he does bring up Yeah.
It's funny.
Forever Ago, Reason Magazine, the mainstream libertarian outlet, they did an interview with a professor, I believe of philosophy, who wrote a book called The Free Market Existentialist.
And he made the case that the logical political position of a devout existentialist should be libertarianism, because we all should just go out and find our own meaning and define it.
And for that, you know, the easiest way for that to happen is for there to be as few government controls as possible.
And I think that that is absolutely the case.
I think this guy was right on the money.
His name is William Irwin, excuse me.
And that's something I mean, I used to when I lived in DC, I knew I knew tons of libertarians
and you do, you do encounter this sort of existential streak with a lot of them, you know,
they're really into they're really into partying, generally smoke a lot of pot, and they don't have
like a very clear kind of moral vision or moral codex, except the one of leaving people alone,
so they can do their own thing, which is actually pretty existential. And this is, I think, a big
part of the reason why a lot of folks tend to kind of grow out of libertarianism is as you get older,
you become your, your moral values become more clear and more entrenched. And that kind of live
and let live philosophy makes less sense when you're 40 than when you're 20.
But anyway, that's somewhat tangential and Yeah, in regards to, getting back to Sartre, I think another one of the reasons why they fell out is that Camus was just a monumentally better writer.
It's crazy.
Jean-Paul Sartre's big play is No Exit, which It just isn't all that.
It's fine.
It's not horrible.
It's overrated.
But it's really, really overrated.
No, it tells a lot, man.
It's really important.
The thing is, you know everything you need to know about him after 30 seconds.
There's no depth there.
It's kind of like when you see a preview for a horror or an action movie that gives away just the entire film.
It's kind of the thing with No Exit.
If you read the synopsis, it's like, oh yeah, that's the whole play, and it's not uniquely brilliantly written.
And then Sartre's philosophical stuff is unreadably dense.
I can't get through it.
Well, it's not just that it's dense, but when you actually unpack it, it's stupid.
Sure.
There's not a lot there.
Yeah, it's like with Judith Butler or Theodora Dorno.
Again, Jean-Paul Sartre kind of was, I mean, he was sort of the French equivalent of the Frankfurt School in a lot of ways.
I mean, he was never officially affiliated with the Frankfurt School or anything like that, but he's really, really on the same wavelength.
I actually read Jean-Paul Sartre's autobiography, which is called The Words, and it is the most solipistic.
I mean, I know you've got to have a pretty big ego to write an autobiography, but it is unlike any autobiography I've ever read in that it doesn't actually really recount Very many of the interesting things that he was a part of, you know, like living in Paris, you know, when it was occupied by Nazis or anything like that, or like where he was during the huge uprisings in Paris in May of 1968.
It just talks like a lot about his mom and his dad and books he liked when he was a little kid and how much he got along with his grandpa when he was a teenager and stuff.
And it's just, it's, It's like an autobiography of emotions.
It's not really an autobiography of events, which is just which is just really wild.
But meanwhile, Camus is like you have this idea of an alienated person, the alienated protagonist who doesn't really belong in the society and everything else.
But that's not actually the way he conducted himself.
And that's not actually the way he viewed life.
I mean, these characters are are striving towards something.
Whereas I think Sartre's just sort of said, oh, well, we're in this situation.
So, therefore, we're better than everyone else.
And we're not a part of this struggle.
And we can essentially indulge whatever we want and it doesn't matter, whereas Camus takes the existentialist plight and says, actually, this raises serious questions, which we're going to deal with in a serious way.
And we're not going to forget that life is real.
Suffering is real.
These problems are real.
And it's not as simple as pretending to be oppressed while you're sitting in a cafe somewhere and talking about how great the gulags are.
Exactly, yeah, and on that note, it's worth quoting the opening sentence of Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, which really is perhaps the best first sentence of any philosophical work.
It reads, There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy, All the rest, whether or not the world has three dimensions,
whether the mind has nine or twelve categories, comes afterwards.
And it's a bold thing to say coming out of the gate, but the man makes a point, right?
If life is worth living, that actually already answers a great deal of questions.
If you're ruling out suicide, well then there is something to be done, right?
And that is the thrust of the myth of Sisyphus, which the shortened version, for y'all who are unfamiliar with this, so it comes from the Greek myth of Sisyphus.
Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a hill, and then once the boulder reached the very top, it rolled all the way back to the bottom of the hill, and Sisyphus had to walk down the hill, grab the boulder, and start pushing it all the way back up, and that was hell for him.
That was his own Greek hell.
Um, Albert Camus' myth of Sisyphus is really lengthy and talks about a lot of different things, but the conclusion of it is that one has to imagine Sisyphus smiling, that there is actually great joy in pushing this boulder, and that you do not have to view this as a condemnation.
I mean, the illusion is, I mean, the implication It's largely that much, much of life, much of existence is pushing boulders up hills to watch them roll down, but that this is not, this actually does not represent a kind of angst-filled futility that is not worth doing.
Again, it gets back to his first question of suicide is not the solution to getting away from that.
There is actually meaning within it, even if it seems utterly meaningless.
I gotta say, when you were talking about the boulder going to the top and then watching it roll back down again, all I'm thinking about is President Trump getting elected in 2017.
But I mean, but that raises the point, and this is, unless you're someone like me, let's say, and you say, oh, well, there's a sacred order because Evola or whatever, or if you're religious and therefore you say, okay, there's a sacred order because God is real and therefore there are these certain Absolutes that we have.
If you can't make yourself believe that.
Or if you haven't had whatever experience that makes you believe that.
And you're modern in the sense, we'll define modernity as God is dead, there is no overarching moral order.
Right, because Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus completely accepts the idea that there is no God.
There is no God.
It's not even addressed, it's just so taken for granted.
Right, and this has been established for well over a century at this point,
at least in terms of, among Western intellectuals.
Like nobody's operating off this premise, with very few exceptions.
And unless you're gonna try to do like Kierkegaard or something like that.
And even there, it's like, oh, take a leap of faith.
I mean, we can no longer like ration, reason our way to God.
Well, no, and in Myth of Sisyphus, Camus talks about Kierkegaard and the leap of faith.
And I mean, Camus again says, I mean, in so many words, like, yeah,
you can't take the leap of faith.
Right, right.
It just can't be done.
I cut you off.
No, that's fine.
But I mean, that's the essential point.
And he's he's saying.
To imagine Sisyphus happy, to imagine taking joy in the struggle, I think that actually is a very powerful, life affirming thing, because For many people now, especially younger guys coming into the movement now, or younger guys who think about these ideas, you look at the world and it just seems so... It's not just that it's ugly, it's that it's so petty and stupid.
You're being defeated by this moral order that isn't...
Terrifying and powerful the way I don't know.
He might have imagined himself as in the French resistance fighting the Nazis or something.
You're being ground to dust by billions of ants, essentially.
And the values promoted are stupid and everything's in chaos.
And nothing can be taken for granted.
And so how do you conduct yourself in this way?
And I think Camus actually gives us some solid things to hold on to, even in the midst of all this chaos.
Not just in Sisyphus, but in The Plague.
I think one of the lines that really brings it all home in The Plague, the main character is a doctor who is sort of a stand-in for the author himself.
And his point in The Plague, which obviously is particularly relevant now, is these rats come out, they start dying, and the people in this town say, get rid of these rats.
The virus jumps to or the disease jumps to human beings and people start dying.
And there there's a priest who says, oh, this is God's judgment and everything else.
But the doctor rejects this.
He's seeing innocent children die.
And he rejects the idea that there's an overall meaning to this particular plague.
What he's saying is that essentially we're always living under this condition because death could come for us at any moment.
There may not be a giant plague, but if you get cancer, if you get a heart attack, if you are hit by a bus, the effects are essentially the same.
And when asked, well, how do we conduct ourselves in this?
The doctor essentially says, well, I don't know.
I don't, I don't know how we fix this problem, but for me, it's, The way we fight this is by being decent, and the way he defines decency for him is doing his job.
Because as a doctor, he is able to push back suffering in some small way, even if it's ultimately a doomed struggle.
But really, what he's saying is that, yes, death is coming for all of us.
Yes, we're all kind of living under a death sentence.
We're always living under a plague of one kind or another.
But The fight against it, and the battle to grasp some sort of meaning and significance from it, that can be satisfying.
And being decent, doing your job, having basic solidarity with other people, serving a cause that isn't just your self-delusion or something abstract, but something you actually live out, that has real meaning.
That can provide real satisfaction, even in the midst of absolute horror.
I don't know.
I mean, people always talk about Camus as a very negative philosopher and author when he says life, if you say, oh, well, life is absurd, but just because life is absurd, even if you believe that, which I don't, but even if you believe that, that doesn't mean that life isn't worth living.
And you do have to confront that question of suicide right off the bat, because if you're not willing to To stare death in the face, if you're not willing to take that on, you really don't have much to say, and you're just as flippant as Sartre is.
Yeah, it's funny.
The passage you're talking about in The Plague is something I copied and pasted into my notes as well.
I hope you'll indulge me a bit.
Yeah, no, definitely read it.
It's worth reading aloud.
Both of these guys have hard-to-pronounce French names, but the protagonist, the doctor, is Ryu, and the priest is Peneloo.
So what has just happened is that one of Peneloo's sons, who's like a little kid, has just died from the plague in just this horrific way.
I mean, it's just pages and pages of description of how awful it is that this child is suffering.
And the priest, Panelu, says, that sort of thing is revolting because it passes our human understanding.
But perhaps we should love what we cannot understand.
Ryu straightened up slowly.
He gazed at Panelu, summoning to his gaze all the strength and fervor he could muster against his weariness.
Then he shook his head.
No, father, I have a very different idea of love.
And until my dying day, I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.
A shade of disquietude crossed the priest's face.
Ah, Doctor, he said sadly, I've just realized what is meant by grace.
Ryu had sunk back again on the bench.
His lassitude had returned, and from its depths he spoke more gently.
It's something I haven't got, that I know, but I'd rather not discuss that with you.
We're working side by side for something that unites us, beyond blasphemy and prayers, and it's the only thing that matters.
Pantaloo sat down beside Ryu.
It was obvious that he was deeply moved.
Yes, yes, he said.
You two are working for man's salvation.
Ryu tried to smile.
Salvation's much too big a word for me.
I don't aim so high.
I'm concerned with man's health, and for me, his health comes first.
Pantaloo seemed to hesitate.
Doctor, he began, then fell silent.
Down his face, too, sweat was trickling, murmuring.
Goodbye for the present, he rose.
His eyes were moist.
When he turned to go, Ryu, who had seemed lost in thought, suddenly rose and took a step toward him.
Again, please forgive me.
I can promise there won't be another outburst of that kind.
Peneloo held out his hand, saying regretfully, and yet, I haven't convinced you.
What does it matter?
What I hate is death and disease, as you well know.
And whether you wish it or not, we're allies.
Facing them and fighting them together, Ryu is still holding Panelu's hands.
So you see, but he refrained from meeting the priest's eyes.
God himself can't part us now.
So that chapter ends.
Which again, Sartre never wrote anything quite so poignant.
I love how Camus demonstrates how unimpressed he is with his own atheism, and how, you know, the fact that he is in no way willing to even consider this cosmic concept of salvation, that he's also unimpressed with that.
These things have no real bearing on his profound interest in helping human beings.
Which I think is very valid.
What I'd say, and I would love to talk to a devout Christian about this, though, is that, you know, Christians are very fond of saying that the Bible is a really good basis for asserting that all human beings have an innate dignity and an innate worth, right?
This is something Christians are big into, right?
This is something that differentiates them from You know, pagans and abortionists and people who believe in gladiatorial fights or what have you, is that there is this universal dignity in all of God's creatures.
And I think that what a lot of Christians would challenge Camus on would be, well, why, if there is no God, why do you believe that all humanity has dignity and that they're worth helping?
And I'm not sure if that's a direct axiom.
Can we ever actually really address aside from simply feeling that it was obvious, but I think you can make it.
We're all in this together because we're all equally vulnerable to this.
I mean, I think that's one of the implied themes of the plague in the sense that there's no justice in how it strikes people down.
It doesn't matter what you believe or don't believe.
It's essentially a question of chance and randomness.
And in the end, You know, the long enough timeline, the odds of survival go to zero, right?
And I think that it's because we're vulnerable, because we're all equally subject to the plague that never ends.
It's from that we derive a certain dignity.
And that may be negative in the sense that, oh, suffering is what conveys dignity and meaning to people.
But there's another way of looking at that, which is that the struggle against these things.
Gives us a reason to push forward.
And, yeah, you may just be pushing the rock up the hill, but while you're pushing it, you are still doing something.
The fact that death is still waiting for you at the end doesn't negate your efforts now.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's so that I was really, really into that philosophy.
Camus made a huge impact on me when I was a teenager.
You know, I was really taken by that and and sort of viewed it as a as a guiding principle.
But something that I've thought about since then is that Camus died tragically young.
He died in a car accident in 1960.
He was just in his mid 40s when it happened and dying at 1960.
And he was such a brilliant intellectual is like especially tragic because all of these Huge things were about to happen, you know, especially in France and Europe and in the West, and we don't get any of his, you know, opinions on any of these things.
It's, again, much like Orwell.
Orwell died right before all of these sort of global revolutions happened, but Camus was actually kind of lucky in a way in that the biggest cause he really threw himself into He lived to see win, which was the defeat of the Nazis and the liberation of France.
But he didn't live to see like a full resolution of the Algerian question.
And he also didn't live to see, you know, the uprising in May of 1968 in Paris.
the uprising in May of 1968 in Paris.
So Camus was lucky in a sense in that he never fully struck out on something he was really
I mean, obviously he struck out in that he would have loved to be able to, like, wave a magic wand and eliminate all human suffering.
You know, obviously he didn't win that battle.
But I wonder, I wonder if Camus ever would have run out of gas almost sort of the way Enoch Powell kind of did, right?
Enoch Powell was a happy warrior in the 1960s and into the 1970s.
But by the end of his life, Powell Powell was really burnt out on being a British nationalist
and even joked, kind of not joked, that he'd wished he'd just died fighting the Nazis, because
he just felt like he had not accomplished anything. All of the causes that he had
championed, you know, had been lost, I mean, really decisively by the time he died. It did not
seem like he was going to have, you know, a meaningful or positive legacy.
Now, it's a long ballgame, sure, but that is not the way—you know, Enoch Powell would have really disputed Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, I mean, because he just kept having to do the boulder up the hill for decades.
And Camus, because he died young and he got to see the defeat of the Nazis, I don't think ever had to sort of go through the The suffering, you know, that Enoch did or that a number of other intellectuals are just sort of born in the wrong time or just on the losing side.
What happened with Algeria would have been in the greatest interest and Algeria over the long term.
I mean, you didn't see how that fully played out, not just the end of French Algeria, but the horrific aftermath or horrific aftermath, of course, which all the people who were really concerned about Algeria couldn't care less about.
Well, you've come to think of, you know, the, you know, the Vietnam War and all of these things.
Right.
And one of the things that we should probably just note is this idea of meaning falling apart.
And then the idea of everything, Western civilization, philosophically, just taking a, almost a desire for self annihilation, uh, after World War II.
I think it's because World War II is, It's sort of the super myth of our entire moral code at this point.
Yeah.
And it's not, it's not the Bible.
It's not the Western, the story of Western civilization.
I mean, guys like Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill could talk about defending Western civilization or defending Christian civilization in World War II.
Within two decades, all the intellectuals were preaching that the things that they thought they were defending were essentially morally equivalent.
To Nazism, and that needs to be torn down, too.
And I think Camus was one of these people who was able to look past the ideological labels and say, no, there are actual people involved in this, and that consideration should give us pause.
But if the last few decades have shown anything, if the present shows us anything, it's that ideology has a way of overcoming.
Concrete human life, I mean, ordinary ordinary people Who would never dream of say robbing somebody else's house or attacking someone on the street are quite comfortable screaming that people should die.
Because, I don't know, they haven't been vaccinated, or they voted for the wrong guy, or whatever else, and while they may not be willing to do those acts themselves, I think they would be quite, they're not going to protest if somebody else does it.
They might even quietly cheer it on.
So this, and this touches on your point at the very beginning of the show about how, in a certain way, Camus is a lower-C conservative.
It's sort of, Camus' humanism reminds me of, it was It was Russell Kirk, right, who said that conservatism is to not have an ideology?
I'm remembering that.
It's the negation of ideology, yeah.
He quoted that.
I'm not sure if he was the first one who said that.
That's tied in with that Kirkyan view, yes.
Yeah, I mean, there was some major conservative intellectual who said that to be conservative is to not really have an ideology, because ideologies are these weird intellectual abstractions.
To be a conservative is you like, you know, where you're from and who you are, and you want to preserve that.
And I think that's actually pretty accurate.
But a good friend of mine once pointed out that this is sort of a losing argument, because human beings are going to develop ideologies.
And once humans are motivated by ideologies, all these kind of conservative niceties about localism will just be thrown out.
And as such, people who are oriented towards conservatism might consider developing an ideology just to counteract the ideologies that are going to assault them.
Yeah, I've always thought that.
Chemist's humanism is really similar in that he wants people to set aside ideology and focus on this universal humanity and this universal alleviation of suffering.
And that's a nice thought, but the fact of the matter is that human beings aren't all going to just stop being ideological or theological.
They're not going to stop being religious and absolutely overlooking humanity.
in the name of these abstractions and it's like just this kind of constant appeal I mean it's again it's like Sisyphus I mean you really are going to be rolling a boulder up a hill just to watching it just to watch it tumble down if you're going to be dedicating your life to getting to people getting people to be less ideological you know and and to focus on what we have in common as opposed to you know the things that make us different and I think this is a real weakness of Camus and it's a weakness that it took me Took me kind of years to really, to really think of.
I mean, it's, it's kind of like Steven Pinker and all of these people who are, you know, believe that humanity is becoming less violent.
And it's like, yeah, give it, give it time here.
You know, I don't, I don't think, you know, the innate violence of human beings is, is about to just sort of dissolve anytime soon.
And maybe that was, you know, and maybe all of that was good enough for Camus.
I mean, maybe Camus was still fine just being Sisyphus and pushing that boulder.
But in that sense, again, sorry to be like a mortician here, but he got kind of lucky in that he died young.
I mean, it's all well and good to read his monograph, The Myth of Sisyphus, but to actually do that, you need at least some kind of auxiliary ideology to to keep Sisyphus smiling, because at a certain point it's inevitable that Sisyphus is going to not smile.
He can't always be smiling.
There's going to come some point where he just cannot do it anymore, which is not to say he will never be able to do it again, but what is your plan for Sisyphus when he inevitably starts to grimace?
And Camus failed to really get to that, and that again, and we were talking about this on the last episode when I was Talking about how for Christians it's that Jesus walks beside Sisyphus, you know.
And to that end, if human life is Sisyphean, it might be better, it might just be psychologically better to have Jesus at your side.
So now I'll get into the Kierkegaard thing.
So Soren Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist who wrote in Denmark in the 19th century.
of his bigger books was Fear and Trembling, where he talked a lot about the story of Abraham and how God asked him to sacrifice his son Isaac.
And what Kierkegaard talks a lot about when examining that story from the Bible is that it required this huge leap of faith on the part of Abraham.
Abraham had to be absolutely certain that God was talking to him and that he wasn't just nuts.
And he had to be totally certain that What he was going to do would not constitute an act of murder, because it would be a divine exception.
And that because it was a divine exception, it didn't have any bearing on our normal laws regarding murder, right?
And Kierkegaard concluded that you couldn't fully just logic your way into those conclusions.
At some point, you absolutely had to take this leap of faith Because Abraham had to know that if he killed his son, a lot of his contemporaries and his peers were not going to be like, oh yeah, God told you to do it.
Okay, well then it's fine.
He had to be prepared.
Abraham had to be prepared to not be vindicated for doing what he did, for doing what he thought he was going to have to do for God.
And this is Kierkegaard's concept of the leap of faith.
You can rationalize a lot of things about religious faith.
You can get into the metaphysics of it.
You can find historical evidence for lots of things in the Bible.
But sooner or later, you're just going to have to take this leap of faith.
And Camus does address this in The Myth of Sisyphus.
And says that he can't do it.
Kierkegaard was wrong, basically.
We cannot take the leap of faith that this is just too crazy.
Well, I don't want to skip over this just because I think this is particularly relevant to so many of the younger guys and also more middle-aged guys like our age, although I'm much older than you.
Yeah, middle age.
Come on, man.
Like this is graying.
I am the whippersnapper.
All these kids on the way.
Right.
There there's definitely this sense and where people are.
It's a meme is a word that's being overused, but they're they're almost trying to to meme our way back into being traditionalist, Catholic or Protestant or Christian, whatever else.
Or that you just kind of create your own thing.
And this idea that if we just believe it, somehow that will make it real.
That somehow we'll have this direct experience and this absolute faith that people had centuries ago.
The leap of faith can't be faked, you know.
Right, right.
And that's the thing.
I feel like a lot of people are trying to fake it now.
And Camus kind of slices through all that and says, no, this is where we are.
I suppose, I mean, this brings us to The Stranger and this idea of alienation where, of course, I mean, this is something that we all read in school.
You probably read it in school and then you read it again when you're an adult decades later.
Were you really assigned to The Stranger in school?
Yeah.
Oh, wow, I never was.
Philosophy, huh?
Okay.
I mean, it's sad.
Well, again, I'm older than you, so now, I mean, who knows?
They probably, like, assigned, like, coloring books or something like that.
I was assigned Maya Angelou.
We were not instructed to read The Stranger by any means.
I did that in my spare time.
You should have a coloring book.
You'd have like more significant, it has more literary merit.
One of the things with The Stranger of course that I think gets brought home to everyone is of course how the protagonist essentially is sentenced to death not just because of a crime that Really had no motive and was pointless, but also... Well, you gotta slow down.
Not everybody is familiar with the basic plot of The Stranger.
The basic plot of The Stranger is that, in very short terms, the protagonist murders an Arab for no particular reason, and he is sentenced to death.
And while this happens, we see how he goes through life.
He has rather unsatisfying romantic relationship.
He's constantly smoking.
He feels really nothing for the people around him.
That's probably why he committed the murder.
And one of the key points is that when his mother dies, he doesn't show a lot of emotion at the funeral.
It's almost just kind of a bother to him.
And because he doesn't show... The protagonist is this completely dejected man.
He is just totally, you know, the way like Marx tried to describe alienation, Well that's why the book is so important.
the stranger the protagonist shows alienation from everything from mass society from kinship
he's just this totally just this complete fish out of water well that's why the book is so
important it's probably the best portrayal of the alienated person and as you say
Yeah, and it's not just from... Unquestionably.
Oh, I'm alien... I suffer from the condition of alienation because of... I don't control the means of production.
It's way, way bigger than that.
I mean, we can give this guy a factory.
It's not going to make things any better.
It's transcendentally bigger than that.
I mean, and he's not... he is not sad.
This is also a key point in understanding The Stranger.
The protagonist is not suffering from depression or ennui.
He is just this sort of blank slate.
It's just sort of going through the motions of existence.
And it's just so, I think it's in many ways a perfect novel.
And even the murder is something that it just kind of happens.
It's understated.
There's no, he can't really describe to himself.
I mean, he vaguely blames it on like the sun and there's no, it's an absurd act, but the idea of life being absurd is so internalized into himself that the act has no real moral significance.
And it's, It's because he doesn't see moral significance in a lot of these actions, because all of these things are just sort of a tiresome bother, as opposed to things of real importance, the rest of society turns on him far more than they would have just if he had just been a murderer.
Like, people are more outraged that he didn't cry enough at his mother's funeral.
Which is brought up in his trial.
Right.
Than the act of murder.
And it's honestly when I was rereading it again recently what I thought of was actually social media and this idea that power now and virtue now and morality now it's so dependent on showing your emotions and telling people what you feel and demanding that they respect it and say that it's of great importance.
I mean that that really is what Social media is where we we put our emotions in front of everybody and demand they have sympathy and respond to us but The stranger to me Sort of breaks home how fake that all is because once something is is put out into the world Again, it's it's kind of an affectation I mean maybe this is almost a roundabout way of getting back at that Paris circle of Sartre and the rest of them is that it's words are cheap and
Showing emotions mean nothing, and it doesn't get to the core of who you are.
It doesn't get to the core of what the modern condition is.
And ultimately, the only way the protagonist feels any kind of freedom is sort of by embracing the idea of death as something that he's taking on his own terms.
That's like the only freedom that can be found.
Embracing the hatred that he receives.
Which, yeah, I don't want to give away the end because it's well worth reading, but the hatred that he, after he commits this murder and is in prison and there's this trial and everybody's upset that he didn't cry when his mom died, he starts to be really fueled by the hatred of his fellow man, which is interesting.
I mean, I wonder if Camus would say that that kind of hatred could motivate Sisyphus as he's pushing up the boulder.
I would certainly say that it does.
Keep pushing up that boulder just to show, out of sheer spite, to show the gods that you're not going to give up.
Spite, you know, spite can be really energizing.
I mean, it's... There is that!
But it's true.
There's just no denying it, honestly.
But here, let me read a passage from The Stranger that really conveys the sort of blankness of the protagonist.
Just then, my employer sent for me.
For a moment I felt uneasy, as I expected he was going to tell me to stick to my work and not waste time chattering with friends over the phone.
However, it was nothing of the kind.
He wanted to discuss a project he had in view, though so far he'd come to no decision.
It was to open a branch at Paris, so as to be able to deal with the big companies on the spot, without postal delays, and he wanted to know if I'd like a post there.
You're a young man, he said, and I'm pretty sure you'd enjoy living in Paris, and of course, you could travel about France for some months in the year.
I told him I was quite prepared to go, but really, I didn't care much one way or the other.
He then asked if a change of life, as he called it, didn't appeal to me, and I answered that one never changed his way of life.
One life was as good as another, and my present one suited me quite well.
At this, he looked rather hurt and told me that I always shilly-shallied and that I lacked ambition, a grave defect to his mind when one was in business.
I returned to my work.
I'd have preferred not to vex him, but I saw no reason for changing my life.
By and large, it wasn't an unpleasant one.
As a student, I'd had plenty of ambition of the kind he meant.
But when I had to drop my studies, I very soon realized all that was pretty futile.
Marie came that evening and asked me if I'd marry her.
I said I didn't mind, if she was keen on it.
We'd get married.
Then she asked me again if I loved her.
I replied much as before that her question meant nothing, or next to nothing, but I supposed I didn't.
If that's how you feel, she said, why marry me?
I explained that it had no importance, really, but if it would give her pleasure, we could get married right away.
I pointed out that anyhow, the suggestion came from her.
As for me, I'd merely said yes.
Then she remarked that marriage was a serious matter, to which I answered, no.
She kept silent after that, staring at me in a curious way.
Then she asked, suppose another girl had asked you to marry her.
I mean, a girl you liked in the same way as you like me.
Would you have said yes to her too?
Naturally.
Then she said she wondered if she really loved me or not.
I, of course, couldn't enlighten her as to that.
And after another silence, she murmured something about my being a queer fellow.
And I dare say that's why I love you, she added.
But maybe that's why one day I'll come to hate you.
To which I had nothing to say, so I said nothing.
She thought for a bit, then started smiling, and taking my arm, repeated that she was in earnest.
She really wanted to marry me.
Alright, I answered.
We'll get married whenever you like.
I then mentioned the proposal made by my employer, and Marie said she'd love to go to Paris.
That's cool.
I think it's just masterful.
I really... No, no, it's perfect.
I really, really do.
Camus' descriptions of a lot of The Stranger takes place on the beach, and his descriptions of the sun that so influenced the protagonist, and the sand and the waves and the ocean and the sky, are all just really, just incredibly masterfully done.
It's yet another reminder that I really wish I could read in French, but it's not in the cards.
So encoded, right?
Yeah.
Do you think a lot of people just took the wrong, I mean, by a lot of people,
I mean the educational institutions that assign it, and it is considered to be a classic and everything else,
but the takeaway does seem to be this sort of wish for self-alienation,
which I don't think is quite what the stranger is going for.
I mean, the fact that it outlines the absurdity of the modern condition and the plight of modern man.
It's very different from saying, and therefore annihilate everything your culture represented as opposed to grasping for a way back or carving out a new future or something like that.
Well, listen, what I would say is the stranger is descriptive and the myth of Sisyphus and the rebel are prescriptive, right?
The stranger, there isn't a big moral, I do not think there's a huge and obvious moral lesson to the stranger.
I mean, I think I think it's a masterfully crafted novel about alienation and dejection and sort of emptiness and kind of vacuity.
I don't think we were supposed to, like, read The Stranger and then develop a moral codex out of it.
That's what the Myth of Sisyphus for, and he was writing them, he wrote them right on top of each other.
Both were published in 1942.
And I think that, you know, to its literary end, The Stranger really works.
It's perfect.
And the myth of Sisyphus is really compelling and really interesting, but they're trying to do really different things.
As to why so many intellectuals then and now take this leap of faith, if you will, from existentialism to Marxism or cultural Marxism or whatever, I do not have a great answer for that.
That libertarian existentialist I mentioned earlier, he joked that he thinks that communism and existentialism go together sociologically, the way cigarettes and existentialism go together sociologically, where they're kind of happening at the same time, like all the existentialists smoked constantly.
Camus had a cat named Cigarette, for example.
But this libertarian is saying that intellectually there's no obvious reason why cigarettes have to go with existentialism or communism has to go with intellectualism.
It's just, it's sort of a coincidence.
And I mean this, you know, your question as to why did people read this stuff or feel this stuff and then become Stalinists is part of this kind of big impossible question that all of us on You know, all of us in the identitarian world face, which is, you know, why did everything change in the 1960s?
You know, why did at that point whites decide, by and large, to hate themselves and to not preserve themselves and to champion the rights and identity of everybody but themselves?
Like, why did that happen?
There are lots of theories.
There are lots of kind of partial explanations, but we fundamentally don't have a great answer for that.
You know, all of all of the all of the positive answers are incomplete, right?
Right.
And also so much of it is because once you have undermined a person and then a people's belief in their own right to exist or even that their existence is any kind of transcendent meaning, once that's gone, it's sort of a why not if you replaced?
I mean, I think one of the most common questions you get When you're working in this movement is they'll concede the point, right?
They'll say, okay, the great replacement is taking place.
Western civilization is going out.
The future is going to be this kind of global third world, but why do you care?
Cause you'll be dead.
And then there, which is sort of the, another way of saying, why do you care about anything?
But of course, these same people, and again, I'm not, not in every case, but these same people, a lot of times they'll get really worked up about something like climate change.
Yeah.
They care about that.
The terms of what we're fighting get changed every couple of years.
I mean, it used to be global warming, but then they realized that didn't market quite right.
So now it's climate change and no one can really explain.
What it is precisely that we're supposed to do and what what exactly is going to happen if we don't do it.
You know it's it's a. Hypothesis that's.
It can't be disproven and so therefore it's essentially a religious claim.
And so I think.
Where Camus gets us is it gets us to the plight of the modern condition and it gets us to the idea of.
Not losing sight.
Of.
The concretes of life, which to me, I think, are the basis of an identitarian approach.
But, and it's a warning against just the leap of faith to cultural Marxism or self-destruction or radical leftism, which is, for some reason, is seen to be more intellectually sophisticated than retreating to God.
Which, you know, I think it, there's far more evidence to suggest that God created the world in seven days than there is to believe that You know, if we replace all Frenchmen with Algerians, somehow things will get better.
That's that's that's a far more ridiculous claim.
And he does puncture that.
And I think he punctures it effectively.
But again, he didn't he didn't live to see it.
He didn't live to see how this would all play out.
And so we never really had to grapple with these questions fully.
And so we're left to grapple with them.
And we're essentially Camus is sort of step one, and then you have to figure out how you're going to respond to that.
And he gives us some ideas, but he doesn't give us that transcendent grounding, which I think you, you ultimately do need if you're going to be able to keep pushing the boulder uphill.
And at least you have to at least, uh, maybe the better way of phrasing it would be not just imagine Sisyphus happy, but Just because he's failed 999 times to keep the boulder at the top doesn't mean he's going to fail this time.
Right, so I think what you just said is basically Friedrich Nietzsche's reply to this.
Obviously Nietzsche died before Camus was born, but Nietzsche is addressed in The Myth of Sisyphus, but he's not addressed Enough, because again, I'm repeating myself from last week, but Nietzsche's envisioning of the myth of Sisyphus is, Sisyphus is only condemned to do this for eternity if the gods are there, which they are not.
What Sisyphus needs to focus on is becoming an Ubermensch so he can keep the boulder at the top, and there's no reason to think that that won't ever happen.
There's no reason to rule that out.
And moreover, The very suffering of Sisyphus is making him tough enough that he could, in fact, become an Ubermensch who can keep the boulder at the very top.
This is something that basically... Zarathustra... Am I pronouncing that right?
I've actually never been fully aware.
Zarathustra?
I always say Zarathustra, but I'm sure someone will correct us in the comments.
Zarathustra talks about this in Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Alright, he says, uh, a thousand paths are there which have never yet been trodden, a thousand cellu- uh, cellubrites and hidden islands of life, unexhausted and undiscovered is still man and man's world.
Awaken and hearken, ye lonesome ones, from the future come winds with stealthy pinions, and to fine ears good tidings are proclaimed.
Ye lonesome ones of today, ye seceding ones, ye shall one day be a people, Out of you, who have chosen yourselves, shall a chosen people arise, and out of it the Superman.
Verily, a place of healing shall the earth become, and already is a new odor diffused around it, a salvation-bringing odor, and a new hope.
I mean, this is all about man's potential in a godless world, about how we can basically become gods ourselves.
And it's interesting that Camus doesn't really talk about that possibility, even
though Camus was obviously aware of Nietzsche's writing. And this again sort of gets back to the fact that
Camus, despite being an atheist, seems to have kind of held this sort of nominally Christian
attitude, since Camus was so against creating, you know, heaven on earth, and he was so
suspicious of revolutions and just wanted to kind of make things a little bit better sort of here and
there, because he thought doing more than that was basically impossible.
Well, I mean, this is a pretty consistently, you know, conservative Christian view of, you know, we can create sort of healthy societies, but we're not about to No, no, no, no.
sin and we have to be very dubious of utopia because there is only one utopia, right?
If you rule out God, you're saying that utopia on Earth might maybe be possible, right?
You know, you need to come up with a new reason for why utopia is impossible on Earth if there's
no utopia after life, right?
Is this making sense or am I going way off the track here?
No, no, no, no.
Keep going, you're right.
And Camus, again, Camus vis-a-vis Zarathustra is not saying that eventually Sisyphus might
triumph.
And, you know, Nietzsche said, yeah, he might.
Again, both Nietzsche and Camus are supposed to be depressing reads, but I don't think Camus is depressing, and Nietzsche is downright inspirational.
I mean, who else is willing to deliver a message to people on the right saying, like, you can absolutely triumph, like, everything is possible?
Yeah.
And again, Camus just died in a stupid car accident and, you know, cheating us of another 25 years of thought.
I mean, the guy was brilliant.
Agree or disagree with any of his stuff?
Yeah, it definitely does seem like it was just cut off before he had to fully grapple with a lot of these ramifications.
And so it's just sort of left to us.
Yeah, but I think that what else is new?
Yeah, right.
Some weird reason.
Yeah, we have to figure this out.
I mean, I've already figured it out.
I don't know about you, but the I think that.
The reason why it's worth engaging is, well, there are countless reasons, but the biggest ones I would say is one.
I think he does puncture the.
Cliched leftist.
Intellectual Parisian scene rather effectively, because after reading him, everything else just seems so flippant and nonsensical.
The second thing is, I think he portrays the modern condition in a better way than anybody else, a philosopher or novelist.
And finally, I think that there is.
There's the ghost of a sense of optimism in there somewhere.
Yeah, like there is there is a path to freedom.
There is a path to self-actualization.
It's just you really have to work for it.
And it's not something that's just going to be presented to you, which I think is a really terrifying thing for a lot of people, because everybody either fools themselves into thinking like, oh, here's the answer.
It's just been given to me.
Or they're waiting for somebody to come along and give them an answer.
And I think one of the things, Camus, was critical of and identified is that so many of these
intellectuals who were with them for the first part of that journey, as you said, just took the leap
of faith, except instead of to Christianity, it was just to stupid, destructive leftism,
the consequences of which, you know, they'd rather be burned alive than actually have to live
with the consequences of their own ideology. And that's a problem that we see with leftists
throughout history.
Yeah. Well, I think that's a good place to leave it.
Yeah, I think that might be a wrap.
But yeah, for y'all listeners, you can find a PDF of The Myth of Sisyphus online pretty easy, and I would really recommend reading The Stranger.
It's very short.
It might even be considered a novella.
It's so short, and it is just so perfectly worded, even in translation somehow.
I don't know.
I just think it's spectacular.
But yeah, in any event, thanks for tuning in, everyone.
We'll catch you next week.
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