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April 22, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:04:10
204 Art Part 3: Shakespeare

How Billy the S gets in the way of us capitalists

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Good morning everybody.
I hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is 9 o'clock on the 22nd of April, 2006.
I have a little bit of time.
Christina's at an appointment. She's actually seeing some patients and I thought I would drive to the appointment with her so we'd have the chance to chat.
And so I've got a little bit of time as she's seeing her patient, her couple.
And so I thought it might be worth chatting a little bit about Billy the S., William Shakespeare.
Because Shakespeare is the canonical voice at the center of the Western canon, right?
So the Western canon is a history of great writings, and not exactly ideas particularly, but artistic expression of those ideas.
And Shakespeare's right at the middle of all of that.
And so you really can't, I think, have a strong understanding of Western ideas without dealing with Billy the S, because...
He is the one who has transmitted the vast majority of Western ideas to many, many people.
And he's the one who synthesized a lot of the Western ideas.
And the fact that he hung between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance means that he is a little bit for both types of personalities, those who are irrational absolutists in the religious sense, or those who are sort of Enlightenment philosophers in the modernist sense.
sense.
So he spans both worlds and has informed both worlds and covers all grounds.
And because he is, his philosophy is sort of, it's like a disco ball insofar as it reflects everything back in every direction.
So anything that you want to find, you can find in Shakespeare.
It's in this way, he's like the Bible.
It's the mirror up to nature, which is as confused and absolutist as the majority of human opinion.
And so he really is right at the center of artistic thought for sure, and to a large degree philosophy.
So let's start with just sort of a few of the basic facts.
And it's interesting, actually, when you think about Christ versus Shakespeare, just get an idea of somebody who was almost 1,600 years after Christ and who is, for some people, a lot more important than how little we know about him.
He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, of course, April 23rd or thereabouts, 1564.
He died in 1616.
We don't have any clue where he went to school.
They're gone. He was the son of an alderman.
Which is sort of like a local council, local politician.
And so he would have gone to the parish school.
He married Anne Hathaway, who was 26 when he was 18.
He had a child, Susanna, born in 1583.
Hamnet and Judith. And Hamnet died quite young.
He had twins, or his wife did.
and he was first mentioned as a playwright, the attack by Robert Green, a rival playwright, in 1592, and the first document that mentioned him is connected with the theater and entry in the declared accounts of the treasurer of the royal chamber, dated March 15, 1595. and the first document that mentioned him is connected with Dated March 15, 1595.
The first published play of his was Henry VI, Part II, which appeared in 1594, and he wrote 37 plays, sonnets, narrative poems, and so on.
And there's not a lot of understanding about the sequence of the plays.
There's lots of versions, and it's really kind of confusing, right?
Now, there are some people who say that Shakespeare didn't write his stuff based on a variety of things, but of course that's never been proven, like How could he have known military maneuvers, which are talked about in a variety of plays with great detail?
How could he have known Latin?
How could he have known ancient Greek?
And all this kind of stuff. But I mean, this is all complete speculation.
There's never sort of been any proof either way.
And of course, it doesn't really matter.
It doesn't matter who wrote the plays.
What matters is the effect that they've had on people.
Now, I think, sort of my personal opinion is that Shakespeare is big, well, because he's entertaining, and he's a master of plot, which is something that is, I can tell you, not an easy thing to do.
And he is easy.
It's easy to appear erudite by understanding or knowing Shakespeare, and it's also, in the same way that it's easy to appear erudite by understanding and knowing the Bible— And it is a good substitute for having to think for yourself to learn what Shakespeare said on things.
And so the difficulties of the text, which can be annoying, but don't have to be.
I mean, basically what Shakespeare is aiming to do is to communicate as much as possible.
In as little as possible, or in as short a time frame as possible, for a variety of reasons, but that you want to keep things lively on the stage and you can't have lots of digressions.
But he is trying to communicate a lot in a very short amount of time, and that's why the language seems odd or archaic and so on.
But we'll have a look at a couple of his most famous soliloquies and see if we can get at what he was trying to say.
And the reason that this stuff is important to know is that this is how a lot of people think.
This is how a lot of people understand what is meant by humanism or culture and so on.
And you would be surprised how many things you think are just generic sayings actually come from Shakespeare.
And he has a very large effect, in my view, on how we view the state.
He is the very largest and most powerful advocate for state power.
That you could really find throughout history, and that's something that we, as anarcho-capitalists, really need to get a handle on.
He's considered to be a great genius of the human spirit, and he is completely pro-state, and slavishly pro-state, and not even pro-state like we would understand it now, like Michael Ignadia for people like that.
Those who praised George Bush and the neocons, those people have nothing on Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is pro-bloody dictatorship, pro-endless war, pro-welfare, pro-everything that you could imagine that the state could do, Shakespeare is perfectly comfortable with.
Now, this is partly due to his own nature.
His father, of course, was a politician, so it would be rather challenging for him to have defood, as we call it, or gotten rid of his family of origin if there was corruption there.
But also, you simply could not...
In a way that it's hard for us in the West to understand, you could not publish anything against the state.
You would just get shut down, you would get shipped off to jail, and your life would be over completely.
So he was operating in a period of extreme and brutal censorship.
That having been said, he was a genius enough that I think he could have slipped a little bit in about the weaknesses and foibles.
And he does talk occasionally about, I mean, you'll sort of see in King Lear that you can have a vain, arrogant, and unwise king, but Shakespeare's solution is always, always, always, always, always, well, we've had a bad king, and what we need now is a better king.
I mean, that's what the cycle always is in Shakespeare.
And it's sad, and it's depressing, and he was not a wise enough man to, and it would have been quite a lot to ask of him, although he was only about 100, 120 years prior to the rise of free market thinking, and he did anticipate a lot of the humanism of the later Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but he never got and he did anticipate a lot of the humanism of the later Renaissance and the Enlightenment,
And I think that's partly because artists in the free market always have problems, as I've talked about, and also because the only way that he could ever make money as a playwright and as an actor was to slavishly praise all of the local civil authorities because otherwise they'd shut him down and throw him in jail and so on.
So I don't think that he ever would have been able to understand real freedom.
And so what he talks about is a lot of tyranny in his life.
Parents have tyrannies, husbands have tyrannies, the state has tyrannies.
And mothers have tyrannies.
There's lots of tyrannies in his plays and there's never really any solution for them.
The best that he says is that a bad king we should suffer through in the hopes that soon we will get a good king and that a bad king might be there because of the sins of the people.
All of the standard medieval stuff.
I think it's very important if we're against the state to understand Shakespeare and simply because of the degree to which he has informed most people's opinion about the roles of citizens and state and children and parents and so on.
He is called the master of intergenerational conflict and Harold Bloom, who is one of the most famous modern critics of literature, he is an enormous fan of Shakespeare.
He's written many books on it.
There's an excellent one about Hamlet.
He's written one called The Western Canon that's well worth a read.
And I find that quite moving because Shakespeare is very high-quality literature.
I mean, you can't get higher-quality literature for the most part in any other source.
So it's well worth having a look at.
It's well worth understanding. And I will try to make it enjoyable.
Excuse my occasional butchering of the soliloquies.
It's been a long time since I acted.
But I'll do my best to sort of bring them to life and talk about why I think that they're important.
So let's take a speech from a King Lear.
I actually acted to the part of Cornwall in this when I was younger.
Let's take a speech from King Lear.
I'm not going to go into the whole story, but basically it's about a king who is a very old King Lear himself, and he has a love test at the beginning.
Who is he going to give his kingdom to?
And so he asks his three daughters, how much do you love me?
And two of them give these pompous speeches about how much...
They love her. They love him.
And Cordelia, who's his youngest daughter, says, I love you as much as I should, as a daughter should love her.
He gets really angry, cuts her out, gives his kingdom to these other two vulture sisters who end up tearing the kingdom apart, and there's lots of violence, and then, of course, finally the kingdom gets restored after he dies.
Now, Gloucester has his eyes gouged out.
In one of the most horrible lines in literature, the guy who's gouging his eyes out says, Out, out, vile jelly.
Out come the eyes, which is really one of the most violent things that you'll ever see on the stage.
And this guy then wanders around, and he finds a guy who, for a variety of reasons, is pretending to be mad and poor.
And so this beggar finds him wandering, blinded, and the blinded guy says to the beggar, Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens' plagues have humbled to all strokes, that I am wretched makes thee the happier.
Heavens, deal so still!
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man that slaves your ordinance, that will not see, because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly, so distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough.
Now that's a mouthful of syllables, right?
But what is he saying here?
This is sort of important to understand because this is a real combination of both Christian socialism and Marxism.
I know it sounds like a stretch, but let's see if we can't pull this apart and just sort of see what he's saying here.
So this formerly rich guy, his eyes gouged out, he's cast into the wilderness, he's found by this supposed beggar, and he says, take my money.
You've really been done hard by in life.
The fact that I am now wretched has allowed me to feel sympathy for you who are wretched, right?
So he says that I am wretched makes thee the happier.
So because I've been cast down, I now have sympathy for other people who've been cast down.
Now, he says, heavens, let the superfluous and lust-dieted man, so let the man who has too much money and feeds himself with his own lusts, that will not see because he does not feel Because he's never been poor and he has no idea of want or real grinding poverty, he has no empathy for the poor that will not see because he doth not feel.
Feel your power quickly.
So heaven directs this man who is vain and rich and heartless.
Have him feel the power of heaven.
Have him feel motivated to give to the poor so that distribution should undo excess and each man have enough.
So this is very much Marxism.
This is very much Christian socialism.
This is the whole deal.
The rich don't feel for the poor.
This man who's been cast down now feels for the poor and he's asking heaven to motivate the rich and powerful to feel for the poor And so distribution should undo excess and each man have enough.
There's no more concise, what is that, nine words.
That's socialism. Distribution should undo excess.
So anyone who's got too much money should have it sliced away from them, distributed to everyone, and each man have enough.
This is a very powerful statement of both the religious injunction, right?
So he's calling to heaven to open the hearts of the rich people, to have them feel for the plight of the poor, and to give everyone money.
But also there's economics in here too, or exactly sort of income redistribution economics, because he says distribution should undo excess and each man have enough.
So it's not about just virtue.
There's an argument from effect here, too, that every man should have enough to eat, and so distribution should undo excess.
So there's a fixed number amount of money in society.
If I get two bucks, it's because you have one, two bucks less.
And so because Shakespeare didn't really understand, or if he did, never talked about the innate possibilities of growth within the free market, And I know that sounds like a silly thing to do, but he would have figured it out if he had simply looked at his own desire to retire.
I mean, he got quite wealthy through the theater and bought a nice house, and so he understood property rights and the increase of wealth that was possible.
He wasn't one of these failed artists.
He made pretty good money.
So he could have definitely figured it out from there.
But this is something that has been read over by millions and millions of people.
They've seen it in plays.
They've read it.
Shakespeare is one of these people, like Einstein, who was just considered such a brain-bending genius that everything he says is correct.
And so here he has both the religious and the Marxist justification for the welfare state, for socialism.
And Marxism, and this is pretty important, because if you're going to take issue with Shakespeare, you're going to have to have a certain amount of confidence in doing it because he is considered to be the great humanistic and empathetic genius of mankind.
So it's the same way that, I guess, sort of petty people say that, well...
Einstein believed in God, which he didn't, therefore, but who am I to say?
When you have very clear depictions of Marxism and Christian socialism as the ideal within Shakespeare, it's important to understand that this is the kind of stuff we're dealing with, that this is the kind of political thought that we're dealing with.
Now, Shakespeare, as I would generally argue, very, very conservative man, for reasons we can't even hazard a guess as to.
But he does make a great case for the nihilists or the excluded in society who always turn out to be evil.
But he does make a great case for those arguments against social convention.
And then he portrays those people as evil.
So, again, I say Shakespeare always gets every possible angle he covers, which is why he's so popular.
I mean, there's something in him for everyone.
So I'm going to read you a speech from Edmund, who is born out of wedlock and has certain problems with it.
Because, of course, the law of primogenita in the land was that the eldest son would inherit the father's estate, but only if he was the son of wedlock.
If he was out of wedlock, he would not manage.
So this custom is obviously great for the eldest son, but not so great for the second-born son.
And so this is Edmund speaking about his own frustration about both being judged negatively because he was born Born out of wedlock, and also being frustrated at the law of primogenitor that his eldest brother inherited everything and he has nothing.
So this is Edmund, one of his soliloquies.
He says,"'Thou nature art my goddess.
To thy law my services abound.
Wherefore should I stand in the plague of custom and permit the curiosity of nations to deprive me?' For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshine's lag of a brother.
Why, bastard, wherefore base, when my dimensions are as well compact, my mind as generous, and my shape as true as honest madam's issue?
Why brand they us with base, with baseness, bastardy base?
Base who in the lusty stealth of nature take more composition and fierce quality than doth within a dull, stale, tired bed go to the creating a whole tribe of fops got between sleep and wake.
Well then, legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund.
As to the legitimate—fine word, legitimate—well, my legitimate, if this letter speed and my invention thrive, Edmund, the base, shall top the legitimate.
I grow. I prosper.
Now, God stand up for bastards!
And this is a wonderful examination of these ideas, or Shakespeare's very compact argument for the most part.
So, what he's saying here is, I am not going to obey society's rules, which are obviously just sort of created and made up out of nothing.
I am going to serve nature.
Nature, in this case, would be my own sort of base self-interest.
So he says, Thou nature art, my goddess, to thy law my services abound, not to the laws and customs of mankind.
So he says, Wherefore should I stand in the plague of custom, and permit the curiosity of nations to deprive me?
So why should I bother just being struck down by custom?
And the curiosity of nations is like it's a sort of made-up idea.
It's a very curious idea, isn't it?
Like a curiosity of nations. Just because I was born 12 or 14 months shy of my brother.
And also, why am I called a bastard?
How on earth could people say that I'm base?
I have the same body.
I have the same mind.
And my shape is as true as Honest Madam's Issue.
Why do they brand us with all of this?
And also, I was the son of an affair, which means that my father was sneaking around.
He was very lusty.
He wanted to have sex with this woman so badly, and that gives me a certain amount of energy.
And the marriage bed is dull, stale, and tired, and so I'm actually better for the fact that I was born illegitimately, and so on.
And so this is somebody who's throwing himself completely against the customs of mankind, saying, well, there's no reason to believe in any of this nonsense.
It's all made up.
It's all silly. And this is something, of course, that we try to do in this conversation as well, without necessarily the iambic pentameter.
But this is a guy saying, to hell with society, which is just making up all these rules to thwart me.
I'm going to get what's mine in any way, shape, or form that I want.
And this is sort of the base nihilism that is at the core of a lot of problematic philosophies.
We have had a question on the board, which I'll try to get to next week, about...
Why is it that so many atheists are nihilists?
And I would say it's because of this.
Because they look at the customs of mankind, of which religion is one, and they say every belief is made up.
Every moral absolute is made up.
Everything is made up. And this is a statement of near-pure nihilism, which is, I think, very powerfully expressed and would have, actually, I think, a great deal of value if this guy wasn't co-joined with sort of It's not the same thing.
Is dangerous. So again, he's covering all of his bases, and he also is co-joining in people's minds that the questioning of society, that the questioning of ethics, produces madness and slaughter and destruction and death.
This guy questions ethics and plunges a whole kingdom into civil war and causes the deaths of many thousands of people.
And that is pretty important, because whenever we say we don't need a government, we should question the morals of mankind, people react as if we're just plunging everything into a mad civil war and violence, and they get a lot of that, whether consciously or unconsciously, from Shakespeare.
to true empathy through King Lear could be conceived of being described by Shakespeare as leading through nihilism.
So King Lear basically gives his kingdom to his two daughters, who then strip him of his pomp and his circumstance.
He wants all of these knights around him drinking and carousing, and he's eating them out of house and home with his retinue, his posse.
And so basically they say to him, look, you can't have all of this stuff.
You You're old. We don't want all these knights around drinking us out of house and home and trashing the place.
You've got this sort of Aerosmith post-concert do going on every night in our house.
And so we're going to have to take all this stuff away from you.
And he's like, no, no, no, I'm still the father.
I'm still this and that. They're like, well, actually, no, we have the political power now.
So we're going to take all this stuff away from you.
We'll be more than happy to keep you content.
We'll feed you. We'll clothe you.
But you can't have all of this pomp and circumstance.
And King Lear, of course, who's got an entire false self, right?
Only the false self would command someone to publicly declare love, and only the true self would be repulsed by it.
And so this plunge into nihilism, which King Lear goes into when his daughters strip away all of his pomp and circumstance, leaves him wandering in the middle of an open heath during a terrible storm And he's, you know, it's just one of these scenery, it's called chewing up the scenery, you're actually biting the scenery, you're so passionate as an actor, I'm not going to reproduce that here, but it's one of these great scenes where older actors get to scream and cry and rent their garments and so on, and beat their chest.
And this is something that is important to understand, that Shakespeare does talk about this drop in denialism when all of your false attributes are taken away for whatever reason.
And it's when King Lear meets the same sort of guy who's pretending to be a bum, pretending to be a homeless guy.
King Lear meets him upon this heath during the middle of this storm and says to him this.
He says, Now what he's saying here,
I think this is fairly clear, at least to me, so I hope that makes sense to you, He starts off by saying you'd be better off than naked out here in the storm.
Is man no more than this?
Consider him well.
Thou art the thing itself.
So he's seeing this naked guy in the middle of a storm, unaccommodated man, man without other people's illusions about him, like he's a king or a rich guy or a smart guy or a pretty man or a pretty woman or whatever.
Unaccommodated man, in other words, man without other people's illusions, A poor bear forked animal.
What he means by that is just a stick with two legs, like a forked animal, as thou art.
And this is something that's, I think, quite important, that Shakespeare, through King Lear here, we have no idea what Shakespeare is saying, but what King Lear is sort of saying here is that these are the two extremes in life, right?
You have the false self, Which is everything that we sort of show ourselves up to be and everything that we pretend to have and I've got a Lexus and I'm successful or I've got a tongue piercing and I'm cool and I've got, you know, whatever.
I mean, I listen to this music and that means this about me.
All of the stuff that we put out there as pomp and circumstances show for other people, that's the one thing that we have.
That's accommodated man. That's other people accommodating our own fantasies and agreeing with them and so on.
But unaccommodated man is a crazy, naked guy in the middle of a storm, freezing to death.
And what King Lear, when he sees this...
Now, I'm not saying this is true.
I don't believe that it's true. I don't think that these are the two extremes.
But the false self views the true self as naked and insane and defenseless.
This is how the false self maintains its supremacy within the personality.
It creates this fantasy that the true self is utterly defenseless, utterly helpless, because of course the false self is created when the true self is utterly helpless and defensive, usually because it's at the mercy of parental power, such mercy of which of course is not forthcoming.
So, King Lear says, unaccommodated man, you're just a naked guy in a thunderstorm, and then he wants to tear off his own clothes, which are still his kingly raiments, so that he can, I guess, make the leap over.
And he finds, of course, that when he makes the leap over out of his false self, That he gains an enormous amount of empathy and really recognizes that his youngest daughter did love him and so on.
And again, so Shakespeare is making every case for everyone, which is why he's considered so universal and why he's so well-loved throughout the world, because you can find whatever you want in Shakespeare.
And I don't think that he ever really makes a case for anything, but everything he does make a case for, he makes beautifully in a very powerful way.
Now let's have a look at Iago from Othello.
Othello is a play about political manipulation and wild jealousy, and I won't go into the whole story about it, but this guy Othello, the Moor, he's a black guy, he's married to Desdemona, and Iago wants to take Othello down for a variety of reasons.
And so Iago is Othello's servant, and he is against Othello's interests and so plants the seeds of jealousy regarding Othello's wife and so on.
And let's have a little bit of a listen to Iago, who is considered to be about the greatest depiction of a self-interested nihilist in Western literature, or of any literature for that matter.
So we'll just listen to one or two of his soliloquies, and then you can see how Shakespeare both captures the nihilist and condemns the nihilist in the course of the play.
So Ianko's having a conversation with Rodrigo about advancement, and they're both not exactly slaves, but servants to their masters.
Othello is a warlord, like a general.
And Rodrigo's saying, you know, by God, it's almost impossible to get ahead.
Something like that. And Iago replies to him, Why, there is no remedy to the curse of service.
Preferment goes by letter and affection, and not by old gradation, where each second stood heir to the first.
Now, sir, be judge yourself whether I, in any just term, am affined to love the more.
So what he's saying here, there's no remedy to this problem of advancement.
It's the curse of service.
Preferment, right, how you rise, goes by letter and affection.
So it goes by who you know and not what you know.
And it also goes, what he says here, by letter.
You have letters after your name, like a squire.
It goes by royalty. It goes by, you know how we would say that George Bush and John Kerry both come from the skull and bones, both went through Harvard, both are rich guys.
This is not a meritocracy.
It's who you know. And so given that it's not a meritocracy, that gives us some other options.
And he's basically saying, be a judge yourself.
Why would I love my master in any sort of just sense?
Because people rise in this world by hook and by crook and by preferment and by who they know and which school they went to and by how much money they inherited.
Those of us who serve them, why on earth would we ever conceivably love them?
Because we can only love that which would have arisen through merit.
We would have admiration for that.
We would not love someone who simply happened to be born with a silver spoon in their mouth and got to be president.
We shouldn't have loyalty to them just because they happened to go to Harvard and know the right people and so on and was the son of a president or whatever.
So he would say, there's no reason why I would love this person at all.
He's just my master because he's politically connected.
And then Rodrigo says, I would not follow him then.
Why would you follow someone that you didn't love?
And he, Iago, says, O sir, content you!
I follow him to serve my turn upon him.
We cannot all be masters, nor all masters cannot be truly followed.
You shall mark many a duteous and knee-crooking knave, that, doting on his own obsequious bondage, wears out his time, much like his master's ass, for naught but provender, and when he's old, cashiered. Whip me, such honest knaves!
Others there are, who, trimmed in the forms and visages of duty, keep yet their hearts attending on themselves, and throwing but shows of service on their lords, do well thrive by them, and when they have lined their coats, do themselves homage.
These fellows have some soul, and such a one do I profess myself.
For, sir, it is as sure as you are Rodrigo, were I the more I would not be Iago.
In following him I follow but myself.
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, but seeming so for my peculiar end.
For when my outward action doth demonstrate the native act and figure of my heart in compliment extern, tis not long after, but I will wear my heart upon my sleeve for doors to peck at.
I am not what I am.
Now, this is a complicated...
I'm going to spend too much time on it. It's a complicated thing, but it boils down to a couple of simple principles.
So he says, I follow him to serve my turn upon him.
So I'm basically trailing after him with a knife ready.
As soon as I get a chance, I'm going to take him down and take his place.
And so he's basically saying, oh, you know, there's lots of people, the duteous knee-crooking knave is a guy who just kneels in front of his master all the time, and they just get paid, and when they get old, they get a little pension, and that's pretty pathetic.
He's like, that's pretty sad.
He says, there are others who trimmed in the forms and visages of duty, who basically know how to act dutiful, but keep their self-interest to themselves.
I mean, this is politicians in general, right?
And throwing but shows of service on their lords, do well thrive by them.
And when they have lined their coats, do themselves homage.
So what that means is like line your coats is line your pockets.
So you pretend to serve a lord, and they thrive by them.
And when they have lined all their pockets, taken as much money as they can, they do themselves homage, right?
They get their own respect.
And this is very much around politicians, right?
Politicians are to the general population...
Iago is to Othello.
So they're pretending to serve the general population, but they're really serving their own self-interest.
And I think that's a very powerful thing to talk about, that where there is no merit, where there is no meritocracy, there is no capacity to love one's masters.
And therefore, anybody who does pretend to love the masters is either an idiot...
Or is only doing that so that they can line their own pockets.
So this would sort of follow into those who say that George Bush is the best guy ever.
They're either idiots, empty-headed patriotic idiots, or they're people who say that in order to get some sort of benefit from the ruling classes.
Intellectuals praise George Bush either because they're stupid or because they want to get tenure.
Or, if they're in the university system, they don't praise George Bush because they want to get tenure.
But none of it is about any particular evaluation of George Bush because it's not a meritocracy, so you can't have any genuinely positive feelings for this.
So to me, this is a very powerful condemnation of a political system.
This guy's a warlord, so this is even worse in the military.
That all loyalty within a coercive hierarchy is false.
So anyone who follows a coercive hierarchy is either doing it because they're an idiot and they're just stupidly loyal and they're going to get a petty pension and that's it.
And there's no reason for them to love the person that they're following because it's not a meritocracy.
So they're either an idiot Who's serving the pleasure of others but calling it a virtue.
Or there are people who are pretending to serve those guys but are actually lying in their own pockets and will stab them in the back at any time.
This is politics, right?
This is the life of a politician.
And I think it's a very powerful condemnation of it.
Of course, Iago is an evil guy, right?
So... Again, Shakespeare is getting both sides of it.
He's making a very powerful case against aristocracy and the military and politics, but the guy who makes that case is stone evil and ends up destroying large chunks of his society, so it's very much similar to what we see over in King Lear.
But again, this is something we need to deal with as anarcho-capitalists, that when we talk about questioning society's morals, these are the archetypes that are in people's heads, whether they've seen Shakespeare or not.
They've seen it reproduced over and over and over again, that the nihilist is evil.
Now, he may be right, but he's evil, in the same way that the devil is right about God, that God is not virtuous, but the devil is still evil.
This is the same sort of character.
Now, Macbeth is the same kind of guy.
You see this kind of guy over and over.
Macbeth is someone who is a warrior guy.
He's the head of an army, but he's the guy actually out there swinging his sword and cutting the heads off helpless peasants.
And so he has loyalty to his king.
His king comes to stay at his castle.
And just before... The king comes to stay at his castle.
Macbeth has a vision where the witches say, you shall be a king, right?
So he then goes home and tells his wife about it.
His wife is pretty ambitious and pretty, I guess, is considered to be generally kind of evil and basically says, okay, so be a king, right?
You fulfill the prophecy, kill the king.
And... So, what happens is, he goes and kills the king, and then all these bad things happen.
He loses the ability to sleep, right?
I mean, this is his curse. And it's a really, really powerful depiction of insomnia.
I've only had it once in my life, but boy, it's a terrible thing.
And he gets it fantastically well.
So, you have some idea that Shakespeare had a little trouble sleeping himself.
But at some point, his...
So Macbeth, all these terrible things are happening.
Everybody's ganging up against him.
He puts in a dictatorship of the old style, right?
I mean, where people are repressed and so on.
So again, Shakespeare's kind of saying that, well, at the beginning, see, all Macbeth is doing is killing a whole bunch of people, and that's fine.
He should be charged as a hero for that, because the king rewards him for killing all these people, right?
So you have a pretty murderous king.
So he goes and kills the king, and that's the bad murder.
That's the murder that causes him not to sleep.
Cutting down all the peasants is great.
He has no problem with it, but when he kills an old king who ordered him to kill all the peasants, that's bad.
So again, you have this nihilist who's basically saying, well, if the king orders me to kill people, what's wrong with killing the king?
And he does it and then, you know, he is cursed and all.
I mean, this is part of the veneration of the aristocracy that Shakespeare is constantly doing.
And he's making all these great arguments for saying, well, if you're the mafia boss, if you're the top lieutenant of the mafia boss and the mafia boss is praising you for killing people because he's politically ambitious, then what's wrong with having political ambition yourself and killing the mafia boss?
I mean, it's the same principle. So Shakespeare makes a great case for that through Lady Macbeth, but then he punishes Macbeth with a terrible violation of conscience and a demonic curse of insomnia and so on.
Anyway, so then Macbeth's wife dies, and then he has this famous speech, which I'll sort of reproduce here.
And then we'll talk a little bit about it, because I think it's important to understand that this sort of problem of those who rationally question society's ethics and act in their own self-interest always end up being hugely punished.
And that's something which we have to deal with, as I keep saying, as anarcho-capitalists.
So... Macbeth sort of sags against the wall after hearing his wife has died.
I think she killed herself.
And he says this, if she should have died hereafter, there would have been time for such a word.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Creeps in this petty pace, from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Now, that's a wonderful depiction, in my view, of nihilism and the depression that comes from nihilism.
So, basically, he's looking into the future, and he's living a life where he has no values, no belief in anything, no love, no happiness, and so he's looking into the future.
And the days that are to come are just...
Creeping in a petty pace.
So he's discontented, he's unhappy, he's empty, he's alienated, he's depressed, he's a mess.
And so he's saying that tomorrow is just an endless chain of misery that's going on until the end of time, not even the end of death, not even the end of my death.
This is not me.
This is life itself.
This is the problem of the nihilists.
This is what I talked about with the artist, and Macbeth is both talking about this.
And Shakespeare, I do believe, is depicting it as a whole within his own art.
But he's saying, not my life is empty and a waste and full of sound of fury signifying nothing.
Not my life, but life itself.
This is the problem of the nihilists.
They should be talking about themselves, but they talk abstract and they generalize about life as a whole, and this is a real problem with artists, as I mentioned in Art Part 1.
So he's saying, out, out, brief candle, like, let me just blow out my life, let me just end it.
Life's but a walking shadow.
A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.
So we're on a stage, right?
This is the false self, in my particular opinion.
This is the false self. You're on a stage and you're strutting around and you're fretting and you're worried about this and that and you're upset about this and that and you're trying to get this person to think you're a great guy and you're trying to get this into bed with this woman.
You're strutting and you're fretting and then you're heard no more.
Life, life as a whole, life is a tale told by an idiot.
Now, this full of sound and fury signifying nothing, I think is fantastic.
Because if you think about political speeches, right, or the speeches of the military man and so on, it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
This is what Socrates was talking about with rhetoricians or the sophists, the people who just sound passionate.
And if you ever flip on the old-time religious channels and see these guys preaching, well, they're doing a great job.
They're very passionate. So if you think about religious sermons, they're a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, hellfire, damnation, but they signify nothing.
But he's not saying that the false self, or people who lie for a living, or people who are corrupt, or people who are evil, he's saying life as a whole is this, not my life, and that's very, very important.
And again, this is somebody who has seen through To the core of the falsehood of the society that he's living in without finding a replacement.
So the people who see the lies without ever discovering the truth, they turn into nihilists.
And they are the people that we have to deal with quite a bit within the atheistic movement and to some degree within the libertarian movement.
Because they have seen into the falsehood of government, but they still don't believe that society can live without a government.
So they're really trapped in this Macbeth world where they have been unable to find a solution.
To a problem that they've clearly identified, and so they're stuck in this nihilism.
That's sort of my reason why I think that the movement has never been able to succeed.
We've never dealt with the nihilism that's at the core of atheism and libertarianism.
Now, one of the most magnificent speeches that is pro-war comes from King Henry V, and if you get to see the version, I would really recommend the one with Kenneth Branagh, although he did turn into a self-aggrandizing fop a little bit later in his career.
His film, this is the very first film where he was directed by one of the best directors in England in his first take on this role.
He was magnificent in this film.
It's really, really well worth seeing in the woman he later married plays the French chick.
see it.
This is when he was directed by somebody else, so he was magnificent.
When he directs himself, he's totally over the top.
But do get a chance to see King Henry V.
I think he does a magnificent job of this speech.
I'm not even going to try and do it the way as well as he does it, because he's the guy, he's the professional, right?
But this is when there's just a couple of guys about to fight the French.
Over what? Well, over the usual crap, right, that you have to sort of make up as being very important and very, you know, life-changing.
It's just, you know, another couple of square miles of land filled with the blood of peasants changing hands from one mafia leader to another.
But, um... This is why one of his guys says, just before the fight, he says, Oh, that we now had here but one ten thousand of those men in England that do no work today.
We just want a couple of, give us some of the unemployed to swing swords with us.
And the good king, who doesn't hear, who says it, says,"'What's he that wishes so, my cousin Westmoreland?'"'No, my fair cousin, if we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country's loss, and if to live, the fewer men the greater share of honour.'"'God's will, I pray thee, wish not one man more.' By Jove!
I am not covetous for gold, nor care I who doth feed upon my cost.
It yearns me not if men my garments wear, such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending man alive.
Now, faith, my cousin, wish not a man from England.
God's peace!
I would not lose so great an honour as one man more.
Methinks would share from me, for the best hope I have.
Oh, do not wish one more!
Rather, proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host, that he which hath no stomach to this fight, let him dispart.
His passport shall be made, and crowns for convoy put into his purse." We would not die in that man's company that fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the Feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day and comes safe home will stand at tiptoe when the day is named and rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day and see old age will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors and say, Tomorrow is St.
Crispian. Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars and say, These wounds I had on Crispian's day.
Old men forget, yet all shall be forgot, but he'll remember with advantages what feats he did that day.
Then shall our names, familiar in his mouth as household words, Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester, be in their flowing cups, freshly remembered.
This story shall the good man teach his son, And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remembered.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers, for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Be he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition, and gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed that they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speak that fought with us on St.
Crispin's Day. Okay, I guess I'll need to volume adjust that.
That's a great speech, of course.
I mean, it's magnificent, it's passionate, it's powerful, but it's a justification for murder.
I mean, this is something that you have all this honor and you're going to have to strip your clothes off and show your scars and we don't want any more here fighting with us because then there won't be as much honor to go around.
It's all wonderful stuff.
It's all very rousing.
I can't remember some war movie where they talk about this in sort of the Vietnam context.
But this is just amazing, right?
This is how you rouse people to kill and die others, right?
This is the magnificent speech of the mafia murderer.
And this is something that's important to understand.
It's very, very common in Shakespeare, this idea that you should go and kill for your lord.
That's something that you just get all the time.
And so when I talk about one of the three devils that artists serve being war, this is sort of an example of that.
Now, another one of the things that was going on in Shakespeare's time, and you can read this in the poetry of Alexander Pope as well, was this idea that man is both noble and foolish at the same time.
This is a transitional period.
So Alexander Pope writes, I can't remember in which poem, but something like...
That man is noble in reason and fantastic at thinking and so on, but in endless error hurled, the glory, jest, and riddle of the world.
There's a real sort of confusion about whether mankind is efficacious and rational or completely insane and ridiculous.
And you see this, of course.
This is why Shakespeare is so good at tragedy and so good at comedy, in my view, because he really does have that transitional view of mankind.
And of course, like most things in Shakespeare, there's nobody who expresses it better than Hamlet, who is another one of these nihilists who questions things and can't act, right?
This is the problem. This is a very similar thing that we're facing in the anarcho-capitalist movement, is that we are questioning society and we cannot act because we're still very early in that questioning and we're still doubtful about things, and I fully understand that.
But, you know, we have precedents within history, and Hamlet, of course, is one of them.
So, two of his old school chums come by to visit Hamlet, and they've been sent by his uncle, though.
I think he figures that out during this conversation.
But he says that he's talking to them and he says, Hamlet says, I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgotten all custom of exercise, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly framed the earth seems to me a sterile promontory.
This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.
Why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
What a piece of work is man!
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving, how express and admirable, in action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god!
The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Man delights me not.
No, nor women neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
So this is the big pendulum that Shakespeare works so often, and Hamlet does this so magnificently, of course, which is...
You know, a man is noble in reason, infinite in faculty, in apprehension how like a god, right?
I mean, of course, a god doesn't apprehend anything because god is fantasy, but Hamlet is doing this contrast, right?
He's depressed for a variety of things.
We don't know if he's faking depression or real here.
I mean, a lot of actors sort of take it either way.
But he does seem to be depressed, over-intellectualizing and so on.
But he has this pole, right?
And so... As I mentioned in the podcast last time, the future that he's looking towards is the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, where this is the view of man as noble in reason, heroic in action, and so on.
But this quintessence of dust, this is the hearkening back to the medieval life.
He's in Denmark, which is not, at least in Shakespeare's view, the most advanced of countries.
And so he is talking about the historical medieval view of man, this quintessence of dust.
This is pretty significant, this quintessence of dust phrase.
Quintessence just means the essence of it, the atomic essence of it, so to speak.
And dust is an important phrase here because dust to dust is the biblical or the Christian way of looking at life.
From dust we come and from dust we will return.
And so the Christian view is that life is just an interruption from eternity and a pretty sad and pathetic interruption from eternity, the soul before and then the soul after.
And dust is this quintessence of dust that life, the current life that we live, is a degraded, pathetic, horrible, materialistic sort of smear, an insult to the soul.
And the soul should be with God and dancing with the angels, and it's descended to this pathetic, sad, and pitiful earthly realm.
And so when he talks about quintessence of dust, in my view, he's talking about the medieval worldview.
And he's a transitional figure between the medieval and the Renaissance.
And so that's why this speech has these two poles, and you see this in quite a few writers at this time, that they can't figure out whether man is a degraded, filthy, vicious beast full of all of the primal blood of original sin, or is he sort of noble and powerful and rational and so on.
And they can't figure it out.
Unfortunately for us now, the Renaissance guys fought for the view of man as a noble, rational animal, which is, I think, our job too.
Now, of course, I can't talk about Shakespeare without talking about this frickin' to be or not to be speech, which I've never particularly liked and never found particularly powerful.
But it's worth talking about because it is pretty much the most famous passage in all literature.
So let's have a quick look at what he's talking about here and see if we can sort of place it in this continuum that we're talking about between the medieval and the Renaissance.
So Hamlet is obviously not a happy guy.
And he is trying to figure out whether King Claudius, his uncle, has killed his father and so on.
And so he does this big...
He's always dressed in black and looks like someone from sort of the left bank in Paris.
I'm sure he's been played at least once with a beret, I'm sure.
But he comes in and he says, To be or not to be, that is the question.
Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune...
Or to take arms against the sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.
To die, to sleep, no more.
And by a sleep, to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to.
Tis a consummation, devoutly to be wished, to die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream, Ay, there's the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause.
There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin?
A bodkin is a dagger.
Who would Fardel bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose borne no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn away and lose the name of action.
That's a great speech, of course.
I mean, I've never liked it too much because I've never been religious, so I understand that it's powerful if you have some religious sentiments, but for me it's never really had too much of an emotional impact, though I certainly have.
Obviously it's beautifully written. So, what he's saying here, I mean, if you don't mind me paraphrasing, what he's saying here is that we have a choice between life and death.
Life is miserable, and so what sane person would not prefer a sleep, a peaceful sleep without dreams, to what he calls the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to, the flesh inherits, and the heartache.
And so, given that life is so miserable and unpleasant, we should wish to die...
And the problem is that we hope it's going to be a dreamless sleep, right?
To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream.
That's the rub, right? The problem is that we don't know what's going to happen after death, that it might be a heck of a lot worse than we have here, and so we should put up with everything that is negative here, simply because something after death could be worse.
And that's why he says, thus conscience does make cowards of us all.
And so we don't act decisively and we don't seize things in life because we're only alive because we're afraid of death.
I mean, it's a pretty negative and nihilistic approach to life.
And this is something that I think is important for people within the freedom movement to understand that there's a very common theme within Western thought, particularly in Western artistic thought, that When you begin to not care about values,
and values have always been a constant problem in Western civilization because they've been based on religion for the most part, which is not values but fear, fear of religious authorities, fear of hell, A fear of punishment, fear of being accused of heresy, fear of the Inquisition, a fear of being just called a bad person when you're a kid.
These aren't values.
These are things that are inflicted.
They're brutalized upon you, these values.
They're not an appeal to your self-interest in a rationalistic sense.
And so there's a great deal of skepticism and nihilism throughout Western history because we have these values which are based on fear.
And the same thing is true nowadays, that everybody's values are based on fear Fear of being a bad person, fear of being thought a coward, like if you're not pro-war, then you must be some limp-wristed, pansy, paisley-wearing kind of hippie, and not manly.
People have these fears, and the fear drives value in the modern world.
And throughout almost all of human history, the Enlightenment came close but didn't make it.
And so once we understand the degree to which when people are talking about values, like Hamlet or like the nihilists that we've talked about today in Shakespeare, when people talk about values, what they're really talking about is terror.
Terror of disapproval, terror of hell, terror of being called a non-patriot, terror of offending someone by saying that the troops are murderous and then finding out, oh, your father is in Iraq or something, or your son.
So fear is what is at the root of people's what they call values, and they cover it over with this idea of idealism and value, but it's a very shaky infrastructure.
It's a very, very shaky infrastructure.
This is part of what the God of Atheists is all about as the children grow and begin to question their parents' values to find out exactly how shaky and ridiculous what people call truth and virtue and integrity and honor and so on, how shaky and destructive it really is.
And everybody knows this in their heart, right?
So Hamlet is talking about that we deal with the horrors of life because we're afraid of death.
I mean, you could kill yourself with a dagger in a quick second, but we're so terrified of death that we pretend that life has value.
And therefore, something has value simply because it is a reaction to fear, but we don't want to say that we're afraid, so we'll call it a value.
So if you're afraid of people disapproving of you, then you pick the majority position, whether patriotism or the welfare state or whatever.
You pick that majority position, and then you hold that position, but it's not because you believe in it, but it's because you're afraid of disapproval.
You're afraid of being called a bad person.
And that, he says, thus conscience does make cowards of us all.
So conscience, he just means here, the consciousness of the fear of what might happen after death.
Conscience makes cowards of us all.
What we are afraid of, in terms of disapproval and so on, it makes us cowards.
The native hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought.
And what that means to me is the natural integrity, the natural virtue of sensual evidence and rationality, and all of the stuff that's completely natural to us, is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought.
And that means all of the justifications that are piled on based on fear over your natural rationality and your natural honesty as a human being.
And it says here,"...and enterprises of great pith and moment, with disregard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action." So we don't act because we get so confused and baffled by all of this fear that everyone has in society of disapproval and not being thought of as a good person and afraid of hell and afraid of the government and afraid of being called names and afraid of offending people because in the absence of real values, all we do is sort of hungrily cleave to each other because we are sort of like Lear under the storm.
We're naked in this sort of storm of fear and terror and obedience.
I mean, this is a really, really thick thread Of terror in society, in my humble opinion.
And we see this in Hamlet's speech.
The reason that I think people find the speech so compelling is he is really talking about making up values and calling them values when really what's at the base of your life is just fear of disapproval or fear of the unknown or fear of whatever.
And I think that's something that we really need to understand.
We can get a lot from this speech as people who enjoy talking about freedom because, of course, when we talk to people about values as if they're not afraid, as if they're not justifying all of their cowardice and desire for approval and all these what Ayn Rand called the second-handedness of the second-handers,
if we don't recognize that we are dealing with a minefield of terror and enslavement to the opinions of others, All of which is sicklied over with this pale cast of justification and false moralizing, then as I sort of said before, we're not handling these explosives with the sensitivity and respect, like you have respect for dynamite because it can blow your head off, not because it's so respectful innately like it's virtuous.
We're not handling these social explosives with the respect and care that we should.
And so people who are sort of rough in this movement and people who just sort of charge in and so on, I think there's a lot to be learned from speeches like this or from Shakespeare in general and other writers as well, which is there's a clear communication about the fact that...
People who don't believe in values are generally nihilistic, like all of his antiheroes.
It's not because they see a better vision.
They just see that everything that is talked about as virtue is false, but they can't find anything that's true, which is a little bit Socratic as well.
But also these other people who do talk about virtue, who do talk about idealism, and who do talk about honor and so on, they're either in the King Henry V camp, where they're just using it to further their own political ends and to cause a huge amount of slaughter, which they can profit from, or they're people who are covering which they can profit from, or they're people who are covering up their own social enslavement, their own enslavement to the good opinion of others, their own cowardice and enslavement to conformity, and they're simply calling it
And if you talk about them in the realm of virtue without being sensitive to the underlying emotional energy, I don't think you'll get as far as you'd like.
So, thank you so much.
I hope this has been helpful. I do find Shakespeare to be quite fascinating to look into.
I think it's something that whenever you communicate with people as a whole, whether they're philosophers or artists or business people or whatever, These ideas are in the social mix of Western civilization, and I think it's good to be aware of them so that we can understand where a lot of people are coming from, even those who are pig ignorant of Shakespeare, have still imbibed this through a variety of other sources, including things like movies and comic books and other novels and so on.
So I think it's important to understand these ideas and to recognize that, in my view, we're slightly before Shakespeare in terms of our transitional point, but we are a transitional group within society who has not only identified the horrors of the past, as Shakespeare does talk about in his questioning of existing social ethics, But we also don't have to portray ourselves as the bad guys, as Shakespeare portrays those who are skeptical of prevailing social ethics.
But we have a solution, I think, for the first time in history.
Together and collectively, we have a solution, which is that we can get rid of the state and we can find a way to get rid of war.
We can find a way to get rid of totalitarianism, both within the family and within the state.
And we have a solution, I think, and it's well worth talking about how powerful that is, but just have some respect for the explosives that you're handling, because when you're dealing with somebody's false self, you are in a very dangerous maze, and I think it's important to look at how other people have dealt with it before so you can be more effective in your communications.
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