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Nov. 11, 2022 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
14:56
Inexplicable Genius

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comThe gang first discusses the mystery of Elon Musk: what are his intentions? What in the hell is he doing? Richard then unlocks Plato’s “myth of the cave” … and why he might be saying the opposite of what you think he’s saying. Some more Midterm talk brings the convo to a close.

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Richard, I was curious to hear more about your interpretation of Plato's cave.
I've been thinking about this for a while.
It seems like you kind of have a different twist on that interpretation of Plato's cave.
Yeah.
I have a kind of Straussian reading.
I mean, it's not necessarily Strauss's reading, but there's an esoteric message that is...
Suggested to you.
And then there is the exoteric message, which is exactly what you said, where it's at one point you were chained in a cave looking at shadows on the wall and with everyone else.
And then you left the cave and you saw the light of the sun.
And so you saw the good in itself or the idea of the good, the real, real.
And then you went in to try to tell these people what was happening.
They didn't want to believe you.
A couple of things.
So first off, as we know, Plato counsels lying as a politician.
And he counsels lying in general.
Like the big lie of the Republic is actually that we all came from the earth.
And so we kind of like we're a nation that sprung from the earth.
And I think that is kind of a big lie of You Germans just grew out of the ground, basically.
There's some other lies.
He also, throughout the Republic, tells you pretty vividly that the philosopher in politics, I mean, politics is kind of the royal science.
I mean, it should be at least the queen of the sciences.
This is statesman.
He talks about, like, isn't this more important than caring for pigs?
You know, surely we would allow reason to guide us and the best to guide us in this of all professions.
Why do we have petty tyrants and demagogues and people who slither up the pole and all that kind of stuff?
Why do they succeed at this?
This is not terrible in some way.
You know, there's the metaphor of the ship of state, of the man who's able to look at the constellations.
Who could actually navigate.
But the tragedy is that he can never get a hold of the rudder.
And so he kind of tells us that this is impossible in some way.
And that at every stage, you're going to have to engage in some kind of lying or censorship.
You know, his promotion of censorship is pretty explicit.
There's another kind of element to this, which I've also stressed, which is the platonic motive is to valorize dialectic over your lying eyes, in effect.
So, you know, your lying eyes might tell you that this dude...
Who is super rich and has lots of chicks and a great chariot, your lying eyes would tell him that that's the good.
But in fact, that's not the good.
At least not necessarily the good.
And that you need to start to arrive at the good through dialectic.
Now, what is dialectic?
In some ways, that word is kind of overdefined, like Hegelian dialectic.
Dialectic means discussion.
It means words.
It means conversation.
And so you're going to slowly acquire the good in itself via language.
It's an odd metaphor that he stresses looking at the sun itself when his entire motive throughout all of his works, The Republic especially, Is to valorize language and logical reasoning towards something as opposed to the visual.
The visual is brought down and the linguistic is brought high in Plato.
I mean, this is a really major move that he makes.
So it's rather odd to kind of have all these metaphors of like dark caves.
And so on.
And then, you know, you get out of them and you see the sun.
You see it right before you.
He doesn't want you to see the sun.
He wants you to arrive at the idea of the good, which is the sun in this case, through dialectical reasoning.
So it's a kind of curious move.
It's kind of like the metaphor is, in fact, the reverse of what he's saying.
And as I have also stressed, I mean...
And this is rather explicit, but throughout the Republic, he is absolutely undermining Greek religion.
So he is telling you that, you know, oh my gosh, Zeus, you know, he had sex with all these women.
Oh my God, this is not good.
Surely it's not good, Socrates.
Oh, you're right.
And we need to imagine a kind of different type of God that is...
Beyond these superhuman or all-too-human gods that were promoted at the time.
So he's kind of subtly undermining things.
And he worries about all these kind of myths and, you know, the myth of Calus.
Ooh, do we really want that?
And yet, on the other hand, all of his philosophy is just this effort at myth-making.
At the end of...
The Republic, he goes into a myth of reincarnation, and in effect, heaven and hell.
I mean, there is a line in Theototus which is just incredible from Socrates, where it's like, surely you can't believe that you won't be punished in an afterlife for your behavior in this world.
I'm not actually in my library now, but I could go find it.
There are lines that are just...
Basically, like, the entire 2,000 years of Christianity summed up in, like, one line.
This was something new.
This was something he was bringing into the world.
And he puts it in the mouth of Socrates as a curious figure, and then he has all these people around, you know, agreeing with him.
And even in, like, Statesman, I mean, the myth is really, like, the Earth turning in the other direction in the age of Kronos, the age of Saturn.
And humans kind of coming out of the earth.
So he kind of like reiterates the Republic myth in this.
His whole body is a bunch of myth-making.
And yet he tells us that he wants to censor myth and that we want justified didactic.
You know, we don't want any of that Medea stuff.
We want didactic kind of instruction for the youth.
And yet his whole project is myth-making.
So there's just some curious things that are going on with Plato.
And what I would suggest is that he is undermining and in some cases actively trying to censor the Greek religion and the Greek world.
And he's kind of taking early steps to moving to a new type of religion and philosophy.
And this would be a kind of age of Kronos as he imagines it.
Greek religion is, it seems to be a kind of story of overcoming previous religions.
You know, that basic myth of Kronos eating his children and then Zeus kind of tricking him and then escaping cannibalism and then growing strong and intelligent and then coming back.
And, you know, it's like I'm now 25 and I'm intelligent as hell and been training for my whole life.
I'm just going to kick your ass.
There's this myth about overcoming an earlier religion, which I think Plato is kind of getting to.
And he wants to go back to chronology, to chrono-Saturnalian culture.
So there's just a lot of curious aspects about this.
But he clearly wants to get away from Zeus worship towards something.
We don't quite know what it is, a kind of unknown god.
Who would be all good.
It was kind of like a placeholder, in a way, waiting for something.
And I do think that Christianity kind of was able to fulfill that.
But in terms of the cave itself, look, you could basically say that we shouldn't read too much into this.
You know, he's making a really memorable image.
And, you know, don't be like one of those guys who...
Has some weird theory about Star Wars or something, like Jar Jar is the real villain or some theories about how James Bond is always the same character and is a code name.
Anyway, these are people just reading too much into something.
They're much simpler explanations for things.
You don't have to come up with some secret theory that doesn't really even improve the whole thing.
I don't think I would say that about Plato's cave because this is of such monumental importance.
He might very well be suggesting a reading to certain people and suggesting another reading to others and that you don't have to say everything and that you can hint at things or kind of allow them to complete the thought in their own mind.
So he doesn't, like, he could have come up with a myth of the cave of, like, a guy, like, if you imagine, like, you're lost in darkness, and you only have, like, your smell and your touch as a sense, and you're hearing, I guess.
And so you're, like, putting your hands on the wall of the cave, and you're figuring a way out or something, and then you get out of the cave, and you've never seen the light of day before.
Now you see the sun.
He could have done that, but he didn't.
He did a puppet show.
He did basically a movie theater.
He imagined the movie theater before Wagner and before cinema, Hollywood.
So he imagined this people in a movie theater, trapped in a movie theater, in fact, looking at projection.
And you have to thus ask yourself, who are the puppet masters?
Who are these people?
Who are doing shadow poetry on a cave?
Who are basically making cinema?
Who are they?
Are they not just as enlightened as the man who sees the sun?
Or are they in fact more enlightened?
They're the ones putting on the show.
I do think he's saying something about human nature where you're trying to convince people that those shadows are not real.
I do think people will opt in, you know.
Oh, no question.
We all get that.
You try to grab someone by the ears and tell them the truth, and they resist and resist and resist.
Yes.
So my thought was, well, I would be better off if I have been able to look at the sun.
I would be better off joining or projecting the images instead.
Instead of trying to...
It is kind of futile to...
Try to convince those people that the shadows are not real, but maybe instead you could cast some better shadows.
Yeah.
That is what I'm suggesting he's actually telling you.
Because he is himself a myth-maker.
He's obviously engaging in rational disputation, but he acknowledges that it's just kind of futile at the end of the day.
These idiots will never learn, basically.
And he's also counseling lying.
And so all of these people, I think I've mentioned this before, but the Heritage Foundation or some great books college or whatever, they'll be like, oh, Plato's Cave.
Finally, you open up the book and it opens up the world to you and you see the truth and whatever.
I do think the...
His message is much darker, literally and figuratively, than that.
He's certainly attacking, like, solar religion, Sun worship, Zeus, Apollo, etc.
He's trying to move you away from that.
And B, he offers this kind of tantalizing, unfinished image of...
Basically enlightened people keeping others literally and figuratively in the dark and showing them cinema.
So it's actually rather disturbing.
And keeping them in chains as well.
Right.
I was going to ask, you know, what is the alternative to that?
The Marx system of like Roman interpretation and then also creating these worlds, these new worlds that...
You know, produce new forms of art.
You know, what is the alternative?
Are you going to cast shadows that somehow tell the truth?
Like, what is the vision for an Apollonian?
That is the question.
I mean, maybe we should learn something from Plato.
To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, like, can we actually handle the truth?
And what, you know, and if the answer is no, like...
What kind of work do you want to be involved in projecting something for someone to look at?
But I think this is also kind of like the problem of red-pilling people or something.
Do you really want to red-pill the normies?
At the very best, they might resist you.
And at the very best, they also might ignore you.
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