Plato's The Republic, Book 9 Discussion, part 1⧸3 (Bc51UMIoRe4)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Bc51UMIoRe4

Last time we finished book nine, no eight, reached book nine. And I’ll go through our intentions. My intention was to be more structured. Ethan’s intention was to see the qualities in the text. And Mark wanted to apply the chapter to modern day. And then he wanted to find a response to the democratic man and determining the level of corruption that he was partaking in. So, yeah, I wanted to break patterns. I definitely got my patterns broken. Not sure how much I was a part of that, but it happened, which generally has been a really good experience for me. Yeah, it’s not hard to be constructive within that, but at least getting exposed is important. So, yeah, this tyrannical man is going to be placing himself in contrast. So we’re going to get an oppositional binary going, which is interesting. To think about the binaries and maybe there is a justification for binaries within certain framings or whatever. Just, unjust, light, dark, I don’t know. Yeah, I mean, that’s still in the structure of the text. They always use the, this must be so, right? And then like, yeah, you know, or it must be the opposite. They’ve been playing with that throughout the text. The interesting thing for me on this book is there’s nothing about the layers of the city. So I think this is the first time that this has happened. Like, they’re not talking about class system. They’re not talking about the need for the mixing. They’re not talking about any of that. Right? It stays at the individual level. And so it’s a contract, although I would say it’s not a binary because they compare and contrast the tyrannical man against all the other men. Right. And, and, and say which one’s happier. And then they, you know, at the end of the book, actually they do this mathematical calculation, which is just, I mean, it’s hysterical to prove who’s happier and how much happier, which it’s even, it’s so funny. So I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of, I don’t, there’s more. Binary here than there’s anywhere else. It’s just binary for the sake of being absurd as usual. So my intention, um, well, let’s be unstructured. So, uh, yeah, Ethan, are you there? No, he’s not. Okay. We’ll go to Mark. Application to the modern day. I wish you were intention. Yeah. I mean, I, I’m the same way. I mean, I think we’re, we’re at the end of democracy. So I’m just going to, going to apply this to what’s, what’s happening now because it seems to be there. Well, the thing that kind of struck me most about this chapter is not really so much the ideas that I got out of it. It’s more of the poetic nature of the language, like the sting of desire being the Lord of the soul and having madness for the captain of his guard. I just liked the pictures that it painted of as it, I really liked the poetry of the language mostly. Um, so I mean, when I was in Manhattan, I saw Sweeney Todd on Broadway, which is a great show. I was like, I’m going to go watch it. I’m going to go watch it. I mean, when I was in Manhattan, I saw Sweeney Todd on Broadway, which is about, you know, this guy who’s disillusioned with the world and starts murdering a bunch of people. And I saw basically a rendition of Macbeth. And so I’ve been like thinking a lot about madness and in the tyrannical man. I don’t really have an intention. So there’s, there’s one is that’s just where my mind is right now. And so I don’t really know where to go with that. But then there’s a second intention, which is, um, what he does, basically, I want to, I want to, I want to shore up my understanding of exactly what he’s trying to, what his main, what’s the main thrust of this book, because I think in book 10, he starts to kind of build on these ideas as he concludes the whole thing, like, you know, he hate, like in book 10, he starts hating on poetry and stuff like that. And he kind of references some of the points that he brings up here. And I don’t have a complete understanding of that. So I guess one is just meditating on, on, on some, like some of these, some of these aspects of myself, like we don’t, we, we probably don’t think of ourselves as mad. And so I was talking to my sister, like, for example, when I was watching Sweeney Todd, I was like, you know, like, it’s kind of hard when you, in terms of the writing, like I don’t really resonate with character because he, you know, it’s like, okay, fine. You have these things that bad things that happened to you and your wife was killed. And then you take this leap where you start murdering everybody. And I’m like, that seems like too big of a leap. And then in talking to my sister about that and Macbeth and other things that we did while I was in Manhattan, like I’ve started, I started to kind of see like, oh, like maybe I was actually just, maybe I was holding myself back from actually experiencing those works as they, you know, I, like, it was my, it was my own, it was my own issue. Like I was not, not seeing things in myself that was actually preventing me from appreciating certain aspects of these different, you know, artistic works. So same thing, like when I’m reading this and I start to, and the madness theme comes up, my brain just kind of like starts shutting itself off. It’s like, oh, I’m not mad. Like, so I just, I just became aware that I had that reaction to the text. So I kind of want to explore that a bit. That was kind of all over the place, but I’ll leave it at that. Madness and poetry and. What’s your intention? Matt, meditating on madness and fear and, and, and at the end is just, but then secondarily or maybe primarily getting a better, a more clear understanding of what the main thrust is exactly at book nine. Cause I see he makes a bunch of different points and at the end, he makes a bunch of explicit conclusions and how he gets there. I just have some, it’s a, some issues with, with how exactly he arrives at his conclusions. Okay. Ethan, are you there? What’s my intention? Yeah, your intention. No, I’m probably going to be something similar to what’s on you guys helping me see, recognize patterns like that in the, in the world today and how to look out for them, how to recognize patterns. You know, the, the, the behavior and the mentality or we’ll just call it the spirit of the tyrant, how to, how to guard against that or, or to look out for. Okay, so, uh, did you want to reference something from bulker eight Discuish. I would suggest that those kind of the updates that were, uh, referred to on the disconnective function and you are, there might be chunks in particular So how do people react to that. There are comments from people that want to be joining them. from book 8, Eaton? Things that you still want to discuss? No, not at the moment. Okay. So, yeah, this is some notes that I made. So, at the start of book 9, we’ve elevated the theoretical man to the top of the hierarchy. And so, now there is an apples to apples comparison that we can make with the philosopher king. And so I think that’s the framing where they’re engaging from. Okay, now we can stripe out things against each other and see how they compare. So, it’s interesting that the first move that they make is the comparison of the apathites in relationship to the democratic man as well, I think. So you have the unnecessary pleasures and apathites. And the pleasures are separated as lawful and unlawful. So, it’s interesting because I don’t think they made that separation on the apathites. So you can maybe separate these realms, right? Well, what is pleasure versus appetite? Appetite is something that’s necessary, right? There’s a necessary component there. And pleasure is something that’s coming from the will more than from the embodiment, I guess. And that’s where I think the big problem with the tyrannical man lies. The frame seems that he puts towards the pleasures and the desires. He says the desires are either wholly banished or they become few and weak. He has a very proactive stance. And at the end, the message at the end is get your own house in order, basically. But the message throughout all of this is like, it’s never like… There’s not much fatalism here. This seems to be very like Petersonian responsibility-themed stuff going on throughout this. That’s what I saw in the text. Well, yeah, you have to if you’re on top of the hierarchy. And they get into that, actually. Yeah, it’s not just for the people on top. It was really for everyone. And I think the interesting thing for me is, I mean, this book is unlike the other books. I mean, it does not go through that speaking about individuals, then speaking about groups, then speaking about the class system, then speaking about the city and what’s good for the city. That’s not in here, which is fascinating to me. And it looks to me, although it didn’t seem very explicit, it looks to me as though what’s actually happening is the individualistic nature of the democracy is what collapses you into tyranny, because you end up focused specifically on your own, on feeding your own needs and desires, which ironically doesn’t work. It’s rather explicit. The tyrant does not get his desires fulfilled, even though he’s able to try to fulfill them. He’s unconstrained. He can murder his parents. He can have sex whenever he wants with whomever he wants. Like he’s imposing his will left, right and center. And yet that at the same time doesn’t fulfill his desires. It’s not necessarily that it makes him unhappy, although it’s worse. But it makes his desires unfulfillable. He can’t be satiated at all. So I found that fascinating that the structure of the text has changed here in Book 9 in a rather distinct way. It started to change in Book 8 to some extent, but Book 9 is just, it’s all the way down to the individual level. Interesting, interesting thing that you observed there. Yeah, once the, once you know, once we’re at the democracy put places, the ethic at the individual. So there’s no virtue. There’s nothing outside of the individual. Once the ethic just becomes individualism, it’s just whoever it just becomes a matter of arbitrary power like postmodernism. Whoever happens to have the most amount of effective force becomes the person on top. So if I was born with bigger muscles than you, I’m going to be, I’m going to be the one, the guy on top. For example. Yeah, he doesn’t, he doesn’t say who takes over, right? Like again, the structure has changed. So it’s not some progression from where you are to where you’re, you know, to becoming the tyrant. There’s no progression there. The progression is kind of assumed from the destruction or degradation of democracy. And, you know, in Book 7, we’re still talking about the city and what’s good for the city. And in Book 8, we’re not really talking about the city at all, right? We’re talking about what happens in a democracy with the people. And now in Book 9, we’re talking about an individual person that’s tyrant and how he relates to other individual persons. Yeah, I always thought this was interesting that there’s not really much of a transition between democracy and tyranny. If anything, it’s almost entirely the same thing. I always kind of looked at it as two sides of the same coin, but it could just be the same thing. So it’s interesting, right? Because what Mark was describing is like a fracturing. And so when we started with the philosopher, he’s within a hierarchy, right? And like his whole relationship is predefined by the city that was designed by Socrates. So when that city breaks down, also the way the relationships manifest break down, right? So it goes to honor, to money, right? And it becomes more plural and more plural. And then you get the democracy, right? What was the highest thing in democracy? Equality, I guess, or liberty, right? So like liberty is almost universal, but still not. And then in some sense, in tyranny, the universality is reestablishing order because what it needs to suck into manifests. And that’s the flipping, right? That’s the upside down world, I think, that Peugeot is talking about where you just… Yeah, you need to gather things in order to have something. And either you’re sucking on the bones of your ancestors or you’re creating something yourself. And if you’re creating something yourself, you’re going to suck it out of the bones of living people. And that’s why there’s so much slavery talk in the book. Oh, yeah, I like that. Well, I mean, yeah, or you can create with others and then it’s just generative and doesn’t have… Where did you get that sucking on the bones from? That’s good. I like that. That’s me making soup out of it. The only thing with soup is that if it’s not soup, it’s a bowl of ice cream with spoons. Always something with spoons. Ethan, there is a lot of poetic language that is to that effect in 572, like Eish or maybe slightly before there. When they’re talking about the sun and he’s hanging out with the seducers and they talk about how he’s drawn into a perfectly lawless life by which his seducers is termed perfect liberty. And there’s these class of what they call magicians and tyrant makers. There’s this thread out there of seducers, magicians and tyrant makers that have an influence on the sun. And as the sun spends company with them, there’s some interesting poetic language about how what you would think of liberty is actually the thing that enslaves you. It’s very subversive in a subversive way. Another thing, too, before that, though, in 572b, we were talking about assumptions and stuff. They say even in good men, there’s a lawless wild beast nature which peers out and sleep. So that kind of point is just not an axiom that is, I think, unfortunately common today. That’s just a statement that they could just say without needing to justify. And I think that’s an important starting place, too, that I think is missing in our culture. Yeah, there’s the you have the liberty or the lack of constraint, right, that everybody is pursuing right now in our world. And once you have that, you have the ability or the power to make all of your quote unquote wild wildest dreams come true. So it’s the lack of constraint and the ability to realize your your fantasies, which are. Yeah. That’s this talk of liberty. Freedom from constraint. I think that’s what they’re talking about, isn’t it? This liberty thing. Yeah. Yeah, the Bloom translation calls it hostility to law. Right. That would be right. Law would be constraint. Right. Sure. Hostility to law. Maybe we should start calling it that now. And what the Enchanters do is the Bloom translations is they implant a love in him to lead his idle desires, which insist on all available resources being distributed to them. So it’s like if you’re not if you’re not focused on doing something in a directed way, that that opens up the space for these Enchanters to take this these resources and put them into into other things. I just think he’d go on with it. Go ahead, Ted. Sorry. It also goes into this idea that your comfort requires someone else’s labor. Right. And so, you know, that’s why comfort should be temporary, like you can enslave people forever. And maybe you become their slaves so they can have comfort sometimes. Right. Like that. You know, the language in the book is kind of harsh in that way, I would say. And this is one of the sort of more interesting observations of today. Everyone’s throwing around that slavery, that slavery, that slavery. Under the definition of slavery, they’re using slavery is inevitable. And so the fact that something is slavery isn’t surprising because yes, but this doesn’t resolve anything if it’s universal. Right. Now, OK, everyone’s enslaved by something to something for something. Now what? Like that doesn’t resolve justice at all because a universal. Justice is nothing to say about a universal. Right. It cannot say anybody universal. So at what point, you know, do you draw the slavery line? Because it’s one of the great confusions in the translation is, is it slavery or is beholden to a better way to frame it? Like, you know, these are translation issues at some point. I don’t know. But I think that’s where we get confused. We’ll say in in more contemporary era or error is the case, maybe where we’re not understanding. You can cast lots of things that slavery and fair enough, but you’re not you’re not changing anything or fixing anything or intelligising anything at all. Well, I think I think the slavery has to do with the imposition. Right. It’s like you you’re not voluntarily doing this anymore because it’s like an existential threat. I think that’s that’s the thing. Like at a certain point, it’s not a choice. It’s like you get it into a binary and like that’s what the tyrant does. Right. Like it reduces everything into into a binary. Like I want this and you’re going to do this for me. And if you’re not going to do this for me, all these other things need to happen. And they have to. We went into that last last week. Yeah, I agree. That’s that’s certainly the quest for liberty causes a compression back into the binary mode of thinking, which is obviously wrong. We don’t live in a binary world. We’re not little digital creatures all pixelized ones and zeros. It’s not us. And like the binary is there and they didn’t have what we would call binary computing or anything back then. It’s kind of interesting that just a pattern, guys, it’s just a pattern that’s been recurring for thousands of years. And the problem of, as I said, the way they’re defining slavery is it’s universal. And if it’s a universal, fine and fair enough, but also you’re not resolving it. You’re not changing it. You’re not doing away with it. It’s going to be there irrespective of what you think or do. Rename the slave master dynamic in the art. Anyway, yeah. Do you do you get you get did they use the word drone in your guys’s translation? Yeah, it’s really interesting. I’m seeing here and when the other desires filled with incense, mirror, wreaths, wine and other pleasures found in the company buzz around the drone, nurturing it and making it grow as large as possible. They plant the sting of a wall of longing. It’s interesting. Those things that they use are all the things that they use in literature. Right. It’s a misappropriation of something. It’s bringing something that’s higher down to the well, we’ll say the individual or the drone here. Right. That’s an interesting thing I just saw. But yeah, this tyrant, it seems like they completely with the philosopher king is orientated towards the higher things, the vertical causality, bringing things into the world and embodying them. Whereas the tyrant is focused on things that are already created. So on one hand, you have a philosophy king that’s cultivating creation, cultivating a garden and the tyrant you have that’s just consuming the garden and eating everything and and not not taking care of it. So, yeah, the slavery came. I don’t I mean, maybe this is something there. But like there when they keep thinking of slavery, it’s just like you’re taking something for granted, like you’re taking the labor or the work, I guess you could say of something for granted. That’s what the tyrant is doing is taking everything for granted and consuming it and not creating or generating anything. Well, so the way that the tyrant is organizing the garden is by having it be self referential, right, because it needs to contain itself. Like it’s this endless creation of containers, right, like this identification against this reorganization within the identity where new identities occur that then need to be contained as well. And it’s just this endless. Yeah. Yeah, he’s not willing to do anything. He just wants the garden to grow by itself so he can eat it without taking care of it or doing any of the work or either requires no wisdom, no sight or anything. It’s like if a baby grew up, just goes around eating everything. Taking for granted the parents that provide everything for it, which there’s a lot of like that. That’s basically our society, it seems like. Well, yeah, I had an experience with that. Why can’t we just let things be? Because they’re not. They are within something. They always are in relation. We have to take responsibility for that relationship. And the way that the tyrannical man is trying to impose that responsibility is through law and reason. So he’s trying to control himself through law and reason. And then there’s two aspects of himself. There’s the things that can be banished or that are weak and that can be under his control or the things that run out of control. And then they go again into this poetic language. The man sleeps while they reign. The beast awakens from meat or drink. Parted from shame and self-constraint. So there’s this taking over of this other entity that… Well, it’s other. I think that’s the most important part. It’s the other and it’s taking over. And it’s taking over with a will of its own, a mind of its own. And it starts laying down its own laws. These laws that are laid down, they come to supersede whatever there was, right? From, well, emergence, I guess, right? From just being a man. And these passions, they reorient the person. Well, I think the whole drone thing is all about whatever the desires that you have are, wherever they come from, they’re not you. Or they’re not entirely you. And so you’re pursuing them and they’re not satisfying you anymore at some point. It’s sort of like too much of a good thing. And so what happens is you just fall into this problem of not being able to integrate and not being able to find satisfaction. You’re no longer able in some sense to interface with your desires correctly because they’ve grown bigger than you in some way. And now they control you. And so everything that happens is directed by that pursuit. Sounds rather like addiction. Rather than by something, we’ll say that guides you from the outside in a way that affects other people. Your desires only affect you. That’s why they’re your desires. And I think that’s sort of the key in the drone and the winged drone taking over to some extent is that whole interaction. So the way I understood drones is because they made reference to that earlier in the Democratic Man, I think, right? And it was relating to the ruling class. So the ruling class is in some sense a disconnect. Like I’m making the mental association with vampire. So the drone is stuck in the system, right? Because they’re not adding value, but they are dependent on the system. Yeah, well, I mean, it likened them to drones. But you can look at that as the collective desire of that class taking over to the system. Taking over the will of the people within the class. And I think that’s how it was couched in the previous book. And then you see that same pattern here, right? Scaled down. We’re no longer talking about classes. We’re talking about individuals. And so you have a winged drone. I don’t know what the significance of the wingedness of the drone is. It’s not made clear here that I can tell. And I just not anywhere near scholarly enough to. Well, I looked it up actually. So the drones are the only ones that are capable of sexual reproduction. And when you have ants, for example, they don’t generally have wings. So they have to grow wings and they fly out for sexual reproduction. Only the queens. Hmm? With the queen. No, no, the queen and the drones. They fly anyway. The point being. Yeah, like the queen is like flying with the drones and the ones that keep up longest, they’re the fittest. And she picks that one to mate with. Anyway, the point being that I think the wings are representative of the takeover of desire, right? Because like with with those ants, they die afterwards. Right. So they just chase and then they’re done. The imagery I got was one of swarming like one drone. Not a problem. Two drones, maybe not a problem. Three drones, you know, but eventually you get critical mass of drones. Big problem. Right. You know, and then it’s chaos. You don’t know where they’re coming from, where they’re going. That’s kind of the kind of the imagery I got from it. Because they talked about tempering the soul. Here is a single winged drone that takes over. So, yeah, but the reason is because they say when the other desires and that’s in the plural and they say overflowing, like Ethan pointed out with incense or, you know, stuff like that, they they kind of use some of that language. But yeah, I mean, right. The desires grow bigger than the will of the person. That’s addiction. Because when we were talking about slavery and oppression, you can’t like, you know, you can’t just say, you know, you’re going to have to do something. But when we were talking about slavery and oppression, you can’t like in terms of the modern language and how we have these misconceptions, you can’t use it. It’s telling whenever you use the word slave where you’re standing because you can’t presume you can’t use that language without presuming a sovereignty. And so here we have this idea of being a slave at either the individual and then the family. You have to govern oneself and then, you know, the city and then and then the family and then the city, et cetera, like the Christian models like you’re a slave to sin or you’re a slave to Christ. And then we can argue about whether Christ calls you or you could voluntarily choose that. But the point is here we have like responsibilities and you have temperance that’s our importance. And it seems like it seems like at some point you hit a tipping point where it’s like you’re in trouble. Like, you know, you want to maybe some people are born to bronze or gold or to an oligarchic family and like maybe you’re dealt a better hand in life. But like in your situation at every every layer of the stack, there’s always a theme of some degree of personal at least I’ve seen a theme of some degree of personal responsibility. And I’ve also seen the same theme of if you if you if you if you proceed down this path and hit this tipping point like I’ve seen like like watch out. Yeah, well, OK. So the problem I have with that is that I don’t think you’re capable of right relationship when you’re on the tipping point. So you can’t rightfully judge it or discern that you’re there or anything. So and I like I I think the implication is personal responsibility, but I don’t see it anywhere like that. I don’t think he doesn’t he doesn’t talk about a solution to the tyrannical man, right? Doesn’t talk about how you fight it or any of that stuff. He just says this is what happens. Tyrannical man is a four year old on his birthday. And confirm all the time. Where does my right on behalf of my four year old and we’ll have to go. No, no, the actual four year old. I object on his behalf because he’s not tyrannical. Three. He was. OK, we’ll go three year old. Yeah, we’ll we’ll do it to three. But it does talk about how the ruling part changes as you go down this ladder like the rational and then you get to the spirited. It starts talking about loves and desires, right? Which is kind of we don’t really like to I think we don’t really I didn’t like to hear that. Like I want to I want to I want to allow my you know the things that I love to guide me in some way. And so it’s like saying like there’s a kind of a rational part. You know, you have to you have to moderate that spirited signal with the rational part. And then if you corrupt that too much, then you use like then you’re going to be led by the lower part. Now I’ll leave it at that. I’m getting too far ahead. But, you know, I’m seeing that I’m I’m seeing like the battle that’s being fought just sort of changes. But but there is there is this proactive element of agency involved throughout the whole the whole process that I’m seeing. Yeah. So the line that I have here is a piece the lower to make room 40 higher. So basically what he says is you have to do upkeep and then like virtue can exist. And if you don’t do upkeep, we all have a lawless wild beast nature waiting. Necessary appetites encouraged in the democratic man. Who’s capable of balancing the unnecessary, right? So that’s that’s why that distinction is so important. OK, you you you get to be doing all of these things as a democratic not bag. But like if you if you stop making the judgment, you stop making the discernment between what’s necessary and what’s unnecessary, you you just fall down the hill. And yeah, so like this is like this is apocureanism, at least the way that it was shown in my face. So I’m like super confused. Yeah, then the tyrannical man is seduced by perfect liberty. The need to control is done through implementation of a ruling desire or passion, self-control. So. I, I, the way I understood this, because it was a little bit weird in the text, but the way I I understood it is that you submit yourself to something else. And then that something else will rule you and then it will organize your life into it. And then that also becomes the means. Of of others to control your said, like it gives you a means to control yourself, right? Like, oh, I’m going to have pie at the end of the day or whatever. But also, like other people can take away your pie. Or, yeah, like the oil pipeline gets closed or the gas pipeline. That that jives with the trials that he puts this tyrant man through when he says if you’re the rational man, like what’s the what’s best to the rational man is what he values. What’s best to the honor loving man is what he values, et cetera. Right. So that seems whatever you put on the on the top of your hierarchy, that’s going to. I well, I’ll save it for later. Sorry. But, yeah, I see that in the trials that come later. So the quote that I have here is monstrous winged joint drone. So it’s not only a winged drone, it’s monstrous as well. And then he goes into the need to remove our constraints. And I have old love, although I don’t know what that’s referencing to anymore. But I think I think that’s the detachment from from all everything that was loved in the past. Right. So and this is the framing that I wanted to go into. We’re talking about bondage because that’s what a slave is. Right. Like a slave is involuntary bondage. And you have voluntary bondage and involuntary bondage. And the old laws, right, like love is a voluntary bondage because you engage in it. And if you if you cast it off and you adopt these new bonds, right, like where and I think I think the important part of it is, is that it’s not an intimate relationship because it’s not a relationship. And I think I think the important part of it is, is that it’s not an intimate relationship because the tyrannical mind is incapable of intimacy. And I think actually Plato says something similar to that, that that that they they can’t they don’t know what’s freedom anyway. So, yeah, so that there’s a born againness in the inverted way there. You’re baptized in the drunken man’s spirit. That’s the comparison that they’re making. Drunken man’s spirit is the spirit of the tyrant. The spirit of the tyrant. The spirit that gets taken. Well, that that reason does not rule anymore. Yeah, although all the all the relationships that the tyrant has are of a master slave relationship and they in terms of redeeming qualities. He does talk about friendship like he’s incapable of friendship. And so that that does that does seem to be in terms of we talk about there’s no solutions. That does seem to be a theme that actually is brought up in many of the books as as as of having inherent virtue and of being an anti-corrosive, you know, an anti-corrupt of an anti-corruptive thing is uniting with other people under the right spirit. Yeah. And then he thinks he cannot only rule over men, but also over God. So, yeah, that relates to humility, groundedness, right? It’s. And it also says something about the relationship that you’re entering into because. If. If you’re not looking up in your relationship, you can only relate downwards. I think that’s basically what what it means, right? And then. There’s that’s only one way communication. There we go. Like. Because then you have to broadcast like this. There’s no other means of of communicating. If you’re only looking down, you have to broadcast. Well, that was that’s what broadcast is. You’re putting yourself at the top in order to cast a broad net. Right. You can’t cast a broad net from below. That’s made any sense. Yeah. The rule, not just human beings, but gods as well. Like you said, reminds me of in in Christian lore, that’s the very first sin is taking the fruit so that you may be like gods. It’s like the very first sin. Mm hmm. Yeah. The thing that came to mind for me was technology and misattributing what technology can, what the bounds of what it can and can’t do are. But what did you guys think about, like in terms of madness or thinking that you can rule over gods? Is that is that just a I mean, there’s all there’s some force multiplier like you’re being empowered in some way. But I think there’s more to it than that. I could think there’s I think there’s some other aspect to madness here that I it’s not just like what what is what is the what is the state of being where there’s nothing above you. That’s God. Well, yeah, you at the top. But what is your experience? How do you how do you navigate the world? You’re separated from the whole in that situation. You know, you are. Yeah, you’re you’re going around making the world and your own image. So it’s like you are the whole this is narcissism, right? Like this is solipsism. Everything only exists in relation to me. And therefore, all value is how values apply to me like. So if you want something like the only reason I would give it to you is because it’s served me. And then this is the next line. How do you comes into being through influence of nature or habit? Because what are the things that will you the way that you go? You’re pre programming or the structural programming around you that constraints you like that’s the two ways that you get manifest. And inequalities are drunken, lustful and passionate. Right. Because that’s that’s the things that can grab your attention because they have positive valence. In some sense, right? Love is his Lord. Orders. The concerns of the soul. Right. So that’s the reorganizing of the hierarchy of attention. Desires grow and place high demands. Including that and loss of property. So if you take a less material look at those right. So what is that? What that means? Being bound. Like you’re binding yourself to do something. There’s a dependency and a loss of property means a loss of authority. Like you lose claim on being the author of the land. So that that’s the two things that are going on. You become dependent and you become subject. Self love controlled by desires. Right. So that’s becoming self referential. And then in order to sustain that we get to the breaking of the law. So this is this is a rejection of the outside structure. Rejection of constraint as such. Right. Well, restraint that doesn’t serve you. But it’s still goal oriented. But it’s still goal oriented. Right. So we’re effectively looking at the path of regression that’s being followed. He’s addicted and forced to acquire money. Right. So money is potential. Right. Acquires the means to achieve his ends. The young flames more than the old. So this is also relational hierarchy. Right. Like so bones of the ancestors. Right. Like you don’t need it anymore. We’re going to have to live on the planet. We don’t care about how you live because we need to save the climate. All right. That’s sort of stuff. Either convincing by convention, convincing or deception. Right. So that’s the preferred means or true force. The son will establish tyranny over the parents. The mother, which is a likened to the source of being an ancient friend. Gets subject. So I think I think we want to spend some time on this. Give a section where that’s a. I have 7475 or something. Not directly. Yeah, I think I think in general, though, the pattern is. Again, it switches how it’s doing the patterns in these later books. Right. Going from talking about the tyrannical man to basically talking about what happens to the family and as a result, what his son is like. So the first generation tyrant is not the problem. It’s our problem, but the real problem is the son that follows him. I don’t know if that was generally there because the father and mother usually represent the. The higher state of being, so I think that’s still a reference democratic father. Yeah, they got wiped out. The tyrannical man models a bunch of stuff for his son, and then the son comes in basically mirrors his parents. OK, sounds like a Sith Lord. There can only ever be two. And the only way the only path of succession is to kill the master. That was such a cool. There are some ideas that they never really. Developed, but it’s not succession, though. That’s that’s the interesting part. So one thing that came to mind when I went and 575 C or D, it’s like it says that they were assisted by the infatuation of the people. It’s almost like there’s a movement that already exists in the class of people, and then they choose from among them who is the most tyrant like. So it’s kind of like if Adolf Hitler wasn’t in that position, somebody else would have been in that position. That was kind of the model that it seemed to be described bottom up and not top down. It’s not like some force comes top down and makes you a slave. It’s like the you it’s like that class of people together are working together. They have a uniting hate. They have they have they have things that they share in common that they grow into a bigger and bigger Hydra. No, no, no, it’s not. It’s not just sharing. It’s the fact that they don’t share anything in common. And so they they aren’t intimate. And so they can’t get anything done. They have a desire to do things because life basically like life is doing things. And so what happens is to your point, it emerges from below. This is why emergence is not good. Hitler was one among many such characters who could have emerged. He just happened to be the one that emerged. And that spirit takes over. And that’s what develops the tyranny. I mean, that’s that’s how it eats the world basically or tries to and succeed for a while. So if you look at what’s being valued, right, if owner is being valued, you play one game, right? Everybody plays that game. And the only way to succeed is by that game. If money is being valued, there’s many games, right? But they’re still united in money. So when when you go to a passion, right? So if I start up child trafficking ring, you have to participate in the child’s in order to succeed and gain things. Because if you don’t, there’s nothing for you. Right. So you don’t have to go here. But then you have to go to the arms dealing or whatever drugs dealing. But if you want to participate in my child trafficking, you got to do the child trafficking things. And so they’re not united by the child trafficking. They’re united because they desire things and the means to manifest it is shared because else they can’t manifest. Yeah, it’s really interesting because if they were. If if if there’s what did you just say? I would say the things that they desire, they’re not desired. If you’re not desired, if your desire isn’t grounded in virtue, things are going to creep up and you’re going to pull us whatever the people are going to the group. The society is going to allow unethical things to emerge because they don’t care because it’s not that they don’t. Child trafficking doesn’t. It’s irrelevant in regards to what they’re desiring. The spirit of the whole of the whole city society has changed and allows things like drugs and and child trafficking arms to emerge because they don’t care. It’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. It’s not in conflict with what they’re desiring. Well, I don’t know if they don’t care. Right. But I think in the Democratic man, we saw that they lost the basis for judgment. They didn’t have anything to appeal to anymore to to condemn it. Right. You can still condemn things if you don’t have an appeal. Right. Like the retirement condemns things without an appeal because he’s appealing to himself. But yeah, you’re right. That’s not efficient. Right. And this is what all these people are doing. Right. Like we need to create awareness because if we have awareness, we can appeal to it. Well, that’s the appeal to OMR. Right. What they were not saying is we need to have awareness of OMR, the objective material reality, so that we can all find agreement in that OMR. Unfortunately, OMR doesn’t exist. And even if it did, that wouldn’t be how it would work. That’s a really interesting point. This whole awareness thing, I say, because they’re trying to bring awareness to things that are already created or already have manifested themselves as opposed to bringing awareness to things that are pre created, which would be virtue. Right. Yeah. Because in OMR, virtue doesn’t exist. So you can’t bring attention to it. So they only have a choice is to bring awareness to created things. So you’re either a at best. It’s the same thing. You’re either identifying in or against something that’s already created. And we already know that you can’t, you know, from Sam Harris, that you can’t derive a good from a bad. You know, you can’t infer virtue from something that’s already created. You can’t create it from something that’s created. You have to stand on the bad to look up. Because, like, for whatever reason, right, the awareness, right, like I’m being awakened to the importance. And now I can. There’s heaven or like a piece of heaven. And if I stand on the victim, right, like, literally, if I empathize with the victim, I stand on the victim. Then I can look up and I know what’s right, which might actually be true, but also insufficient. But you’re not looking up. They’re not looking up. I mean, I thought what you said was excellent, Ethan, as always. That was really good. But what choice do they have? Right. Like in a world where reality pre-exists and you’re conforming to it in a world of something unchanging through time, right. Something unchanging through time that you conform to. You can’t look into the future because it’s uncertain. Right. So you have to look at something that’s created. You can’t look at potential and future and possibility because their whole appeal is to conform to something already there. Right. That’s the objective material reality. Objective material reality is already there. It’s going to be there in the future. It’s been there in the past. It’s there right now. That’s why simple awareness. If you were just aware of that, all the problems would be even though even if that were true, the awareness wouldn’t have that effect. And like we know this psychologically, we know this from physics experiments. Like we actually experimentally, according to science, know that that isn’t even true. And yet they act as if like awareness is going to solve a problem because they make this assumption of the universal unchanging nature of objective material reality. And so the OMR appeal makes perfect sense. It also makes a flat, reduced, compressed world, and it’s not representative of anything interesting. And it doesn’t work if it doesn’t happen that way. And if reality is co-manifested from your actions, which I don’t know how anybody could come to any other conclusion, but apparently we’re just living in a world where no one’s ever thought about this. Obviously, your decision to eat one thing over another in the past would reveal a different reality and therefore reality must have some interaction with your decisions. Otherwise, yeah, you don’t have free will. And that seems kind of silly to even ponder. This may not be super relevant to anything, but to me it is kind of comical how simple like the methodology of medical science is where you get things like the recommendation that you sleep eight hours or the food pyramid. If you look at the studies, it’s like, OK, we ask a thousand people who like you kind of seem like you’re sort of healthy and you just ask them like how much you sleep? Seven, nine, seven point five. They literally just average the numbers and like that’s the recommendation. That’s how medical science is done. You know, and like obviously methodologically there’s there’s there’s, you know, huge. Anyway, I’ll just leave it at that. It’s just it’s important to be aware of how simple these things really are. You know, and, you know, I’ll just leave it at that. Term in terms of, you know, when you listen to authority and. They have to be to some extent like the authority doesn’t know you personally and can’t. And so, you know, and that is that that’s the problem with the hierarchy. Like the hierarchy has to communicate. I mean, this is the problem that’s outlined, you know, in in Book seven is that the philosophers don’t want to be taken away from their pursuit of moving ever closer to the good. But they have to be. And when they’re taken away from that and brought to the lowest level of the city, they’re not brought back into a cave. When they’re brought to the lowest level of the city and they say, hey, guys, look, this is terrible. You need to fix it. They’re hated. Fair enough. But that’s how it works. Like it cannot work any other way because the people who can’t see aren’t going to agree. And you could ask yourself, well, once they once they’re shown it, they can’t be shown it. If they already had the capacity to see that this was bad, they wouldn’t have manifested it in the first place. So they have to be told to clean it up and trust in faith, maybe that the philosophers are telling the truth and that they’re seeing things accurately because you can tell the truth of what you see. It’s still true, but not see things accurately. Like there’s a lot of trust and faith going on. All of that at every level is imperfect. And, yeah, that’s the problem of hierarchy. Also, that’s the problem. And it’s not going away. So suck it up, buttercup. Yeah, it’s a really interesting point. I like that what you said, like when they come back to the bottom, the very depths of the city, they’re rebuked. Right. And that’s actually in a weird cosmic way necessary. And, yeah, it’s it’s almost by like the hundredth person that you feed to lions that it starts to get recognized. Well, and they could be wrong. I think the philosophers could be missing something. It’s not like because they’re philosophers and they’re on high in that particular iteration of Book 7, which is no longer the parable of the cave at all, the allegory of the cave, even a little bit. We went way past that allegory by that point. It’s not made clear that they actually have perfect vision and sight. Some of the things they may think need to be cleaned up, cleaning them up may destroy the world. And if you look around, you might see that pattern manifest now. Like, oh, we we we did away with physical signatures. Now you can do electronic signatures. And what happens? What happens? Fraud goes through the frickin roof the minute that law is passed in the United States in the mid 90s. I remember it well. And and and so it’s like, well, yeah, we don’t need this. It’s totally unnecessary to have a physical signature and physically be in front of somebody to validate their identity. Really? That seems a little weird. And you do away with it. And sure enough, I’m not saying it’s ultimately better or worse, but there’s a bad side effect there that’s pretty significant. I mean, people’s lives get wiped out by identity theft now. And that never used to happen. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s a constant reminder that coming from the pragmatist of the group that, you know, you’re we’re in creation. Right. And things need to work. You know, you can’t like you have to remember that we’re within creation and, you know, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the better as you so wisely coined that term. Yeah, that’s interesting. So I want to go to the philosopher king because I think the qualification that Pocriti gave was that the true philosopher king would have to know the form of the good. And it’s like, OK, right. So you know the form of the good. But even if you do know the form of the good, now you have you have your body, right? You have your extensions in the city and they might be corrupted, right? Not intentionally, but like they might have insufficient information coming to you. So even if you have perfect sight, you don’t have perfect awareness. Right. Well, and even if you had perfect sight and perfect awareness, you don’t have perfect implementation because your body is not perfect. So even the awareness in this is what we in in in recent times, the problem that we have is that we keep identifying one thing that’s wrong and saying, OK, this is the one thing that’s preventing us from manifesting utopia or whatever we’re trying to manifest. And it’s never one thing. And so they fix the one thing. And then that doesn’t doesn’t actually work. Right. Because there’s more than one thing. And it’s on and on and on. So even if you fix the awareness problem and and if you think about the realm of platonic forms or the Ida’s, I think is a better better way to think about it. You can see that. We had the philosopher kings two books ago. Then we get into democracy, which is equality doctrine, which collapses. And now nobody cares about anything outside themselves. And because they don’t care about anything outside themselves, they are possessed by it as a winged drone. Right. And they’re basically not only consuming the things around them, but their desires are consuming them at the same time. And so you end up feeding the desires of whoever’s at the top of the hierarchy at the time to the earlier point. Right. Like, it’s not clear if it’s actually the physically strongest or the physically biggest or the scariest or the most bombastic, whatever, whatever rises to the top in the tyranny. It is being consumed by the winged drone of desire. And in order to feed its desires, it’s consuming the slaves below it effectively. And so and I think that may be part of the confusion of the parable so-called parable of the so-called cave, which is still done in my book, by the way. You know, you’re extending this allegory long past its life, at least according to Plato and according to the book, like read the book. And so you’re getting sort of confused with the problem posed by the allegory with the problem posed by Book A, which is the demolition of the utility of trying to equalize everything through democracy. So democracy and equality in some sense are kind of the same thing or one leads to the other, however you want to think about it. And then that devolves into this hyper individualism. And this is where, unfortunately, I hate to do this. Jordan Peterson is obviously wrong, right? Because he says the individual is the highest logical and the conclusion, but he doesn’t really understand. No, that means individual desire consumes not you, but causes you to consume everyone else. Yeah, every time Jordan Peterson says the sovereign individual, I just kind of cringe. Yeah. But I haven’t heard him say it for a long time. No, no, no, he needs to go say the autonomic individual. Right. Well, I mean, it was interesting, right? Because he was using it mostly as a way to destroy the ideas of what we now call woke, which, you know, a kind of pre-woke or something, whatever, right? That hyper liberalism should lead to the individual being at the top. And it’s like, did you read Book Nine of the Republic? Because that’s not a good thing. And we know why. We know why, or at least Plato knew why. The question is why we forgot. And again, I mean, this, why aren’t the so-called modern philosophers screaming about this literally every day at the top of their lungs? Guys, middle of Book Eight, all the way through Book Nine. I’m just saying, like, look around. This is a problem. And so why this isn’t more widely talked about or discussed or used as a warning, I don’t know. I’m a little freaked out by it, honestly, still. People, they just, people get clueless when a tyrant, in a democracy, you know, we’ll just call it equality. In a society of equality, when somebody rises up with power and they just don’t understand why. Why would that person want to rise up to power and tyrannize everybody? Will you just, you just, you just put them, implanted them in a society where the highest value is their own individuality and their own desire? What did you expect? And I mean, you could argue that the same thing is happening in something, you know, you can probably identify this pattern somewhere. What’s happening in geopolitics right now at this point, you know? It’s interesting if you relate that to China or Russia, like why people don’t understand China and Russia, right? Because they’re thinking they’re tyrants on top. It’s not tyrants on top. That’s, that’s, they’re autocrats. They’re not tyrants. They’re autocrats. Totally different. Yeah, they’re not recognizing the stage of government they’re actually in. Since we’re talking about how… Like that’s the problem. It’s above the… Literally. Well, and they’re only recognizing democracy and tyranny. It’s like, it’s not a binary, guys. It’s like, tyranny is the absolute worst thing. So we must have democracy. Right. Yeah. So it’s like, Lord help us. That’s why, that’s why I keep wanting that, that t-shirt, the God Save the King. Is that what you want? Tyranny? Because democracy, that’s how you get tyranny. I think it’s like, yes. So I want to get back to the book a little bit because like, what do we think about mother being described as the ancient friend and the source of being? It’s interesting. Yeah, like that was really weird, right? And then the mother gets subjected. Right? So in some sense, right, she’s representing the generative principle, right? Like that from which you came or something. But then that’s perverted, right? Like it’s, well, it’s put under you instead of that it provides you, right? It comes at you. And then the father is described as the first and indispensable friend. You know, last week I watched a little talk Schindler gave on Dionysus. And Dionysus said that being is the first gift from God, which is very interesting. And that it’s really well with if you look at, you know, Catholic and Orthodox tradition, you know, the veneration of Mary and the mother of God. It’s the very first being is the first gift. And if she is what did you say the grounding of being? It’s very interesting. Not a source. Source of being. Yeah. So that’s the feminine. Like the matrix. That which generation, right? Like it’s the womb in which things happen. Yeah. Oh, I really like that. Where is that? In my head. We got to be 574 D in that area. Now, maybe we should read it in a different translation. What about when the possessions of his father and mother give up with the great swarm of pleasures inside him won’t you first try to break into someone’s house or snatch someone’s coat late at night? Then won’t you try to to loot a temple? And in all of this, the old tradition, traditional opinions that he held from the child, the child is what is finer. I don’t know if this is there. Yeah, it is. The bloom translation says a swarm of pleasures densely gathered in him, by the way. Which is interesting. Oh, yeah. It’s right with the drones. Well, in the, in the, you know, this idea of now acting as love’s bodyguard and conquering along with it, right? And then it’s these are the opinions that formed early release and dreams in sleep when the child was born. So the tyranny is established by love. What, what keeps the tyranny in place? No, the tyranny is in the sense that, you know, I think the tyranny is the idea of, you know, this idea of, now acting as love’s bodyguard and conquering along with it, right? established by love. What he had rarely been in dreams, he became continuously while awake. And so that rarity, that rare sort of vision that you had when you were sleeping is now something you become 24-7 while you’re awake. Yes. So there’s denigration of dreams and that elevation of the sort of conscious state of being. Well, it’s not, no, I think the wakeness is like the falling asleep is the removal of vigilance, right? And now when you’ve been indoctrinated while you’re vigilant, you’re not aware of these things, right? Or their nature to you. I think that’s the way I see that. So since we’re at the murder of the sarcastic line, how very blessed it seems to be to bear a tyranic son where he just murdered his parents, I just did want to bring to put on the table this idea that there’s this theme in Christianity, redemption requires the death of something innocent. Like in Genesis, when Adam and Eve sinned, they needed clothes, which is technology, and that’s made of a dead animal and that creates a separation. Or in Judaism, the purification rituals required water. They require like purification water, which they had to burn a dead calf and then take the ash, the dead calf, because the water, you know, like if you touch a dead person or something, you’re now impure. You need to be purified, but you had to do it with the ritual purification water. And there was always this theme of it requiring the death of something innocent. We’re talking about how desire consumes what’s lower in the stack. And same thing, like when the philosopher went into the cave, he was killed. So I mean, we see death here is not being done in a redemptive way. I don’t know exactly what the death of the innocence, what that points to or what the relevance of that is, but there is definitely, I don’t know, I just wanted to point that out because there’s- The parents aren’t innocent at all. So there’s no death of the innocent. True, true. Yeah. I mean, the father’s tyrannical. So yeah, let me read- The father doesn’t constrain him, so. So let me read it because I think the version of mine is really- So, but our heavens, Adamantius, on account of some newfound love of a harlot, is anything but a necessary connection. Can you believe that he would strike his mother, who is his ancient friend, and necessary to his very existence? So there’s a harlot, right, which would be like the external coming into the home, right? But it’s, yeah, it’s not a necessary external. And then, ancient friend, and necessary to his very existence, right, so that’s the continual dependence. Would he place her under the authority of the other, right? So he’s taking the external and placing it above the root of his existence. When she is brought under the same roof with her, or that, under like circumstances, he would do the same to his withered old father, first and most indispensable of friends, for the sake of some newly found blooming youth, who is the reversible of indispensable. Right, so that’s a cutting of the ties, right, the cutting of the thing that works, the thing, the branch that you’re sitting on, and replacing it with something of no value, out of whim. You don’t have the judgment to see if it’s good or not, but you bring it in and replace it with that which is above you. Right. There’s something- Sorry, John, I said, the theoretical son is a blessing to his father and his mother. There’s something, I remember there’s a video that Pajot did a couple weeks ago, and they’re talking about the curse of Ham, and there’s something similar going on there, where Ham was trying to use the authority of the identity of his own father, inserting himself. I think it’s the same thing going on here, as he’s removing that which is above him and placing, and forcibly putting himself on that throne, I guess, if you will. I got now related to the story of Jacob, I think. He got gifted a cloak of many colors by his father, and then because he has it, he gets envied, and he gets thrown in a well, and he gets cast out to Egypt. There’s something there with this inheritance from the father, and he’s not cast out to Egypt. There’s something there with this inheritance from the father, and how that’s mediated, and how that goes wrong. In some sense, what is the cloak of the tyrannical man? It’s just whatever he finds outside that suits his liking. Yeah, that’s the one he stole at night time from some guy on the street. So, what’s interesting, you mentioned that, they talk about how he becomes less able, the tyrant, as he becomes more powerful, he becomes more incompetent. If you’re composed of things that you’ve stolen, like you said, it’s like a vampire. You’re not actually developing the generative capacity to make the cloak or buy the cloak yourself. You’re becoming weak when you do that, fundamentally. If we go through this, then he breaks into a house, so that’s property, but it’s the acquisition of property by false means from others, and then steals the garments, so that’s imitation, like that’s taking credit for other people’s stuff. Next, he proceeds to clear the temple, so now we’re at desecration. We’re taking the sacred, and we’re employing the sacred to our means. Meanwhile, the opinions which he had when a child, which gave judgment about good and evil, are overthrown by those others, which have just been emancipated, and are now the bodyguard of love and share his empire. These, in his democratic days, when he was still subject to the laws and to his father, were only let loose in the dreams of sleep. But now that he is under the dominion of love, he becomes always in a waking reality what he was when very rarely in a dream only. Interestingly, there are a few such men in the city, but all the tyrants basically get together, and either are at the top or serve other tyrants. He’s putting back in other people, he’s taking all the other people out, he’s putting them back in, and says they do many small deeds. Right. You’ll break into houses, cop purses, right, bare-fault witness, and take bribes. But they all gather together and serve whoever the biggest tyrant is. Yeah, because there’s no other place. I think that’s the issue, right? The gathering principle is not a shared thing, but it’s being outcast. Well, no, it’s being tyrannical. It’s being in the tribe of tyrants. It’s not being outcast. You think it’s a positive thing? I don’t think it’s a positive thing. I don’t think it’s a positive thing at all. I think that tyranny begets tyranny. And so mini tyrants like the idea, because they still have to look up, so they look up to the big tyrant and serve him. And you see that pattern pretty much throughout history where the most competent tyrant of the tyrants is at the top and all the other tyrants are serving him, and they try to rise through the ranks. They never get out of that system. You can’t escape the inevitability of hierarchy and the attraction of that which is at the top of that. Yeah, what struck me about this passage was how it’s talked about how the old opinions which you valued when you were a child and how you corrupt your judgment, and then as you start to serve the lower parts of yourself, they become the bodyguard of love, like the corrupt conscious. That’s kind of a scary image. I don’t know. That just jumped out there. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. I think that’s the thing. That’s kind of a scary image. I don’t know. That just jumped out to me. I mean, I’ve seen that pattern. That’s being your own gatekeeper. It’s kind of scary to think about. Well, and therefore they live their whole life without ever being friends of anyone. Always one man’s master or another’s slave. The tyrannical nature never has a taste of freedom or true friendship. So freedom is cast as also not having slaves. Yeah, because you’re disconnected from the world. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can’t be on either end of that. So here, the father and mother are compared to fatherland and motherland being subjugated. And that was also really curious to me. I think I get a better sense of what fatherland and motherland is. Like motherland is in some sense alien to you, right? Because the mother might come from a different land, while the fatherland is the direct inheritance. Uh, so that’s interesting. The motherland is the land from which you took your sustenance of nourishment, which is different than the political force. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s also culture and stuff. Yeah. Thank you. Just real quick to rewind a little bit on the freedom thing, because they talk about how the tyrant is the one who he’s an ill-governed person and he has to be master of others when he’s not even the master of himself, like a sick person who’s compelled to be an athlete. I think their idea is like, if you’re not of the type of person who’s capable of being a leader or a master, then you can’t have slaves, right? So it’s more like I think of being out of place, like not everyone should own slaves, but I think there’s also the role of the king. And there’s a role of for people to submit under the king. Well, in relation to the submit mittens, right, like without power, they submit to the state of being, right? Like how things are going and they’re being opportunistic. But when they gain power, they leave their relationships or their bonds, that’s the way I framed that behind. So I think you can be under a king and you can be willing to be dying for a king. So the thing that I was thinking about is in Wheel of Time, right, there’s this, he kills like the elites, right, the nobles of this aristocratic society, and then he saves their servant, and then the servant is, yeah, I’m going to go with them, and he kills himself, right? So that’s one way of being a slave, right? So this is why I’m a little bit objecting to the way that Plato frames this, right? But there’s a different way where that would have been correct, right? But in that situation, that wasn’t correct, because you just took away the whole identity of that person. Yeah, I mean, well, that’s why you didn’t kill the emperor in the end. The motherland, fatherland thing is really interesting because you’ll fight for the direction of the fatherland, but you’ll die for the motherland, because that’s saying all sustenance. It’s a very different relationship, which is why it should concern you anytime you’re talking to a Russian, because it’s only the motherland, and you should take that freaking seriously. That’s a positive, actually, on their behalf, and Americans don’t really have that, and so, yeah, which I think we do, but it’s more underneath because of our relationship with Mary, probably, but because America the Beautiful is a love song to the mother, but we never use those terms. It’s weird. Well, I was thinking about Napoleon, right? And I think Napoleon flipped them, right? Like he let everybody die for the fatherland instead of the motherland. Well, yes, but that’s fighting for. That’s not dying sacrifice. There’s a nuance. They’re kind of the same thing, and they’re kind of different. No, no. Napoleon killed off the French, because he didn’t like the French, because he was Corsican, and they took away his wealth. And he did the, I’m disappointed in you because you didn’t win the war for me, and I’m your emperor thing. So, the two negative motivations for him to basically destroy the population of the country that he was ostensibly trying to rule. But that is reflected in the, when these men in private life, before they rule, aren’t they like this in the first place as to their company? Either they have intercourse with their flatterers who are ready to serve them in everything, or if they have need of anything from anyone, they themselves cringe and dare to assume any posture, acting as though they belong to him. But when they have succeeded, they become quite alien. In other words, in not being able to accept proper praise, right, or proper help from people, you remove yourself from the world, right? There’s the intimacy crisis, right? You remove yourself from the world, and now you’re an alien. Like you’re not in the world, and that allows you to be a tyrant. One of C.S. Lewis’s books, and I don’t know if it’s a Screwtape Letters or one of them, it’s one of the very dry, saltine, cracker ones. They pull up this hero from the dead, and he’s like a Greek hero, and he’s existing with them in modern England of C.S. Lewis’s time, and he’s remarking upon the windows, and he’s amazed by the house, but then he’s incredibly frustrated that there’s no one to wash his feet, and no one to bring him his things, and he’s like, you are both kings and servants here, and he’s just like ranting about the state of man, and there’s no hierarchy in the house, and you all have things of lordship constantly at your whim, and yet you take no dominion over each other, and no one knows their place, and just this whole thing. And that reminds me of that, because I think it’s even more intense now, because it’s like, who’s right? Oh, the customer is always right, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so like that’s being treated like a lord very in a non-healthy way. It’s a non-healthy way, because you should be coming with alms like, please, on me electricity, please, not the customer’s, you can’t go get a different electric company, that’s insane. Anyway, yeah. And so having sex with your flatterers, that’s a bubble, right? Like that’s self-referential, like not engaging with ideas. Did you say Hollywood? Did you? Oh, I just heard Hollywood. Yeah, me too. Stop being a materialist. No, no, you said Hollywood, dude. I heard Hollywood. Yeah. Just for what it’s worth, is kind of besides the point, you lose a lot of the graphic language in the Joelette translation, the Bloom translation is a lot more graphic. I like it. I don’t think that’s graphic. I think that we flatten the language. Intercourse does not actually mean sex. Well, no, it doesn’t there, but no, but there were many, there were many, I read both translations this whole book, there were many places where it was just, everything was just generally more explicit than in the Joelette translation. It would completely activate disgust. Like, I’m kind of barking, but like, no, you should, you should be that disgusted by it. And that is the beauty of alliteration. Like, you should alliterate it and you should make it very personal in a way that people can’t ignore it, because that’s what that’s for. They’ve done a good job of ignoring it so far, Sally. Well. You were doing something? I’m not. I’ll go back to putting up my installation. So, yeah, so we got a qualification for the tyrannical man as treacherous and unjust. And then the state and the man mirror themselves in manifestation. So this is the as above, so below, but I think everybody’s using that wrong. No, it’s not. He’s doing the flip again, right? Where he’s saying, instead of the man is reflected of the city, the city is reflected of the man. Right. And he keeps playing with that idea. In other words, you can’t get a rounder, more cynical relationship between where you’re born into and what your, say, your personal nature is. Yes, but it’s you are what you eat, right? But the way that people use the as above, so below is that there’s a literal correlation between above and below instead of that. Right. They affect each other and they resonate instead of our identity. It’s a relationship. Right. And the only time that relationship becomes a problem, as outlined here, is when you either embrace it, right, or remove it. Right. That’s the, you’re having intercourse with your flatterers or you’re pretending like you don’t need it. And that’s when you become alien. And because you’re alien, you can be tyrannical because you’re not connected to the things you’re doing anymore. That’s what a tyrant is. A tyrant is somebody who’s disconnected from the people he or she is affecting. That’s how we perceive tyranny, whether we actually talk about it that way or not, is irrelevant. If you listen closely, that’s what people are saying. The tyrant is any person who’s disconnected or somebody feels is disconnected from the results of their actions. They just cast them as a tyrant. Now, often that isn’t true. It’s just that you’re on the wrong end of that particular bargain. And maybe you’re in the minority. And that’s the right answer because you don’t want to inconvenience the 90% for the 10%. That doesn’t make any sense. That’ll destroy your city by definition. And so you don’t know. But also, that’s sort of the pattern. And I think actually that’s where the whole thing changes. So it might be a good point to land things. Yeah. So I guess I’m going to set up the frame a little bit. So now we need to look at the state as a whole in relation to the tyrant. I don’t think we’ve adopted that framing yet. Didn’t you make that point earlier, Mark, that there is the root? It’s not scalable. It’s not… What’s the word that we use? It’s not… Whatever. You can’t look at it at the level of the state because it doesn’t exist. It can’t exist. A tyrannical state actually doesn’t exist. It’s almost like the definition of a tyrannical state is absolute destruction. So that’s why it’s only looking at it at the individual level. Right? And as we know, the word for individual in Greek means idiot. Right. And we’re just reading about it. The state of tyranny is the consumption of that at the top of all the things below it. So it’s technically the dissolution of a city. It’s the thing that makes the city no longer be a city because it descends effectively into chaos as the result of the equality doctrine from the democracy. Yeah, exactly. So we’re in a weird position because we’re kind of longing for an eidos of tyranny. But tyranny is a deprivation of being, right? And so you can’t have it… Because it’s non-dualistic, right? You can’t have a negative identity. There’s just identity and you get less and less identity so you get to nothing. There’s not an inverse, right? And that’s why we can’t see this going… We can’t see this even to the scale of a city. But you can have a negative movement. And I think that’s what people are… Like, I’m thinking about this conversation I had earlier today and it’s like… There’s so much going on. But the point… What are these people looking for in a tyranny? Let’s just say we start with the climate tyranny. So we can create a movement in a direction and we can participate in the movement. And because we’re in the movement, we’re doing something. And we’re doing something that we can judge by a shared standard. So we create the illusion that we’re manifesting something, but the thing that’s being manifested is self-referential. That’s the problem. Right? Like, it’s its own standard. And that’s insufficient, right? But it can last for a while as long as it can feed upon that which upholds it. Yeah, we’re back into this identifying in-created things as opposed to identifying in uncreated things. Yeah, it’s this weird thing. This had me thinking about the number zero. And what zero is, it’s the point in between negative numbers and positive numbers. And I looked this up. I said, when did we start using zero? Like, when did that start becoming a normal thing that we use guess when about the time it was? Take a wild guess. Romanticism. It was around the 16th century. So in other words, around the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance. Yeah, and it was actually forbidden from what I understand it was actually forbidden to be used commonly by the church because the church regarded it as being associated with evil. And of course, as moderns are like, silly church, why would you think that zero is evil? It allows us to do calculus and all of these build buildings and stuff. But what it does is it allows us to zero existed and people would still use it. They just didn’t want it commonly used because it can be abused. It’s like forbidden knowledge. So it allows you into thinking that the world can be that there’s symmetries. You can have anti this. The anti this is a thing. It has just as much being as this does. And then you start, what did you say, Manuel? You start to become self referential. So my identity is anti this identity. And it’s not actually identifying in anything higher. It’s actually using its own identity to give itself its own sustenance. Well, and zero is not a number, technically. Right. Right. It’s a placeholder, which is even more interesting. Peterson writes, zero is a funny number. It’s because it’s not actually a number. But the interesting thing about zero is that two has an opposite in negative two. That opposite doesn’t exist to your point without the zero point. But in a very strange way, zero is the exact opposite of all numbers, negative and positive. And that’s the opposite of zero. And so there’s a deep asymmetry there. In other words, there’s more nothingness or badness in the world than there is goodness. Yes. Quantitatively. Like, let’s just stay in the material frames. That’s the problem. That’s the asymmetry I was talking about. That’s the important part. Zero represents asymmetry. And nobody really knows what’s going on. That’s the important part. Zero represents asymmetry. And nobody realizes that. Because without that zero at the center of that line, the cancellation effect between two and negative two doesn’t happen. It doesn’t function. Math fails in some fundamental way. Yeah. There’s still a lot more that I need to think about with the number zero. But yeah, it’s up. If negative two theoretically exists, we can find positive two. It’s just not the way that the world works. We fall into these delusions. That’s why the church prevented people from using this number zero, because they were going to fall into the traps. Right. And then you don’t get silly concepts like being in nothingness, sitting in meditation, trying to find the not you or the state where nothing exists. Algebra, silly concepts like algebra. That’s what we don’t need. You don’t need algebra to build a cathedral. Help me understand how identifying against this anti-referential in the climate case. So if the climate tyranny is pro non-destruction in theory, right? So are you saying that there is not a- No, that’s not what it is. Well, that’s what I would play. They say you’re wrecking the environment, and because preserving the environment or not destroying the environment is more important than you being alive, we’ll kill you rather than destroy the environment. So you’re saying that it lacks an inverse? It’s anti-nature, because if there’s too much of one animal, they’ll start killing it, because all animals, all organisms, all plants are destructive. You have to destroy to create. So it’s a false position. There’s no such position as being pro non-destruction of the environment. Destruction is built into the environment. But it’s even worse because it’s- And that’s why there’s no inverse. It’s not pacifist. You’re creating a pacifist framing, and the climate people are not pacifist, they’re activists. So they want to create nature, they want to assign nature here, and they want to put three dogs and a cow. That’s what they want. Right. They have no idea what they’re doing, and it’s pretty simple. It all comes down to this, is they’re trying to define or infer non-destruction from destruction. Their first point of identity is destruction, and they’re trying to identify non-destruction from destruction, and that doesn’t work. You can’t define- No, no, no, no, no. That’s not even what they’re doing, at least more than in the Netherlands. If you hear the discussions here, it’s like we need to go back, we need to get nature back in the Netherlands. And so we have one square kilometers of ancient forest, and that’s all the nature that we have. And what’s ancient forest? Ancient forest is forest that’s older than 400 years or whatever. So we don’t have any nature that’s older than 400 years. So what are they referencing when they want to get something back? They’re referencing an arbitrary point in time, like, oh, this is when the Amish originated. We needed to go back to when the Amish originated, and that’s how the Netherlands should look like. And then they’re going to say, well, in order to achieve that, what you’re doing with your emissions is blocking us from having that manifest, so we need to cut your emissions because you’re evil. Right, right. But at the same time, they’re pretending like they didn’t draw a standard or a line. They’re pretending like nature already had the standard or line. We’re not even appealing to that. We’re just saying it exists and therefore, but to Manuel’s point, what they’re actually doing is tricking you by picking a point and telling you that they didn’t. And so the trick of all of these groups, it can be climate, it can be safety, it can be race, it can be any of these stupid groups, is the postmodern trick, which is you start from a bad axiom. You say something that is obviously incorrect, like we’re pro-anti-destruction. There’s no such thing as pro-anti-destruction. It doesn’t make any sense, right? That’s just gobbledygook talk. It doesn’t function in the language to convey any sort of communication. And so they say that, you don’t question it, and they move forward from there. Well, look, I’ve said it before. I can use reason, logic, and rationality to justify anything. Murder, Holocaust, genocide, anything you want. Logic, reason, rationality are your guys. They can do that. All you have to do is start at one of the points where that conclusion is correct. Hitler did this. This isn’t a magic secret. Hitler did it. Go listen to what Hitler said. It’s not wrong. It’s evil. It’s unethical, but it’s not scientifically, logically, or irrational. It’s not incorrect scientifically. It’s not incorrect. It’s not illogical. It’s not irrational. It’s not unreasonable. It is wrong, though, and you have to know that. In the same way, you have to listen to the arguments that the quote pro-climate can be pro-climate. You’re not part of the climate in some sense. You’re such a small, insignificant bug on the planet. The planet can’t understand your existence. They start from this idea that they are judging nature and saying what’s good and bad about nature. Then they’re saying, because I’ve made this judgment, what you’re doing, I judge to be bad. They’re telling you they’re not judging. It’s just nature. It’s very Rousseauian. It’s just nature. It has nothing to do with me, even though I made all the judgments and did all the framing and told you what those judgments were and set those standards into your head. They’re being tyrannical in that these are the standards I’ve picked. I didn’t tell you I picked them, but I saw it. It’s entirely arbitrary. It’s deceptive. It all goes back to this. I’m going to keep repeating this. It all goes back to their first point of identity. Their first point of identity is within creation. It’s something created. All problems come from that. Nothing will ever work ever, ever, ever. Your first point of identity is something that has already been created, something that’s measurable. That’s what they’re doing. That’s why it looks so silly when we look at it. It’s like, what’s their first point of identity? It’s anti-destruction, blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t make any sense at all. You can build a whole logic. The conversation I was having today was about I want to have a non-biased perspective on the world. I’m like, okay, why? Because I want to see the world for what it truly is. I’m like, what does that mean? What’s the use of this? For real. Okay, you can do that. And then what? It’s meaningless. It’s completely meaningless. What are they looking for? I was trying to get there, but obviously, yeah. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone there, but it’s security. It’s looking for the sense of security. I don’t want to make the wrong action, so I need to see things for what they truly are so that I cannot make the wrong action. And then I went into this, well, when I go outside, I want the world to be a certain way. I don’t want it to be too hot, and I don’t want it to be too cold. And I think that’s right. I’m an embodied being, and I embrace that set of constraints, and I think it’s actually good. There’s goodness in there. And then you get the Sam Harris thing. Yes, that’s how I live the world, but I want this other world too. And it’s like, but you’re not living in the world. But I need that world because that’s the world I can see. And that’s just it. And it’s all of these things. And it’s like, well, I want to create the world I… Well, what’s creating the world I’m adapted to? It’s creating the world where I can see, where I can have agency, where I can act. And if you don’t have that, you fall into an existential anxiety. And that’s what people are fleeing. So, yeah. And again, I never liked this, oh, all religions are about death because like, at least the way I understand it, like, religions are maybe about dying, but they’re not about death. Right. So, I think standards is a good segue into landing the plane. Which state or man is most virtuous? That’s what we’ll pick up next time. The first proof that they’re going to walk through. Yeah, I’ll repeat our intentions so we can use those in the reflection. So, I try to be unstructured. Mark wanted to see what’s happening. Danny wanted to meditate on madness and fear. I’ve been doing that for months. And he didn’t want to recognize the patterns in the modern world. What did Danny say again? Meditate on what? On madness and fear, I think. Yeah. Careful on that one. He was doing abysmal. We need to throw him a lifeline just in case something happens that I have something to grab onto. You can make one call to your friend, Danny. I’ve got like five stories. All right. Okay. Let’s reflect on what happened and set an intention for the week so that we can integrate our insights.