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April 5, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:52:09
Nietzsche, Civilization, and Anti-Culture

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comÜberboyo joins the group to discuss … what else? … Friedrich Nietzsche. Topics include the genealogy of morality, the decline of Civilization, and the rise of “anti-culture.”

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Fantastic.
Well, I guess I'll keep the introduction brief because the meat, the revelation of character will probably happen when we start talking about this stuff.
But I'm an Irish man, first of all.
And I guess I would start with my character and personality.
I'm very creative, very imaginative.
You could call me that type of open-minded type of person.
And I was in college and I developed a big fascination with Nietzsche and Jung and various German idealists, I guess you could call them.
And I basically dropped out of college and tried to sort of figure my own way through the world.
Started to essentially become some type of quasi-entrepreneur YouTuber.
You know the way modern millennials are these days where they're kind of doing a lot of hats on.
They wear many different hats type things.
And I'm sort of running a kind of crazy combination of all of those things.
I talk about philosophy.
I talk about storytelling.
I talk about skill development.
And yeah, I have many different concerns.
I'm concerned about the nature of Western culture right now.
That's one thing that is not looking that great.
But I'm also concerned about things like personal development and a variety of things like that.
So I think I'll leave the bio there.
So you're in your mid-20s or so?
No, I'm in my late 20s now.
Late 20s now.
Okay, well, that's not much of a difference.
Yeah, that is remarkable.
Yeah, I feel like in some ways that...
The trajectory of my life, but compressed.
So that is very interesting.
Sorry to interrupt, but I've been checking around because I've been reading some of Mark's stuff.
And I've also found some essays that you did on Nietzsche.
And I was like, man, these are really, really good.
They're really, really precise.
And I found some things you were talking about.
Bowden.
What's his name?
Jonathan Bowden.
Jonathan Bowden, yeah.
They were really good as well.
So I was checking that stuff out and it was helping me flesh out some thoughts and stuff.
So it's good stuff.
Juicy stuff.
Ah, thanks.
Yeah, well, you know, I've got a lot.
There's a lot more where that came from.
So I'm going to be releasing that as time goes on.
So yeah, it's something that I'm very, very interested in.
And like you, I've been interested in Nietzsche for...
Really, most of my life, or adult life, that is.
So we're going on a quarter century of being a Nietzsche fanboy or just being kind of obsessed with him.
Always returning to him, and there's something new to learn.
I think I first read him when I was an undergraduate, and I was...
Engaging in some intellectual expansion on a number of different levels.
And I read the Genealogy of Morality first.
And again, it definitely affected me.
It kind of blew my mind, so to speak.
Kind of shattered a lot of assumptions that I had.
But what I've noticed is that every time I return to those books, I find a new perspective on them.
And I feel like I uncover something, or maybe in some ways I've changed, and thus I'm reading it with new eyes.
And there are a few authors that are like that.
I think a lot of authors, they shoot their shot, and they are who they are.
But I think with...
With Nietzsche, there's a lot of becoming and then a lot of layers and nuance to it.
So I would put him up there with Shakespeare and Plato and a number of other people who I kind of keep returning to and return to critically and return to refreshed.
Like, man, it's so funny, but Genealogy of Morals was one of the first books that I read by him as well, specifically essay one, because I hadn't a notion what was going on in essay two or essay three, but I got essay one.
I kind of understood that.
That was a bit more clear to me.
I tried to read Zarathustra before that as well.
That's the meme book we all go to.
And, of course, that just went completely over my head.
That's the worst one to start with, I would say.
It was very, very bad.
But that's obviously what you're going to go to, because it's very...
We're all the prestigious and whatnot.
But genealogy of morals, because this is something that even, I guess you're saying that you find them, you find yourself constantly going back to him, again, like myself.
And a part of that, I think, is just that he's one of the highest quality writers, I think, out in the Western literature canon.
You know, like, it's unbelievable how good he is.
And Genealogy of Morals is a brilliant expression of that.
It's so well written.
It's so captivating.
He's so good at really capturing your imagination.
His turn of phrase is just so brilliant.
He's so good at one-liners and stuff like this and just layers them through the whole thing.
So I think it's absolutely brilliant.
And I think even the man himself said that you...
When you read something, you go away and you come back and you have changed.
Therefore, what you get out of it changes.
You can only get so much out of a book that you've gotten out of yourself in some sense.
And I've definitely found the same thing myself.
It says an awful lot about where we are in some sense, where we have this figurehead, almost like this prophet, the heathen prophet, I guess you could call him.
And he has got this ability, just with this bizarre intuitive way that he thinks.
He's got this...
Eternal, fertile ability to help people collage their thoughts against him.
It's almost like the way he wasn't systematic allowed him to be almost like this hard thing that people can bash up against.
And he generates creative perspectives.
And it's very, very fertile overall because almost every major figure has been huge into Nietzsche since he was about.
Yeah, that's definitely true.
I noticed that you jumped on a space that I jumped on.
I guess it was early in the morning over in Ireland, and it was quite late.
I was about to fall asleep on it.
But where there was a discussion of Nietzsche, and yeah, I mean, I think I mentioned there, as I get a little bit older and I get a little more I think also,
when coming to Nietzsche, You do come at him from a point of alienation on some level.
You have that splinter in your mind that something's wrong with the world.
And it's not just the...
Prices of the subway are too high or taxes suck or whatever.
Or, you know, women are on Tinder now or OnlyFans or something.
All this stuff that people endlessly complain about.
But there's something bigger.
And I think he located that something bigger, something wrong with the world in morality itself.
And do you resonate with that?
In the sense that there's a...
Yeah, Nietzsche might not be systematic, but he's uncovering a certain kind of system that is inflecting and informing the world.
And that's the thing you have to address before you can start addressing all of these issues that are ultimately kind of epiphenomenon at the end of the day.
You know, dating life sucks.
I can't afford an apartment.
All that's real and certainly something I could, you know, be sympathetic towards.
But it's not really getting at the heart of the matter.
And the heart of that matter is the moral system that informs the modern age.
Man, there's so much in this.
Like, this is, again, one of those things I constantly go back to naughty, nasty Nietzsche about.
I think the first thing that hits me is that...
The thing that he stresses, because I come from the sort of psychoanalytic psychological thing, is how unconscious this stuff is.
Like, your value system is buried at the very root of your psyche, as the likes of Freud and Jung would say.
And you aren't aware that it's even a thing.
Now, this is a big deal, because when it comes to making decisions in your life, what these guys will tell you is that your value system is actually the...
how you rationalize decisions to yourself and how you make decisions.
And this actually is like technically what we would sort of mean by morality.
It's decision-making.
We have this very interesting thing where we have this set of beliefs, I guess you could say, but it's not necessarily beliefs.
It's like we care about things, I guess.
And again, Nietzsche is just so penetrative in the way he understands this.
Like we care about helping the poor or we care about being nice or we care about whatever, like whatever thing we value, we would say.
And this is deeply buried inside of us, unquestioned.
And as a consequence of this, when we go and live our lives, we sort of act out that value system.
We act out that story.
You've probably heard someone like...
Fucking Jordan Peterson described this.
We're acting out our unconscious value, but it's very much along those lines.
He's getting that from psychoanalysis.
And Nietzsche's just so brutal, like so brutal, where he's basically saying all the downstream effects, like our moral behavior, the manifest behaviors we have in the world, are a consequence of the value structures that we have inside of our souls, I guess you would say.
And he just pokes at the thing you're not supposed to poke at.
And he says, Can we ask questions about that value system?
Is that value system really correct?
Is it useful?
Is it good?
What is it?
And so when I was growing up, I completely unconsciously was essentially a sort of liberal.
I grew up in a modern household.
The values were like that.
Again, like when you read Nietzsche and he points out that you're a Christian moralist, but an atheist.
He's like, that's the modern European, the European pessimism or Buddhism or whatever.
That was exactly the experience I had growing up, like a very Christian upbringing, but not really like massively theistic.
We went to church and stuff like this, but it wasn't like my grandmother was like really, really Catholic.
But, you know, parents were just, they were sort of doing it for the ropes.
The schooling I went up to was very.
We're sterilized of religion.
The culture I grew up in is like religion's not seen as that important and all this stuff.
You were part of Catholic Ireland, I would assume, just out of curiosity.
Or were you a Protestant?
You're a Catholic island, yeah.
Well, I have a unique kind of mix, because I actually knew a lot of Protestants, and I was talking to them, and I had very intimate, like, I had some very, very good friends there, and I guess I could see the differences in culture, but it wasn't, like, hugely distinct.
Like, there was definitely, being Irish was probably a bigger phenomenon there, because I was just, that's just more of a Northern thing.
What is the joke when someone says, you know, are you a Catholic or a Protestant in Ireland?
And they said, well, I'm an atheist, actually.
They said, so are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?
That's the type of stuff where you get a bomb underneath your pedal in your car if you're not careful.
So that was the story.
But as I said, I was growing up in that context, very much a modern...
I think everybody's gone through this a little bit.
And I was not aware of this value system.
I read Genealogy of Morals, and it was almost like it couldn't even hit me because I couldn't even peer that deep into myself, especially at that age.
And then as I got older, and I guess you could say the sort of cascading of red pills that happened in the last couple of years and all this, really threw up the crisis of culture in my face.
And it made me start to realize, like, sort of a criticism of Western culture started to land home.
Like, I really started to see anti-liberal perspectives and stuff like this.
And that was flipping on the head the whole story of my youth and stuff like this.
And this really started to open up a question of like, well, what does that mean?
What's going on?
And then I see now all sorts of fascinating problems showing up, like people flipping back to Christianity.
And it's like, well, Nietzsche's got a critique of Christianity.
What's going on there?
And all these facts.
Fascinating thing.
So I think it's a huge deal.
Very, very fascinating.
A lot of derivative consequences.
But if you have any thoughts on that, let's say...
Well, yeah.
I mean, I'm curious what you think about these things.
Because I think a lot of people on the right, they like to go back to some time when it all changed.
So your basic conservative...
In Europe or America, they might look back to some period, maybe the 1980s, I guess, or the 1950s.
That's the real classic one.
When everything worked.
99 out of 100 people were attending church every Sunday outside of the Village Atheist.
You turn 20-ish and you can work and get a job and get a wife and have 2.5 kids and get a gold watch after working at your corporation for 30 years and then die in bed.
This is just perfect.
There was patriotism.
Economic success, etc.
And these myths are kind of different in every country.
But I think deeper conservatives, they'll try to find some turning point.
There's a school that would actually include some Straussians, would include some Weaver and some other conservatives as well, of looking to Ockham.
Something happened in the Middle Ages.
But I would say with Nietzsche, I think he sees a major moral turn really in the ancient world.
And it's not that something like the Enlightenment wasn't profoundly important, or even things in the 20th century, you know, the pill, free access to condoms and abortion.
Of course, those are important and shattering in some way.
But I think he sees this Much longer term episode of morality and that the turning really occurred.
It occurred in Rome.
It occurred in the ancient world.
It might have even occurred with Plato.
I mean, he doesn't quite make it specific because of the type of writer he is.
But I think he sees this as kind of like a much longer term Episode that we're experiencing.
And it's not just something went bad 10 years ago with, I don't know, Barack Obama or Tony Blair or something, and now the world sucks or something.
It's something went back and something went wrong in the ancient world.
And I think that's a very bold claim.
But I think it's something true in a way.
And again, not that these things like...
You know, the French Enlightenment or the pill, not that these things are unimportant, of course they are, but they're also kind of all riding that bigger wave.
But what do you think about that notion?
I think this is absolutely correct.
I try to look at this stuff culturally.
Because it's one thing, again, to read this.
I would sit down there and I'd read Genealogy of Morals.
And I'd read this when I'm a young man.
And it would manifest around me.
And this stuff actively happened.
I lived through these ideas coming to life.
And that floors you, man.
Because this is one thing, you keep going back to him.
He is genuinely prophetic.
He predicts things to accuracies that just astounds you sometimes.
And so I'm living through this experience where, You know, like Jordan Peterson shows up in the mainstream culture and starts saying, God is dead and it's terrible.
I'm like, whoa, God is dead.
And that's what these people say.
What's going on here?
And you notice us going through these phenomenon.
And so...
What I wonder about it is that, like, is there an instance where this stuff has been baked into the cake for maybe centuries or at very least decades?
And then an awful lot of people nowadays are just sort of waking up to the effects.
So, like, the cause has long since happened.
And now people are waking up and the frog has been boiled, you know, and they're like, oh, my God, every, you know, there's transgender people.
A lot of people complaining about this stuff or, like, dating life has gone to shit, as you said, or the breakdown in culture in general.
And then at that point, they wake up and they're like, They say there's something wrong.
What's wrong?
And the natural human instinct.
I even think of this in a very mechanical down-to-earth analogy.
If you're a boxer and you go and you're fighting and then you lose a fight, you're going to go back to your coach and your coach is going to be like, well, let's go back to the drawing board.
What was working last time?
Stop being so creative.
Stop being so crazy.
This is sort of like the critique of progressivism.
Stop doing crazy shit.
Fuck science.
Science is obviously a terrible thing.
Fuck the future.
Fuck all this type of stuff.
Let's go back to 1950s or something like this.
Kind of revert back to something.
Or as you said, a lot of people are like, let's go back to the noughties where the conservatives are like, let's go back to the 2000s where we lived in the American Pie movies or something like this.
That was when everybody was cool.
This type of stuff.
Then some people are like the 50s.
But you know, even you could go to the 50s.
The 50s were futuristic and modernistic as hell.
They were absolutely wild.
And then again, go back to the 19th century.
This is a big one now with the return to the traditional architecture, which is really cool.
It is like, at the same time, is it congruent?
Is it authentic?
And then the return to even further back, you know, to the medieval Christianity or something like this.
I think the instinct, the thing I always analyze is the emotional instinct.
I try to approach this stuff psychologically.
So people are coming up against a problem, like a boxer.
Your Western culture is a boxer.
It's after losing.
It's fucked up.
And so it...
It reacts to that experience by thinking, what was the last thing that worked?
I want to go back to this.
And that could be anything inside of their heads.
It doesn't mean it's true.
They'll just almost sometimes just pick something sentimental to them.
Now, the kind of question is, is that the correct approach?
That's not how you think.
That's almost like the incorrect version of thinking.
That's reasoning in a conservative way, which is not wrong.
It can work.
But the correct thing is to say to yourself, assess the situation.
Ask yourself, what is the first principles of what is going wrong here?
And then decide an effective approach of action going forward.
And I think this is what Nietzsche achieves.
In some sense, Nietzsche does point back to Rome and Judea, for example.
But I'm not sure if it's the correct way to follow his line of thinking to say that we must pin the exact moment where...
Where everything went wrong.
It's more of a question of we existentially exist in our current situation.
There's a variety of different causal forces that led to these trends.
How can we assess our situation and plot out and understand the nature of our situation, accurately focus on the correct things we need to focus on, and then build a future out of that?
And I think this is what he was trying to do with the transvaluation of all values.
He was trying to look back and say, well, why do we have the culture we have?
Okay, obviously Judea conquered Rome spiritually.
Why do we have this culture right now?
Now, was that conquest correct?
If we could...
Actually do something quite similar to that and reevaluate what we're doing and create a new structure to our value system, change those subconscious first principles.
Would that set us on a path where we could overcome our situation and not be like crushed by, I guess you could call it modernity or something like this.
And so I see him as a very pragmatic, problem-orientated thinker, which actually turns him into some sense a futuristic thinker, a very optimistic thinker in some senses as well.
So yeah, that's sort of my take on it.
Yeah, well, I think there's another...
Aspect to this is that Nietzsche, he's not a reactionary in the sense that he wants to return to Rome and go crucify Christ again or something like that.
I mean, that's not what he's doing.
I think he feels like we had to go through this age.
Christianity and Christian morality is going to ultimately lead to the nihilism that He was experiencing in the mid to late 19th century Europe, but certainly the nihilism that we are experiencing in the 21st century.
But it also made us deep in a way.
There's no way out but through.
We have to pass through this age.
In order to get to the other side.
So any kind of reactionary thinking is rewinding a videotape and trying to get to the earlier point.
But if you're watching...
I don't know, what's a...
A tragic movie.
You know, you're watching The Godfather or something and expecting it to have a happy ending if you replay it.
It's not.
It's going to have the same.
You're going to go through this even if you could hop in a time machine and go backwards.
And so there, in a way, are great benefits to Christianity.
You know, like the blonde beast.
You know, image that he has in the genealogy, that is something that obviously Nietzsche admires.
There's just some aspect of Nietzsche that is a lot like Conan the Barbarian or, you know, something.
You know, it's just let's crush our enemies and dance to the lamentation of their women or whatever.
That is in there in Nietzsche.
But that's not the entire story.
I feel like he challenges us to kind of Will the past in a way.
To not think that the last 2,000 years has been a disaster and we just need to kind of LARP as Romans or LARP as medieval monks or LARP as 1950s businessmen.
We need to kind of will our past experience.
Follow it all the way through to its ultimate conclusion, which is going to be something terrifying and tumultuous.
It is going to be a world war the likes of which we can't imagine.
It is going to be the shattering of gender relations.
It is going to be people engaging in...
Casual nihilism that we see today, whether it's through deaths of despair and suicide or self-deconstruction.
We need to pass through this because we chose this at an important point.
You can't reverse this process.
This process is much stronger than you.
You need to embrace the process and ride it out until the end.
I think that's one of the more And I think it's...
and let's not forget who he is.
But on the other hand, I don't think...
Nietzsche is certainly not a conservative thinker.
And I think it's...
Maybe not quite correct to place him on the right.
He doesn't have a lot of those right-wing instincts.
He's not a progressive, of course, but he is a progressive in the sense of like, we, you know, these...
Cultural processes are in motion.
They have a logic of their own.
And we need to see it all the way through before there's going to be a cataclysm and a birth of something new.
And I think that's almost kind of the most challenging quality of Nietzsche is to say yes to this.
If there's one just unequivocal...
Injunction in Nietzsche's work, it is to say yes to life.
But that means saying yes to the last man on some level.
That means saying yes to transsexual...
Gender ideology lesbian drag shows.
Not that we need to like any of that stuff, but you have to say yes to it.
You have to understand where we are and embrace reality and understand that it is functioning under a logic that is going to lead to a cataclysm, but we must see this through.
There's no turning back.
You can't be like a crab and walk backwards.
You have to ride it out.
Yeah, I mean, I think that that appears most vividly in his endorsement of Dionysus, you know, which I think that he, in my view, he had a sort of imperfect understanding of this deity, but from his perspective, and it's also correct that he understands Dionysus as a god of decadence and a destroyer on some level.
And a lot of the things that, I mean, people criticize him for not having a system, but Part of his role was to destroy a system, namely Christianity.
And metaphysics as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think that in this way, he is kind of liberated not to have a system because he's, you know, it is a little bit of a kind of cultural critique.
He's taking a part of it, taking a system apart.
And he'll compare Christianity to, you know, he'll advocate for Dionysus, which...
He implicitly is advocating for a kind of decadence.
He'll advocate for Islam and for Buddha as well, but I don't think he was...
There's no sense that he was intending that those would be systems that Europeans would adopt, but only he uses them as kind of foils against Christianity to compare them sort of favorably to Christianity, but not to advocate for them.
As replacements for Christianity.
I mean, it's evident that his heart lies with Rome, if you read all of his works.
So, I mean, I think that, you know, that's one way of looking at it.
I mean, as it comes to, so a lot of what he's doing is destroying, right, in a kind of useful destruction.
He's kind of clearing a wreckage for something new.
You have to kind of destroy a temple to build one.
He would say something along that line.
You have to destroy an altar to erect a new one.
And I think that that was a huge part of what he was doing.
But he was also pointing to a new direction.
Maybe not as explicitly as we would have liked, but I think that there are reasons for that.
You know, some of them may have been kind of cultural and social and political reasons, but some of them also may have been because the vision was still sort of forming in his mind as well.
You know, he describes great thinkers as people who are not necessarily ever arriving, but who are grasping towards something that is greater than themselves.
You know, one thing I wanted to remark on, too, is that I think that one kind of positive note is that, you know, there's this famous quote where he talks about the shadow of the Buddha.
And this goes to your point about Christianity.
Like, we're still kind of in the wake or aftermath of Christianity.
Though God has died, there's still his shadow on the wall.
You know, in the metaphor he uses is of the Buddha who...
You know, the Buddhists show his shadow, you know, in a cave for centuries after he's died, because he's still present.
And he's using that metaphor to talk about God.
And there's a couple of points there.
I mean, in particular, he's talking about, I would say it's fair to say he's talking about a Jewish God, right?
So in some ways, it's a kind of, it's not necessarily, there's a kind of sorrow.
To the death of God.
And I think he's acknowledging that, definitely.
But there's also a kind of liberation to the death of God.
I think of the...
I've never analyzed this film in a close way and certainly not from a kind of REM lens.
So I don't know if there's any sort of ethnic subtext or messaging in the film.
But there's a film called Shawshank Redemption, which I saw a while ago.
But there's one scene, kind of the best scene in the film that I remember vividly.
And there's this old guy who's in the prison.
He's been in the prison his whole life.
And when he's finally released from the prison, it shows this very succinct, very sorrowful little montage.
But it just shows him...
You know, out in the real world, not knowing what to do with himself.
And he eventually and very quickly kills himself or commits suicide, having been released from prison.
And I think that that is a little bit of the sort of the despair that Christians feel, is that they've been released from the prison, but they kind of don't know what to do with themselves.
They don't, you know, they're...
Their whole world has changed.
It has become unfamiliar and has become something that they're not really adapted to, ultimately.
Anyways, but if any of you guys want to jump in.
Yeah.
Go ahead, Uber Boyle.
Sweet.
I've known you're all good.
You're all good.
You're all good.
I've loads of thoughts on this.
I'm leaping in here because I've got so much stuff flowing through my head.
So again, I think...
What I'd really love to stress is just in almost like a formal sense, like Nietzsche is a very good, I guess you could call him philosopher or thinker.
He's not...
Ever seduced by the desire to reason from analogy or reason from what's kind of socially common or false dialectics.
He's a first principle thinker.
And I think this is what gives him this destructive feel.
Because that's essentially what someone who can peer down into a first principle, that's what they're able to do.
They're able to realize that if the patterns they're looking at are incongruent, there's something more fundamental that they don't see that is actually driving the phenomenon.
And so they tried to dig down and find out what that is.
the famous example of this would be like Elon Musk's people telling him the story that like, you can't build a rocket ship this way or that way.
So Nietzsche really does this type of stuff where he understands that he's looking at something as complicated as culture and social relations.
And he's seeing all the stories that come pouring out of this stuff.
And he's trying to look for hard facts underneath it.
He's trying to look for things that are stable.
He's trying to penetrate down into it.
This just turns him to a monster.
Everything is worthy of being chipped away with hammers.
As people often say.
And so you see in response to this, people are very bad at this.
Very, very bad at this.
And you'll see this in false dialectics that pop up.
So for example, right now, I'm getting an awful lot of...
A lot of people are mad at me for posting that Christianity was the woke movement of Rome.
Now, I find it fascinating to see...
Objective, by the way.
And it's fascinating to see the way, like as I speak to Christians, it's fascinating to see the way they frame this in their head.
They immediately assume that I'm a neo-pagan, you know?
And they're like, oh, so you want to go back to Odin?
And it's like, I'm Irish.
And it's like, well, you want to go back to, I don't know, Jupiter?
And it's like, again, I'm like, I'm Irish.
I'm not sure that's, but maybe, you never know.
But nonetheless, they're putting me into this frame and they've got this dialectic already set up inside of their heads.
This leads then to this war of these two stories.
And so when you're engaging in this conversation, there's no actual thinking going on.
People are just sort of saying, well, the Bible says this, and then the LARP pagan, you LARP pagans don't know this, and then they're complaining in a different direction.
And what's fascinating is that I've noticed with these pagans and Christians, they're almost all traditionalists.
They almost all want to go back to the countryside and avoid modern society Ted Kaczynski style.
And so they've got all this unity, but they're fighting in this sort of superficial level.
And so it seems...
It seems like there's this big, big war going on, but actually underneath it, there's actually some very, very fundamental connection that might be even more important than ideology in and of itself.
And so Nietzsche does stuff like this.
He goes, he comes across phenomenon, he attacks them.
And I think the master-slave one is such a brilliant advantage of this, or an example of this.
And the way he approaches it does not easily fall into dialectical thinking.
He doesn't...
Certainly master morality is attractive and powerful and important, but...
As you said earlier, becoming Conan the Barbarian or something like this, he's not saying that.
I'm not sure he's really saying anything in terms of prescription stuff.
He's saying that these things need to be assessed.
He wants us to re-evaluate everything and judge what's going on.
But he would talk often about the virtues that slaves have.
In fact, some of the things that he puts as his cardinal virtues are things that you could say the slaves have the most, such as the ability to turn any disadvantage to your advantage.
You obviously have to be in a bad position to learn this type of virtue.
I spoke, for example, of Christian Nietzsche, because I think this is really, again, if you're a first principle thinker, you don't fall into dialectics.
You don't fall into this type of stuff.
Instead, you go down and you discover what is fundamental.
And all these first principles essentially turn into tools.
And so if we can assess master morality and see that the masters are healthy, strong, beautiful representations of life at its apex and its peak, but they've got problems like naivety, they've got problems like lack of subtlety or something like this, we can actually assess that objectively and be like, all right, I see the good and the bad there.
And you can flip over to the slaves and you can be like, look, they're resentful, they're botched, they're ugly, they're decrepit, but at the same time, they're crafty.
They've got depth, as you said.
And so we could actually...
We could actually take a mix of these if we so wanted to, and we could develop a very interesting type of person.
Imagine a brave, you know, visionary, forward thinker who had craftiness and depth of thinking that they could penetrate into long distances in the future.
Now what you're doing is you're creating an original mix that hasn't really been seen before in the way that we might understand it.
And of course, then Christian Nietzsche, as you brought up at the very start, is very much related to this, I feel, because he says many times that science, which he loves science, Comes out of Christian ability to cook the blonde beast into the monastery where he becomes a book nerd and he's forced to spur over all these Hebrew prophecies and all this blather and all this stuff.
But this actually does something to his brain where he develops this penetrative unity of focus and culturalizes him or prepares him for...
He turns him into a certain species, I guess you could say, that we now have as a raw material.
And Nietzsche very much in like an affirmative thinker says, this raw material is here.
Whatever it is, it's here.
We've got to use it.
Maybe we've got a bit of slave morality in us.
How can we turn that into something?
How can we get the best out of that?
Maybe we need to develop some more master morality.
Maybe we can bring all these types of things out of.
But he's very much like, you know, use what's on your plate.
Well, that's really what it comes down to, the most important thing.
So I think that's a big, big stress.
And that transforms an awful lot of the way, like, again, it's a thinking skill.
It transforms an awful lot of the way you react to the craziness of our moment, where you start to realize that almost everything you'll get presented is a false dialectic or an emotional dialectic.
Oh, react.
Become a reactionary.
Go join Charlie Kirk's thing or whatever it is.
Or go and become a Christian reactionary.
Or become a fucking...
Running around pretending you're Achilles or something like this.
It's like, look, none of those things are authentic ways to engage your reality right now.
It's instead a question of like, how do we actually achieve an embrace of our reality, affirm it, use it, and spin it to our advantage?
I think that would be the closest you could get to something prescriptive from the man.
Yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Do you want to talk about, do you want to go into a little more of Dionysus?
Because, I mean, Nietzsche, he famously begins his career with the Apollo and Dionysus dialectic in The Birth of Tragedy of Dionysianism as a kind of undifferentiated all,
this falling into losing your identity and personality and falling into that That rhythm of the mass.
He talked about the music of Wagner and what he imagined music in the Greek theater might have been.
I think we can all imagine attending a rock concert while drinking, of course.
And there gets to be a point where everyone in that stadium or everyone even in that smaller concert venue, whether it's 100 people or 40,000, you're all singing the same words together.
You're all moving together in one room.
And you do, at some point, lose yourself and lose your own identity.
And you're kind of part of this group.
And on some level...
Nothing matters.
You lose your inhibitions.
You lose your pretensions.
Reason is kind of irrelevant in this moment.
I think it is a real Dionysian experience.
And this can be contrasted to the Apollonian, which he associated with, say, architecture or sculpture.
This is something that is meant to last a thousand years or more.
This is something that you see an individual in All his glory that, you know, you think of Michelangelo's David or something, this concentrated, skeptical, maybe even, look of David, the fully formed...
The masculinity of David standing there provocatively, having faced Goliath, but ready to face the world.
And also that beauty of David's form is something that is timeless and inspiring.
And so he kind of has these two things.
He also infamously signed a letter while he was suffering at the end of his life, was beginning to sign letters to Jacob Burkhardt and so on, signing them Dionysus.
He almost fell into that undifferentiated state.
But as you say, Mark, I think we should take what he's saying You know, getting at that kind of emotional quality of what Nietzsche is getting at with Dionysus, but also take it quite literally in the sense of who was this god exactly?
Who was this god that Nietzsche had this, you know, who was kind of tantalizing for him and seductive for him, someone who he thought was a...
Also a kind of modern God, something that would express the decadence of his time.
But then also taking that God seriously, what does it mean for Nietzsche, for us looking at him critically?
What does it mean for us that Nietzsche embraced that God?
He had many nice things to say about Jesus, but he didn't embrace Jesus.
He didn't also embrace exactly Apollo, although that is obviously a...
Extremely important figure for him.
He didn't quite embrace Zeus.
He didn't embrace Odin.
He makes some passing comments about Germanic paganism and Wagner and so on, but kind of throws that out by the end of his career.
So what does it mean for us that Nietzsche saw Dionysus as a central figure in his life?
Yeah, again, I would say that on some level he's presenting a foil for Christianity.
We can see Jesus and Bacchus or Dionysus as antipodes.
We also can see Apollo and Dionysus as antipodes.
Though between Christ and Bacchus, the two figures are actually more similar than people realize.
And Bacchus ultimately is a kind of A predecessor or a inspiration for Jesus.
Jesus is a kind of more, a kind of sublimated version of Bacchus turned into a kind of piety cult, as it were, a sort of crypto-Bacchus, you might say.
But I think that, and I don't know that he really made, was thinking of it in those terms.
I think he writes at one point that I think it's in will to power.
So these are almost kind of more notes than things that he really kind of established clearly in his mind or thought of as very strongly valid ideas.
But he says that Jesus is the opposite of Bacchus, right?
And in a way, that's correct.
I mean, I think we can see a kind of Caducean relationship between Christianity.
And the decadence of Hollywood, for example, or the decadence of liberal society or liberal culture.
But I think on a truer level, I think that both gods ultimately fall into the category of Semitic gods.
And I think this is what the sort of mythographers were pointing to in the ancient world.
Tacitus makes an error where he, you know, this might be the origin of Nietzsche's, you know, and I think error might be a strong word.
I mean, we, you know, just so Uber Boyo doesn't get mad at us, we are also very referential of Nietzsche.
Oh, yeah, sure.
I think I'll commit many more sins than you.
All right, all right, all right.
Well, just, you know, I mean, we, because, you know, when we disagree with Nietzsche, we disagree with him kind of in a, A careful way, because we know how powerful and insightful a thinker he is.
So we kind of check our bases or think about it carefully, because he's usually right.
I mean, he gets a lot right, obviously.
But yeah, he seems to be...
So the mythographers were saying that he was kind of equivalent of Yahweh in the ancient world.
And, you know, Israeli archaeologists are sort of admitting this now, interestingly enough.
Tacitus looks at the cult of Judaism and looks at the cult of Bacchus and says, these are not the same cult.
One is a cult of merriment, happiness, and celebration.
And this was at a certain point.
Point in the development of the cult of Bacchus, right?
Where probably, maybe to some extent, it had become sort of domesticated at that point.
But it's a cult of happiness, celebration.
And the cult of Judaism is this sort of dour cult where you have these serious brooding rabbis.
And so they are dissimilar.
They're not the same cult.
And he was making that remark in reaction to...
You know, other thinkers and historians and mythographers that were saying that they were the same cult.
And I think that what he was missing ultimately is, I think, what a lot of sort of conservatives miss, too, is that there's a kind of duality to Judaism where there's a kind of crypto-pagan aspect of Judaism, which we see, for example, in the secular world, whether in Hollywood or finance or, you know, Jews basically.
Pursuing ethnic interests outside of, you know, an explicit identification as Jewish, as just sort of members of the society, as important players in Hollywood, dominating Hollywood, for example.
That also is ultimately kind of expression of Judaism and an expression of the sort of duality of Judaism and a cryptic aspect of Judaism that I think Tacitus was missing.
But to Nietzsche, I think that Nietzsche, so in other words, I think that the figure that would have been better for Nietzsche's metaphor, though I guess somewhat more obscure and not a god, not obscure, not more obscure, but not a god, would be the figure of Orpheus.
I think Orpheus represents the decadent Arian, for lack of a better word, whereas Bacchus represents a...
A kind of proto-Jewish element, I would argue, that is interested in bringing decadence to an Aryan group, right?
So, you know, we see that with the Athenian theater, for example, is called the Dionysia, and it was explicitly a celebration of Dionysus.
So in the Dionysia, we see a formation very similar to Hollywood, for example, right?
So we see a kind of reoccurrence of the phenomena in the modern world.
And so that's my reading of it.
And I don't think that, but I think that we nevertheless understand, we get his point, right?
So when he's referring to, and it's kind of a nerdy academic point that I'm making maybe, that maybe he's talking about Apollo versus Orpheus might be a better way of like, if we're going to be kind of specific about our metaphors here and the myth.
But I think it is important, though, that we understand this kind of duality to Jews.
It's sort of illustrated as well, I think, vividly in the Athenian theater with these masks that they wore, like the mask of comedy, for example, versus the mask of tragedy, that ultimately these are kind of masks developed to produce effects in audiences.
To develop feelings in audiences, whether to demoralize or to distract or whatever the case may be.
Now, of course, I'm not saying the Dionysian was all a sort of proto-Jewish phenomenon in the sense that there were evidently Aryan playwrights that were actually very critical of the Dionysia itself for making fun of it and that sort of thing in the comedic vein.
But that it was ultimately something like Hollywood and was ultimately something foreign to Greek society in, you know, in the way that some of the philosophy ultimately had a kind of, you know, Persian sense, Persian origin or Egyptian origin through, you know, guys like Socrates or Heraclitus.
You know what I'm saying?
So there was a kind of foreign, but that, I mean, that's just sort of the Greek, Greek was a kind of, was mixed in that regard, that there was definitely both, you know.
Strong Aryan and Semitic elements, and the culture that we see ends up showing a kind of dialogue between those forces or elements.
I don't know what else you want me to say.
I guess what I was getting at is that, are there problems, or maybe put a different way, are there revelations by the fact that Nietzsche identified with Dionysus?
In the sense that, you know, what does that say about him, but also what does that mean for us looking back at him now?
Like, he's identifying with, I mean, you can see in, you know, the bakke by Euripides, it is a foreign, quite dangerous element that is inserting itself into Greek society.
And so what does it mean?
That Nietzsche chose that.
And then also, Nietzsche might have seen Dionysus and Christ as oppositional in a basic sense of stodgy, puritanical Christians who are terrified of seeing a lady's legs or something like that.
You know, Dionysus, who's, you know, drink up and, you know, let's take part in an orgy or something, you know, on just a basic, there's a basic distinction that you can easily make.
But I think that distinction is, I think he might have very well have been missing something.
I mean, it is Dionysus who is this god of rebirth, much as Christ is.
It is Dionysus who is a god of wine, and as you've You know, provocatively pointed out, it is Jesus who turns water into wine, it's Jesus who is the vine, you know, among other metaphors that he's equated with.
There's this interesting connection between Christ and Dionysus that maybe, and I would stress maybe Nietzsche missed, but you can take this on a...
Different level as well in the sense of Nietzsche's own identification with Dionysus and his own identification of himself with Christ as the Antichrist, but, you know, an Antichrist is still a Christ in a way.
And that he imagined much as Jesus did and much as Dionysus kind of created in a way, he imagined himself living in this degenerating world where, you know, Again, the 1870s probably look blissful from our perspective, but nevertheless, he was envisioning coming world wars.
He saw cultural decadence.
He saw socialism as a kind of new expression, almost a brutal one of Christian morality, of dragging everyone down to one level.
And there was going to be a kind of rebirth, a superman.
That would come out of this.
And so there's something we can see in Nietzsche of his equating of himself with Dionysus.
So on the one hand, it's kind of problematic that he chose Dionysus in the sense of you're ultimately choosing this god of chaos and destruction.
But then it's also kind of revealing about the The actual nature of Nietzsche himself, in the sense that he imagined himself as a Dionysus, and he imagined himself as Christ.
He imagined himself as inaugurating the end, or as being a figure that would be rebirthed after the end, and so on.
Do you follow me on that?
Yeah, yeah.
It is interesting, and because he's such a deep and analytical thinker, And because he knows people so well, and probably this is the fate of every person, is that the things that what he doesn't realize about himself, he reveals unconsciously, right?
And so in other words, I don't know that he would necessarily even have understood himself as basically kind of...
Because I think that ultimately, you know, Nietzsche...
You know, he's part of this process of revealing sort of the identity of Jesus Christ himself, that he is, you know, he is this God who is a sort of composite God of these previous dying and rising gods and borrows from other myths as well, probably even including myths, you know, that Apollo was involved in.
You know, for instance, there's one myth where Before Apollo is born at Delos, Leto has to go around and she's being rejected by everyone and doesn't have a place to sort of give birth.
It's very kind of reminiscent of the birth of Jesus, for example, right?
But of course, Apollo and Jesus are different gods, and Apollo is not one of these dying and rising gods.
He's understood as an immortal celestial god.
So there's obviously influences.
From the ancient world that are creating Jesus as a composite character, that are inspiring Jesus.
And I think it is just a kind of, it's almost like a sort of, you know, the fact that Nietzsche, who is railing against Christianity, adopts Bacchus as an avatar, whereas you could argue that Bacchus might be the most influential inspiration for Jesus.
Adonis is another figure that you could argue.
This is the case.
But in terms of the symbolism, you could make the argument that it is Bacchus.
And in fact, there's imagery in the Hebrew Bible that seemed to compare David very closely with Bacchus.
He's got the donkey under a vine, and he's got the wine-stained shirt.
And what's kind of implied with the metaphor is that...
He's using decadence to sort of dominate the donkey, and the donkey is the Gentile or the non-Jew, for example, David, you know, King David.
So, and donkey also is a symbol that's closely associated with Bacchus.
He's riding the donkey, and Vulcan as well is also closely associated, as is Jesus.
Jesus rides the donkey in his triumphal procession.
But in any case, so it is a kind of...
It is a kind of profound thing that maybe he didn't, he himself didn't realize how profound his association with Bacchus was, but it's almost as though he wanted to worship the kind of revealed Christ or the revealed Jesus in his real or in a kind of truer form, as it were.
You know what I'm saying?
To get to your idea that there is something Christian about it.
You know what I mean?
That he is ultimately seeking the true Christ or whatever, you know, in the Protestant manner of like trying to really figure this shit out.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
No, I think he is his son of a pastor.
Yeah, but again, I think part of his attraction to Bacchus is that he sees Bacchus as a foil.
Vis-a-vis Christendom.
And I think that that is a major, at least that would be, I would guess that that's part of his conscious attraction to the figure of Bacchus.
You know, he understands Bacchus ultimately, I mean, he doesn't deny the sort of subversiveness in Bacchus.
And he sees it as a kind of destroyer.
But because he sees his most important task, it would seem, is to be the Antichrist as he were, as it were now.
You know.
Go ahead, Steph.
No, I have a stack of thoughts on this, Jen, so I might take a couple of minutes.
I hope I pull out the fucking popcorn.
There's some really good stuff that you brought up, and I think because some of the things I was reading from Mark about Apollo and things like this, and many of the things, Richard, you were saying itself, I think are just so fascinating to explore.
So I've actually written out a couple of notes here.
Like one thing I'd love to go into is Jung, and Jung's actually psycho.
Analysis of Nietzsche, if you will.
He talks about this specifically, much different than the ways that you would see it.
And then, of course, the relationship between Apollo and Dionysus.
But I'd actually like to start with the thing that you brought up.
I think it was Richard.
Mark said it as well.
But anyway, about essentially the Dionysian theater as, in some sense, a sort of Hollywood.
Because this...
It's such a big idea, and it comes with another side of Nietzsche, another big idea from Nietzsche that is, again, one of his most challenging ideas and one of his most shocking ones, but actually one of his wisest, in that the truth is not that valuable to life.
The truth and life are not necessarily related at all.
To know the truth...
In some sense can be demoralizing.
It can make you depressed, you know?
It's like you see an awful lot of guys in the red pill space and they're learning maybe dark truths about women's nature and you actually notice they become very jaded with women as a consequence and they can't actually set up relationships because they're so quote unquote red pill, they become black pill, this type of phenomenon.
Now this actually scales in a profound way.
You see even these funny scientific experiments they do with computer programs where they code one little AI towards life, life goals or life.
References or something like this and another one towards the reality of the simulation it's in and the one that is seeking reality always dies compared to the one that's seeking just success in a fundamental level.
Now this is not a trivial idea at all.
Not a trivial idea at all.
And Nietzsche goes in and studies mythology.
This is actually what Birth of Tragedy was all about.
He was looking at this whole concept of like...
What is the purpose of stories?
Why do we bullshit ourselves with crazy stories about God and heaven and stuff like this?
Why do these stories matter?
And he sort of finds out that these stories are actually the most important thing of everything.
It's not a good analogy, but it's like a donkey needing a carrot in order to lead him forward.
If we knew the truth of our situation, we'd all become nihilists, we'd all become pessimists, and we'd all just blow our fucking brains out and stop.
Nietzsche is much more like, we need a narrative.
We need fairy tales.
We need stories in order to keep us moralized and motivated.
Stories lead to life, lead to success.
And that's more valuable than truth.
That's a big idea.
And so the whole purpose, he looks at the infrastructure, because he was hanging out with Wagner and all that.
And they were creating the mythos that like inspired the German revival movement and eventually like the Nazis.
They all love this because Wagner captures this very Germanic energy.
He captures this big sort of epic Lord of the Rings energy, you know?
And it really just, when you listen to Wagner, like you get hyped, man.
There's something very European.
There's something very pagan about it, very European about it.
And he's bringing up like this deep, deep energy inside of you and keeping you excited and getting you filled with this ambitious.
Otherworldly fantasy feeling.
It's so amazing when you listen to them.
It's the same feeling you get out of Lord of the Rings.
And you'll go online and you'll find so many of these traditionalist accounts and all this.
And they absolutely love Lord of the Rings.
They're like, Lord of the Rings is an identity.
It's religious for them and stuff like this.
And it's because this is the effect that these type of things can have.
In some sense, Lord of the Rings is completely made up, but it probably keeps these guys out of depression and being jaded at the modern world more than anything else, more than the truth.
It's amazing.
And so the purpose of...
The myth that we tell ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves, is to serve life.
This is a big deal, a really big deal, and the responsibility of artists is to achieve this.
Now, I guess if people want to get a very relevant version of this, you could make a very strong argument that the problem with our culture, and this is the type of thing Nietzsche was critiquing, the mythos that exists in our culture, is that it is in some sense...
Anti-life on its predicates.
Now, I think you could say that perhaps there's people who are running the culture that have resentment directed towards Western people.
And as a consequence, the narratives they put out are fundamentally demoralizing.
Of course, Nietzsche said that one of the most demoralizing feelings of all is guilt.
And so what we see is all these stories about how we're these demons, we're these monsters.
We should relinquish our civilization towards the victims of our struggle in the path.
I get told this stuff all the time, even though I'm Irish.
I never get to cash in on this.
This is kind of my pitch.
Where do I get the reparations, guys?
What's going on?
Nonetheless, there's this...
Anti-life energy that's demoralizing.
And so think about what type of effect that has on a culture.
You have a mythos, a story that demoralizes, that makes you not believe in yourself and not believe in life and not believe in your right to create and your right to reach towards the future or your impetus, I should say, to reach towards the future.
It stamps that out.
Nietzsche would say it's the castration that a slave morality places upon a creative master.
What you see there is something very terrible because that leads to less success, less life.
And this is very, very damaging.
And so the mythos is essential.
And this, then you go back to ancient Athens and you look at Hollywood and you see that the way that people related with these myths, there's many, many complicated things.
I guess one whole tangent that I'm not going to go down for the moment is to ask a question of like, well, what type of mythos could we construct that is moralizing, that is supporting life, that is giving us a...
Prominent and solid identity.
And this is why I found some of Mark's ideas really powerful.
Like the assertions about Apollo, very, very fascinating, because it's actually that precise thing.
It's like, all right, how do we empower an affirming identity as opposed to a negating identity, an anti-life identity, a guilt identity?
Now, another side of this, because I want to go into the Jesus question and the Dionysus question, is...
Nietzsche was thinking about these ancient Athenian theatres and stuff like this and he was getting a little bit funky with this because I guess they might have even grown out of human sacrifice cults, if you think about it.
And what was actually happening with these is that this is the famous mechanism of the scapegoat that people like Girard would talk about.
There is an experience that we all have where we have trauma, you know, like bad things happen to us.
We stub our toes or, you know, Mark makes fun of me or I make fun of him or something like this.
And we all get jaded and someone beeps at me in my car.
And it's sort of like the community builds up this like storage of trauma.
And there's a big problem where that trauma in some sense needs to be released.
That trauma needs to be expressed.
And this is almost like our jadedness and our depression and our feeling of pessimism about life.
You could even say maybe it's a little bit of the trauma.
Truth sneaking in, if you want to get a little bit savvy.
But nonetheless, that trauma, actually, if too much of it gathers and it reaches a critical mass, it becomes demoralizing.
It stops the community being able to function and shit just goes fucking crazy.
It's like all the gods come up to play and people start getting angry at each other and all these type of things.
And so art was, in some sense, functionally put into place.
Theater, drama, ritual most importantly.
This is why I brought in the idea of human sacrifice.
I'm not saying we should go back to that, but these sort of evolved out of this.
And what was happening is that these rituals, these shared experiences, allowed very interesting things to happen, such as, for example, even in the medieval times, a public execution would be a way that everybody could project that hate upon the guy getting executed, and it's almost like a catharsis, you know?
And in some sense, it's a tragedy ritual play that the ancient Greeks would have been experiencing when they're doing this.
Of course, they would have acted out with the stories of Dionysus, because it's a very, very similar thing.
And this catharsis, as Aristotle noticed, is extremely important.
Extremely important because it allows people to get rid of bad feelings and then go and pursue life with an optimistic attitude.
It's almost like the opposite of a hangover.
You get fucked up on depression and tragedy by watching these plays or participating in these rituals.
And then you go out and you have a new lease for life when you go out and take on the world.
And that's actually exactly the function you'd expect out of something like this.
This is what you want to achieve with these things.
And so Dionysus...
I know Mark has different technical definitions.
I'm going with this sort of, I guess you could say Jungian or comparative mythology, or maybe even I would say a Nietzschean definition, where the purpose of these was to evoke that tragic feeling out of people so that it would lead to a...
pro-life or an affirmative state of thinking because they'd watch something tragic happen and they'd achieve catharsis.
And Jesus was exactly a Dionysian experience.
Absolutely.
A hundred percent.
Jesus is a ritualized myth of human sacrifice.
And you sympathize with Jesus because he's the guy getting killed.
And this gives you all this huge catharsis, like coming up on with passion of the Christ.
Look how much people love that movie.
And it's precisely for these reasons.
That's the feeling it evokes out of you.
It's very, very moving to see this, to see the story of Christ and incredibly powerful story.
And Dionysus was It was the death of the hero, the death of the life in some sense, but then it is born again at the end and it's this kind of victory.
No, I think M. Nietzsche definitely was oscillating between the crucified and Dionysus throughout his life, especially at the end.
But on a very specific reason, I've been thinking about this an awful lot.
I think Jesus, he worried, was...
Would lead to guilt, first of all, because the crucifixion is an accusation of guilt upon the world.
But second of all, he thought it was anti-life in its predicates because essentially Jesus dies because he doesn't have enough power.
He has too little power.
He's not able to overcome his circumstance.
Whereas Dionysus specifically is so powerful and so attractive that he draws all the babes.
All the babes come running in and they want to eat him alive.
And so it's almost like that's the difference as far as I can see, that Dionysus is too juicy.
Too vital, too full of energy that he gets destroyed.
Life actually turns on life because it's almost like there's too much energy swelling up there.
And there's something incredibly fascinating about that.
And then Jesus on the flip side is lacking power.
And what I see in this is a juxtaposition, very similar to the master-slave thing, which is the consciousness of Christ is a very human feeling.
The feeling of not having enough power, being a victim to circumstance, and essentially being a victim.
It's the perspective of the victim.
Now, Nietzsche worries that that's an incredibly demoralizing way to think.
And he sees that the consciousness of Dionysus is the kind of delusional God power.
Like, you're so strong, you're so vital.
The warrior is an absolute apex.
The artist, when he's in his shaman...
Trance and stuff like this.
This is an overflow, an expression, sex, orgasm.
He brings all these phenomenon related to this.
And this is, in some sense, heroic and an apex of life and a peak of power.
And he was all about the kind of flow and power and the peak of energy.
The Ubermensch is, in some sense, an expression of that energy.
Actually manifesting itself tangibly in the world.
And so I think he had a big conflict where he was a human.
He had many, many victim flaws.
His health was not powerful enough to overcome things like his problems.
He was not powerful enough to lose Simone to marry him, you know?
So he felt like a victim, like we all do loads.
And that makes you feel, it makes you understand Christ and get wrapped up in that.
But there's also a part of us that wants to go beyond that.
We don't want to be all too human.
We want to be beyond that.
And actually, there's something very important about that as well.
We've been able to embrace that ascendant energy.
And so that's the sort of affirmative Dionysian spin, the overflow of powers, we'd often say.
And again, to try to wrap this all into some sense, it actually does bring up quite interesting questions about Christianity.
His criticism that if we decorate ourselves with these myths of this guilt-inducing crucifixion at the start of the world, that's predicated on...
It's actually a little bit demoralizing when you think about it.
And if we could see the reformation of new mythologies, new stories that had this affirmative Dionysian energy, which he's categorizing as something separate, maybe that would be the thing we need for the future, like stories that lead us towards life.
And he worries that we'll go through this phase where all the stories will break down, the truth will sneak in.
We'll all become demoralized, spin into anti-life spirals, and then there'll have to be some type of victory over this.
And I think part of him might have been looking at Wagner as an example of a type of character who could produce this new style and really get a cultural movement going.
Now, I have loads of other things I want to say, but maybe I'll just leave it there if there's any ponderings or something like that.
No, this is great stuff.
I would encourage you to keep going.
Oh, God.
All right.
Here we go.
Give me one second.
Well, I would just say, I mean, real quick on just what you said just right then.
Yeah, I mean, I think Wagner in Nietzsche's early career was this...
Notion of a new culture that is coming out of Germany.
And it's going to be a nationalist culture.
It's going to be a specifically, uniquely German culture.
And I think he had this dissatisfaction with Wagner as time went on.
And I think some of that came due to the kind of nihilistic quality of Wagner itself.
I mean, the ring does ultimately end with the end of the world.
And he kind of saw it as an expression of decadence and not really as an overcoming of decadence or as a way out.
And I think with Zarathustra, there's an attempt to, you know, is Zarathustra really giving us all these moralizing myths?
I mean, there are things like the...
You know, the camel and the child and the lion.
And I think in those ways, it is rather evocative and moralizing.
But I would say that book is not particularly moralizing.
In many ways, it's a study and failure of Zarathustra being rejected by the world, of Zarathustra dealing with his acolytes and how he can Relate to them and what their task is in the world, even overcoming him.
Maybe I wouldn't say demoralizing, but it's a curious kind of equivocal work.
It's a study in failure just as much as it is a study in triumph.
And I think Nietzsche felt that he had to give us that story.
Discussion of where we are right now, this kind of failure that we're experiencing, our inability to know what's behind the corner or over the horizon.
And I do think he kind of leaves that open.
I mean, what exactly the real moralizing myths are going to be.
In the new world is something that I don't think Nietzsche can really express yet.
It's something that is going to be the product of the child.
It's going to be the product of this, in some ways, kind of naive, playful being that's going to come after the end of our civilization, who's going to recreate a myth that we never even imagined, who's not going to try to...
Revive paganism or revive Germanism or medieval Catholicism or whatever.
But this child is going to tell a story that we can't even imagine at this point.
I think that's a really good observation.
I really, really like that because I get that same feeling as well.
On both counts, first of all, Wagner, he is...
There's many reasons I guess he's jaded with it.
One of them is that Wagner's reconstructing this very, very Germanic mythos.
And I guess part of Nietzsche's wondering, I guess maybe this is more of his political side, but should it be some type of pan-European thing?
We don't understand that now, I guess, as Western culture.
Was he looking for something broader and bigger?
And then Wagner was slipping back into Christianity as well and stuff like this.
And Nietzsche didn't really like that stuff.
I'll get into that maybe with the Jungian take on all that because it is an interesting one, a little bit tangential.
But then the Zarathustra is a fantastic point as well because Zarathustra, Nietzsche often talks about how much he likes the likes of Isaiah and the prophets and all these.
But he calls them satirical writers.
He kind of points out that they're tongue-in-cheek predictors of the future.
And they have a very interesting, he sees them as an interesting archetype.
And I think he understands that that's what he is.
He realizes he's not Christ.
He realizes he's not the Ubermensch.
He realizes he's Isaiah and he's going to get sawn in half and he may as well make peace about that.
And so Zarathustra has that energy where I find this is one of the most compelling parts of Zarathustra.
Zarathustra is futuristic.
He describes this big idea, again, related to that idea of collective trauma.
Mankind is this giant ball or a cloud.
This cloud of black trauma and pain.
This overflow of negativity all flowing up.
And this cloud is going to morph together and catalyze into a storm.
And then there's going to be a strike of lightning.
And that lightning will be the Ubermensch.
And I am here to collect the profits of the lightning.
And I am the first of these profits of the lightning.
But the lightning will be the Ubermensch.
Talking about this future, exactly as you're describing, where there's going to be some great creative process in the future, but he's merely the herald.
He's merely the bridge towards this.
He's all these types of things, which again, I think flows back into something that I wanted to talk about with Dionysus and all those, which is he's constantly using this terminology of the down-going and the up-going.
That's the whole motif, especially the start of Zarathustra.
And this is sort of related to many of the things that Marx says, and I'd wonder about this because Marx looks at Dionysus in a slightly different way.
I would see it as, all right, so Nietzsche's coming in and he's in some sense describing Dionysus as an entropic, dissolving...
Crazy energy.
Like it's just pure ball of energy that just, it's like a vortex that sucks everything into it.
And it's a destroyer, like Shiva the destroyer in some sense.
And I could definitely see how that could be weaponized into something subversive.
And Apollo is juxtaposed as this crystalline, ascendant, angelic energy that is frozen and solid.
Obviously, Christ was both.
Christ began as this dissolver of the old world, the Dionysian energy that swept over Rome and chewed it up and spat it back out with a new face and a new shape.
But after that, Christ rose up and became Apollonian.
He became a representative of order and stability and these types of things.
And I'm not sure if you'd agree with that, but I think that's very, very interesting because that's...
The relationship of a very important force, the super symbol of the culture in relationship to the era.
So Rome going through the decline is Rome going through the God is dead period.
You know, the Jupiter and all that is dead.
In comes this chaotic Dionysian energy from the East, ironically, and chews it all up, transforms it, morphs it.
And then the down going is achieved.
And once the down going is achieved, the energy shifts and the up going begins.
So everything at the, it's like...
A body dies and it has to dissolve before it can be born as something new again.
The phoenix has to rise again.
And it's almost like this type of thing where Dionysus comes in, destroys everything.
And then when the up-going begins, that's Apollo's start.
And I'm wondering, we look at our situation, we would love a stable culture.
I think this is really the thing to get at.
We would love a stable culture of moralizing myths to be around us, but that's just not our situation.
Realistically, we're actually in the middle of the Dionysian period.
And Nietzsche himself said he saw a couple of hundred years of nihilism that we'd be schizophrenically trying to make our way through.
Now, in the end, something Apollonian will rise that will create some type of stable order for some period of time.
But in between that is going to be pure.
It's almost like, you know...
You're in a trench in World War I. You can't trust your ears and your eyes anymore because you've got tightness because they've been blown out and you can't see anything.
So you have to go on the floor and feel around with your hands and sniff.
You turn a bit more Dionysian into the animal.
You have to go a bit back into your instincts, trust your gut to make it through.
And so this is sort of the era we're going through.
Dionysus, gut instinct, the destroyer is actually very useful in this phase.
And it's also the predicate energy that will set up the direction we want to go.
So as you pointed out, like rock concerts, all these type of things, the dissolution to fall into that type of energetic space has many fascinating effects.
But again, I said a lot there.
Maybe if you have any comments on that before I try to bring some order to all these things I'm pointing out.
No, I'm enjoying it.
I mean, Mark, do you want to jump in?
Yeah.
So, yeah, the only thing I would say is that I think that, and I do this in my work as well, is that I think that we should look critically at this idea of...
Of tragedy and catharsis.
Nice.
Because we see it, we of course see tragedy and catharsis in films in Hollywood today.
And I'll think of one example that's popular on the alt-right or the dissident right is Blade Runner, both the first film and the sequel.
And you'll see people memeing this a lot.
And there's that famous scene with Rutger Hauer.
um on the roof of the building with Harrison Ford and you know he's about to expire the replicants about to expire and um the subtext of that scene whether intended or not and we we argue you know Richard and I have analyzed these films we argue that there is a kind of intended subtext there But the subtext is kind of the death of Aryan man,
right, in this sort of urban hellscape that's become Chinatown or in San Francisco or wherever it is vaguely, this modern urban hellscape.
And that Rucker Howard represents that.
And whether or not that's the intention, it kind of, you know, it serves that function because we have this, you know, this very vivid blonde archetype.
And we have the kind of theme of decadence and degeneracy all around him.
But this, it is demoralizing.
Ultimately, it is demoralizing.
And you'll see, you know, you'll also see these memes in the DR where people will have, what's the name of that, Ryan Gosling, who starred in the, you know, the season.
He was a Blade Runner as well, wasn't he?
Yeah, he was in the sequel.
He was in Blade Runner 2049.
And he's sort of this Wayne, sorrowful character who doesn't have a real girlfriend.
I guess he's not real himself.
He's a replicant.
But his girlfriend is this hologram.
And there's a lot of memes in the VR about this character.
And it's very kind of Wayne and sad and depressive.
Ultimately, in my view, it's not healthy, right?
So I think that there is an element of tragedy that is not good or not useful.
And Apollo, in contrast, is understood as kind of the sunny god, right?
So the idea is that you couldn't, you had to approach his idols smiling or being sunny, being happy, right?
He's the diurnal god of clear skies and this sort of thing and happiness.
Whereas, you know, this element you're talking about in tragedy, you're correct.
I mean, the story of Christ is very much a tragedy.
And it emerges, you know, from those elements with the god Bacchus in the Dionysia, the theater, which had this tradition of tragedy that Aristotle analyzes.
And I think that, you know, Aristotle, I think that he feels an obligation because there's this ancient...
You know, at the point that he's analyzing tragedy, the golden age of tragedy in Athenian theater has already passed by 200 years or something.
But it represents this sort of rich and proud tradition in Athens that people are very proud of, right?
So I think that he feels a way of...
I think he's looking at it as something of a great sort of Athenian tradition, and he's defending it.
So in ways, he's sort of rationalizing.
He's rationalizing, but he's also trying to figure out what purpose did it serve, because it must have served a beneficial purpose in his mind.
But I don't know if that assumption can be made necessarily.
To give Dionysus his credit, the thing that we can love and appreciate about the Dionysia in the Athenian theater is that it was a religion that was wildly creative.
I mean, if we understand that as religion, it's a religion that encouraged artists to be creative and to create, you know, I mean, they were working within a known mythos with all their characters, but they were also inventing within that mythos.
And so that's something that I think is a very good or positive thing that we can look at that tradition and take away.
But I think that the idea of tragedy, I think that they're...
There can also be a kind of sinister aspect to it where there is a desire to deliberately demoralize in some cases.
And in some cases, that has a kind of ethnic subtext where they're happy for the population to be depressed or demoralized and inactive.
And the more sad we are, the closer we are to death.
In Greek mythology, death and sleep and You know, sleep being a symptom of sorrow.
They're all kind of siblings or are part of the same group of gods, as it were, the same family of gods.
And I think that, you know, so I think that that is something to we I think the tragedy and that's not to say that we do away with tragedy.
I mean, I think that they're like, for example, we can think of very affirmative examples of tragedy where, for example, a hero.
You know, defends the bridge and dies alone on the bridge, but saves his tribe, right?
I think that they were going for something like that in the recent Viking movie, The Northman, which I don't think was entirely succeeded, but I think they were going for this element of, like, there's tragedy, but then there's, you know, he saved his offspring or his scion.
Ultimately, the tragedy is affirmative, and we can watch that film and be like, yeah.
That's so that that would be a kind of even though the film itself has flaws, that does seem like a kind of affirmative use of tragedy.
So I think that in also I think in tragedy, we also have to look at.
Whose tragedy, for example, using the example of Blade Runner, whose tragedy is being described in that film?
Ultimately, it's our tragedy, right?
It's our displacement on a kind of esoteric level that's being described in that film.
And that is demoralizing.
So I think that tragedy, you know, again, we don't discard tragedy, but we find kind of appropriate uses for it.
You know, because...
It does make sense for a father sometimes to die to defend his family or for a warrior to die to defend his tribe.
And though that is a tragic event, it's ultimately a kind of affirmative and glorious event that serves a higher purpose, I guess is the point I would make.
Whereas other expressions of tragedy, we could say, are just demoralizing, right?
And not necessarily, you know, the cathartic effect.
The cathartic effect is kind of a theory that Aristotle is putting forward.
But when I look at, you know, the effect of, for example, the film Blade Runner on the dissident right and the way that they sort of process that film, I don't see it as a film that is encouraging them to be powerful and successful and to overthrow their enemies or anything like that.
I see a kind of Wayne, you know, acceptance or demoralization.
Occurring with a sort of internalization of that mythos.
I think that's a good point.
And I think it goes again to what I was saying at the start, you know, the purpose of your mythos is supposed to help you achieve success.
And if your mythos is demoralizing, if it's guilt inducing, especially or whatever it is, like if it's just not a good mythos, the stories are, your culture is not getting you all feeling all heroic.
You're in a very, very bad position.
And there's definitely something to be said for a big winner energy.
James Joyce, I used to read quite a lot of him.
He started off.
His career as loving tragedy, because that's what you're taught to do as a storyteller.
Tragedy is the way that you write all your books.
And as he was writing Ulysses, this is a big revelation for him.
He was like, actually, comedy is more divine than tragedy, because comedy is the energy of the big winner.
Comedy is the energy of the inconquerable and all this.
And so he becomes very big.
Comedy, obviously, in the technical sense, meaning things work out in the end, as opposed to things are funny and all this.
But of course, it has that energy of big winning and all these type of things.
I think fundamentally that these two things are more just like functions of human nature.
And for specific reasons, like the whole concept around tragedy, or first of all, the whole concept around a big winter energy, yes, is really real and actually really important.
And I look at the 80s as being just full of that energy.
Top Gun, Schwarzenegger films and all this.
It's all just so fun, so high energy, so raw.
It actually kind of reminds me of things like the Iliad, where there's very little introspection, but there's something amazing about it, glistening about it.
Very, very fun.
In fact, I would say the Iliad is sort of like an Apollonian text in some sense.
The tragedy is just like they're not lamenting so much.
They're putting Arnold Schwarzenegger and Total Recall into just this bizarre...
Super fun sci-fi world, and he's getting this hot girl, and then he kills her, and then he gets another hot girl.
It's just all winter energy.
It's all these type of things.
And then you look at the art after the 1990s, and it's very brooding and sad and depressing and all these type of things, and it's lost that, and an awful lot more tragedy shows up.
And absolutely, to your point.
I think in a technical sense, though, there's obviously a place for tragedy in an aesthetic sense.
The point of tragedy...
Is that it actually mimics our experience of life.
First of all, like we die at the end.
So that's, you know, a big shebang lads, like that's going to happen to us all.
And I think the very difficult existential reality for us is that our life is going to consist of peak experiences.
And at some point that will, like we will fade away from that.
And actually the experience of the most treasured parts and sometimes the parts of our lives that we are seeking towards.
Are almost always peak experiences that fade.
Like, for example, orgasm.
For example, some type of career success.
Producing a child and seeing a great moment in their life.
Like, these happen along the way.
And there are these peak experiences.
And what comes after those is a sort of tragic ending to this.
Like, nothing lasts.
A very Buddhist type of idea.
And there's certain Apollonian arts cannot represent this.
Like, architecture can't show you the idea of a peak experience.
The statue can't do the same thing.
And it does something else.
Which is very bombastic and powerful and manifest of like grandeur.
But music shows you that like music gives you an experience and then it's over.
And at the end of the song, you're depressed.
You're like, that was class.
I can't listen to that again.
You can never really experience it in the same way.
A movie is the same thing.
It's time bound and there's a big apex in the story.
And then the end of the story is the kind of wrapping up.
And so tragedy very much mimics this type of experience.
And as I said, it's just.
Part of how our brains work and all artists are in some sense going to wrap themselves around this.
And it's more just a question of almost like a platonic elite, making sure that the mythos is not massively demoralizing, using tragedy to make us hate ourselves with this guilt complex or whatever it is, and making sure that our tragedy is affirmative towards life.
As I said, you could look at the Dionysian myths to be actually possessing this.
Why does Dionysian die?
Almost in a comic way, he's so juicy.
He's such a mad lad that all the main ads come out and rip him apart and eat him.
I think Perfume, you know that film?
Perfume is an interesting example of this, like a representation of the Dionysian story that I've never quite seen before.
And in some sense, it's hilarious, but also absolutely twisted and schizo at the same time.
It's unbelievably gripping to just watch that film.
And the end of it is just so crazy.
It's hard to describe it as demoralizing.
It's just so bizarre and amazing that there's something special about it.
Yeah.
Well, go a little bit.
I remember you mentioned a, you know, like 20 minutes ago, you were interested in this almost like Jungian psychoanalysis of Nietzsche.
I'm curious what you have to say on that.
Excellent.
Yeah, I'll get into this.
So this is a very fun one.
Now, again, I'm not sure what you think of this.
This is just a perspective.
You can chew in it whatever way you so wish.
So Jung had his critiques of Nietzsche, actually.
So Jung did a seminar.
As the Nazis were rising.
And so Jung was a bit of reactionary to the Nazi movement.
And he was looking around him.
And he was feeling that there was...
He was a very sensitive man to the unconscious.
He had been through World War I. Just before World War I happened, he basically had a schizophrenic break, which he wrote down in the Red Book.
And in that, the year before it happened, he was seeing visions of people dying in these fields of Europe and stuff like this.
And so this guy sort of felt prophetic.
He knew how to listen to his gut and his intuition.
And so as the Nazis arise, and he was feeling these big, strong feelings once again.
And he wrote an essay called Wotan, which is about...
The Old God of the Norse.
And he talks about in this essay how Wotan is like a trickster.
Wotan is like this energy.
Now, again, I've read Mark and Mark has a different interpretation on this.
So this is like a slightly different spin.
But again, this is sort of Jung's ideas here and you can critique them for what they're worth.
He would point out the fact that he believed that gods or archetypes, or you could say energies from our unconscious mind, whatever you want to call it, can possess us.
We can get possessed by things, and they can bewitch us, and they can make things happen to us.
And he basically points out that there was this energy rising in Germany, maybe for a couple of hundred years, maybe since Goethe, when Goethe sort of...
They conjured Faust and Metastopheles.
That's the beginning of something that led to the German idealistic new society.
And all along this, there was this cultural energy picking up steam.
And the likes of, like, Wagner capture into this, and they create this, they craft this.
Their dreams are shuttling out these new visions and these new stories, and they're creating this new pagan religion, essentially.
And Nietzsche gets on board with this, and he feels this too.
And Jung kind of points out that this was the old god, the Norse god Woden waking up again.
Protestantism, he even says, is actually a representation of this.
People thought that they were worshipping the Protestant god or the Christian god, but it was actually, it was Wotan.
In fact, the word god comes from Lombardy, which actually meant Godan, which meant Woden, you know?
So he had this big idea that the Germans were worshipping their collective will, if you want to put it this way, their collective spirit or something along those lines in a variety of different ways.
Now, it was classical Europe.
Obviously, you prestigiously love the Greeks.
And so Jung actually taught Nietzsche was just literally...
Feeling this energy.
He was picking up, because Nietzsche's a very sensitive man, picking up in this Woden rising energy in the German people.
And he was just calling it Dionysus because that was the prestigious, fancy way to describe these things.
But actually what this was, was the possession he was experiencing of Woden rising up again.
And then, of course, after Nietzsche, Nietzsche comes out with all these vitalistic, profound, neo-pagan, anti-Christian perspectives.
And then this shuttles down into World War I in the most bizarre way, the soldiers of the German army.
We're charging up against the French and the British with the Bible and thus spoke Zarathustra, what they were deployed with.
They were given both those books, which is just fucking crazy.
Like, what the hell?
The British were saying, look, they're all Satanists.
Like, what is going on?
They're carrying these books by this dude who wrote the Antichrist and willed the power and stuff like this.
And then, of course, this comes to a head in the First World War.
That was actually the Germans.
They put their foot forward.
Wodan puts his foot forward and says, we're going to be the leaders of the future.
We're going to assert a new vision of reality, a new story, a new Weltanschau, a new worldview or something like this.
And then they put their best foot forward and they get beat down and then they lose.
And then, of course, the energy is not done.
Woden has more fight in him.
And so it builds up once again, it builds up once again, and then it returns as the Nazis.
And at this point, it's like it's coming back with even more of a menace at this point.
It's more refined.
It's more stretched.
It's more angry.
It's a wounded wolf, this type of thing.
And so this is what Jung felt was going on around him, is that it was just like, at that point, they were all in.
They were full tilt.
They were either going to finish the job, create a new paradigm, new world.
Or it was over or something like this.
And so basically, he was very pessimistic about it.
He believed that it was like the kind of fickle, excited energy of a false god, a trickster god, if you will.
And that it was going to lead to the Germans' ruins.
And he felt proven right in the end.
He called this before the war, by the way.
And yeah, he points out to an awful lot of this phenomenon this way.
Now again...
It's also dismissive of some of these other things we're saying.
But he then categorized Nietzsche as, he diagnosed them as being possessed by this spirit.
And this is why he like drummed all this stuff up.
And Zarathustra is an example of this spirit bursting out in him and stuff like this.
And even he points out the Zarathustra just being the most surreal book because in the 19th century, everybody was very rational.
And everybody would not have this idea that you have an unconscious.
That's just such a weird thing to think in the 19th century.
We all thought that, you know, that we had these rational egos and that's all we were.
We were a Christian and you believe Christianity and you were formalized this way.
And then Nietzsche comes up against the God is dead problem.
And Jung was like, his creative dynamism and imagination was so profound that he did...
The right thing.
He invented an imaginary friend, an imaginary character that his deeper unconscious could explode into and act as a wise guide that would teach him what to do with the situation, help him process the pain and help him process the confusion.
And so Zarathustra was in some sense Nietzsche's Unconscious, manifesting, a schizophrenic friend in order to explain to him how to deal with the God is dead problem.
And Jung would say, you know, that was partly Wotam, partly in the German spirit doing that as well.
So that's kind of the completion of the take.
Again, it's Jung's take.
Yeah, I know.
It's great stuff.
Yeah, I think there's a lot there.
Yeah, go ahead, Mark.
I wouldn't even necessarily disagree with that reading.
Or at least not in its entirety.
I mean, I think that that is true, that the Norse myth exercised a power on the German imagination that was quite evident.
I mean, we see that most vividly with Wagner's Ring Cycle, of course, which people consider, and I think rightly, one of the greatest German works of art, certainly of that period.
Yeah, it's incredible.
Yeah, yeah.
So I think that that is true.
I mean, I also share some of Jung's reservations about that spirit, too, in the sense that that Norse myth is ultimately very pessimistic and disastrous.
All the gods die, right?
And I make the argument that what it's actually describing is a kind of conversion to Christianity or the inevitability of Christianity.
Because after Ragnarok, you know, the one god that...
Rises from the dead and returns is Balder, who's, you know, mythographers identify as a very kind of Christ-like figure.
So he actually could be kind of describing or prophesying the coming of Christianity and the end of a pagan faith.
Theoretically, that's my reading of the myth.
So there's something very tragic.
And nihilistic and destructive about it as well.
So Odin is a kind of doomed god.
So if he's your guy, then he's born to expire, as it were.
He's born to die.
So I think that there are very kind of dangerous things ultimately about that myth, which we saw born out in World War II.
So I think that Jung is correct, that mythos, that this kind of Norse mythos is playing an important role in directing a lot of this cultural phenomena leading up to World War II.
I think that's definitely the case.
And the Germans were sort of self-conscious of it as well.
And it probably became more of a thing during that period, during this sort of pagan revival.
You know, I think the way that it served the Vikings, for example, against Christianity, you know, it may have had a similar kind of function to the extent, I mean, we don't know to the extent, you know, this myth is sort of late arriving to us coming through Christianity.
So we don't know what the Viking religion looked like, really.
We don't really have a clear view of it at all.
Theoretically, it could have served a similar function.
It does seem that the myth of Valhalla, for example, could be very similar to the myth of an afterlife in Islam, where a warrior's death is rewarded, and this becomes great propaganda for raiding beaches and killing monks and fighting English armies and this sort of thing.
But yeah, so Young's reading I think is different.
Basically correct.
I think what he does, though, which I think is a mistake, and again, it's a kind of nerdy technicality, potentially, but I think he identifies Hitler with Odin or Wotan, and the etymology I have for that name that I've always seen for it is inspiration rage or frenzy.
So in some ways, you could argue that he's...
He is similar in some ways to Bacchus or Dionysus, a god of madness, right, for example.
But yeah, I mean, I sort of lost my train of thought here, but yeah, so I think that...
There's a very tragic and doomed aspect to that mythos.
He identifies Hitler with Woten.
I think that that's sort of a bit of a misidentification.
Siegfried or Siegfried is kind of the Apollonian figure in that myth.
And he's a sort of more...
Ah.
Every...
Every time we talk with Mark, there'll be this moment where he'll pop out due to his...
Yeah, well, let's...
I'll just kind of complete the thought.
I do think there is a...
Oh, are you back, Mark?
Yeah, can you guys hear me?
Where did I drop off?
You were talking about Siegfried.
Yeah, so I think that's a better sort of...
Um, analog with Hitler.
He's, he's an Apollonian figure.
He's the dragon slayer and he's a mortal figure, you know, in a universe that, you know, where he can't really control all the events.
He's just a sort of tragic figure, a mortal figure.
And, um, and yeah, but it's tragic for the gods as well.
The gods also die.
There's, um, Even in that essay, just to give you exactly what Jung says, again, I'm not saying this is the reality, but I just find it so fascinating.
So that Germanic spirit that we were talking about, you could say the rise of Odin, as you're describing, was building up and Nietzsche might have felt the tingles inside of him a little bit and she kind of let it in.
And I think what Jung was pointing out is that Hitler allowed that to just...
Saturate him.
Like Hitler was basically like stood up at one point and said, you know, all father.
Take me and do your will.
Express yourself through me.
Jung's sort of implying this.
He compares Mussolini to Hitler and he says Mussolini is this aggressive, bombastic, hyper-masculine, these big chimp movements where he's asserting himself and all this type of stuff.
Jung's sort of pointing out that Mussolini has this grandiose and he's got an ego and he's a man.
He's a man and all these types of things.
Whereas Hitler...
Hitler was a shaman.
Hitler was a mystic.
He was actually, in some sense, had these more demure, introverted feelings to him.
He wasn't necessarily a leader, but like a chief druid magician type character.
And when Hitler was talking, he was releasing out of him this manifest spirit.
The spirit was speaking through him, he would say.
So Hitler was...
In Jung's eyes, technically possessed by Wodan and became the mouthpiece for the German spirit, which is why everybody got sucked up in that type of energy so much.
It was just so captivating.
He was so powerful with this.
But again, that's his take.
You can read into it many different things.
There's all these fascinating ideas about...
What was sort of happening with these guys?
It was the rise of the Germanic, you could even say a European counter worldview to the Judean worldview that would have been there since the Bible, since 2,000 years ago.
And was that one of its first great challenges?
I think maybe Napoleon might have been one as well, but we'll kind of leave that aside.
And this is just a very fascinating way of thinking, like the worldview or the Weltanschauung clash.
And the struggle for the future, because so many things about that war have all these bizarre aspects to it.
Like the Germans would come up with the concept of Jewish science, and then they would penetrate, and they would get into rocketry, and they would approach science in a very German way, like Nietzsche's perspectivism.
And this would actually lead to them getting these bizarre superpowers, like rocketry, as I said, and they had all these alternate oils and stuff like this.
But then, of course, Jewish science is the one that shredded open the atom bomb.
And gave the Americans the super weapon and all these things.
And so it's like, what was going on, man?
This is just bizarre in every level.
And so, yeah, it's a really, it's just such a fascinating time of history.
Yeah, I mean, you could make that argument about Hitler.
I think that...
Because, you know, I think that people in the DR now see him as a kind of a truth speaker, though, or a soothsayer or a speaker of truth, right?
Which you would associate more with Apollo.
So I think he does also have a kind of Apollonian aspect to him.
And again, in the Norse myth, there is no real clear male sun god in the Norse myth, which is an interesting feature of it.
There is a female sun god, Sol.
But Siegert has aspects of, but he's a mortal figure.
He has aspects of Apollo.
He's this dragon slayer.
And mythographers theorize that he might be derived in some part from, you know, Apollo or even Saint Michael or, you know, earlier figures where there's a character slaying a dragon.
Bouncing off everything you said, I've been thinking about this very pragmatically.
So as I said, the leverage position is really important.
You know, like horses were brilliant until rifles came along and then all of a sudden everything changes.
Castles were awesome until cannons came.
If you owned a castle, you were in a powerful position and then some bumfuck from nowhere could just like shoot gunpowder at you and that's the end of that.
So we have a sort of similar situation where there's these massive entrenched institutions that are promoting a mythos, you know, a theater, dream theater that is negatively premised and life denying, perhaps.
How do we play a better leverage position?
How do we get ourselves, how do we utilize these things quite well?
So very much in line with what you're saying is not bowing down to something like a machine, but looking at it as a tool that can be leveraged towards a goal that is not necessarily machine dependent at all.
It's just simply a tool.
and I keep on thinking about I suffer from this too.
Like I make that Zarathustra video.
It's 15 minutes long.
It gets like, you know, loads, it gets 16,000 views.
It does well, but it gets the same as my other video where I rant into the screen about the problems in the world for two hours or something like this.
And YouTube rewards the longer one because it's longer watch time.
And I'm sort of, I've got, there's this entropy to this where, like, if I'm going to continue to do this, I'm going to have to actually go towards the thing that's easier to make.
It takes me a month to make Zarathustra.
It takes me, like, 20 or two hours to make the other thing.
Now, there's a big problem there because entropy is going to win in the long term.
Efficiency is going to win in the long term.
And so we have this, like, suck where, you know, the whole, I think you've seen this stuff before, like, we're all podcasters, podcast revolutionists.
Like, I don't know, is this really going to solve anything?
Oh, let's fight the culture war by making another podcast.
It's like, that's...
That's not political action.
That's not cultural action.
That's not making stories.
We look at all these people making movies, making music, making art, and we're stuck being commentators on the culture.
Like, that's not good.
That is bad.
That's a terrible place to be in.
Well, it is what it is.
Let me say two things.
I do think there is a power in deconstruction and dispelling this and really kind of looking up the skirt of People who are more powerful than us and revealing their truths.
I think there is a power in that.
I get your point, obviously, but I wouldn't just totally dismiss what we're doing now or podcasting or whatever.
But on a deeper level, and this is something I've talked about with a group a few weeks ago, a few months ago maybe, is we're in this kind of weird...
When Mark and I will look at a Spielberg movie or a Kubrick movie, you see that those are two artists who are both immensely talented and skillful.
And they're also in the belly of the beast of a cultural power center.
They have massive amounts of capital is put It's put in their direction, and they're exploiting this industry to the best of their creative abilities.
I mean, they are real masters of the universe types.
And I think with both of those examples, those aren't just films.
They aren't just mere entertainment.
E.T. is Jesus Christ, among other figures.
They're bringing a kind of religious-like Experience to the public.
And that is, you know, even if we have a load of criticisms about someone like Spielberg, we can still admire that and understand the function he's playing.
But I feel like we are entering a world of, like, anti-culture or something.
So whatever criticisms we might have of Spielberg...
They're more respectful criticisms than I would have of Tim Pool.
What I'm saying is we're moved where the movie theater, like in my childhood, because Mark and I are older than you, our childhood, it's like you go to the movie theater like you go to church on Sunday.
You go, you sit in the dark, you're both in a group, but then also kind of individualized in the dark.
It's a kind of weird experience.
You're experiencing something quasi-religious with these images and music and words all happening at once.
I mean, it's a connection to opera, connection to the Dionysian theater, connection to church, etc.
And we're now experiencing culture as like, you know, when you think about like my daughter who's in single digits still or a young person who's, say, 21 or something.
They're sitting down and they're individually viewing on a small screen this anti-culture sludge.
So there's no mythos to Tim Pool or Mr. Beast or something like that.
There's arguably no content whatsoever to someone like Tim.
It's just weird stream of consciousness nonsense, effectively.
And though he's getting more views and he's having more of a cultural impact than, say, the nightly news or many...
You know, many Hollywood movies that don't do too well.
Like, he's having more of an impact, but there's no there there.
Like, there really is.
I think we're almost entering this.
It's like a new conception of the end of history.
Like, it's not liberal democracy.
It's nothing.
It's Tim Pool rambling about some news article he saw, he read the headline of on Twitter.
It's kind of a horrifying place that we're entering of an absence of myth and narrative.
And I do think, I mean, I might sound like an old fogey here, but I do actually think it's really scary.
And it's different and somehow worse than...
Like, the mythicism of Hollywood up until, you know, say, the 80s and 90s.
Like, absolutely.
It's a brilliantly articulated version of what I was trying to put out.
It's like, the anti-culture is actually a great way to frame it and a great way to categorize it.
Because it's sort of what I'm saying is that, like, as a creator, I'm incentivized towards the social media suck.
Towards anti-culture.
This is it.
And so I literally sat down.
I sat down and tried to make something.
I was like, well, Zarathustra, I've never seen it visualized properly.
Let's try and make a little piece of culture here.
I'll give it a whack.
Everybody's complaining.
And I invest in it.
I pay dudes.
I paid a couple of grand, a couple of thousand.
And then it obviously takes time.
And then I put it out.
And it does well, but it's not competitive with just Sludge.
Sludge just does as good.
Well, you should have just unboxed a new...
iPhone or put on makeup or rambled on about your gender dysphoria.
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