Plato's The Republic, Book 5 Discussion, part 1⧸3 (eiwUJyoh7jg)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=eiwUJyoh7jg

So I caught up today. I don’t have any reflection too much on the two weeks before because I kind of lost it. It seems like the weekly thing is actually important for a reason. Like if you extend things beyond a week, I don’t think you retain it. So maybe that’s why a week has seven days or something. It has to do with retention capacity of humans. Anyway, yeah, so it was really interesting watching last week’s episode because I had my own ideas, but the participation is different to video than when you’re there, right? And you’re not steering the conversation, but you’re reflecting to it. And I made a ton of comments and I want to go through them. They’re all on the web page of the YouTubes on the video. So we can actually get some views going because there’s more of us here than there are views. Anyway, I think I found the thing remarkable. Well, yeah, I was talking to Mark earlier about the structure, about the onion-like structure, but the thing that I realized is the fractal nature of the argument and the way in which it is fractal. And that is the thing that just caught my eye. It’s like, oh, there’s actually a pattern that is… It’s not cyclical, it’s spiral. Like it’s literally spiraling because it’s not ending in itself. It’s ending upward into the hole or it’s entering downward into the part. And yeah, like that’s some fancy trick and a way of thinking that I think we all have been struggling with in some ways. So maybe this will actually provide tools for a breakthrough in that sense. So I guess I’m going to be trying to use that lens today when attending to what’s going on, trying to relate things to the fractal nature and figuring out the use and the limitations of that line of thinking. So, Danny, do you want to give your reflection? So my intention to engage last week was kind of more pertaining to motivation. I’m just curious. I’m still curious to… I didn’t really get that from last week. So I guess I’m still kind of hovering there. I’d like to kind of get a better understanding of what the thing is that moves. Like if you have an idea, like you should get out of bed and clean your room, how did they link that to actually lighting the fire? So like their conceptions of desire. So I don’t really have a lot to contribute for reflection other than like my mind is still kind of hovering in the same place. So yeah, I don’t really have much, I guess, on the way of reflection from last week. I mean, I can kind of summarize for the group, I guess, you know, to jog people’s memory, we talked about the three virtues of wisdom, courage and temperance. And then Manuel was… Well, I’ll let you speak for yourself. I won’t put words into your mouth. Yeah, so I actually have been thinking about the same things that you’re struggling with, how to connect motivation to conviction. So that’s been on my mind as well. So we might delve into that. Adam, you want to go next? I wasn’t here last week. The previous week, I set my intention to basically be something to the degree of engaging with the topic and the discussion and where I think I can offer some perspective or historical context to the ancient world in which this is taking place. I try and do that. So I’m doubling down on that intention, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t here last week. And yeah, so in that way, I don’t really have much of a reflection on the previous conversation. I’ll be looking through the text as we’re discussing it, just to see if anything stands out to me historically or in the discussion at present. AC. So reflection from last week really got me thinking about the good and what it is, like how we actually know the good and something came to mind is like the good is like a rock, like a foundation. Somehow, maybe think of the Psalms, hail the rock who saves us. I can’t remember which psalm it was, but yeah, that’s what I remember from last week. And what would my intention be for this one? Boy, the first half of this book was interesting. I guess we’ll go we’ll be going through it. But I wasn’t quite sure what to think the latter half of the book got more into what you think of as Plato and espousing his ideas. And that’s more of what I’m interested in, and like how he’s how he’s set up his ideal and what we can pick apart from it and how it’s useful, concerning what justice is. Okay, so Mark. Sure. So yeah, last week was was interesting. I think, you know, it just encouraged me to think more about virtues and values and sort of inspired my that always does my hit my weekly live stream, which was which was tell us last night. So yeah, and then in reading five, you really get that sense for that onion like quality that Dr. Lenten Jack talked about in his expose on the Republic. And yeah, I mean, in this chapter seems like it’s two different chapter two books, right? Like, it just seems like there’s two pieces because the first part of the second part are vastly different from one another in many, many ways. You can see that mirroring that echoing of, you know, that’s been been throughout. And one of the more interesting things for me was just the realization that Socrates flat outs as dialectic has nothing to do with contradictions and opposites. So this is not dialectic. If you’re doing that, I was like, wow, well, no one’s mentioned that before, because that’s it would specifically push back against Hagle, for example, Hagle’s wrong. Okay, fine. I’m good with Hagle being wrong. That’s that’s true. So yeah, the idea of thesis, antithesis, synthesis is wrong, because dialectic doesn’t have that quality, by definition, according to Plato. So yeah, it’s different from the platonic dialectic. It’s also useless. So Plato’s get it right. Again, it’s weird to me that everybody misses that or no one seems to mention it. And also the whole idea in there that you can’t divide people into men and women, you have to divide them by task, right, by the I doS of the task. And then you can ignore right and that gets back to tell us again, like, no, you ignore that category that ontology because it’s not relevant, right, that the relevancy is and whether or not they can do the job or be a good good at doing the job. So I found that interesting. So I’m looking forward to engaging with that. I guess it’s Ethan’s turn that reflection on last week and reflection on last week kind of goes and goes well with the stream theme of the stream last night is tell us and I really like the part in book four where they they talk about getting caught up in things like losing sight of your tell us so we’re losing sight of the good like people that are their tell us is medicine and I’ve just keep inventing new illnesses never actually cure themselves and the same thing with with lawyers, you know, their tell us is the law. So they just keep finding things illegal or trying to legislate over and over again. Attention for this week is to understand a little bit better what the heck is going on with these women and children and common marriages, common children trying to figure out what’s what Socrates is, is pointing at here. So I wasn’t able to finish book five, I got there the first half. Okay. Yeah, so let’s roll back a little bit about last week, so we can do the roll up of the last week with my comments on it together. So the first comment I made was got a whole essay here for us. Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Yeah, I do have a whole essay and a lot of it in relation to you, Ethan. You said the idea of withholding information from people who don’t have any way to relate to it. Like that really appealed to me. Because because that sounds like a good way to put boundaries on your interaction with people. Like, like, what am I providing to you? Like, like, because, yeah, like, the fact that someone is interested doesn’t mean that you should give into their appeal to to interact with to commune. Like, I, I am able to judge whether you can commune with me on the thing that I’m expert on. So yeah, that’s something that I personally want to explore. Then going through, we ended up with courage, which was Danny’s favorite subject. I first thing, the idea that courage applies, applies just to the individual, I think is flawed. And that’s an inherent conception from individualism. When you are courageous, you have a conception of goodness that is conflicting with your self interest or with your ego, right, or the impulse that is going from your ego and privilege the thing that is not your ego, right, like true belief over the thing that appears to you as real, to your senses and to your feelings. And that commitment, right, like that going through and superimposing is an act of courage, because now you’re doing something that feels like a detriment to yourself. And then the question is, well, do we have right courage or wrong courage? Right. So we need to have a justification for the courage. Yeah. So the thing that is the justification for your courage is the body outside of yourself, right, the thing that’s bigger than yourself that you’re conforming to. Right. And that’s why I think courage is not related to the individual, because like it’s, it’s, it’s, courage is that which allows you to engage in transformation. That is necessarily towards something that is outside of you. Did that land on me? These virtues are not located within individuals. They’re things that individuals conform to outside of themselves. This is struggle with. Yeah, this week, I was listening to Ben Shapiro and he keeps talking about we have no individual justice. And every time he said that, I went like this. Then, yeah, then he hit on the point of aggression being part of courage, right? And I identified the aggression in the courage as the breaking of the framing, like your personal framing, like you need to have a power inside of you that’s capable of overcoming that with your reciprocal narrowing, right? Like that which closes you off from the world, right? And that’s a spirit, right? Like a spirit that can do that is aggression, right? Like aggression is a really powerful way to transcend whatever you’re at, right? Like because you can ignore pain, for example, through that. Oh yeah, and then I, this is a correction to you, Ethan, because you said that wisdom is judgment, but I don’t think wisdom is relating to judgment. It’s relating to discernment, and the judgment is relating to action itself, right? Like it’s coming from the discernment into the implementation of the consequences of your discernment. And I, yeah, so I think that wisdom is related to seeing the whole, right? Because it’s the head of the body, right? Like it’s that which is responsible for the whole of the body, right? So that’s the emanation which defines the telos of the body, right? Like it defines the way that, well, I guess we’re going to use for Vegas word, structural functional organization, that the body is going to be participating in. And then I started making this really crazy idea of, right? Can you distinguish again between judgment and discernment real quickly? Well, the judgment is drawing implications, right? Like that’s what judging is. Like this means that, right? Like the fact that something is, doesn’t have implications in and of itself, right? Like when you start putting it in relationship to you as an agent, right? And the implications for your action, then what is gets transformed in, like you go from the is-ought, right? You go over the is-ought gap, that’s where the judgment happens. Okay. So, okay. Yeah, I didn’t look up that word. In my translation, the word judgment is used what the original Greek word is used. It would be actually interesting to see what it is and see if it’s actually, it’s a 428 B. But judgment has to do with justice, right? Like there’s a reason why justice is being done by judges, right? Good counsel. That’s what they use in this book. There’s no judgment here. It’s just good counsel. Right. Well, counsel doesn’t have to do with what you should do. It’s like how you should make your decisions. Right. It’s advice. Yeah. Yeah. I think that sounds better. Okay. Damn. Oh yeah. So now I made this setup and I’ll post it in the chat so you guys can look at it. So, they’re talking about these four virtues and I didn’t have a list of what they were called. So you have wisdom, which is related to discernment of what we relate to, right? Which is providing the grounding of our action or whatever. Then we have courage, the courage is the thing that allows us, that orients us to the thing that’s a problem or that we need to face. Right? Like it’s defining the relationship that we’re engaging in as well. Right. So I connected that to the shadow, right? Like just the shadow is the thing that you’re not dealing with, right? Like the thing that needs attention and the courage is the thing that allows you to face the thing that needs attending. But yeah, about the courage, I’m a little bit iffy about that, but I think it’s somewhat correct. And then temperance, or I don’t know what word they were using, is in the relationship, right? So we’ve established the relationship and so like now where are we in that relationship? Like how does that relationship look like? It’s weighing and then the justice is all of the entities maintaining their place. So it’s like the thing that I saw, oh yeah, well, yeah, so I think using the idea of defining the role that you’re in, the identity, right? Like that’s the way that you’re having your relationship, right? And then, but that’s in some sense it’s sense making within the relationship while justice is the implementation or right relationship. Yeah, you can read what I wrote because I wrote it in a somewhat different framing. But the important thing that I saw here is it’s like the process of amination or something, right? Like there’s a way in which you go down the hierarchy and you start changing the aspect. And then when you come in justice, right, you have identified a organ of the body effectively, right? You have identified or you’re at a thing that is in relationship to other things in the body, right? And then that entity also has its own wisdom, right? Like that has its own body that needs to go and then it has its own courage, and that’s where the fact of like nature comes up. I was just like, oh, like the same principle goes again and again and again. Yeah, I’ll stop there because we probably need to discuss this a lot. Did that make sense? No, not particularly. But I don’t think it’s relevant. I mean, I talked about all that stuff in book four, so. This justice proper action within the identity being in relation to all other identities, is kind of an inverse but also consequence of wisdom. Yes. Look, you need temperance and courage to enact justice and therefore justice is a second-order emanation, unlike temperance and courage. They’re not of the same type. Are you saying that justice is kind of like sitting on a tripod of temperance, wisdom, and courage in the sense that it’s a higher entity? No, it’s not sitting on anything. It’s an emanation. It comes down from above. It doesn’t need to sit on anything. It imposes itself on everything else. And then because of that, proper justice requires wisdom, courage, and temperance to implement. But that means that justice isn’t at the same level as the things that implement it, right? It has to be second-order in that way. The way I look at it is like a distillation, right? So you put the thing that you orient as the body towards, right? And it goes through wisdom, then it goes to courage, and then it goes through temperance. And then justice is how the body starts responding to the outside, right? So now it goes back up, right? Like now it’s allowing the body to change identity, right? Because in order to be just when we’re being attacked by the enemy, we need to have a war economy or something, right? So my proper action now is to make swords instead of plows, for example. Okay, what did I have more? The idea of the part and the whole, right? Like justice is in some sense the thing that is combining the part and the whole in the dynamic. It’s like completing it. And then, well, the other thing that I was intrigued about is this idea, right? Like they say, justice comes from a man being just, right? So like that’s the second order of fact, right? But that also means that justice doesn’t exist, right? Like it manifests, like it has no separate existence from its manifestation. And so trying to— I don’t know about that. I don’t know where you’re getting that from. Because— Denomination, it exists apart from whether it’s implemented or not. Otherwise, you have no form to conform to and therefore, in the platonic sense, you can’t manifest it. Yeah, but I think the description that they gave has no form. Oh, I agree. I agree with that. Oh, yeah, yeah, he’s playing with stuff for sure. But he admits that. That’s not his definition of justice is not informed. Okay, well— So I agree. Damn, so far, justice is a formless thing. Can you say that again? Justice is a form of what? Formless thing. It doesn’t have a form. Yeah, in chapter four, it doesn’t. That’s why he throws it out and goes to chapter five. Yeah, that’s the whole pattern of the book. Oh, yeah, look, this doesn’t work. Let’s try again. Oh, yeah, look, this doesn’t work. Let’s try again, right? That’s the book. Yeah, so like last week, you guys ended on justice and we’re like, well, maybe we need to dig into it a little bit more. Are you guys satisfied or unjust? I’m not. Is there something from four you want to know, Danny, or is that going to get resolved in five, or at least the latter half of five? I got to finish the entire Republic, I think, to resolve it. I can see patterns and sense them. I just can’t put words on them. One thing that jumped out to me of what—I’ve been thinking about everything you’ve been saying, and I haven’t been saying much, but in terms of connecting the shadow on courage, I wonder where courage comes from. Courage seems to be the key locomotive thing that kind of puts the other stuff into action. That’s what strikes me as. But the courage comes from the wisdom, I think. You have the discernment through wisdom, like, oh, I see a part of my shadow, right? And the courage is like, now I engage with that. In ancient Greece, we’re all passion. Everything comes from passions, and then I’ve divided it into passions. So courage is a function of controlling your passions. It’s a different type of control from temperance. But where does courage come from? Courage comes from the wisdom plus the passion. It’s not a—and you cultivate it. It’s not a thing that you’re granted. It doesn’t pre-exist in that way. It pre-exists in the form way, Plato. It doesn’t pre-exist in the way of, well, there’s a courage over there, and you can just grab one, and then you have it. That’s not— And the courage is placing the ideal over the actual. That’s what it is. So there’s definitely an election of—like, they construct an ideal, but the thing about courage is that they give warlike imagery, and they speak of necessity. And then—so in discussing in chapter 5, when they speak of the difference between men and women, they often—and also just in terms of, like, why is this thing or this thing and that thing or that thing? They talk about the necessity of the thing. That’s what—I mean, that’s just what I’m thinking about, is, like, what’s at the core of courage? Why do you need—I don’t know. Again, this is kind of giving into the motivation. You can also pay the enemy off, right? Like, if the enemy is at the gauge, you can say, well, if we give you all our gold, wait. Like, you don’t have to fight. But then you’re no longer who you used to be. Courage, in some sense, is merely the willingness to sacrifice for the ideal. And making that decision is a function of wisdom. And implementing that is—you know, that’s where the courage lies. And then sometimes you run out, right? Like, if you don’t make the decision to go meet the enemy before they get to the city, then yeah, you know, you’re going to have to capitulate something at some point. And I think a better way of looking at it is the ability to live in faith. Right. Oh, yeah. I really like that, actually. It’s reminding me of telos, right, when we were talking about yesterday. If you have a telos, which is not located—it’s potential, right? You’re having faith in that potential. Like, so, for example, if you have a telos, you’re not going to be able to make the decision. So, for example, good father, right? I have faith in that higher principality that I put my identity in. And then that determines how that courage and faith in that higher ideal will determine how I live out my life or whatever. Yeah. Again, going back to how do you get to do things, right? Like, there’s two things, right? Like, one—and they’ve been talking about it—is being driven by fear, right? Like, oh, I’m scared about this, so I’d better be doing that, which is a lesser form, right? Like, this is to complain about religious people. They’re all afraid of going to hell, and then they’re not really good people. It’s like, yeah, fair enough. Like, you’re not a good person if you’re doing things on that basis. And the other part is, like, you do things for the ideal, right? You’re motivated by the intrinsic quality, and like they go in the end of chapter five, they talk about this, right? It’s like, if you can truly see the thing for what it is, right, like, then you’re one type of person, and you know it, right? And this is, again, the knowing by participating in the being, right? And if you don’t have that, if you don’t have that quality, then you’re living in an illusion. Like, you’re living in a fantasy. Like, it’s not real. Yeah, I like that, um, courage as opposed to fear. Does that clear it up for you, Danny? Does that give you some more to think to honor? Oh, yeah, well, what it is, defining it as a concept, I don’t have an issue with. It’s more of, I mean, I don’t have a lot of logic. It’s probably not a rational thing. I just know the word, the language they use to describe courage, they say it’s like it’s kind of salvation. It’s this fear-like thing. It’s just like very extreme thing. They’re not as extreme with the other ones, right? That’s why I say it seems to be a key, like, it seems to be qualitatively very different than anything else that’s come up in the Republic so far to me. It is, because it’s about ultimate sacrifice. Right, yeah. It’s about the ability to manifest. Like, without courage, you can’t manifest. You can’t take responsibility. You can’t do all these things. Yeah, so I guess I was maybe just observing that. Like, you have to have the knowledge of the good from wisdom for courage to be able to manifest. Right? I think you can be courageous towards the wrong thing. Yeah, I don’t think you need knowledge. You can just do things not knowing. And that’s courageous in and of itself, right? Because you’re going to a territory where you can’t sense make. They did talk about courage in the context of the purple dye thing and said you need to start with pure white. And so I wonder if there’s something there. Like, maybe you don’t want your courage to be applied to the wrong thing. Like, maybe you want to make sure that you’re starting with purity and then implement the courage. Right. And that’s their perk. They do another absurdity. We’re going to start with a pure person, right? They know that. They state that doesn’t exist, right? So they’re deliberately trolling at some point. They’re deliberately just telling you things that they know are garbage. To exemplify something. That’s the purpose of good philosophy is to exemplify one particular aspect. So, you know, and this is the pattern of the book throughout, right? They just make these absolutist, universalist statements that are absurd for the purpose of exemplifying what they’re talking about and the fact that even in a perfect world where you have all these false dichotomies, this doesn’t work. And set up a world with perfect false dichotomies and it doesn’t work. Right? And that’s the important part. And it’s the same thing with courage. You’re not going to get to the bottom of courage without solving a bunch of unsolvable problems, which in which case are probably not problems, right? Just without these constraints that are universal. And that’s just the way it is. So it’s not like we’re born into courage, right? We develop it again. It’s something you develop. Not everyone can be courageous and not everybody can be equally courageous. You know, again, it’s not a thing you can go grab out of your backyard and say, I have two courage and Ethan only has a half a courage and yet it doesn’t work that way. Yeah, they’re ethereal things, not material things that can be. Well, it’s not even manifestable. I think that the courage isn’t manifest with second order fact of things like temperance. And that’s the key is that there is a hierarchy within the virtues. And that’s where people get confused. And that’s why we have the true, the good, the beautiful at the top. So you can’t have, right? Like, okay, the enemy is there, right? That’s my wisdom. And it needs to be defeated, right? So that I have a telos, right? Now I’m courageous, I’m facing the enemy. And then what? Right? Like, do I go in berserker style? Do I go like in a phalanx? Like, what’s the way? Like, do I murder the whole enemy or do I capture them? Right? Like, the fact that I’m courageous doesn’t give me an answer of how to be within the telos, even if I’ve engaged in that relationship, right? So that’s where the temperance comes in, right? And then the justice is in the execution, right? Like, is the phalanx actually being a phalanx when engaging? I think an important point that I don’t know if it was mentioned since we started discussing is if you start at utility versus goodness, I think that has a huge, if you start, what they do in the, this is one of Manuel’s big observations, in my opinion, is in the Republic, they start with utility. They say, we’re doing this for the utility, you know, the utilitarian lens for the state. And when you look at courage, or any of these things that way, wisdom or temperance, when you start with utility as your telos, your corollaries are like, you don’t really have a lot of wiggle room to, like, it’s pretty much predetermined where you go with that. So, like, let’s say I’ve got this pulled up, Manuel’s comment on self-courage and about, you have an ideal and your conception of how you like, I need to clean my room. Is that utilitarian or is that good? Do I need to clean my room because it would be a good thing to have me in the state of- No, they’re not exclusive. That’s what people get wrapped up in, right? And part of the project of the Republic is to say, all right, let’s build a total utilitarian system around the stuff we are sure of. And look, it doesn’t work. Okay, good. Well, that’s good to know. It’s just a refutation of utilitarianism as such. And that’s why when people go, I’m a utilitarian, I’m like, do you read? Have you read a book? Because no. Like, it’s just absurd. But if you take the flip side of the equation, right? Like, if you’re taking the good and you can’t implement it, right, which is what all these people are doing, right? Like these post-modernists, like, oh, this is good, right? And then it can’t happen. Then you’re on the other side, right? So you need to have the utilitarian capacity to manifest and you need to have the intrinsic idealistic nature that you conformed to. You just can’t reduce it. And the utilitarians reduce it to one side and the post-moderns reduce it to the other side. And they’re both wrong. And it’s not that hard. It just sucks because now you get to track more than one variable. That’s life is a multivariate equation, right? Like, and that’s what people don’t like. They’re like, I’m too complex. Well, but that’s too bad because it is. And like, this is why I like the body language, right? And the submission thing, right? Because like you cannot manifest the good without a body, right? Without it functioning properly. Like it’s a necessity. You can’t get around it. And then, well, like then the question is, well, how do we do that? Right? Like how do we fit in? Right? And I think, well, I think the way that we’re using submission, like, is highly analogous to justice. Like, in some sense, there’s not much difference between how Plato uses justice in book four and how we use submission. Yeah, I think that’s where people again get, they kind of get wrapped up, right? Because they don’t want to see it in that fashion. They just want it to be different without understanding that it cannot be different. And that’s really what the Republic shows is it cannot be different from how it is. The book just seems to be an experiment in, let me show you why things are as they are and cannot be any different. And people get wrapped up in wanting things to be completely apart. And, you know, book five goes into that with the, you know, the importance of the body, right? They actually touch on that, at least in the first part. Yeah. So it’s interesting how they introduce it, right? Because there’s a little story going in, right? And then it’s like they’re talking. And then what stood out to me is the tension of discord, right? Because they’re discordant with Socrates’ layout, right? Yes. And then Socrates is like, well, and they’re like, well, we don’t like to do that because we’re disruptive, right? So the discord is putting on a constraint. And Socrates is having an explorative mindset, right? So these are intense, right? If we go into the idea of dialogos or whatever, right? Like, I think that’s the dynamic, right? Like it’s the imposition of constraints and the aspiration. And what is the correct means of navigating that? And they highlight that part in the play, I guess, part of the book. Right. But that’s the interesting thing is they introduce two concepts, well, a bunch of concepts, the two main concepts all at once, right? Oh, we don’t want to just object. Really, why not? Right? Because this is revealed later, because that’s not dialectic. If your job is to object and find an opposite, then you’re not doing dialectic according to Plato, period, full stop, end of statement, right? But the other thing is that, you know, in the beginning here, what they’re actually talking about is what he didn’t address, right? He’s saying, well, you haven’t gone back and addressed, well, we’ll say the inconsistencies between, you know, robbing us of a section, a whole section of the argument, right? And what he’s saying is, well, yeah, and that’s because I’m not trying to give you an answer. I’m trying to explore a topic. And it is the spirit of exploration that is the dialectic, which is why you can’t just be in opposition to it. Like if you’re doing the thesis anti this thing, you’re not in dialectic according to Plato, because you’re doing the opposite of an exploration, because all you’re doing is fighting against the explorer. And, you know, I talk a lot about this as a type of conversation that’s exploratory. It’s exemplified in the Republic. Who knew? Never would have guessed. Of course, I figured it was in the Republic. It had to be. Plato’s not an idiot. You know, it’s not, you know, it can’t be a unique observation to me. I never for a second thought that. So you can see that this whole thing, and Socrates just lays it out in the beginning of book five, I am not giving you answers. I’m not telling you I’ve got this figured out. I’m exploring this with you. And the reason why I haven’t mentioned it yet is because it looks hard and I didn’t want to go there yet. And they’re basically saying we have to go there. Also, he’s going one step further. It’s like I’m kind of disagreeing with myself. I’m ashamed to take this step. Right, right, right, right. And that’s the that’s when he finds a problem in the exploration and starts over. Right. And then in book five is again, it’s starting over. You’re starting over. And then he’s saying something else, which is also really interesting in relation to verve. He’s like, affirmation is only necessary when you believe you have the truth. Right. So I am not affected by your discord because you’re not affecting me because I’m looking at the truth. And like I’m like if I stand here or I stand here, like I don’t care because I’m still oriented towards the truth. And like that’s there’s more in there than it seems because like this is you can use this as a rule when you judge people. Right. It’s like, oh, like you get upset when I disagree. Oh, like you must seem to think that you hold a truth, right, instead of that you’re partaking in the being of. In or the exploration. Right. Like you can’t be exploring if you’re objecting. Again, that’s that’s what he said. You’re not in dialectic if you’re objecting and only objecting. Right. That’s not that’s not dialectic. Any protesting would be a better word. Protesting, you know, dialect. Yeah. Well, there’s lots of there’s lots of similar phrases that are dead on for the same thing because we just keep inventing new words to avoid falling into what Socrates talks about here. And it’s like, wow, that’s cute. But also, no, I mean, he’s still you’re still you’re just using a new word to get around being guilty of what he’s accusing you of. So he’s he’s lifting out a space between birth and education. I found that really, really nice because like, you’re not being educated when you’re a baby. And the way that I framed that was it’s laying the foundation. Right. So there’s there’s a place where you build the foundation. And then you can start building your knowledge from the foundation that you’ve laid right through education. Um, so, yeah, I really like that distinction. Does anybody want to butt in? Because, well, I guess we haven’t gone far yet. Well, one thing I think it might be important is to fortify the mark mentioned, it made the observation about his bloom his version you had language like hero six or style, I think, but you can’t put things on top of the opposition. I think it’s important to maybe cite some sources that’s in 454 a because I think that’s an important point that we’re going to stand on. So it might make sense to fortify it. It’s in 455 a when they’re talking about the power of the art of contradiction. My translation uses simple like a simpler language. But it says, you know, this is the great power of contradiction. Why do you say so? Because I think a man falls into the practice against his will. I thought that was an interesting observation. I didn’t know what was there. But he thinks he’s reasoning and he’s just he’s really just disputing because he can’t define and defied. So it’s like you because you lack discern proper discernment, you get into the spirit of contention. And therefore you can’t have a fair discussion. To me, that’s it. To me, they were making a statement more about like the spirit of, you know, like the spirit. Yeah, again, like what kind of attitude you have when you come to the table? What lens are you using? No, no, no, I know. I think it’s tell us. Tell us about tell us. Right. If you don’t share it, tell us. You cannot like like this is the problem with all our arguments online. Right. Like people don’t share it. Tell us. And then they’re talking and then they’re pretending that they’re talking to each other, but they’re talking to themselves. Yeah, they’re explicit about that. They say, why do we, you know, valiantly insist on verbal truth? But there’s a differences in our pursuits. Our pursuits are not the same. And therefore we cannot have meaning the same. We cannot share the same meanings if we don’t have the same pursuits. They say it explicitly. 454B. Right. And that’s because meanings brings from content plus context. And so if your context, which is determined by your tell us, is not the same. And that’s the essence of online trolling. That’s where it comes from. Like we’re playing a game that you don’t understand. And we’re going to play your game within your rules, but we’re really playing our game. Right. And so it’s a self referential, purely parasitic, by the way, but way fun way of way of interacting with people based on this very principle. You know, it’s based on the principle that, well, if I’m talking about something else, or I’m not being serious when you’re being serious, then, you know, it’s just funny. It’s a funny contrast or whatever. That’s the essence of trolling. And yeah. And then in C, 454C, they go into proper categorization, right? Proper ontology. That’s what the next section is about, is proper ontology. So Manuel, I don’t know if you were going somewhere with connecting education to ontology or categorization, but I just thought it was important to cite before we moved on to the whole, because the men and women thing, it’s kind of messy. Like, do they have different natures? They say the dogs don’t have the different natures. They shouldn’t do the same tasks. They talk about how- No, it’s not natures. No, they don’t say dogs don’t have different natures. That’s not what they say. They say with respect to action, because you’re judging action and you’re ignoring nature, right. We get confused because we’re trying to do the object thing. We’re trying to go, oh, a dog is an object of type with properties. No, it’s not. You’re just saying, no, that’s not how you think about it ever. That’s what he’s saying. You don’t think about it that way ever. He’s saying the way to think about it is in terms of, we’ll call it available T loss or something, right? Like either the dog’s a good hunting dog or it’s a good something else dog, right? And therefore the fact of the breed and the fact of what color it is and the fact of how big it is, is irrelevant. And so this is the relevance realization. Again, proper categorization is relevance realization. It doesn’t make any sense when talking about guardians to divide guardians into men and women. It doesn’t make any sense because the act of being a guardian has nothing to do with men or women. It’s a form that just doesn’t involve itself in these other characteristics. And then he explicitly says this, like the manifestation is irrelevant. He’s not talking about equality in terms of outcome. He’s talking about equality in terms of task to do, right? And that’s it. That’s where the equality is. It’s the open, the authoritarian argument. He’s making a capacity argument. It’s relating to potential. Right. But that’s egalitarianism. It’s saying if you can do the job, you’re allowed to do the job. And that’s the only standard for doing the job, right? It’s purely self-referential in that way, is just saying if you’re good at killing people, then you’re good at killing people, and therefore we should let you kill people. It doesn’t talk about the other ostensible theoretical properties of men or women or dogs or anything else. Whatever it is that they’re on about, which I’m not sure exactly what it is, it’s a higher thing, because they say idiosyncratically in the individual desires, women can be better than men at things. Like sure, fine, you want to be, you know, but whatever the unifying principle, there’s a theme of unity in the chapter, and they say the physician, when we call somebody a physician, we’re saying the class, if this, you’re a physician of minds, right? Tontology. That’s small ontology. Yeah, whatever they’re- Small ontology, categorization as such. And they’re privileging the categorization over the things in the category. And we get that backwards, because when we say objective material reality or science, we’re trying to give the objects the primacy. And what Plato is saying is objects do not have primacy. What has primacy is their function. Men and women are of the same nature, and that we’re subordinated to the same thing, whatever the thing is that they’re trying to point to, whatever it is, they’re pointing up. Yeah, the city. Yeah. The city. And they’re saying that that is what unifies men and women. So they’re saying like, hey, we’re trying to get at something over here, but it’s not useful to think of, thinking of men and women as different is kind of like talking about a hairy versus non-carry carpenter. So not what we’re on about, right? We’re on about some unifying principle. That’s what they’re trying to point to. Yeah. So this is, in some sense, an expansion of the idea of temper. Right? So, okay, what is my relationship? Right? And the relationship that I have is the role that I’m in. Right? So the role is determining my identity. And that’s what they’re doing. And so what is the most, the best example of a role of a human being? Well, that’s their sex. Right? So what they’re doing is they’re taking the most fundamental way of understanding a role, and they’re just cutting it down. They’re saying it’s invalid to make this judgment. And I think that’s the trick. It’s like, okay, I take down the biggest problem that I can tackle, and therefore it’s universally true across every category. Well, and also they’re, you know, reinvoking this don’t create problems where there aren’t problems. Right? If you start from the frame of men and women are different, you’ve created a bunch of problems that don’t need to be there with respect to being a guardian. Because with respect to being a guardian, the apparent frame that men and women are different on average is irrelevant, because being a guardian doesn’t care about that difference. It’s not interesting or important. Right? And that’s the relevance of this realization. So yes, you can be, look, and this is the problem. I mean, that Verveki talks about was a conventory explosion. You can find an infinite number of similarities or differences between men and women. So what? That’s not interesting or important. What’s important is the telos. Right? Okay. Well, if the telos is to raise children, now we can, you know, if the telos is to protect the city, now we can do something useful with that. And ignoring the end result, because you’re not interested in the end result in terms of men and women, fixes everything so that the problem never manifests. In other words, the fact that you’re going to end up with fewer women in combat is not considered a problem, because your goal is never to get equality. And if your goal isn’t to get equality equal representation, then you don’t create the problem. The problem only exists within the telos. So if the telos is good guardian, the fact of men and women is not relevant. It’s not interesting. It’s not important. And it’s not considered. That’s the opposition again. I wrote down this is an argument against absolutism, right? Or dogmatism in some sense. Right? Because that’s implicitly what it is. Like, oh, man, woman, right? And then therefore, right? Is the saying the frame of man, woman is defining how the world should be or whatever, right? Or how the world is. And so I think what he’s doing is he’s making this track of basically undermining your sense making and reorienting it in a different way. Like he’s engaging with your fundamental sense making at this point. Yeah, just as in, you know, in recent times, we’ve been sort of trained to pay attention to an arbitrary physical manifestation that doesn’t exist and isn’t helpful. And because of that, we’re acting as if we always have to consider that. But the fact of the matter is we absolutely do not. It’s just a stupid game. And if you don’t play, everything’s fine and everything works better. And so the minute you drop this idea that the fact of difference as such is important, which again is explicit in the beginning of book five, everything solves itself because those problems that would have been created never get created ever. It’s just not a factor. Right? And so, for example, if you do good work in your craft, let’s say you’re a software engineer, right? The fact that you do good work is not affected by the failure or success of the company because the company doesn’t depend only on your work. Like, you know, the best software in the world, and if the marketing is terrible, no one’s going to know about it. The best software in the world, if the funds are mismanaged by the chief financial officer, it won’t see the light of day. The worst software in the world, and if it’s well marketed, it will sell. That’s called vaporware. Like, you know, this is everywhere. It’s just that’s an indication that you’re paying attention to the wrong thing. And yeah, it’s funny because that all came up in my live stream last night, is that you can use the manifestation of whatever people are doing to determine what their tell-us actually is, even when they don’t know it. But seeing the manifestation and seeing what they’re paying attention to or just asking what they pay attention to often will tell you what the tell-us is any good. And that’s what this is pointing to. So yeah, a couple things jumped out to me. So I have here capacity versus attunement, right? So he’s talking about, well, they could become guardians. But then they have to become guardians. So there’s an implementation aspect. And I brought that up into where does this utility give into faith? Because at a certain point, your predictive capacity is like, you don’t know what a baby can do. Like, maybe if you have a five-year-old, you can say, well, they might become a lawyer or politician, right? You might be like, accurate, like 50% of the time or something. Not even close. Maybe. But that’s conceivable, right? So there’s this aspect where your ability to be a guardian is like, you know, you’re not a guardian. You’re not a guardian. This aspect where you’re looking at a potential, which is real, right? Which is justified. Maybe that’s the word that I should be using. There’s a justified potential. And then there’s a hope or something, right? That you believe in. I found that line interesting. Yeah. And the other concept in there, especially with and see what war is like so that there’ll be better warriors. And they’re all objecting, like, oh, no, you can’t risk the children in the war. And he’s like, but it must be so. All right. Because they have to see it exemplified in order to learn it. So the whole idea of mimicry, the whole idea of participatory, quote, knowledge, which is not knowledge, it’s information, is right here in book five, which I find fascinating. It’s like, you know, we’re still rediscovering Plato, huh? Well, that’s good. Good on us, I guess. We could have just read it and believed him. I don’t know. By the way, Manuel, technically, statistically, you can’t have a 50-50 representation on that. Because children, well, yeah, children change. But also, it’s not there aren’t two items in the set. And therefore, statistically, it’ll never be 50-50. But it’ll be more like, it’s either true or it’s not. Right. And then you can do statistical analysis. No, no, you can’t do it. It doesn’t matter. Like, at some point, if you ever cross the threshold, like, there’s a threshold. Anyway, doesn’t matter. Not relevant. Yeah. So are we done on the man, woman thing or are we still having some? Oh, it gets worse. I don’t know about that. I mean, it just it’s just resolved by changing your T loss. Yeah. Because then, again, the problem doesn’t happen. And a problem that doesn’t happen is technically resolved. Like, oh, we’re never going to run into that wall. Well, the next part, they go into common marriages and common children and stuff like that, common families, which even I, I mean, again, you know, you have to recognize the book is deliberately absurd, right? Again, it’s trying to show you if the world were perfect and dichotomies, all of which are false, by the way, actually were implementable in the world, it still doesn’t work. Like, it is really is a let me show you how stupid you’re being like that. This is the theme of the book is let me show you how retarded you’re actually being about this stuff. You cannot do this. And here’s the proof that you cannot do it will use logic, reason, rationality, and will show you that even under the most ideal conditions you could possibly ever conceive of none of this stuff is going to work out the way you the way you think it could. None of it. That goes to the point, just to give some context. And there, we get on to a strange concept later on in the book called the philosopher king. Now, why are these Greeks talking about a king? The last time there was any serious person who’s who is turned by the name name king in Greece to all the people in this conversation was the Iliad. It was King Agamemnon and Menelaus. They still had those original time the Athenians had a title for somebody, which which was the same as king, but they weren’t a king. It was they didn’t they didn’t even treat him in the same way. The Basilio’s. And, and again, even at this time, the the king that king office wouldn’t have. It was one of many different offices. So it is quite a ridiculous thing. I mean, it would take until about two generations after these men for any Greek city state to be under to be under somebody who called themselves about a king a Basilio’s. Otherwise, it would have been some sort of assembly or a tyrant and they would have just called themselves out there. There are tyrannos. So this is the ludicrous conversation to all the people involved when they’re talking about common families and then they’ll get on to the idea of, you know, a king, which yeah, it’s not it’s non sequitur. Yeah, well, there’s a point in there where Socrates is begging them to just let him say what he’s about to say because they’re trying to stop was like, this is too crazy. This is way too. He says, just let me fantasize here. Just let me think he said, well, he compares himself to somebody on vacation in their thoughts without any consequences. Something like that. Right. Well, then that’s the spirit of exploration. Like, yeah, and that’s what everyone says they’re longing for. I mean, in some sense, right? This is Jean Francois, Leo Taric, can’t everybody wants to be able to do their unrestrained thought experiments with no consequences, right? And that’s fine as long as you’re not going to take an action in the world, but also you’re going to take an action in the world. So that’s where it gets tricky is you can’t just let people fantasize endlessly. And yeah, you can see that struggle underlies. Yeah, this chapter in particular, but I think it’s probably throughout the whole book. Oh, and maybe that is actually they’re displaying one of these virtues, right? Like, so maybe they’re actually displaying temperance in the thing was like, oh, yeah, I want to do this, but I’m not because like, the functioning of the body would not be proper. Right. Yeah, so everything were absolutely perfect. This is how the guardians would have to behave to have be best children possible and the best marriage is possible for the entirety of the society. The waking some well, you can’t injustice. Well, and you can’t you can’t you can’t allow them to have an alternative ideal like family, which is why they flatten it out. Right. And family is, you know, it’s actually relationship as such. I mean, in this model, they’re just flattening everything to you are an individual within a city with a role. And they’re separating out those roles in a very scientific, ontological way. Right. And they’re saying, All right, your role here has can never have anything to do with anything but the city. So you can’t have a familial connection whatsoever, in order to perfectly implement guardian. And it’s like, Oh, okay. Like, it’s not it’s not logically inconsistent or incorrect. It’s not wrong. Like, this is what you know, it’s work, right? Like, like, like this stuff happens. Like people do. I was thinking of that. Yeah. And they do something like this in Persia. Yeah. And in China, yeah, like, they did. Yeah. Well, what’s the practice? Like cutting off stuff from Oh, yes. Yeah, that’s that’s. And the reason why that’s the case, by the way, is because then you don’t have somebody who is going to usurp or overthrow your dynasty, because they can’t perpetuate that dynasty. So the unix, this is something that the Ottoman sultans did. And it was in some way it is it is it’s quite effective. But again, to the Greeks, this would be foreign, and it would be Persian, right? So it would be this is another completely fantasy based sort of deal, like the Greeks would probably look at unix like we actually look like you look at unix, which is there, there, there are mutilated body and and something’s horribly wrong. Why they don’t go there, they go instead to, we’re just going to confuse everybody and mix up the children. So they can’t that way, we don’t have to mutilate any bodies. Fair enough. But it’s a nice compromise. And also, right, like, the testicles make testosterone, right? So if you get rid of them, you have a lot more feminine, it’s like, that’s true. Yeah. So yeah, make make marriage beneficial is back to the utilitarian thing. And then actually, they actually said we need to make marriage sacred. It’s funny reading that at first, but by how they make it sacred, not how you would think. But yeah, they do another absurdity, they, you know, they’re practicing pseudo eugenics, I guess, or, or, or breeding. And he’s like, Well, we’re just gonna have to trust that we have a higher authority that can make these judgments. And I think he says, we’ll just we’ll just consult the the Oracle at Delphi, you know, they’ll tell us who needs to breed with who, right, kind of sets it off their side. You know, but yeah, very much kind of doing this, this, this, this philosophizing, like you say, you know, they’re kind of absolutizing things so they can get a better idea of, of something. Yeah, it’s high. It’s a very high contrast effort. But also to your point, they keep sneaking in the religious authority left, right and center. It’s like religion is all throughout this book, it’s absolutely dripping with it. And it’s dripping with it in the way that it’s not mentioned very often. But it’s mentioned in relation to the most important decisions. All of the most important decisions are, are fields to religious authority, every single one of them. And it’s, it’s, it’s so bizarre how they actually walk through the thought process, like they bring up the dogs, the male and the female dogs and say like, Okay, well, they kind of do the same function, same T loss. And then they talk about, you know, the differences between men and women. And then suddenly, they just say, Oh, well, we’ve got to have a matrimony elevated highly, because licentiousness is an unholy thing which the rulers which shall be forbidden. And yes, it ought not to be forbidden. Moving, moving right along, nothing to see here moving right along. It’s just, it’s just crazy. It’s crazy. You know, it’s like, they’re talking about, you know, the whole point of this is exemplifying the problem with categorizing things. And then they’re just kind of like, okay, now that we’ve done that, you know, moving right along, we’re not going to try to build anything. We’re just gonna, you know, I don’t know, I just think it’s funny. I laughed. And they make jokes too, like when they talked about I laughed, like when they talked about the necessity, this is completely unrelated. So I don’t know why I’m bringing this up other than it’s funny. They bring up they say like men and women have a necessity to attract one towards one of the other dimension intercourse, but it’s not the kind of necessity like a geometry. It’s not a geometrical necessity. I swear, that’s got to be like an intentional joke, you know, they have stuff like that. Well, yeah, but but actually, I made a comment around this. And it’s like, the law, so they’re trying to get get the individual to lose their individuality, right? Like, you’re not you’re not allowed to have your selfie space. And then they’re like, oh, but there’s nature, right? And there’s lot of nature. And we got to recognize that some things are just gonna happen, right? So this, they’re coming. This is the pragmatic implementation thing that they’re shying away from. And they’re bringing it back in. And then they say, well, but we can’t really have that. But after the prime, right after the prime, it’s okay, right? So now we’re just like making a section where things are not okay. And afterwards, there’s different rules. And, and then there are even more so it’s like, but if the oracles ask something, then it can be different. Because like they’re the higher authorities, like, okay, like, you just like screwed up your whole system. But, but yeah, I think I think that’s, in some sense, they’re foreshadowing this, this imperfection that has to exist because like else, it’s just not going to be realistic at all. So, Do you mind if I just close this up real quick? I don’t remember if Manuel connected, he mentioned that he noticed this morning that they use, what did you say? Like, they create tension with lenses. I don’t remember what you said mentioned, but that that’s what they’re doing is that they keep on opposition, they’re using opposition in order to, you know, be exploratory. And I think what you meant, you mentioned capacity versus attunement, that has to be what they’re on about with the men, men and women thing, right? So it’s like the Paul VanderKlein might say like the spirit of like, that’s what the geometry joke about, like, they’re literally making sex jokes about being a math nerd, like, no, dude, like, you’re stuck in the textbook, it’s like the difference in the spirit of finesse versus I don’t remember what Paul VanderKlein’s puts on the other side. Is it really is it literally geometry? Oh, okay. That’s funny. Yeah, this is from Pascal, Pascal talks about this. So, okay, so maybe I don’t know, maybe they’re bringing I don’t know if the spirit of finesse is what they’re trying to bring into here, or? No, it is. That’s exactly what they’re pointing. That’s exactly what the joke is. Yeah, they’re doing the propositional procedural thing, right? And they’re like, well, yeah, there’s this other thing that we’re not going to deal with it because we can’t. Right, it’s all because we can’t. Right. Well, and again, they exemplify that with the children, they say, look, we have to let some children die, because they have to watch their parents, they have to watch the other guardians that they will become fight in war. We just we’re just going to have to sacrifice a few of them because of that. And it’s just like it’s nothing, right? It’s absolutely nothing to them. Because again, they’re trying to do this, this high exemplification argument around this thing. But again, you have to consider, you know, an animal probably jump in here at some point. The passions are what rule people, they know this, they talk about this all over the place, maybe not in the Republic, but they that’s the formula that Plato uses is that what drives us is always a passion, always. And so they, they are pretending like the passions don’t exist until they can’t ignore it, and then saying, well, you know, whatever, and jumping over that is on gap again, but by appealing by doing the religious appeal, because passions are the driver for everything and not mimicry and not education and not, you know, your loyalty to the city like those aren’t drivers. The drivers are still in the passions. I think Danny lost his and I don’t know if he noticed, but they talked about the noble lie again, right? And its necessity, right? And then they compared it to medicine. And I was like, Oh, right. So what is what is medicine is like, everybody, everything is okay. Like, you’re not sick. It’s like, that’s what medicine is. So you know, you’re still sick. The fact that you feel good for a second, because you think you’re not sick. It’s like, no, you’re sick. It’s interesting. Yeah. And they went, they went on with this, right? Because I think, from from there, from the noble lie, they went into, into the separating the children. And what do you do you tell them, right? And again, with the separation of the children, they again, they recognize the law of nature there, right? It’s like, well, we can’t have these people have sex with each other, right, because they might be family. Right? And I didn’t go into how they would like deal with their brothers and sisters of different age ranges. Anyway, like that, because I don’t, I don’t think it’s possible to, to mathematically fix that. Sorry, some weird things like there’s, they have cycles of breeding. And like, this group of people breeds at this time, and then like, right, going forward, it’s like, you’re not allowed to breed with no, they say actually, you are allowed to, to, to breed or to fornicate with people of the same breeding time. But you can’t, there’s like a seven or they said seven, nine month cycle, you can’t, you can’t procreate with the people above or below, because there’s a risk that you might. Yeah. But he also says, the law will allow brothers and sisters to have sex with one another if the lottery works out that way. And Pithia approves. Yes. Another religious appeal. Yeah. Yeah, it’s chock full of these appeals that you kind of miss because they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re, you know, for sentence fragments effectively, where they hit a limit and they go, yeah, the gods are going to figure that out. And then they just move on with the argument. And you know, it’s easy to miss because it’s, it’s just a couple, couple words in a sentence, but no, it’s, it’s the most important part of what’s being said, usually in the paragraph. And it’s like, oh, this most important part of the paragraph. And they just punted it to religion. Yeah, that’s pretty much what they did. So, Dan, they start talking about the laws of property unless someone else has something they still want to get into. Where are you, Manuel? I have no idea. I was, I was listening. 462. Maybe I missed a whole bunch. Maybe you guys should take the lead because I was in the store at this point. So you guys take the lead. 462, I think. Oh, we’re all the way there. Wow. That’s, yeah. Well, yeah, unless you guys want to like take something in the middle there. I have to remember what’s before 462. Oh, yeah. This is just the commonality argument around the, right. It’s just the commonality in education. And again, like the interesting thing to me is the education is definitely all about exemplification and mimicry, not just about sitting in a classroom, for example, which I don’t think they actually, and I don’t think that was their idea of education at all. I suspect that was different. So, yeah, I don’t know what else to make of all that. Schooling, schooling for the ancient Greeks could have been, there were, I mean, I know later on in Roman times, they would have had something approximating a school in the sense for the pleb children. And they’d just be taken all together as a group rather than individual. But usually families would. I expect it would be the same for a lot of wealthy Greek families. You’d get a tutor in, or you wouldn’t get a tutor at all. And you just, you know, that’s it. Because, I mean, it would depend on what class you are. If you were of a kind of more wealthy disposition, you’d get tutors in. And this kind of large scale public schooling that is more modern is just completely foreign for anyone of this time period. Yeah, that’s a good contextual note because we tend to use these in anachronistic way. Plus, you know, this city doesn’t exist. Like they’re talking about things about education in a thing that they never built and never could build. And they knew they could never build it. So they never even tried to build it. And we’re like, oh, the Greeks did this. And no, they didn’t. They explicitly didn’t because they figured out it doesn’t work anyway. Why would we waste our time? Right. And they sell for a lot less, I guess, ultimately, in terms of the ideals put forth in, you know, in the Republic anyway. They don’t even, they don’t reach those heights. No. Well, I’m not really sure where I’m going. I was going back in my notes on Book 3 when we were, when they first brought out like full-fledged eugenics, just looking for common threads. And they were kind of on about like, what I would, from my perspective, it seems like they were on about vitality of the individual when they’re talking about the habits of life, indolences. This is back when they’re talking about, and then relationship of roles. So when they were talking in Chapter 3 should a judge actually know evil as opposed to these other roles that maybe are going to want different relationships to things. Now, before they get into the, as Casey mentioned up, like, oh, this is not an approved child, the bastard child that’s approved or not approved of the state. Before they mentioned that, they talk about the prime of life, like men and women being in the prime of life. So I wonder if there’s something there about, like they’re talking about something about spirit. Like, I mean, when we say somebody’s in their prime, you know, what do we mean by that? Like, why can’t a 65-year-old man be in his prime of his career? They’re not talking about prime. No, they’re not talking about prime. They’re talking about reproductive prime, which is a totally, there’s no such thing as prime by itself. That doesn’t make any sense. They’re talking about reproductive prime. Well, they say it many, many, many times. My translation certainly says both men and women. Those years are the prime of physical as well as intellectual vigor. And then. Yeah, well, I think the word vigor is most important there, right? So. They’re talking about breeding up front. It starts with the breeding. And so, yeah, in the context of breeding, then it’s about breeding. It’s not about anything else. Right. And what does vigor mean? Vigor is in some sense, relation to the passion. Right. Like. Yeah. Like. And being unsold, right? Being alive. Right. And so why would you give people freedom if they lose their liveliness? Because they might be in control of the thing that would otherwise control them. Yeah. Like I think that’s. That’s what the book opened up to with the guy on the road from the religious festival saying, oh, you know, it’s nice being older because this the passions aren’t as strong anymore. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s very important because we, you know, again, we try to be the objective material realist and go, oh, right in this section right here, they’re not using, you know, they’re not framing. Well, no, no, they already framed it. They’re not going to keep framing it. They’re just wasting words on a page at some point. So, yeah, it is in the context of breeding already. And you can’t take it out of that context and have it make any sense because now you’re talking about something they weren’t talking about. Yeah. I suspect the translation is something like if you look at ancient Greek, probably something like a Rete meaning height or peak. But I don’t know, could you give me the reference for that? Danny for that. Vigor. Prime. 461 plus or minus a little bit. D. 460 D ish. Or so. And so, so, so what are they doing? Right. So, so we have, we have four phases now. So we have the formative phase, right. Then we have the educated phase and then we have the prime and then we have the post prime, right. Old age, effectively. Right. And they, they, they have different rulesets, right. Like they have different constraints upon these categories because they deal with separate problems, right. Like the first two are, are you going into something, right. And then at the third in your prime, you’re expressing something, but, but you’re still getting control or you’re still working on mastering yourself, right. Like, like, so, and, and then in the end, like you, you get, you get into this other phase and, and I, I think they get looser the later you get, right. Which is what happens in our society as well. Right. Yeah. And you, I mean, you can see in here clearly that they’re talking about child rearing. And I like that in, in, in, in my book, it’s like, so I think they will take the offspring of the good and bring them into the pen to certain nurses, right. It’s like, what? The pen? You’re keeping children in offsprings and pens? What’s going on? Like what? Yeah. And it’s all very mechanical. That’s the other thing that we miss. Like all of this book is mechanical. It’s all mechanical. It’s all like, if this, then that, this, this, or that, this, this relates to this, this way and only this way. Right. And so you, you do have to pay very close attention because, you know, just before the section you were talking about, Danny, if the guardian species is going to remain pure, that’s the statement, right. Everything else is taken in that context from that point forward, which is when we’re talking about, you know, devices so that no one can recognize their own, can’t supervise themselves. And then they go into easy kind of childbearing. Why is easy kind of childbearing important? It’s important because it otherwise gets in the way of guardianship. Because again, the, the, the, the big T-loss here is guardian, you know, the guardians. And, and so then they’re talking about prime, right. That’s the third frame that they’re entering you into is, well, what is prime in the context of guardians and birth, right. And so that’s why they’re not trying to define like vitality for weightlifting. They don’t care about weightlifting. They care about, about easy birth for women and men at some point. So, so it’s very, it’s very hard for us in modern times to try to understand framing because we’re so used to inserting our own, because, you know, the postmodern say that they’re all equal. So it’s easy to get lost, especially in this book. Well, I don’t think in any old book, I would say. Well, the disc book’s especially tricky because they do keep switching frames on you explicitly. I, I think maybe there’s some relationship to vigor and a place in hierarchy. So I think I found a spot where you mentioned vigor. Sorry, I interrupted. No, no worries. 461. Mine doesn’t say the word vigor or anything like that. It just says like a man still of beginning years. Right. Women of childbearing age. Mine doesn’t say anything about vigor. Still unsure with the Greek word they use. Because they might be like equivalent words in Greek. Like they would use the same words for those sorts of things, but it just depends on the context. Yeah, I’m not sure. Mark’s translation for when he was laying down, I think it was 454. Yeah, 454A. Yeah, the reasoning versus speech. His translation literally used the words heuristics and dialectic, which jump out to me as being like, oh, it smacked me in the face. My translation used really simple cat, simple language. Like, oh, this is a person who’s just disputing over words. He’s a word truthy person. And I think that’s the reason why I think that’s the reason why I think that’s the reason why we use this word, this word. The reason why we say he’s disputing over words. He’s a word truthy person. Right. That’s that I didn’t I didn’t make the connection of like, oh, jumping the Aza’gath and stuff like that. And so the translation makes a big difference for sure. I like the simple elementary level translation, because I just, I like to feel good when I read. Mine says I quarrel in a conversation. Interesting. Disputation. Conversation. Yeah. I don’t think I have a bigger in here either. Verbal opposition in the spirit of contention. Not fair discussion. That’s what mine says. Is it 454? Yeah, we just compared the two. Yeah, we just compared translations at 454. I didn’t mean to like divert us. It was kind of a maybe not that relevant. Back to 454. No, no, it’s very relevant because it does. I mean, and that’s the good part about having a book club with multiple translations. We learned that kind of early on. Translations matter a lot. Really interesting because they have ten translations and we just like they were next to each other so you could read the same line multiple times and then everybody was like but they did this here and what would that mean? Because like with Chinese, like that’s not a linear translation. Not even close. Right. Yeah. So those things actually set opposite things at some point, right? It was really strange to have the Chinese translations. I was like, oh yeah, this guy is a Christian. Oh yeah, this guy is just like post-modernist. Oh, this guy is like Yeah, the only thing you could see was not the difference in the text so much as the difference in the translator. You’re like, oh yeah, this translator is coming from this perspective and that translator is coming from that perspective. What book was this you’re talking about? The Tao Jie Ching. Okay. Yeah, they got a great Tao Jie Ching online with what you do is you open two browsers, you get five in each browser in the same site and you can compare ten translations and they’re different lengths. The same sections are different lengths. It’s really funny. It’s vastly different. And then you read that with Ecclesiastes and then you find out there’s no different between East and West whatsoever. It doesn’t exist. It’s all imaginary. I imagine you get one in Chinese and it’s like this long and then you get one in Spanish and it’s like three paragraphs or something. Yeah, yeah. Cici. Cici. Cici senior. To go back to the law thing. They’re going onto laws of property and then they start digging into personal versus collective identity. Which I have found highly interesting. And so effectively they said when you get a transgression from the external the internal unifies because its identity is being threatened. Threatened, right. Right. So if you turn that around in order to know, right, if we lack discernment, what hole we belong to when the hole gets threatened do we rally to the defendant, right? Like that’s kind of a litmus test. Do we rally to the defendant? Well, you rally to defend the whole, right? So if someone insults America and you start defending it, it’s like oh, like you co-identify with America. You feel part of the American spirit. Now, yeah, you also have to be a little bit more open to the facts. You can say, well, that’s not an actual attack, right? But that’s a different point. You say like a man, like if a man’s finger gets hurt, then the entirety of his body realizes that there’s a threat against the entirety and not just the finger. Right. Which is in some sense it’s frame breaking, right? So if you want to be able to share the identity of the whole, you need to lose the identity of the individual well, right? I think that may be the more important part, right? Because like I was talking to Danny about this, right? Now they’re going into stuff and I was like oh, this is what people are going to like to have communion, right? And in this sense, again, they go into the negative, right? Or they go into the utilitarian frame. Oh yeah, you should commune because it’s better for you to be part of a community, in fact. Or you should commune because like else you’re going to get hurt, right? And it’s all this negative framing while When in the Bible they start saying well to faith hope and love right like there’s an aspiration Introduced in the unity as opposed to just a utilitarian thing And I was I was wondering if Plato was was gonna make that step too because that would be Interesting to see how he does that Yeah, I don’t know we’re getting up on time here Manuel what do you want to do Yeah I don’t know if you guys want to cut out 11 or go to 1115 Yeah, I think we’re somewhat in the middle Yeah, I Can bring some some observation in right just It’s kind of on this thing that I wanted to bring it in at the start Because we were talking about discord And at least that was the word that they were using in the translation that I was hearing As a discord is is connected to the internal right so this Disregulation within the internal state and then war is is Disregulation between the outside and the inside And so I I found that the And so I I found that that idea really interesting right and so The implication there is that through the expansion of identity we can resolve things through discord By apparently different rules That are aimed at resolving things between pieces right so I think this is this is what all the globalist Wanted to do right like they want to reduce war to discord by being part of the same body And and then What they’re basically saying as well like if if you’re having discord you’re not aimed at the destruction of the other right like that effectively because Because you share a dependency Right what section is that manual because I don’t That’s a bunch later but not much They’re talking about Greeks and but but I’m not going into into the book I was more thinking about The implications about society right yeah There’s a section on that earlier where where to your point they make a distinction Chapter War Yeah, no, I don’t know if they’re making one between this word Yeah, but it is war and something else right and this goes back to that whole idea of hostile versus enemy in the Bible It’s the same problem with the German translation. This is a difference between a hostile and an enemy Yeah, there’s there’s that which is internal the internal So that hostage hostis hostiles being the at the political or not the political the the enemy of the state Who’s coming in outside trying to destroy it and then in a mcgoss meaning somebody who’s within the state Who is just you know under the same head, but let’s say you differ there. There’s there’s a kind of differing of of How you’re relating and and and maybe you don’t like each other And dehumanization is the word that they use in modern discourse Like if we’re dehumanizing them if we’re ordering them that that is a war Space instead of a discourse space And the solution really is have a single body. It’s just that doesn’t work and it’s stupid. So right so So, how do we appeal to the unifying principle and what is its strength Right and then I got this thing. It’s like the intimacy builds over time, right? So you can’t you can’t just State the body note that there needs to be a participation within the body and you need to be in a role And then because you co-identify with that then you go identify with the body as well. So that’s That’s the thing that’s necessarily takes time And if you look at these these postmodern people right with their allies ship right like the allies ship is is the attempt to create an artificial body because like you’re allied right and it’s not only just just allies in general right like allies and generals like oh we’re going to be together because it’s convenient right and then It allies ship can’t be a single body And it’s not only just like you’re not going to be a single body Right. So you need a binding agent to be intimate around and that cannot be something subjective like an internal identity Right. So because I cannot be intimate with you around your experience like that’s not an option for me And and I think I think so. So I think it’s a very important thing to have an ally ship around your experience like that’s not an option for me And and I think I think so. So the intimacy crisis and a fake making of intimacy and and and and not putting the intimacy within The right framing is is the why these things can’t hold and why they’re evil like at the same time So now we’re back to like a utility argument right like every time the argument is like the thing that you do cannot exist and therefore it’s evil Yeah, that was my little sermon about that Yeah, well I’ll just I’ll just give some historical context this as well because they’re talking about who is a Greek and who isn’t in this And within again within within the same two generations of these men talking about it the Macedonians who were largely considered to be barbarians That is not Greeks outside of the body of Greece and under Philip the second and then later on who and his son Alexander the great And I don’t even think it was at that time particularly but but it was Alexander the great and Philip of Macedon Fight to take up the cause of Greece against the Persians. So they were harking back to Thermopylae to this to this great event that that united the Greeks And even though they were Macedonians, even though they were considered barbarians and within by the time you get to maybe 100 years after this where this dialogue is taking place Macedonians and Greeks are under the same within the same body under they’re both they’re both considered to be Greeks and the Greeks don’t consider the Macedonians to be barbarians They consider the Romans to be barbarians, but the Macedonians are are as Greek as the rest of them so far as they’re concerned So that’s interesting. Well, yeah, no Greeks left in Greece. So yeah, Oops. Adam, are you saying that they cast a specific group of people in the way that they wanted to because it was convenient to them? No, it wasn’t convenience. No, the Macedonians were the Macedonians took up the cause Macedonians under Alexander the great under Philip firstly, they United Greece actually As a political body and then they gathered all of their men in the gathered an army and they went off to fight the Persians who as I mentioned previously were these kind of far off great barbarians And the kind of the kind of the worst of the barbarians because of course if you think back to the 300 or let’s say or the Battle of Thermopylae that is that is the kind of color you can see it as a kind of coalescing point of Of a lot of the Greeks or the the kind of the identity of Greek and by them taking part in the the retribution for that by conquering the Persian Empire completely reversing what happened at Thermopylae ultimately Firstly, I mean they spread the Greek language around like the reason why the lot of the Bible manuscripts are written in Greek is because and the reason it’s spread in that way was because of Alexander the great ultimately because he spread the Greek language he spread Greek culture and by that kind of He attached himself and the Macedonians as a people who did speak Greek even beforehand, but they were still considered barbarians. So this is this is how it goes. They were eventually then woven into made part of the body of Greece. Yeah. And so the difference in ancient times of Danny is culture. It’s it’s total Culture, you know, they they understood the different cultures existed and that’s why they were city states and they would unite as convenient Right because the culture of Sparta and the culture of Athens have no overlap. Yeah, I’m wondering what I think man. I don’t know if Manuel said this. I have it written down the so on the difference between war and discord. They say discord is like You’re at war with the other states that are external but internally we’re unified. So there’s a unifying principle to our state, which is why we’re going to say, well, when we’re going to fight amongst ourselves. We’re going to call that discord and not war. Right. And Manuel made a statement that I think is a very interesting one. Yeah, like the tell us in this court is peace. Oh, they they they they’re explicit about that. Okay, that’s peace. Okay. So there’s a difference between war and discord. Right. Right. And Manuel made a statement that maybe discord is not being aimed at the destruction of the other. So That’s in the text as well. Yeah, like the tell us in this court is peace. Oh, they they they’re explicit about that. Okay, that’s peace. Okay. So there’s still a piece is possible in that situation, but peace is not possible with your enemy ever. Right, then it’s victory. Right, whatever that means. Okay, because peace is not the same thing as intimacy. So like if I say our state’s going to have an allyship and we need, like you said, we need a binding agent to be intimate around that cannot be peace only. No, no, no. Peace is the result. It’s a second order of fact. A second order of fact. Okay. Okay. So then the higher order, then the thing that unifies us as a state is what a desire for peace? No, it’s the spirit of the state. Okay. Okay. So first of all, right, I was going to go into this, right. So the thing that Adam talked about is integration and assimilation. Right. So there’s this identity, right. And if that identity gets confused with my identity, then we at a certain point share sameness in such a way. But we only share sameness in a specific domain, right. You could call that culture or whatever. Right. So for example, like I might side with America if we’re going against China, but like I might not side with America if we’re going against South Africa or whatever. Right. Like because my identity or the things, the sharedness within that one conflict is different than the sharedness between the other conflict. Right. Like I assume a different identity. So you can appeal to me as part of a body, right. If I have an identity within that body, right. And then the more intimate I am with that identity, the stronger appeal you can make. And so I assume that I have a different identity within that body. And then the more intimate I am with that identity, the stronger appeal you can make. And so Adam might go into this, right. So this idea of an empire, right, was an identity that was only shared based upon like some high rulership. And it wasn’t shared among people ship, right. Like the peoples were strictly kept separate within an empire, but there was still a ruling acceptance, like a legal sharing that was submitted to. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So a good example might be the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but closer to the context that we’re talking about here. If you think of Alexander’s empire, he never made them take on Greek culture, let’s say, or start speaking Greek. That just came about because basically they, it just made administration easier. But the Persians were part of the, let’s say part under the head of Alexander and the Greeks at that time were as well. And they both had their relationship, their particular relationship with him. Another good example is Egypt. So Alexander is Pharaoh to the Egyptians, right. But to the Greeks, he is just Alexander or King Alexander. And this is, this is a good example of this is when, so in the Persians, for instance, the way they, oh, and to the Persians, he’s the Shahanshah, the king of kings, because he displaces Darius. And the way the Persians relate to Alexander, how they show him that they’re allied or they have, they bear allegiance to them, that he’s their head. Is that they prostrate themselves fully on the ground before him. Whereas to, and this caused controversy, but to the Greeks, that’s just not on the table. They still recognize him, even the Macedonians, right. They still recognize him as their king, but they have a way of relating to him that’s not the same as the way the Persians do. But nevertheless, they have, there’s a way in which they’re both under the same head. And in fact, they’re so much under the same head that even after Alexander dies, you have this, you have this spreading of Greek language and culture to the point where it becomes a trading language throughout the entirety of Mesopotamia and Iran. Right. And that’s the keeping of the intimacy, is keeping of the title. So you don’t try to retitle Egypt in the Pharaoh, in the Persians, in the Persians, in the Persians. Right. And you don’t try to keep the intimacy, the keeping of the title. So you don’t try to retitle Egypt and the Pharaoh into king. Right. And you don’t try to make the Greeks bow down the way the Persians do. And why? Because that’s a mistake. You need to keep the intimate relationship with the head intact. Even though it’s the same, say, physical head, that doesn’t matter. Right. This goes back to earlier, right. It doesn’t matter that men and women are different. It matters the purpose of guardian. It doesn’t matter that the titles, that the person’s the same. It matters that the titles are different. Because that’s where the intimacy comes from. That’s where the relationship comes from. It’s a big, deep mistake that Napoleon makes that actually Adam and I talk about on navigating patterns, right. In the French Revolution talk, we talk about this error because, you know, you’re supposed to have different roles in different places in relation to different cultures. And when you don’t maintain the difference, you try to make everything equal in outcome. And it does. It gets destroyed immediately. And if you don’t live out the role, you’re alienating the people from you. Right. So if you’re a Pharaoh and the Pharaoh does this every year and then you’re gone for 10 years, then you alienated the country. But if you’ve done it every year and you just submit it to the customs, then they wouldn’t have much problem accepting. Right. That’s not absolute. You can change the custom to some extent, but only so far. And these things aren’t knowable. They’re not hard lines. We like hard lines. We don’t have hard lines. It’s not the world we were born into. Yeah. I mean, a good example of this in the Egyptian context is all the Roman emperors are still represented like the ancient Egyptian pharaohs, even though they were 2000 years removed from them on the wall with the hieroglyphs. But at the same time, the governorship of Egypt would have changed. The customs would have changed, let’s say, in tax collection because beforehand it might have been that it was all sort of what? It was all gathered. The way it worked is that they would all be all the seeds would be gathered up and then distributed by pharaohs men. The Romans, by the time Egypt goes later, might have changed that. And by the time of the end of the Roman Empire in the West, I don’t even think the emperor had the title of pharaoh anymore. So I was watching one of those Korean shows and they were changing a law to something absurd. And the guy says like, there’s no precedent for this. Like since the beginning of our empire, this never happened. And then they said, well, but in this other kingdom upon which our legal system is based, once upon a time they had this one law. A thousand years ago. Yeah. And then it was OK. Like then it was accepted. Wow. OK. Yeah. Well, you got to base it off of something. And the past is a good, good way to go. Historical grounding is important. So, yeah, I think I think we’re going to go more into bodies and what makes you part of a body. And I think more importantly, what makes you feel part of a body, because like that’s the binding element and the way that. I was going to say the body derives authority, but it’s not authority. It’s cohesion or integrity. That’s that’s the words that I’m using. And yeah, right. And so this goes also into foolishness, right. Like what is foolishness being divided within yourself? Right. All right. Oh, OK. Right. Like that. That means that there’s like these these conception of the talos is not shared among the body. And you can even get a split personality. Yeah. So is everybody OK? Or do we want to like hash something out still? I’d be OK if I weren’t tired. Yes, I’m good. I’m good. I thought you had like a load of awesome insights. So I still have plenty to do. Like, yeah, I’m excited. I’m excited. This chapter, I struggle with more than any other. The first half of Chapter five is the hardest one for me. Yeah. The second half is really good. I can see how all the threads connect in the second half of Chapter five. When we’re going towards absolute justice and beauty, things come together. But yeah, I struggled with this. So interesting. Interesting. It’s the easiest, easiest chapter in the book for me so far. The first half. Like, ah, this is all. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Granted. Except the revelations of like, oh, no, Plato was explicit about about dialectic having nothing to do with opposition ever. Like, oh, OK. Well, that’s interesting. I’m not surprised, but I’m pleased. Yeah. So try to figure out relevant bits for you in a reflection and try to integrate them and setting an attention of how to sense make during the week. And we can meet again around that.