https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uAUxULFnlpI
I think I have sufficient inspiration today. So let me rehash our previous intentions. So I wanted to look for modern uses of what they were talking about and figure out the purpose of the framing. I think that was fairly successful. I think it’s even more successful now because this amazing insight where the father is the being that you participate in, I think it’s really applicable in the text as well. And especially later on. And they even define mother and father in some sense later on, which is really interesting because I feel like there’s more symbolic stuff going on than we’re giving it credit for. And probably also lost in translation a little bit. We’re at the democratic man. So that’s where we’re at. Let me see. What did I do? I have been seeing the Twitter’s, the patterns in the Twitter’s, although I did really get distracted. So I don’t know. My intention for this week is getting my shit together. Trying to be more structured. Whatever way I can manifest that in this book club. So, Ethan, you had the intention of adopting the frame of the book and see how it qualifies the world. So yeah, maybe you want to do a reflection on that and your time in between. So I think you want. Your intention last time was adopting the frame of the book, the framing of the book, and see how that qualifies the world. So the qualities that that’s highlighting. So did you manage to do that? Yeah. I would say so. Yeah. Just how they as follows, they’re intimate. You’re cutting out. I’m sorry. I switched to push the top. And you need to hold that for a long time. So yeah, what’s your intent for this week? Probably would be something similar to that. Okay. So then we can go to Mark. Mark wanted to get a modern applicability of the tax. So did you manage to do that? Yeah, I think especially in this section, the section about democracy and we’ll say the breakdown and foibles of it are certainly applicable to right now. I’m a little perplexed as to why literally everybody isn’t mentioning this every day in every possible communications medium. But I strongly suspect no one actually read this book or the people that did conveniently either skipped over certain parts or misinterpreted entire sections because the failures of democracy as being played out right now are, well stated right here in the second half of book eight, that is for sure. What’s your intention? Well, I think my intention continues to be to apply this to today to see how spot on you know, how spot on Plato really is, which so far has been pretty good. Okay. Danny, your intention was not to have an explicit intention and to be under the governments of specific spirits. Is that a thing that you’ve managed to achieve? Yeah, in my life, I’ve been very engaged. The reason why I was just overloaded, I’m still overloaded. So in that sense, and I’ve been managing pretty well. But I mean, initially also in book eight, it was, I’m a part of many bodies and all the bodies that I’m a part of are corrupt in different ways. And what we see here are different models of the soul and different ways in which the soul becomes corrupted. I still, my mind is still there on, in terms of sort of under that theme, in terms of a modern application, which is Mark’s intention. I was rubbing shoulders with some very wealthy and smart people. And one common worldview that I’ve been seeing over and over again among people who are very powerful and wealthy is I need to be careful. I need to codify what I say and be careful about some of these things. But the worldview of spiral dynamics and integral theory is viewed as coming out of the ashes of postmodernism being, like I was talking to some people about how in a career, the game that you play changes as you move up the hierarchy. And so the idea of, from what I understand, integral theory says that values are imposed by circumstances. And so some people want to be social workers. Some people want to be stock traders, others cars, athletes, musicians. So as we see in this model of democracy here in the Republic, where there’s this like Hakuna Matata attitude, I’m seeing that the worldview that a lot of people hold nowadays matches what Plato points to in a lot of the problems in democracy. So on one level, it’s one application is how to respond to that, gaining an understanding of how to correct that or at least be able to operate in a world where, and again, I kind of need to be careful about some things, but I’ve seen a lot of evil in high levels of boardrooms and corporations. Being able to understand the minds of some of these people and what motivates them, at one level, that’s one intention. But most fundamentally, in terms of my own participation with the world is being able to understand the nature with which the bodies that I’m involved in are corrupt and then discerning how and how much to engage with them. So I’ll leave it at that. Okay. You mentioned integral theory, because the way I understand that, that’s hierarchically framing the ways of engaging with the world. And then on the top, saying that you have a perspective that can contain all the other perspectives, which is effectively what they want to do with modernism, right? In some sense, a parallel impetus. I don’t understand it completely, but that roughly jives from what I’ve been told firsthand by the people. I have not gone out of my way to study these things. I’ve been told about it by many people and these people are all very, like they’re all, I’m seeing a common thing among the most powerful people that I know in my life is they tend to kind of hold this worldview. They say integrally informed is a term I’ve seen on multiple occasions. And yeah, I met a modernism as well. I’ve seen that theme kind of emerging frequently as well. And so something bothers me about it, but again, I haven’t studied it or anything. Well, the metamodernism is like a yucca mannical philosophy, right? Have a place for everything. Well, we will actually see when we get to the tyrannical man. That is what the tyrannical man is like, have a place for everything. Everything that we like, we’re going to incorporate that. So yeah, like I think that the regression is real and we’re slipping out of the democracies. So I think the last time that we talked, we went to the democratic state. Are there still things that we want to rehash or about these things? Are we good to continue? Oh, I think we’re fine to continue. Okay, so we can go to the democratic man. So the democratic man is characterized by being trained in the democratic man is characterized by being trained in miserly habits. He’s engaging in necessary pleasures. This is back to the epicurean stuff. And those pleasures are contained in a purpose. That which is unnecessary is deemed hurtful. Right? So that is the constraint that he’s still holding himself to, the democratic man. The desires that drive him are money making, induced by the available luxury. And then there’s the externally induced desires there to facilitate the internal desires. There to facilitate the internal desires. When a paternal correction happens, an internal war follows. So there’s two parts of him. Even when the desire gets overcome, new desires appear because there’s no principle to resist them. The, yeah, the principle is basically embodied by his father, but I don’t think he has internalized that. There’s nothing to resist in the citadel of the soul, which is, I think, and I think that’s a stoic reference. And then we end up with a refusal to entertain or listen to the oligarchal part of him, right, the fatherly part. So do you want to say something about this part? Sure. Yeah, I think one of the things that stands out for me is the idea in here about, and it’s implicit that because you have the freedom to do these things, you will do them. Like you will start paying, stop paying attention to the oligarchic, to your own oligarchical nature, right? And it’s not clear to me, although maybe it’s in the text and I missed it, but it’s not clear to me if that’s the result of not, of being sick of oligarchy, right? And so, you know, I don’t think it really matters. Well, yeah, well, that’s my question is, does it even matter? Is it the nature of the people changes and they lose their flavor or their, you know, like of oligarchy in all the things, advantages it has, and therefore that goes up? Or is it that they get sick of what’s above them and free themselves from it and that causes them to allow themselves to be that way too? I don’t know. Well, I think we have to realize that they’re explaining the emergence, right? So they’re not saying that this has to happen, right? But it is going to happen, right? Like there’s, if there’s 50 men, like 10 of them will, this will happen to, when there’s 10, there’s going to be 20 more, right? That’s basically, I think, the argument. And so these systems can be stable in some sense. That’s the pattern, right? So he’s, you know, a lot of people talk about the pattern of the text and how it’s an onion and, you know, the early books and the later books are mirrors of each other. It’s like, well, that’s because he’s exemplifying pattern at all layers of the manuscript, right? Like the whole thing at every layer is exemplifying a pattern right up into and including the top layer of how the book’s laid out, how the arguments are laid out inside the arguments themselves, inside each individual book, right? Inside each individual argument, inside each individual book, there’s these layers, right? It goes from the personal individual perspective out to the perspective of what if there were other people with personal individual perspectives, what about the city, right? It just, it keeps scaling up. Yeah, and I think the symmetry is also required for the argument to work, I guess. Right. Well, in a perfectly logical world, things are symmetrical. I mean, it’s not the world we live in and that’s oddly identified in the book everywhere and no one ever talks about it. But right, there’s still appeals to the gods. So far, every single book has at least one appeal to one god or goddess, which is weird for a strictly philosophical text, of course, but I don’t think this is. So the fact that this pattern is exemplified, I think, is what’s important about this and the reason why it’s absurd in the way that Socrates will say, well, don’t you believe this? And everybody will go, well, yes, it must be so. And there’s sort of no counter arguments is to point out the absurdity of being able to live in a symmetrical world where any of this would even work. I think it’s just more poking fun at the idea of philosophy as a solution. I think it’s interesting that there’s nothing to resist in the citadel of the soul. So the citadel still exists, the structures are there, but they’re not used. And this is where the flip happens in some sense. This is the clown world, the upside down place. And my book provided a list, and, Marc, I don’t know if your words are going to be different, but there’s this list. I don’t know, like it’s where they start describing these words will be called this. You don’t have the page? No, I don’t. I don’t. Translation reference number? Okay. I don’t do that in my notes. Yeah. I think it’s worth talking about the empty citadel. It implies that you have a citadel in your soul, which I think is fair, but it also implies that because it’s yours, no one’s ruling over it. Because there’s no one else there. It’s inside you, right? So in a sense. Well, the principles used to rule over it, right? But you don’t have the principles. Right. But there’s no ruler. I think that’s what he’s really pointing to. Citadels can embody many principles. 560C. Somebody has to enforce them. The thing that jumped out to me about the early part of the democratic section was in 557E, where he pointed to there being a lack of necessity. There’s no reason to go to war. There’s no reason to go. This is after they talk about how the poor and the rich are going to fight together in battle. And then the poor are going to see that the wealthy are fat and incompetent and think, oh, they’re good for nothing. And then when he gets to 557E, when he’s talking about the problem, he says there’s no necessity to do anything. Anybody can do whatever they want, live whatever kind of life they want. And so that kind of made me think of like, it really felt like the image of the brave new world, like the problem of pleasure, like why get out of bed and do anything? And so recently, I’ve kind of been spending a lot of time around like in mystic ideas and medit. I’ve always kind of, and stuff like that. I think there’s a similar kind of spiritual gluttony that people can fall into in terms of, like, it’s true that like going within and observing your consciousness is of some form of value that can support creative action. But I think oftentimes people can fall prey to making that its own distraction. So one thing that I’ve been sort of thinking about, like personally, I run very well in negative emotion. And so I’ve been trying to cultivate the ability to run on positive emotion for the last couple of weeks or months, which basically, mostly unsuccessfully. But I think in studying a lot of like Eastern stuff, one thing that seemed that I think I’m starting to see is that the responsibilities that you like, I think there is something fundamental to choosing to take on responsibilities. Like you have to, in terms of, I mean, in terms of motivational drive, like, I think necessity and responsibility is an important part of, from what I can tell, your motivational systems. And I don’t think there’s getting around bearing some form of responsibility. Like, yeah, fine, maybe you can have a worldview where you say you can do whatever you want in life, or to varying extents. Like, I mean, I’m just not saying I have that perspective. I’m saying I can understand that position. But it seems pretty unavoidable to me that the necessity, that necessity is just an unavoidable force in the world. And so in 557E, that’s one, that theme just jumped out at me. And then in 558B, the term forgiving spirit is another thing that caught my eye as a pathology. It’s like, these are pathologies of a time that are just running amok. I don’t have any commentary on those, but I just noticed that this seems, this feels like he’s just describing our day to a T to me. That’s pretty funny, right? Because I did that in my live stream last night on my channel. I talked about your comfort is at the expense of someone else. And sometimes your pleasures are at the expense of your past self. Sometimes your pleasures are at the expense of your future self. Necessity by definition is that which you can’t get around. You can’t avoid it, not doing away with it. And that’s how we define it. And it’s important to have that definition because there are things like that. There are things that you get like eating. You have to eat, otherwise you’ll die. You have to drink water, otherwise you’ll die. So there’s a bunch of other things too, but those things are required. They’re not optional. And you can put them off or you can store them up or whatever to some extent. And you can take them too far and they can become pleasures. But that’s when we don’t recognize that. And I think that’s more what the democratic failure is. We stop recognizing the trade-offs that we’re making with our past and future selves and with the people around us. And that’s when we fall into a problem. We lose humility and gratitude and then everything goes down. Well, but the problem is, right, we worship money in the democratic soul. And so money doesn’t have a balance. And I think that’s the issue. So if you’re in a world that the necessity is only framed within itself and it’s not framed within society and is actively rejected, that that gap’s framed in society, then—and there’s the circular thing, right? Because if you don’t—well, they went into that in the distinction between knowing and opinion. And if you live in a world of opinion, you live in a relative framework, and now there’s no justification to impose anything anymore. Because how are you going to impose anything in a relativistic framework that there’s no basis for authority? So I think you said 240 or something, right? 50, 56, 560, sorry. Yeah. Yeah, so let me just give my list. So modesty gets called silliness temperance, unmannliness, moderation, vulgar, and mean. So you can see the—instead of pointing up, right, from the virtue, they’re pointing down, and they’re only seeing the constraint instead of deliberation. Initiation into great mysteries. Insolence is confused with breeding, anarchy with liberty, or insolence is considered breeding, anarchy is considered liberty, waste is considered magnificence, and impudence is considered courage. So— They have shamelessness is considered courage. Right. And so, like, it’s all pointed out instead of pointed in. Oh, I like that. So you have in and out and up and down. And it’s—yeah, that’s just—what is it? Is it salience? Valence. No, it’s valence, right? Like, how do you veil these ideas? Come on, Ethan. I did it. I said veil. No? From necessary to freedom to the unnecessary. Age extinguishes the passions, creating a balance. Age is a balance. Age is a balance. Age is a balance. Age extinguishes the passions, creating a balance. That’s when growing older. Because you’re unmoored, you end up arbitrarily drifting between extremes. Democratic man refuses to separate good from evil. Within his fortress, indulgence of the hour, fashion dictates liberty, inequality, and the lack of discernment. That’s what I have on that. But yeah, I think that this is where the capacity for discernment is completely lost. And it’s liberty and equality mindset that does that. Yeah, the wish, as Danny pointed out earlier, to include everybody. And not make judgments about what’s better and what’s worse. One would, maybe in recent times, call this tolerance. You see too much tolerance, and then maybe you end up with this confusion. Because to your point, Manuel, you’re using money instead of T. lo’s to measure things. And then it’s a close to say, as Nassim Taleb points out, a lot of people get wealthy because they get lucky, not because they’re good at anything. And some people get wealthy without any knowledge of, poor knowledge of what they’re doing. It’s got a great story in there about a guy who talks about green lumber. And he honestly thought that green lumber was just lumber that was painted green. When anybody who knows anything about lumber, and most people don’t, like fair enough, would know that green lumber is lumber that hasn’t been cured or hasn’t sat for, hasn’t been kiln dried, it hasn’t been sat out in the sun for a year, or whatever the normal curing date is for that particular type of wood. And he had no idea. And he was a trader in green lumber, made a fortune in it, and never knew what it was. And he wasn’t lucky. He knew what he was doing. He just didn’t understand the nuances and details of what he was actually trading, but that’s not required for a good pattern. Good to know that. Knowledge is not required. Danny, did you want to reflect on that spirit? Well, I was just thinking about what you said about they only see the constraints instead of the deliberation. And so I was thinking, what’s the response or the move to that? So let’s say I was thinking about the rainbow flag. Let’s say you’re talking to somebody about the rainbow flag. Socrates would not do what a Protestant or an ortho bro would do, which would just say, be like, I have the right answer, hard authority. Respond with hard authority. I think there’s a place for hard authority. But if you’re talking to somebody, it’s the same thing like we were talking a long time ago, months ago, actually, about if you’re talking to somebody where you presuppose a framework and then try to put somebody else into your own framework, it’s not going to work. If you were to imagine Socrates maybe having a conversation about the rainbow flag, he probably wouldn’t be using the authority hammer. He would be skillful in being able to be able to skillfully interact with the person at the right level and say the right things, to march them back, maybe demonstrate some error somehow. But it seems to me as though, like, I mean, I think I need for as myself, I need to get better at engaging in the right way at the right level. Because a lot of what I do is I just check out, I just think, oh, I just like kind of shrug my shoulders and be like, man, I don’t want to engage with this person. I’ll just go live my life the other way. But there’s times in which if there’s causes or people or things that you care about, there’s a time and place for you to no longer do that. I’m not saying it’s your mission in life to have to run around and correct people. But it’s good to have the capacity to be able to engage in a more skillful and better way, which is not going to happen if you don’t train for it. Mm hmm. So I can see two responses. Right. So one is, why would these things exist in the first place? Right. Like, what’s the function? The function of what? The position of the why do people see only the constraint? No, no, no. Like, why is this constraint valid? Like, why did people subject themselves to that constraint voluntarily? So at that point, you can make a rational argument like, okay, like, this is the benefits and now you have a trade off. But I don’t think that works because I don’t think that’s the problem. And like, what I think is the problem is like, this person is looking for a problem. And they don’t care what the problem is, they’re just looking for the problem. And you just challenge them on that. It’s like, why are you so insistent on looking at the negative? Like, I want to be constructive here. Like, why can’t you cooperate with? And then they’re evil. Like, because what I need to give up their place. Because it’s like, the arguments almost never matter. Like, I’ve hardly come, talked with someone where it actually mattered who was right. It’s like, I mean, authority is good. So we get caught up in that adversarial mode. Right. One of the things that was expressed by that whole setup with anarchy, freedom, wastefulness, magnificence, you know, all that, is that you’re setting up a dichotomy. And when you’re setting up a dichotomy, you’re going to have a conflict. And it’s going to be very clear lines. But you’re doing that. Like, that’s not the world. The world is not set up like that. And I think that’s part of the exemplification here is that that freedom, because we have freedom to interpret any way we want, causes us to compress incorrectly, because you can’t understand the world. Right. It causes us to compress everything down into this binary, into this dichotomy. And that causes, you know, these problems that don’t need to be there. And I think this framing of in and out and up and down is also really, really valuable. Right. Because you can point up somewhat decontextualized. And then when you get agreement on that, you can go back down to where you were talking about. And actually, well, people intuitively get really resistant to that stuff. But also, you can point in when people point out. Right. Like, okay, like, what brings us together, what joins us. And then you can say, well, yeah, like, the fact that we have a book club now means that that person can join. Right. Right. You can choose to be generative. Also, another thing that I touched on last night, or not. Right. You can choose to be generative of something positive or generative of something negative. You can choose to be generative or not. Right. There’s still three options there. And yeah, it’s important which one you go with, because you can always generate opposition. I just don’t think you should. And there’s almost always a secondary motive, right? That’s driving a person. And they’re just using the playing field to play out what’s in their head. And if you just cut down that tree, if that tree is at least manageable. Well, one of the things we said last week, towards the end, I think it was just Manuel and I, or I said, is I don’t like a lot of themes of redemption in the Republic, which I don’t think he’s trying to do that. But if you’re at the place where you’re talking to somebody who’s modesty to them, the silliness or temperance to them is unmanliness. There was a line somewhere here, it said, this is, I mean, it didn’t say this, this is what I’m remembering. It’s like, this is the kind of person whom which a harmonious and balanced spirit would not go near. It was just like a description saying that’s the kind of person that somebody who’s not degenerated to that level doesn’t go near. And so I see that that’s kind of seems to be what I see more of is just like red flag, stay away, lost cause. I mean, he’s not saying that, but I’m just observing that in the text. Well, there’s a couple of issues, right? So because he went up the mountain, right? And now he’s going down the other side of the mountain. And when you’re going down, and I think what he’s appealing to, and this is connected to basically the recession of the church as well, right? It’s like, these people down the mountain are so far away from your ideals that you can’t reach them. And this is the thing what they said, right? If you get back into the cave, you’re ridiculous to the people inside the cave, right? They’re going to make fun of you. So there’s this concession where it basically says you can’t do this. Like, it’s not up to you. And that doesn’t mean that you can’t do things, right? Because he’s arguing that the philosopher king can rule, right? So he says you can’t do things, but you can’t do these things. But again, it’s the trade-off, right? If you want to be different from other people, they might find you ridiculous in some aspect. Yep, that’s a trade-off. Like, you don’t get both. And so in a hierarchical society, which again is what that was all about, was hierarchy is inevitable and class systems are going to emerge in a city. You don’t have a choice, but you still have to deal with everybody else in the city, right? The top layer still has to come all the way down to the bottom layer to improve the city. And it doesn’t matter at all, right, that they should continue towards goodness for their own sake. They have to sacrifice that and be ridiculed by the people at the bottom in order to make the city better, period, full stop, end of statement. And so if you’re not willing to make that sacrifice of leadership, you shouldn’t be a leader. And that’s part of the problem is that you’re not getting around the fact that difference creates conflict. You want to be different and unique, you’re going to conflict. How you deal with that is very important and you can’t treat it like a function of the world or, you know, it’s mostly a function of your choice. And that’s part of what’s getting exemplified by the problem of, we’ll say, infinite freedom within the democratic man. And I think the primary concern that comes out, at least in this chapter, is don’t corrupt. Like, hold on to whatever version of ideals you have because else you’re going to partake in the regression. And like, maybe he’s going to make a positive case later on, but yeah, like, I think just being warned about what can happen is maybe enough positive. I think that’s maybe all the positive case that you can give. Because I think that’s the only way to do it. I was thinking about this yesterday, I think, right? Because what is it? It’s a set of constraints, right? You put a ton of constraints upon yourself and then those constraints are supposed to liberate you. It’s like, yeah, like, tell that, well, that was the beginning of the book, right? Like, he’s trying to tell that story and it doesn’t work. Yeah. Well, freedom makes no sense without constraints. Because you’re not free from anything unless there’s something to be free from. You need the constraints in order for freedom to even make sense. There’s no such thing as freedom in a vacuum. Well, this gets more clear in the tyranny section here. So, here we go. The father descends to the son, develops fear, and the son loses respect or reverence. The lack of constraint is freedom. Outside and inside are equalized. Right. Well, that’s right. Again, when you characterize freedom as a lack of constraint, which is impossible, everything becomes equal. And now you lose discernment. But I think also this idea that your father is like that which you come from is not above you. I think that’s so important. Because if where you come from is not above you, what is? Yeah. The master fears and flatters his scholars. Sounds like what’s happening in some universities. The young is on level with the old, ready to compete. Bad temper and authoritative— Right. Bad temper and authoritiveness are bad forms. Yeah, but that’s worth digging in on. The young are competing with the old. But there’s an imbalance there because if you’re 50, you know you’ve got a lot more experience than someone who’s 20, right? Or even if you’re 30, even a lot more. And so you shouldn’t expect to be Elon Musk, right? This is that Jordan Peterson, compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who somebody else is today, because you didn’t have their experience. You didn’t have their journey. And if they’re older than you, why are you competing with them? Well, I think the games that are being played lend themselves to the competition. Because if you have a martial artist or whatever, they’re going to whoop your ass if you’re young. That’s not a function of the games. Games don’t care who participates. No, but the imposition upon you in order to participate in the game, like that, the buy-in is lower. But when, and even when you’re in the game, when you’re 20, trying to compete with a 50-year-old to be a CEO is never going to work. It’s not a function of the game. That’s a function of your idiocy. So your fault. No one else. Yeah, but you can argue with the CEO, and if there’s no valid principles to judge on who wins, then— You can, but you’ll lose every time. I don’t think they’d lose. That’s the problem. No, but they do. And that’s what everyone’s upset about. They’re like, I can’t be Elon Musk. But you didn’t have any of the accomplishments or experience of Elon Musk, and you’re not willing to do any of the things that he does. Literally none of them. So even if you’re smarter than him, it doesn’t matter. But that’s not the way they self-evaluate their participation. And that’s the problem. No, it’s not. But it’s what they do. That’s the competition they’re in, and that’s the problem. They’re thinking, I’m as smart as Elon Musk, and therefore I should be as wealthy as Elon Musk. I think you’re trying to compete with Elon Musk, and he’s older than you, and he’s done things that you haven’t done, and he knows things that you don’t know. And so you’re involving yourself in a game that you cannot win because you don’t even understand what game you’re in. It’s not the fault of the game. The fact that the game doesn’t care who you compete with, games don’t care. That’s your fault. You shouldn’t be, not that you shouldn’t look up to him, not that you shouldn’t strive to be like him, but you sure as hell shouldn’t compete with him, because you’re going to lose every time. You have no chance. Anyway, I saw the spirit come by on Twitter. There’s this weather anchor, and he made this call. He said, I want every old person to give their vote to their children. Voters in the political vote? Yeah. Because they can’t compete. Well, basically the argument is, well, the children know better because the future is more of them than of the old people. And when you do that, though, what happens is they get taken advantage of. So the problem with lifting people up is that if they aren’t ready to be lifted up, you just create a bunch of victims at a different layer of society. So you can say, oh, look, all these homeless people are victims. But if you lift them all up and give them places to live and let them vote, their votes will get taken over by somebody who will take advantage of that. And so you’re not doing them any favors, right? And people think they are doing people favors by lifting them up before they’re ready. And yet you should lift people up when they’re ready. And determining that is really hard. But also you shouldn’t just lift everybody up, because they’ll just become victims of something else. And people don’t like that answer. But you know what? That’s actually what happens. And they’re removing the wisdom, because that’s where I get upset. Why would you, as a wise person, remove your wisdom from the equation? That doesn’t make sense. And like you said, we’ll get into that. It’s all right to be taken over by whatever spirit is there to take it over effectively. Yeah, so temperance and authoritativeness are bad forms. The old is conforming to the young, right? That’s basically what I was talking about. That’s the embrace of emergence. Well, hierarchy collapses, and the sex is confused. Right, but that’s the flattening, right? That’s the equality. If you want things to be equal, they’re going to be flat. And then there’s no hierarchy and then everything gets confused. Yeah, but also in the sexual realm, right? And this goes into… Right. No, no, the problem of non-binary is in here. And no one’s mentioned that. I find this strange that no one’s mentioned this actually. Plato outlined this in the Republic, guys. Because then it’s not a postmodern problem or a modern problem, whatever ridiculous, incorrect classification people are using. It’s a pattern that Plato knew about and wrote about. I don’t know what to tell you. The animals take over the behavior of their master. Sensitivity arises, taking issue with authority. Laws lose their meaning. Oligarchy and democracy are ruined by the same disease. I don’t have any commentary, but I was just thinking about why… Well, two things. One is, why do institutions lose respect? Where does the fault lie? Whether you’re thinking about it at the university or the church that the family could list out, like you mentioned with the vote. Well, the one thing that you mentioned is, why would a wise person remove their wisdom from the equation? That’s kind of like living hidden. If you think that you can see the world straight and you think that you have… As far as you look left and right, and you’re just like, as far as I can tell, I’m the most qualified person to lead. And if you don’t step up and lead, then maybe you’re moving the world towards hell by doing that. Which is kind of a scary and unfortunate and annoying thought because leading is annoying and difficult. But it’s sort of like, who’s to blame if it’s at the university? It’s like, yeah, you’ve got all these competent professors and then is it corrupted from the administration? Whose fault was that? Who was supposed to be standing guard in that situation? For the family, it’s an easier answer. It’s like, you’re probably the father’s fault. The vast majority of the responsibility is probably right there. But in larger bodies, things need to be just. Everybody needs to know their job and do their job well. And that means we need people knowing the form of each job and ensuring that they’re able to replicate themselves to the next generation. That’s a responsibility that we have. So one of the things I need to write on our list actually, there’s the negative effect that we have. So when I become a leader, people are going to rebel against me. I’m going to have to make decisions that are going to hurt people and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Those are really obvious. And then it’s like, well, I shouldn’t do this, right? And the way that I came up to this framing, well, again, but I was talking to someone who was suicidal and it’s like, they were trying to determine the negative effect of killing themselves. And I’m like, yeah, but that’s not the important part. I think the important part is the lack of the positive. Like you’re removing your contribution, you’re removing the potential that you, the light that you can bring on the world. That’s the thing that’s bad, not so much the ripple effect. No, like you’re removing your value. And I think when the world comes to a get flattened, like that discernment is completely gone. Like the discernment of the positive is completely gone. While the negative is more in your face, right? This is where you get Peterson talking about heaven is as far from hell as you can get and all that stuff. He’s just taking Sam Harris’ nonsense. So it’s like, no. Well, and that’s the problem with when you flatten the world, you end up with direction. So all you need to do to find the good is to go away from the bad or the evil or whatever. And that’s not true. The world is much more vast than just directional. And the reason why you flatten the world to some extent is because now you can get out of responsibility. If there’s no up to step up to, there’s no reason for you to step up and be responsible. And that’s part of what the problem is. That’s why this flat world, this no boundaries, no constraints, live and let live attitude is so attractive. Because then the people who should take responsibility and should do the right thing actually don’t see a need to anymore. And they can get out of their sacrifice, get out of their responsibility, take themselves out of their duty and not have the hassle and use the excuse that, well, everybody can do what they want. And so I’m not causing a problem. So that’s the right thing. Yeah. And again, right? Like, no authority, like, there’s no authority to appeal to you. And the only authority that you have left is the law, right? That’s like, oh, the opinion of the masses is what dictates morality. Like, that’s the only authority that you can appeal to because you can’t see any other authority. So at that point, he’s laying out three classes of democracy. One is freedom. Freedom creates more drones because there’s no way to exclude people. Right? This is maybe a better word would be zombie. Then there’s an orderly class. Consistency of traders, they’re responsible for feeding the drones. And then there’s the workers with hands. They’re basically maintaining the existence. And so the drones are actually the elite class as well. So I looked it up, right? It’s the male bee that has no function except for basically the male. So the male is the male, right? So the male is the male. So the male is the male. So I looked it up, right? So it’s the male bee that has no function except for basically insemination. So yeah, maybe that’s a better way to look at it, right? You just see depository. And that’s the intellectual. That’s maybe their association with freedom, right? Because the traders and the workers are bound by reality. They can’t afford the freedom, and it’s nonsensical to them in their world. Here we go to sharing. Sharing is being done by taking from the rich. Conservatism is sabotaging the state. And the conservatives, I think, are forced to take the role that’s cast upon them. Right? And that’s as a saboteur. The abuse of the conservative breeds revolution. And that revolution then gives rise to the strongman as a protector that will turn into a tyrant. Yeah. Well, we’re seeing a lot of that. We’ve got to protect us from the evil climate and stuff. They go into the tale of the temple of Lassine since. I don’t even know what that is. Anyway, there’s no restraint in the exercise of power. People who are banished return in resentment. And that process is the fulfillment of the tyrant. Right. But that’s, again, that’s due to the flattening of the world. Right. You flatten things out and then you let people in. You lift them up, right? Before they were at the bottom, they were exiled. They return. Now they’re resentful. In essence, you can’t let them back in. You can’t just let them back in. They have to redeem themselves. And if they don’t. And so I would say, Danny, there’s no redemption in this other than there’s the exemplification of what happens when that process isn’t seen through. I don’t talk about the process itself. Well, yeah, but the people who don’t get redeemed in this story are the good guys. Right. This is the problem. Right. So the good. Not in that case. No, no. The exiles were getting let back into the city. They’re not being redeemed. Yeah. Yeah. But the exiles were the conservatives. Doesn’t matter. They weren’t the good guys. And they’re not going to be the good guys. They were exiled for a reason and they’re brought back in. They get resentful and they were never the good guys. No, but they’re not the one. They also become tyrannical. But they become tyrannical towards the dictator. Still not the good guys. Yeah. Well, then. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, they go. They try and kill the tyrant, but because they have no other option. And then tyrant gets justified in having a bodyguard. And then basically we’ve passed the slippery slope and we paved the route for total domination. Because now we’re effectively in war. When rising in success, the tyrant is feeling good. He’s radiating it to the people around him. When he has dealt with the external threat, he has to generate an internal threat so that his leadership is needed. Taking up arms against people that challenge his authority and that will result in a wane of his popularity. His supporters will start resisting and they will need to be removed as well. And then he will need a pretext to maintain opposition. And the enemies that he sees are the valiant, the high-minded, the wealthy, and the happy. So they’re all a threat to his authority. And then the inverse of healing happens through a purge. I like this connecting it to the healing process where it’s basically instead of burning off the dead wood, it’s burning off the good wood and putting more dead wood in place. So people are effectively frustrated in opposition. And again, upside down world. Although I like the inverse better than upside down, inside out. Maybe that’s why they’re trying to put the margins on the inside, because it’s inside out. They’re trying to put the inside on the outside and the only way to do that is to put the outside on the inside. Yeah, you can’t bring the margins to the center without creating new margins. No, no, but I think because if your primary motivation is resentment, it doesn’t matter what outside you put inside. You just want to have the inside on the outside. Absolutely. When your relationship is resentment and anger, everything you do is corrupt. So what you do does not matter. Yeah, should we go with this or should we go on? Oh yeah, then basically the tyrant himself is stuck. He only has oppression or death as options. In some sense, yeah, everything needs to be reduced to the binary frame because force is the means by which things happen. Well, you have no discernment that things still need to happen. And so you create binaries because you eschewed the nuance of complexity. You’ve compressed the world already. Yeah, but I think if you want to do things through force, you have to create binary. You have to do things through force when you create a binary. There’s no reason to use force if you’re not doing things. What you’re doing is based on a binary. That’s why you use force. You don’t start from force. You start from worldview. You don’t start from methodology. The methodology emerges from the arena, from the worldview. The worldview is already binary. And so the methodology has to be forced. And in some cases, force is required. But if your worldview is binary, in all cases, force is required. You have to mandate things. You have to pass laws to get things done. You have to do executive orders. Those are all binary frames. It’s like these people won’t do what I say, therefore I have to use force or threat of force. Yeah, so that was really interesting. So basically what was described is that there’s a binding through threats of force, which is the only binding capacity that’s left. And that was connected to devotion. So people who devote themselves to the leader are like those who are bound through the threat of force. Right. Well, and hierarchy is inevitable. So you have to bind yourself to something. And maybe you’re binding yourself to the leader, in which case, yeah, you’re bound to all the tools you have at your disposal. It’s just the only tool you have. Your disposal is force and threat of force. Those are the only two tools you actually have at that point because of your worldview. And then everybody else doesn’t like that. And so instead of binding to the tyrant, they identify against. And we know what problems that causes. And then he liberates the slave. So they end up under his control. That is binding through depth. Right. But again, that’s raising people up, right? And then re-victimizing them because you raise them up and now they’re able to be victimized differently. You’re not saving them. You’re making it worse. And now we get to the amazing part. The poets will glorify the tyranny, the decadences, granting the artist status, true favor with the tyrant. Then basically what the artists are doing is deciding what is worship. They’re propagating what is worship. I think that’s what propaganda is, propagating that which is worship. That’s an interesting idea. He said that one more time. Propaganda is propagating that which is worship. Yeah, that sounds right. Doesn’t solve the problem of what is propaganda in the moment. But I don’t think propaganda is a negative and it’s not a negative in that formulation, which I think is correct. It’s not a negative. It started with the church, right? Now it goes into the army. The army will be big, fluid and plural, which is the means of expressing force. It’s a big club. It comes in many directions. There’s many implementations. It’s not a principle. You can’t just put it in a sentence. It’s a statement. There’s no sure way to avoid the imposition of force onto you because of the fluid nature of it. But he will employ the sacred as a means to spread wealth to the people, like the French Revolution, to reduce the taxation necessary. So to curry favor. The tyrant is sustained by his parents. The parents have lost control. That speaks to the comfort, right? Tyranny comes out of comfort. That’s how it happens. You see a tyrant, he’s comforted. It’s not the only way, but that’s one way. The killing of the parents is the removal of the emanation that tries to exert itself to you. That’s the ultimate act of liberation, in some sense, killing your father. Then we get to the tyranny of the slaves. We’ve lifted up the slaves, and now the slaves are basically the ones that express the authority. Then we end up with a loss of order and reason. So that’s the interesting wording, order and reason. Keep that frame in the next chapter as well. Do we have things to say about this? Well, I mean, yeah, there’s a lot there. The artist part as well, Aaron. Yeah, the collapse of the equality system, and it’s not as explicit as I’d like, although it’s definitely in there, is due to the equality. Equality doctrine, assuming people are equal, and raising people up and bringing other people down, is the collapse that causes the tyranny, because hierarchy is required. It’s not optional. If you’re not dealing with it in a healthy fashion, you’re going to end up with equality doctrine, and equality doctrine is going to destroy everything. It’s going to destroy the world. It really is remarkable how many people claim to have read this book, and no one’s mentioning this. Literally no one is mentioning that the gender binary problem is right here. It’s actually right here. I don’t even know what to say. Everyone’s pretending like this is a modern problem. It can’t be that modern if Plato wrote about it. What’s your definition of modern now? Does it stretch all the way back to ancient Greece? The definition of modern is losing its value real quick in that case. I’m going to go on a little bit into the tyrannical man. It’s not really about the tyrannical man. Where is that? That’s book nine. Oh no, I didn’t read any book nine. We could stay here for a while and chat on all the problems that the collapse of democracy causes. What causes the collapse of democracy really is this equality doctrine, this flattening. I am just utterly shocked that no one’s mentioning this. Oh yeah, that’s Plato book eight, man. That’s where we’re at. It’s right there. You don’t need any fancy meta-modern spiral dynamic garbage. It’s right in Plato. It’s sitting right there. The problem is right there. To Danny’s earlier point, people are not taking responsibility and stepping up. That’s contributing to the problem. That’s contributing to the problem of flattening the world, reducing everything, compressing it, making it all equal. It’s a big issue. Before you started, you covered a ton of ground there. The first thing you started with was in suicide, the important part is not what’s the cost or what’s bad. How much damage will it do? The most important thing is you’re removing your value. I think that’s an important… That’s a microcosm of this problem of the same sickness at different levels is somebody has a warped sense, warped perspectives. They’re sick. They can’t see that they have value. I don’t know. I’m thinking about the concept of value. I know you did a live stream of value. I watched the monologue, but not the rest of the conversation. People feel disconnected in different realms. You can help them with different types of problems. Where was I going with all this? I guess I don’t really have a point other than, oh, the one observation I made was that Plato presupposes virtue. A lot of that he presupposes virtue or whatever. When he starts with their aristocracy, I think that’s a fine move. I think it’s like when Peterson says that beauty requires no justification. An icon of the Virgin Mary doesn’t require defending. It has an authority in and of itself. No, no, but that’s not fair. There’s six books or five books before. He’s climbing the hill to exemplify… Because they wanted to make a contrast of the self-interested man versus the virtuous man. They first had to articulate what that even is. He’s not presupposing the virtue. He’s contrasting the virtuous with the non-virtuous to make a case for the virtue. Right, but also it is the loss of virtue that leads to all this problem. It’s this looking across, trying to make things equal, trying to get things to the point where people are unconstrained, and then the slaves and the exiles are, you know, what’s the point of this? It’s a loss of virtue. It’s a loss of virtue. It’s a loss of virtue. It’s a loss of virtue. Right, and then the slaves and the exiles are, you know, let back into the city and all this nonsense. And that’s what ends up leading to the tyranny because you can’t do that. You cannot live in a flat world. And yeah, to some extent, he’s saying, look, when you don’t take the parable of the den or the cave seriously, which basically clearly states there are classes in society. Those classes are not optional. They’re not going away. And you need to pay attention to them. And you need to take responsibility for the fact that they’re existing. And you need to realize the people at the bottom rungs of the ladder cannot rise up the ladder by definition. And therefore the people at top of the ladder need to sacrifice and go to the bottom of the ladder to make things better. Really not unclear. Right, that is what Plato’s cave is about. It isn’t about anything else. Nobody tells you differently. It’s lying to you or mistaken somehow. I don’t care why they’re lying. They’re still wrong. And that’s actually really important. And then this is the outgrowth of that. It’s saying, look, when you get rid of the oligarchy or the democracy, you run into this flattening of the world, right, because you’ve made everybody’s vote equal, roughly speaking, even though it’s not quite that way. And that causes everybody to behave non-virtuously because it’s in their best interest. Because now they can pursue the good, right, without being dragged down to the bottom of the city. Because they’re not causing problems for anybody else, which is A, not true, but B, not relevant. You have a responsibility to the city. That’s what the previous book, Book Seven, was saying. You have a responsibility as the philosopher class, as a member of the philosopher class, all philosophers have a responsibility to the city to go all the way down. When you don’t do that because you created democracy, so you don’t have that responsibility anymore, the world collapses. And then tyranny is inevitable. I think if we look at the presupposition of virtue, what is he doing? Well, he’s basically dressing. He spends the first half of the book dressing the onion. He’s adding the layers. He’s creating the garments that need to be worn by the virtuous person. And so you—and that’s the constraint, right? The garments constrain your movement, but they also make your movement graceful, right? They show you in a different light. And then he undresses, right? This is the chapter of undressing those garments. And then what you see is what is being held up by the garment. And every layer, like something else, is held up, right? And then it’s not only the virtues that are held up, but also society is held up as a consequence of the virtues. Well, the only thing that can hold society up are the virtues. And when you try to compress it down to mere democracy and say that people can hold themselves up, it fails. Well, one of the things that I was thinking of when you’re talking about how in the tyranny, you have the margins get put on the outside. It’s kind of like George Orwell’s 1984 Thought Police. One of the things in my life that cured me of issues was like in soccer, you can use the same concept of Thought Police, but you can use it positively. Like in soccer conditioning, there were words that we could not say, like can’t. If a coach heard anybody say the word can’t, everybody’s running sprints. And it’s so—it’s like it’s beaten into your nervous system that you literally—the thought of the can’t never enters your brain because you purge it from your brain. Same thing like you’re never allowed to discuss score. If the coach hears anybody discussing score, practice is going to be held the next week, the whole week. Like all your—100% of your attention has to be on fundamentals of the game. What’s going well? What can we do better? And that’s very useful training. If you want the world to manifest itself in a certain way, just be—implement some Thought Police rules on your negative thought habits. Find ways to just exterminate them from your nervous system. There are ways to do that. I’ve done it many different times. After that, like school became effortless. Taking all AP classes, my grades skyrocketed, and it was like effortless. It was as though the burden of school was significantly reduced in some way. I don’t know why. I changed as a person in some way. But it’s one of those things. It’s like I don’t even have time to acknowledge the opposition. I only have time to focus on what I can control and where my attention is right now. And that kind of changes the way that those years of my life manifested themselves. So in thinking about the upside down society as well as the problem at the level of the individual and the warped sense of perspective of suicide, I’m not a psychologist. I don’t know what the answer is to cure somebody else. But in my own life, I can say that part of an aspect that worked for me is you just decide who you want to be, and then you have to be very serious about that, and then you have to find a way to embody it like your life depends on it, like with extreme intensity. And then it’s almost as though you forget. It’s almost as though you can’t even remember what your old problems were. You’re like, wait, what? What do you mean it’s cold outside? I don’t even think the thought. That’s it. You just go for the run. That’s managing your attention. And yeah, when you change the framing of the world, a bunch of things vanish because your framing is first and foremost a filter. So if you filter out the negatives and you focus on the positives because you’ve trained your attention to the positive, then yeah, the world’s going to change. And you can’t just do that. You can’t just be positive all the time, but you can have these heavy filters towards things, you know, towards whatever your immediate set of goals are, right? Like being better soccer player, right? And that does exact as Vervik would say, or draw itself out into other areas, right? And then things become, we’ll say better and better, right? Because you’ve trained your attention in that aspect towards that capability. And so then I was thinking about basically the answer to tyranny, like when you talk about the tyrant’s enemies or the valiant, the high-minded and the happier, perhaps fulfilled. For me, again, I don’t really- No, no, no, no, they’re not his enemies. Not his enemies? What he sees as that he can’t like lad B, but they’re not his enemies. Because an enemy means that you’re actively opposing and that’s not what they’re doing. But they could, right? I mean, that’s the green word that he wants to burn. But yeah, he could. He sees those as the green word being like, I want to throw them into the lines then, the valiant, right? Yes, because he’s threatened because that’s against his nature. But being against someone’s nature does not equal you being their enemy. Enemy. Treat them that way, but that’s not what they are. There’s lots of reasons to get rid of things, right? There’s lots of reasons to say, stop talking to somebody in your life. And it’s not because they’re your enemy, right? It can just be because they’re super unlucky. And every time you’re with them, bad things happen, right? You’re not mad at them. You’re not angry with them. They’re not your enemy, but you get to let them go. And it’s the same thing here. They didn’t burn the Christians because they were the enemy of the people that burned them. Like that wasn’t the reason that they got burned. Is it fair to say that that is Plato’s list of the antidote to tyranny? Cultivating val- What’s the word? Whatever the word is, Rebellion, Virtue, Hymenous, etc. So, I mean, the one thing that is clear is that the antidote- That doesn’t fix anything, right? A tyrant is going to tyrant. This is one of the things I had to deal with. I read this stupid book of some crazy Protestant guy, and he’s talking about how to relate to authority in the Bible. And he’s saying, always submit to authority. Like you just you just have to submit. I don’t like this. I don’t like this. I don’t like this. But I’m like, what’s the alternative? I can’t come up with a better alternative. And basically- You have to hold together your part of the world, because if you’re not doing that and instead you’re trying to take down what structure is there, that’s still worse for everybody in all cases. And like this is the impulse of the acceleration is, right? It’s like, okay, like the the wall is going to come, right? The wall of reality is going to hit this tyrant at some point. But you can’t accelerate that, because at that point, you’re at fault, right? And now the tyrant can just scapegoat you. So like, that’s why accelerationism, even if that was good, it doesn’t even work. Like the only way that you can make it happen is like, are you going to turn the system towards the good, or are you going to expose it for being evil, if you do the right things? Like that’s the two ways that that will happen. And like, yeah, sometimes you’re going to end up on the enemy’s list by just doing good things. Like that will happen, right? And that was the groups that were were exiled, basically, right? These were people who were trying to do things and they got exiled. And then, well, then they came back with resentment, which is what you shouldn’t do. But that this, yeah, but you’re going to be fed to the lion sometimes, like that’s just going to happen. And if you look at the these Chinese or the Japanese, right, like they feed themselves to the lion, right? They just commit to Harikiri or whatever. It’s like, I disagree with the path you’ve chosen, and I’m just going to like, stand in front of the house or whatever. I’m going to kill myself in front of your house and now you’ve got your honor just completely destroyed. I think like, Jordan Peterson, you know, and many different people with Jocko, he was interviewing Jocko Willink, Navy SEAL guy who now talks about how to lead leadership in business. Jocko Willink is all about like, you got to play the game because like the military is obviously very bureaucratic and you can’t fight every fight, right? And so the problem with like, you have to know, engage strategically with maybe pulling your tongue against your boss sometimes and doing things to curry favor with the right people in order to do what you like. If you just go in and oppose your generals and your generals have a bad battle plan and a bunch of people get killed, like just because you went and told your general you’re an idiot, you’re wrong, you do this, much people are going to die, it’s not going to work. So like, if you actually care about your people, sometimes you need to know like, all right, I’m going to have to curry favor with my generals and win some credulity before I can spend my capital and behave more strategically in the world. And that’s not really a message that, I mean, it’s kind of obvious, but it’s not a lesson that like, we have very mature, it seems to me as though we don’t really have a robust and mature community, like groups or sets of vocabulary to, I don’t know, it just seems, I mean, it’s kind of, it’s wisdom, right? I mean, you have to behave with wisdom in the world and I guess maybe I’m just- Yeah, but like, I don’t think you have to do these things. Like, I just think you have to be virtuous and these things will happen. And the fact that he can look back and say, I have done these things, so you should do these things, is like, no, don’t do these things, just be a good person and the right people will be attracted to you and they will do good things for you. Like- Well, I mean, you don’t fight a revolution by dying a doorstep on your doorstep as a martyr, you fall back and you raise an army and then you go fight a revolution with an army. I mean, that’s- You don’t fight a revolution because revolution ends in everybody dying, so don’t ever do that. All revolutions fail, like, all of them, historically, just what happened, right? Everybody’s like, revolution! It’s like, no, that’s bad. But you can see it in your brain. It wasn’t and that’s part of the problem. When you think the American Revolution was an actual revolution, it doesn’t resemble one. And I have a video on that. And America would have lost if they weren’t an island super far away. Well, and if it weren’t part of a larger war, like, it was a small battle as part of a larger war with a lot more at stake than the, quote, freedom. To this day, we support England. We’re still not separated from England. That never happened, right? We’re separated from the authority of parliament in the UK. That’s what we’re separated from. But we still- Two world wars, we jumped in. There was no reason for us to do that. We weren’t under any threat at all. We jumped in anyway. Like, did we really separate from England? I don’t think so. It doesn’t look that way. So, yeah, we just didn’t- We rebelled against the authority of parliament. Absolutely. And then when the king wouldn’t help, we rebelled against that. But it wasn’t a revolution. And yeah, you should submit. And the problem with saying everybody needs to use wisdom is that everybody doesn’t have wisdom. Everybody isn’t going to get wisdom. So they don’t have that available. It would be great if everybody could be equally wise. But we don’t live in an equal world. Everybody can’t do that and isn’t going to even if they can. And even if they did, it wouldn’t result in what you think. We’re far away from that. That’s not a solution. There isn’t a solution. You just kind of have to deal with the fact of this pattern. Plato is not putting forth a solution here either. He’s saying this is what’s going to happen. I saw a TikTok thing come by. It was basically a guy saying, well, God didn’t bother not to create suffering and therefore blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And he was contrasting that to God is good, in fact. And it’s just like, well, what is the valence that you’re going to take when you look at God? It’s like, yeah, obviously God created the suffering. But why is the suffering there? And what is suffering? And if suffering is evil, then God is evil because he created it. If suffering is a self-imposed exile from the garden, then we’re having a different story. And that’s all valence. That’s the problem. We can engage these things in many ways. And if you choose the negative one, you’re screwed. But yeah, again, what place does the suffering come from? But yeah, again, what Plato did is get us up the mountain so that we can look down. And if you never get up the mountain, you can never look down. Right. And then you can talk all you want. It’s nonsensical. And have you seen what’s happening in Israel? They launched a full-scale attack on Israel from Gaza. And there’s actual war language used, like we’re in the state of war on both sides. And people have been kidnapped. It’s like, okay, well, that’s your rebellion. Like you burned down a bunch of buildings, you hit a bunch of other buildings, you kidnapped a bunch of soldiers. And now what? Like, I just don’t see how these revolutions work. And it was the same in Turkey. These guys, they end up driving all their equipment on bridges and stuff. And it’s like, I was like, they’re never going to do this without knowing that they have support. And then they don’t have support. And they’re like, why are you doing this? This is just desperation. Like at that point, you deserve to be punished. I have nothing else to say. If you just mess up the country because you were going to be found out or whatever, and you actually don’t have a proper plan to take over the country, like, yeah, to deal with you. Oh, what language would you use to describe, let’s say somebody’s addicted. What language? So I mean, I’m just sort of thinking of tyranny is a thing that emerges or develops beyond freedom, or at least the corrupted theorists freedom. And now I’m going to think of like a form of addiction, like a person who’s addicted. Like, you could say that they could perform some revolution, or it’s more like transformation. I mean, it’s more just like a transformation of values. What language would you use to describe the reversal? Submission? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, addiction is not submitting to your needs, but submitting to your wants. And then you’re just changing what you’re submitting to. Okay, that’s fair. Well, it goes actually into this in a tyrannical man, right? And it’s here. Man sleeps while they reign, which is the animalistic part, right? So reason and law go to sleep. Right. And it’s like, yeah, if you never wake up from your sleep, like, you’re going to be addicted. And they go into that, like, you get ruled by your passions. And then one takes control. And the one that takes control is going to get cultivated by the people around you, because they want to have a means of controlling you. And like, oh, shit. Right? Like, if I’m surrendered to my passion, and someone has the means of controlling my passion, they have a means of controlling me, and they’re going to keep me there forever. And that’s what we’re seeing, right? Like, all of, and this is not conscious stuff, right? This is just like, how things go, right? How do I affect this other person? Right? Like, how can I affect their behavior? Well, by controlling the thing that they want. So if I want to be effective, I’m going to look for the thing that they want, and I’m going to do something with it, that I can affect them. And so everybody is doing that. And like, that’s just creating hell on earth. And then you end up in a power game, right? Because like, at a certain point, you got to have your hit. And you’re going to have to see that struggle to the end. I mean, I see that theme of in terms of being asleep. When he was talking about the miserly man and the oligarchy, he said, as a man who does not cultivate himself, implying that cultivation is proactive. I mean, that seems to be the, there seems to be a threat of consciousness. I mean, it’s kind of has to be, but it’s sort of tautological. Like, how could it, how could it, I mean, when it comes to submission, though, that means the problem with the divided man is that, like, you have competing desires consciously. I mean, you can’t just, you don’t just submit to every subconscious need that you have. You know, at the highest of his list of virtues is rationality, right? And if the solution is to be conscious and submit to the proper things, I mean, you’re kind of in a bad place if your rationality is already corrupted. No, no, hold on. The divided man was the oligarchy. Like, this is not a division. This is plurality. This is chaos. Like, that’s different. Like, division means that you’re being pulled apart. But being pulled apart means that you have the good. You have access to the good. Like, these tyrannical people, they don’t have access. Like, you have to realize it’s not in the realm of whatever, their experience. Like, this is the problem, like, how Socrates comes into conversation with Glaucon is like, I cannot convince you. At this point, you’re not going to understand me. Like, he’s seeing the is that the dividing line? He’s seeing the dividing line that Glaucon cannot watch over. Like, he can’t see past the line. And so this is the problem when you’re arguing with people. Like, really can’t see past the line. Like, and at that point, they’re in bad faith, because they can’t see past the line, so they cannot be in good faith. Like, it’s not an option. Like, this is the thing that I’m starting to see with these Protestants, right? So I think what’s happening with these Protestants is, because they have the Christian framework, it often looks like they’re in good faith, because they’re doing the right things. But they run into the end, right? They run into that line. And then they can no longer be because the framework is closed. It’s not open. I’m trying to think. There was also a line, I think, early on saying, like, about, again, on the oligarchical miserly type, like, if he were educated, then he would have prevented this issue. I’m just thinking of my own life. Like, I was very miserly. I had scarcity mindset. Like, my parents were a Great Depression generation, right? And I inherited a lot of that. And so I was just thinking to myself, like, I still do have a lot of scarcity mindset, but significantly less of it. And I was just thinking about what exactly was it that changed me. Some of it was probably information, like reading things like Rich Dad Poor Dad, or changing my conception of what money is and resources and energy and what my attention and resources ought to be put into the service of. But again, I mean, he’s not here giving solutions, but I’m just trying to think about in my own life, trying to map the sound of my own life and then think about- But again, like, I just don’t think that you can do these things, right? I’m going to have to finish my article, First Order vs. Second Order of Facts, because that’s the thing that you’re talking about the whole time, right? So a First Order of Facts would be, I get this knowledge and now I’m going to, like, implement it at every point. I’m going to have my attention say that I need to do this other thing. But that’s not fixing anything. That’s just indoctrinating yourself. But that’s the problem with the Protestants. Like, they’re indoctrinated, which means that they’re doing the right things, but that also means that they’re not good. They’re indoctrinated in doing the right thing. And so the way that you get to do the right thing is to be virtuous, right? Like you said, yes, you need to be having a reason to spend them. How do you get your reason? Get a tell us, right? The tellers will provide you your reason. Then you don’t have to worry about the reason. Because, like, if you need to spend all your money or your life for something, and, like, that’s worth it because you have decided that’s your tell us, then you’re going to do it. Like, the whole concept of scarcity mindset is going to vanish. Like, when you were talking, like, I don’t know if I have actually scarcity mindset, but, like, I don’t like spending my money, right? I don’t have a problem spending it, but, like, it’s not something I like to do. How do I spend money? Well, like, I spend money by deciding that I need to do things in my life. And then I don’t think about it. But that’s not me relieving the mindset. That has nothing to do with the mindset. That just creates a different baseline. Like, the mindset is in how do I create the baseline? What’s the means by which I create the baseline? And at a certain point, you can just make it fluid. Like, that’s the whole point. You want to have the virtues dictate where the line is instead of that you have the line dogmatically placed somewhere. So one of the things in church is you have a gratitude seat. So once a month, you get to pay money for what you’re grateful of, right? You can give that into the hands of God. Like, that’s a way, right? So they have tithes, they have normal seats, right? So one of them is upkeep. The other one is basically a reminder that you’re in this relationship and that you’re giving something back to the church. And the third one is, okay, like something happened and I’m going to express gratitude for what happened in giving money, right?