Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett.
Speaker: Just finished reading Kostin Alomariou's Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy.
Speaker: This is BAPS dissertation.
Speaker: It's been available for a long time online, but I wanted to wait until I could pay $30 to read it.
Speaker: It's a fascinating read.
Speaker: If you're familiar with the podcast, it's...
Speaker: in large part an articulation of things that he's already said, but to see it laid out carefully for the benefit of a maybe neutral to hostile audience, you can feel how it forces him to clarify his position and it snaps a lot of things into place.
Speaker: And the dissertation is ostensibly making this narrow historical point, basically that Socrates was executed for a reason, that the prejudice of the ancient Greek states against philosophers was essentially justified.
Speaker: But in the process of making that point, he pretty much lays out his whole deal.
Speaker: Which is also Nietzsche's deal.
Speaker: He's characterized himself as a popularizer of Nietzsche.
Speaker: And Nietzsche was obsessed with the production of genius, the production of high culture.
Speaker: He basically believed that the products of genius are all that can justify human existence, that ordinary life is so depraved and so bovine that it has essentially no value in itself.
Speaker: He argues that the emergence of genius is the consequence of an aristocratic culture, and by culture we mean that in the same sense as like horticulture or agriculture, the cultivation, the breeding, and nurturing and pruning of a particular biological type, a particular type of person.
Speaker: He explains how these aristocratic cultures emerged, why they evolved into these breeding programs for genius and other cultures didn't,
Speaker: And then he makes the case that the philosopher and the tyrant are the consummation, the inevitable conclusion of this aristocratic breeding program, that they're very closely related phenomena and that they may in fact be the same thing.
Speaker: So why does BAP care about this?
Speaker: Why should we care about this?
Speaker: Well, you can disagree with Nietzsche and with BAP when they say that high culture and genius are all that matters, that ordinary life is totally without justification.
Speaker: And you can disagree with them when they say that the production of genius, of beauty, of high culture is 100% biological.
Speaker: But if you think that high culture matters at all, and if you think that human heredity,
Speaker: is relevant to that at all.
Speaker: Then you look around, you see what's happening, and you think, clearly this problem they've identified matters, even if it's not the whole show the way that they think it's the whole show.
Speaker: And really the only escape that I can see from their fundamental conclusions is the concept of miracle, the concept of human and divine agency.
Speaker: acting outside the bounds of the principles of nature as we observe them and understand them.
Speaker: And by that I mean free will.
Speaker: Free will is intractable to empirical analysis.
Speaker: It's essentially magic.
Speaker: There's not a scientific way to talk about it or even think about it.
Speaker: But if you step outside that frame, it's like if we're just biological machines, if we're just monkeys, then it seems like Nietzsche has a pretty good grip on what kind of monkeys we are.
Speaker: And from where I'm coming from in my faith, the life of a monkey, the materialistic, naturalistic, fully constrained, fully mechanistic life, is essentially the way that people live in the absence of faith.
Speaker: So it's not just that he explains some counterfactual reality that I don't believe in.
Speaker: He's actually explaining the way that life works for most people in the same way that Nietzsche criticizes Darwin for explaining only a particular kind of life, maybe only life in England.
Speaker: He says that basically Darwin characterizes all life as this bare, constrained struggle for mere survival because that is the type of life and the type of thinking that prevails under the conditions of like the overpopulated Malthusian filth of like 19th century Liverpool.
Speaker: But even if that's not the way everything lives, it's worth knowing about that kind of life if a lot of things live that way.
Speaker: You don't have to swallow it whole or make it your all-consuming theory of everything.
Speaker: So what are the most pressing problems that he identifies?
Speaker: Clearly something has gone seriously wrong with family formation.
Speaker: Bapp says in the preface that breeding is the foundation of all law.
Speaker: The rules that determine who gets a mate and how define which traits and virtues become the defining characteristics of the people.
Speaker: And so he says the question of who gets to breed is the only political question, identical to the question of regime, constitution, or foundation as such.
Speaker: And this can be defined explicitly and coercively by policy, or it can be defined culturally through ordinary people's understanding of who is desirable and undesirable, who receives the resources to breed.
Speaker: And he says this process is cruel, necessarily cruel, because no matter what you do, there will always be hierarchies in sexual desire.
Speaker: There will always be those who get picked to play or picked to play more often, and those who don't.
Speaker: And being cut off, especially permanently cut off from reproduction, is one of the most devastating psychological experiences.
Speaker: Historically, selection was mostly a question of attrition through disease, warfare, famine.
Speaker: And we'll also talk about these aristocratic breeding cultures that made deliberate policy decisions about who got to breed.
Speaker: And those regimes were definitely cruel, no question.
Speaker: But BAT points out that in terms of how many people get picked and how many people get shut out,
Speaker: It's not obvious that our modern way of making these decisions is any gentler.
Speaker: The cruelty is distributed across millions of one-on-one interactions, but anybody who's familiar with Tinder acknowledges that it's a deeply cruel process.
Speaker: And at least these pre-modern regimes were selecting for something.
Speaker: They were selecting for some excellence, or at least selecting for physical robustness and resilience.
Speaker: He says,
Speaker: The laws were meant to harmonize or coordinate man's intense desire for sexual love and for posterity with the regime's overarching goals and its needs.
Speaker: They were meant to promote certain qualities that were seen to be and probably were hereditary, and which the regime intended to promote in the population.
Speaker: We are now driven instead by a different and more primitive law, and this, in combination with poorly thought out government programs, is creating a certain type of man and society as well, only no one yet knows exactly what.
Speaker: So one reason to care about the contents of this dissertation is that our breeding system, which we should acknowledge is a system, is badly dysfunctional.
Speaker: In its own way, it's as vicious as the breeding program of Sparta, and like the Spartan system, it's shutting out so many people, male and female, that demographic collapses on the horizon.
Speaker: But unlike the Spartan system, it doesn't seem to serve any higher purpose.
Speaker: In fact, it seems completely destructive.
Speaker: We're not sending our best.
Speaker: Besides which, you can just look around you and see that there seem to be forces that are at war with the concept of distinction itself.
Speaker: That are at war with the idea that some things are good and others are bad.
Speaker: And I'm not even talking about morally good or bad.
Speaker: I'm talking about it's better not to have sterilizing birth defects or it's better to be sighted than blind.
Speaker: This oppressive, moralizing, safety-obsessed gynocracy that wants to cut down all the tall poppies and preserve and proliferate every kind of dysfunction, every kind of sickness that you can possibly imagine.
Speaker: And this is what Bapp calls the longhouse, and he calls it that because he believes that this is the primordial state of human beings, the default to which they descend in the absence of this quest for excellence.
Speaker: And you can disagree with the historical details, and maybe you can argue that Bapp and Nietzsche are sort of uniquely neurotic, uniquely sensitive, uniquely depressive, but that does seem to give them the ability to observe and talk about this phenomenon at a level of resolution,
Speaker: and with a clarity that maybe eludes, frankly, healthier, happier people.
Speaker: But the thing they're talking about is clearly real.
Speaker: It's right in front of us.
Speaker: And so you have to deal with a lot of their conclusions, especially, he wouldn't call them moral conclusions, but his value conclusions, the ways that he thinks people ought to live, and the ways that society ought to be organized.
Speaker: You have to take that, I think, in the context of how incapable he is of appreciating ordinary life and how much revulsion he feels at it.
Speaker: And if you take his view, maybe you argue that that's the truth.
Speaker: The truth is actually dark and dismal, and ordinary life is in fact useless, meaningless, hideous.
Speaker: And anyone who appreciates that is sort of cattle-like.
Speaker: But even if you don't take his view, this longhouse, this war on distinction, is something that we're all up against.
Speaker: And if you care about excellence and you care about beauty, then this should matter.
Speaker: All right, so what is the longhouse in the historical context?
Speaker: The longhouse is the default human condition, the substrate from which all human civilization emerges.
Speaker: It's little tribes of people huddled together in terror and danger and darkness, clinging to survival and therefore clinging desperately to traditions and folkways that keep their community cohesive, that keep them safe, keep them doing what they've always done and what has worked so far.
Speaker: Any individuation, any deviation, any willfulness, any inequality threatens the community.
Speaker: And it's punished with a brutality and an intensity commensurate with the overall environment of terror that they live in.
Speaker: And this architecture of convention and customs and gods and rituals and genealogies and oral histories that explain this is what we've always done, this is how we do it, this is what happens to you if you don't do it, that whole architecture is called nomos, which is variously translated as law or convention or custom, but it goes way beyond law or custom as we understand them.
Speaker: It's
Speaker: not only impossible to escape, it's impossible in some sense for these people to even imagine escaping.
Speaker: It's like the psychological capacity to consciously deviate from custom hasn't really developed yet.
Speaker: But the first glimmers of individuation, what we would think of as consciousness, is in the person of the shaman or magician character who's just a little bit more wily, a little bit more complex, a little bit more imaginative than the rest.
Speaker: who either knowingly or unknowingly starts making things up.
Speaker: They come up with explanations for things.
Speaker: They put themselves through exotic experiences, either with asceticism or drugs, and their role as the repository of ritual and truth for the tribe gives them this position of higher status.
Speaker: If you've seen the movie The Invention of Lying by Ricky Gervais, it's sort of an exploration of this shaman character.
Speaker: He lives in a world where lying hasn't been invented, and he sort of speedruns the process of developing from the shaman to the sacral king.
Speaker: You know, you have to sleep with me or the world's going to end, and you have to give me money and all this stuff.
Speaker: And he basically becomes a millionaire and gets the girl, and lives happily ever after.
Speaker: And a lot of the tension in the movie is created by two things.
Speaker: Number one, the people around him holding him to the lies that he's told, holding him to the things that he said.
Speaker: And number two, his own discomfort with lying, his unwillingness to lie in certain circumstances.
Speaker: And so it's sort of an exaggerated and accelerated version of the psychological development of the shaman in history.
Speaker: The real shaman isn't that psychologically distinct from the tribe.
Speaker: They're more sophisticated relative to him, and he's also definitely still a product of his culture, definitely still enslaved to the nomos.
Speaker: Our image of the sacral king, the god king in Babylon or Egypt or something,
Speaker: It's like he's God, he can do what he wants.
Speaker: But in fact, those roles were very tightly constrained within the cultural expectations of that role.
Speaker: And actually, in a lot of cases, performed almost an entirely ritual function where, yeah, he gets to have sex with a virgin at a particular point in the season to make sure the harvest comes in.
Speaker: But otherwise, he's nobody particularly special.
Speaker: And in fact, this sacral king is often under much tighter constraints and heavier penalties than the rest of the tribe as a condition of inhabiting this privileged position within the tribe.
Speaker: So maybe the tribe isn't quite sophisticated enough to really cotton on to the fact that this guy is just lying.
Speaker: But they're sophisticated enough to have some like intuitive guardrails up to keep that guy from getting too big for his britches.
Speaker: So you've got these egalitarian, communitarian, democratic societies governed entirely by consensus and tradition.
Speaker: Almost literally like a herd huddled as tightly as possible together to protect itself from predators.
Speaker: And through the shaman, through the institutions of religion, you eventually get oriental despotism and, you know, like the bureaucracies of China.
Speaker: But these aren't aristocracies of the type that Nietzsche is concerned about because they don't become free from the culture that produces them.
Speaker: Their function remains managerial and religious.
Speaker: They're still bound to the constraints of the nomos that created them.
Speaker: So that's his vision of human life purely concerned with its own preservation, purely concerned with its own comfort.
Speaker: It's ruled by women and old people and the priorities of women and old people.
Speaker: And it's psychologically inescapable from the inside.
Speaker: But, he says, in certain cases, pastoral societies had an opportunity to develop differently.
Speaker: So these are itinerant herding societies that live on marginal lands that are good for grazing but not farming.
Speaker: And they follow a different trajectory than the agrarian democratic communisms for a couple of reasons.
Speaker: First of all, pastoralism involves intimate contact and intimate violence against less complex forms of life.
Speaker: A hunter kills an animal out in the wild, but that's not exactly the same thing psychologically as raising an animal from birth for the purpose of killing and eating it.
Speaker: There's a simultaneous intimacy and a distance that has to be maintained there.
Speaker: You have to understand very well how this creature acts, what it needs, and then when the time comes, you have to cut its throat.
Speaker: And as these lambs or these goats or these cattle iterate over the course of a single human lifetime, you get to see that this sheep produces particularly abundant or particularly soft wool, and this sheep produces much more milk.
Speaker: And then as those sheep have descendants, you get to see them grow up and see them inherit the same traits.
Speaker: You get to discover heredity.
Speaker: You learn that one sheep is like another in some ways, they're different in others.
Speaker: You learn that a sheep is like you in some ways and unlike you in others.
Speaker: There are things you can teach a sheep to do, there are things you can't teach a sheep to do.
Speaker: And this is the beginning of an understanding of nature, that all forms of life have an essence of being that makes them what they are, and importantly that there's a hierarchy of higher and lower.
Speaker: The shepherd also achieves physical distance from village life by virtue of needing to go out and find grazing territory for the livestock.
Speaker: So you can imagine the healthy young man up on the hilltop looking down at the sheep and also looking down at the village at some remove.
Speaker: I'm up here, they're down there.
Speaker: I can see them, they can't see me.
Speaker: And if I go just a little bit further around this bend, I can be alone.
Speaker: And so this physical distance from the village also creates the possibility of some psychological distance from the gnomos, the convention of the village.
Speaker: There's also just way more variation in outcomes possible with herds than with crops.
Speaker: There's a limit to how much produce can be created by one person under human power out of the ground.
Speaker: But the limitations of the size of a herd that you or a group of people can guard or steal is much more relaxed, and it's closer to the concept of interpersonal violence.
Speaker: So the size of your output is no longer a function of just your effort.
Speaker: It's a function of your prowess, your ability to take things violently, both psychologically and physically, your ability to sneak and thieve and lie and misdirect.
Speaker: Besides which, these young men subsisting on milk and meat are also just going to be physically bigger and stronger than anyone living an agrarian lifestyle.
Speaker: So eventually, under these conditions of loose, intermittent contact with the village and existence outside of the village's enforcement mechanisms, combined with these immense incentives to act against the Nomos, potential rewards for breaking the rules, acting independently, these young men become the first human beings to break away psychologically from the Nomos.
Speaker: This starts with cattle rustling, eventually develops into various other forms of predation, including slavery.
Speaker: And this is a messy, lossy process.
Speaker: A society in which every individual is a sociopath, just taking what he wants is not sustainable.
Speaker: So in most cases, you have this gang of young men who sort of ride into town, eat whatever they can take, and the tribe disperses, collapses.
Speaker: There's not a way for it to sustain itself under that kind of threat.
Speaker: But in a few cases, maybe you imagine an exceptional crew of bandits who managed to hold the tribe together and actually rewrite the nomos.
Speaker: They produce new values that justify the subjugation, the conquest, the inequality.
Speaker: And so this tribe, animated by these new values, turns the predatory impulse outward.
Speaker: So instead of being just this loose, valueless youth gang, you get an actual culture and an actual society whose values keep it cohesive on the inside and violent on the outside.
Speaker: I'm quoting here,
Speaker: Now the assumption here is that surplus required for creativity and contemplation can only be created by slavery.
Speaker: And I don't know if I buy that.
Speaker: It seems like particularly with the incorporation of animal power, you can imagine people becoming prosperous without slavery, although they would have to get pretty proficient at defending their herds and their wealth.
Speaker: But the really essential development in this pastoral conquering society is the development of the pathos of distance.
Speaker: This is the ability of the aristocratic culture to view the subject cultures from above and from outside.
Speaker: Anyway, he gives a few examples of pastoral tribes in history.
Speaker: One of them is the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Speaker: who were these Nilotic herders who conquered the agrarian Hutu.
Speaker: He says,
Speaker: The Tutsi dedicate themselves entirely to warfare and administration.
Speaker: They despise manual labor and endeavor to spend as much of their lives in conspicuous leisure as possible.
Speaker: Tacitus describes the Germanic raiders as not easily persuaded to plow the earth and to wait for the year's produce as to challenge an enemy and earn the honor of wounds.
Speaker: They actually think it tame and stupid to acquire by the sweat of toil what they might win by their blood.
Speaker: And if their own tribe sinks into the sloth of prolonged peace and repose, many of its noble youths voluntarily seek those tribes which are waging some war, both because inaction is odious to their race and because they win renown more readily in the midst of peril and cannot maintain a numerous following except by violence and war.
Speaker: He also describes the Nuristanis in Afghanistan who preserve this Indo-European pastoral and aristocratic sensibility as kind of a fossil all the way up until the Islamic conquest.
Speaker: So the Nuristanis have two social classes, the ruling landowning herders and the artisans and servants.
Speaker: Their religion has this radical dualism between the sacred and the profane, the male and the female.
Speaker: The high places are good, the low valleys are bad.
Speaker: Wild goats are better than domesticated animals.
Speaker: Raw meat is better than cooked meat.
Speaker: Light is better than darkness.
Speaker: Men do all the tending of the animals and all of the public, religious, and martial duties, and women do all the household chores and farming.
Speaker: And men are expected to spend time up in the high mountain pastures to purify themselves from the pollution, the corruption of life down in the valley.
Speaker: So you can see this clear mapping of the pastoral to the masculine and the agrarian to the feminine.
Speaker: The sky father rules over the mountaintops and the high, cold, austere places.
Speaker: And then there's the earth mother governing the green, warm, populated valleys.
Speaker: Bap mentions elsewhere the contrast between the agrarian Han Chinese and the Tibetan pastoralists who had conquered them in the past.
Speaker: And this is, you know, this is a contemporary account.
Speaker: The Chinese conquered Tibet in 1950.
Speaker: But it says, "...female Han Chinese respondents emphasized physicality in their descriptions of Tibetan men, whom they described as having strong bodies and being very manly, handsome, and brave."
Speaker: The women viewed the Tibetans as bigger, taller, stronger, darker-skinned, rougher, more masculine, and more loyal than other men.
Speaker: And this is where it gets really interesting.
Speaker: Instead of describing the masculine in reference to the feminine, Tibetan men repeatedly contrasted their masculinity with that of Han Chinese men.
Speaker: So there's a sense in which societies as well as individuals manifest masculine virtue, and they come to look upon these subject populations as not only governed by women, but womanish in their subordinate position.
Speaker: The feminine society is the one that's concerned with survival and cohesion, everyone staying together seeking to avoid harm or conflict.
Speaker: The masculine society is concerned with excellence and is willing to suffer and inflict some harm to get there.
Speaker: And this roughly, I think, maps to the roles of fathers and mothers, how they raise children, and where they stereotypically disagree.
Speaker: Now what I find confusing about this is that, as far as I can tell, in Bap's view, all human society began as matriarchal and feminine in its values.
Speaker: It was very stifling, harm-avoidant, risk-averse, until this masculine perspective broke free and rebelled and subjugated feminine cultures by force.
Speaker: And given how psychologically durable and ubiquitous patriarchy has proven to be, it's a little bit hard to imagine how these matriarchies were established in the first place.
Speaker: Maybe he would argue that it's sort of the disinterest of men, their neglect of the community and its institutions.
Speaker: Sort of like you see in a lot of places in Africa now where the men sort of drift in and out of the community and they have a couple girlfriends, baby mamas, but they're not in any position of authority in their families or in their communities and they don't exactly want to be.
Speaker: He talks a lot about the Australian aboriginals and Kalahari Bushmen and the logic that extrapolates that back to our own distant historical past is kind of hard to falsify.
Speaker: Like maybe that's how these tribes worked, but how would you know?
Speaker: It seems like it's just sort of taken for granted that these matriarchal societies are living fossils and that that's how we know where we came from.
Speaker: And he's, you know, he's more of a student of this topic than I am, obviously.
Speaker: Like maybe he can show me like the chipped bone or the chunk of pottery that proves that this is the way, you know, people lived in Neolithic France.
Speaker: But I just don't think it makes like a ton of intuitive sense.
Speaker: Anyway, so these pastoral warrior bandits conquer the sedentary tribes.
Speaker: and they find themselves once again like the young shepherds on the hilltop looking at another culture from above and from the outside.
Speaker: But this time, instead of a binary choice to embrace or reject the gnomos, they already have their own codified gnomos to compare with the gnomos of the conquered peasants.
Speaker: And eventually they conquer multiple villages and they see that there are ways of doing things and gods and rituals here that are not practiced there.
Speaker: And the aristocratic nomos, the aristocratic culture, is not only different from the conquered regime in the sense that the gods have different names and are propitiated in different ways.
Speaker: It's genuinely oriented around a different notion of the good.
Speaker: He talks about how the democratic, communitarian notion of the good is essentially subtractive.
Speaker: It's the absence of predation, the absence of threat.
Speaker: It's a state of rest, of comfort.
Speaker: And this extends all the way to the notion of heaven, that heaven is a place of eternal rest, a place without danger, a place without work, a place without conflict.
Speaker: Whereas the aristocratic notion of the good is strength and overcoming and conquering.
Speaker: And the consummation of life is to do great deeds and to have those deeds exalt you to become like the gods, to have the intensity and the glory of being that a god has.
Speaker: So how does this different notion of the good develop?
Speaker: The aristocratic culture is still under the same survival pressures, the same environment of danger that pushed the democratic egalitarian tribes towards safety and conformity, but the circumstances are a little bit different.
Speaker: First of all, they're wildly outnumbered by their subject populations.
Speaker: They can't compete for quantity.
Speaker: They also aren't the only game in town.
Speaker: The threats facing them from other conquerors, including sort of their wilder cousins on the steppe, are anti-inductive, meaning that once you figure out how to deal with it, it finds a new way to come at you.
Speaker: They also live among the subject people.
Speaker: And in many cases, the failure mode, famously with the Mongol conquerors, is finding a high-status position within that culture, settling in, getting comfortable,
Speaker: and completely losing the edge that made them conquerors in the first place.
Speaker: And then some other Mongol tribe views them rightly as weak and decadent and Chinese and conquers them again.
Speaker: And this process fails over and over in exactly this way.
Speaker: The conquering population becomes decadent and soft and they're conquered anew by their still wild cousins on the steppe.
Speaker: So to recap, in order to survive, the conquerors can't prioritize quantity over quality, they can't optimize for stasis and stability, and they have to remain separate.
Speaker: They can't conform to the overwhelming majority of people around them who are subjugated foreigners.
Speaker: And so in order to stay connected to their own culture and maintain both closeness within the aristocratic culture and distance from the conquered peasants,
Speaker: They become very well-traveled and they stay in constant contact with each other across long distances.
Speaker: He says, the Indo-European and Hurrian princes in the Levant maintain surprisingly close connections with each other over distances of hundreds of miles, exchanging not only lavish gifts but also daughters and sisters in marriage.
Speaker: They start to develop a taste for the exotic, for the resources and the arts and the cultural products of these far-flung cousins of theirs.
Speaker: And since they can't compete on quantity,
Speaker: The aristocratic nomos turns toward an obsession with individual human quality.
Speaker: Like, we didn't get here by being numerous, we got here by being the best.
Speaker: We got here by being dangerous as individuals.
Speaker: And the character of those values begins with two concepts, Andrea and phronesis.
Speaker: Andrea means virtue or valor.
Speaker: It means manly courage and prowess in combat.
Speaker: What makes you a man as distinct from a woman?
Speaker: What are you built to do?
Speaker: You're built for violence.
Speaker: The bones in your head are built to withstand blows.
Speaker: Your fists are built to swing sticks and throw rocks and to be used as clubs.
Speaker: Your hormonal environment is designed to encourage you toward violence, encourage you toward risk-taking.
Speaker: to insulate you from the psychological negative consequences of violence both against yourself and the kind of violence that you inflict on other people.
Speaker: And so a well-turned-out man, a good man, meaning a man who's good at being a man, possesses Andrea.
Speaker: He's well-engineered toward his purpose as...
Speaker: killer.
Speaker: And phronesis is the ability to give good counsel in war.
Speaker: It's a type of wisdom about practical action, a type of foresight.
Speaker: Bapp spends a lot of time on a pre-Socratic poet, Pindar, who he argues is the best example of the Greek aristocratic culture and values before they began to be examined and abstracted and radicalized and subverted by philosophy.
Speaker: Pindar was paid by the aristocracy to create these poems of praise of their great deeds.
Speaker: And so Bapp argues that this is a pretty good indicator of what they actually valued because it's what they were willing to pay to have somebody else say about them in public.
Speaker: And in Pindar, Andrea is represented by the lion.
Speaker: You could say naked force, brute strength.
Speaker: And Phronesis is represented by the fox.
Speaker: So this is cunning and creativity and audacity.
Speaker: And so the Nomos, which is still backward-looking, it's still about custom, it's still about tradition, it's still about genealogy.
Speaker: But instead of thinking about what did our ancestors do that kept them safe, it's like, who were the great men?
Speaker: Who were the mightiest warriors?
Speaker: Who were the greatest counselors in war?
Speaker: Stasis won't keep us safe.
Speaker: We can't be safe.
Speaker: We're surrounded by these intelligent, active human threats.
Speaker: So the way we survive, the way we stay safe, so to speak, is by becoming extraordinarily personally dangerous.
Speaker: And the purpose of the primordial lawgiver, like Lycurgus of Sparta or Solomon of Athens, is to be the one who actually synthesizes everything that's worked thus far, what makes a great man, and to say, here's how we get more of that person.
Speaker: And to some extent that involves drilling and training and self-denial in the same sense that growing a tree involves pruning.
Speaker: But the natural health of the tree, what kind of tree it actually is, and the quality of the tree, that comes first.
Speaker: You can make a healthy tree realize its full potential through pruning, but doing that to a sickly or a stunted tree won't make it a healthy tree.
Speaker: So the training of second nature, the education of these aristocrats is important, but first nature comes first.
Speaker: People often think of the Spartan state as the most obsessive about eugenics, but actually what sets them apart is how obsessive they were about the drills and the discipline and the cult of the state that orients the innate biological material that you've developed toward the state's aims.
Speaker: But the Greek aristocracies all over were just as obsessed with human quality.
Speaker: And one of the things Pindar reveals is that the aristocracy sees itself ruling because it is physically, intellectually, and spiritually superior, that such virtue or arete cannot be taught, and that it is a matter of blood, of birth, and of nature.
Speaker: But this is not something that they said out loud or told themselves.
Speaker: In their value system, rule is just a fact.
Speaker: It justifies itself.
Speaker: If you have to explain why you deserve to rule, then you've already lost the plot.
Speaker: So superiority is a matter of breeding.
Speaker: They know that the blood of the heir contains, in some sense, the accumulated excellence of the line that he comes from.
Speaker: But excellence has to be manifest.
Speaker: And this creates an obvious tension between the aristocracy that rules in fact and the upstarts who want to make them prove that they deserve to rule in the contest.
Speaker: Bap compares Agamemnon holding the dead scepter of tradition, the scepter of his rule, against Achilles swearing by a sprouting bough, a sprouting tree branch, symbolic of the living reality of nature.
Speaker: And it's not that the aristocratic culture itself holds established hereditary claims to power in contempt.
Speaker: It just maybe views them as more contingent or up for debate.
Speaker: Arete, which is the excellence that defines the word aristocracy, doesn't just mean to do well, but to do better, to excel or overcome others.
Speaker: And it has to be proven in the agone, which is the contest.
Speaker: But it would still be a mistake to view this as like a meritocracy.
Speaker: Because both the hereditary aristocrat and the upstart are playing the same game of breeding.
Speaker: They wouldn't use the term reversion to the mean, of course, but they recognize that the unimpressive son from an aristocratic family carries a different biological inheritance than, say, an unusually brave or competent slave.
Speaker: They recognize that sometimes greatness skips a generation.
Speaker: There's a particular story where a man has accomplished some great deeds in the Agone, and he's described as manifesting an inborn nature handed down from his grandfather, who had done similar things.
Speaker: It says, Nature hides, lays dormant, occasionally manifests itself in explosive actions.
Speaker: And so to be obsessed with one's immediate heirs would be to miss the point because the fire is carried in populations.
Speaker: It doesn't breed true.
Speaker: Whatever is in your nature to do, you'd better do it.
Speaker: And on the subject of family and children, Bap definitely downplays the role of domestic life and says that these heroic types should not be interested in matters of the home.
Speaker: But when marriage is discussed in Pindar, it's oriented around the development of excellence.
Speaker: It's not an end in itself.
Speaker: One of Pindar's poems is a retelling of the story of Pelops and Inumaeus.
Speaker: Inumaeus is this mighty monster of a king who heard a prophecy that he'd be killed by his son-in-law, and so he challenges all his daughter's suitors to a chariot race, and he defeats all 18 of them and has them all executed.
Speaker: And Pelops overcomes him, but what's important about that is not that Enemaus is evil, but that he's mighty.
Speaker: He's this strong, dangerous force of will, even being presumably, you know, a couple decades older than the people that he's in conflict with.
Speaker: Like, it's not just that he won a bride, it's that he took his bride by force from a mighty king, which is indicative both of his quality and of her quality.
Speaker: And it says, he raised six sons, leaders of the people, eager for excellence.
Speaker: Feminists like to complain about guys in movies winning the sex prize, meaning that, you know, you solve the problem, you defeat the bad guy, and then you get the girl.
Speaker: And basically, in the aristocratic gnomos, it's like, yes, you should win your bride in a way that proves your excellence and her excellence.
Speaker: And you should produce a lot of sons so that they can be excellent.
Speaker: So there's this endless quest for supremacy, superiority.
Speaker: Your status as top dog is never settled.
Speaker: In fact, there's almost a sense in which this culture doesn't really acknowledge hypotheticals.
Speaker: Fusus, meaning nature, the body, only becomes apparent, real, only possesses being, and bloodline is only proven at the hour of its triumph and contest, during the exhibition of a great feat of excellence, of great physical strength, of victory in battle, of violent victory over an opponent, or over a challenge, as in the case of Pelops or Jason.
Speaker: And this is essentially the meaning of life to a Greek aristocrat.
Speaker: They regard themselves as literally possessing more being than the peasants.
Speaker: They are more real, more true, more alive.
Speaker: Pindar uses the adjective esthlos to describe the aristocracy, which comes from the verb esthai to be.
Speaker: They considered themselves true men in contrast to the lying common man.
Speaker: In fact, their word for a man, one of themselves, is aner, but their word for the common man is anthropos.
Speaker: which means essentially man is an animal.
Speaker: And the etymology of Anthropos is a compound of aner and ops, meaning the face, the appearance, the look.
Speaker: So Anthropos literally means someone who looks like a man.
Speaker: You could compare it to calling someone a human versus a humanoid.
Speaker: So an anthropos is not exactly a man.
Speaker: And being exalted up to godhood in Olympus is not to be subsumed into the divine ocean, to be absorbed into like an oblivion, a de-individuation.
Speaker: For them, godhood is to join the gods in their manifestness, their superhuman reality.
Speaker: Eternal life isn't long life, it's the life of the eternal, the undying, the youthful, the intense, the vivid.
Speaker: When Achilles is offered the choice to go home or die young in glorious battle, he is choosing the life of a god, godlike life, eternal life.
Speaker: Another contrast between the idea of nature, Fusus, and Nomos is when Odysseus washes up on the shore naked before the princess Nausicaa, and he manages...
Speaker: stripped of every outward mark of power and wealth to reconstruct his kingly status through the power of his aristocratic speech and bearing.
Speaker: His kingship is not a political fact, it's who he is, it's what he is.
Speaker: And the tension between nature and the aristocratic nomos is that the nomos aims at the highest achievements, the excellences, the arts,
Speaker: But it can't achieve them, because convention by its nature homogenizes and equalizes.
Speaker: What the aristocratic gnomos can do is breed the specimens who are more likely to produce this greatness spontaneously like lightning.
Speaker: But even then, it requires the reincorporation of the savage life.
Speaker: Even men who are biologically prepared for greatness by this selective breeding program can still be held back by it, which is why, in myth, they often have to go into the wilderness to be tutored by Chiron the centaur.
Speaker: The half-man, the beast-man.
Speaker: He teaches them the truths of nature that are found outside the city.
Speaker: And often this is a function of their dispossession in these aristocratic wars and intrigues.
Speaker: So Jason is educated by the centaur because his birthright is usurped.
Speaker: Romulus and Remus have to be nursed by a she-wolf for the same reason, because of their uncle's intrigues in the palace.
Speaker: And this mirrors the way that these aristocratic cultures were constantly re-barberized by their less civilized cousins from the steppe.
Speaker: Both the individual prince, but also like the culture as a whole, had to be constantly taken back to school and forced to relearn the law of nature from the savages.
Speaker: And to be a dispossessed aristocrat in this framework is a pretty interesting position, because your rule was its own justification, your excellence, the power that you had to defend your place.
Speaker: And when that's taken away, the children of aristocrats have an opportunity to prove their quality, but nothing is given to them.
Speaker: And I suspect that's why so many mythical stories begin with the dispossession of the true king or the true prince by an evil uncle or a vizier.
Speaker: Hard times in wild places are part of the proper education of a king.
Speaker: And this may be the only solution to the ultimate problem of hereditary monarchy, which is the quality of your heirs.
Speaker: Like Odysseus stripped naked on the beach, or Jason, or Romulus, or King Arthur, it's the violation of the gnomos, the collapse of their rightful position, that enables them to prove that they deserve it.
Speaker: And as the breeding program proceeds, and the nature, the fuses of the specimens grow stronger, and the stakes of the conflicts between them grow higher and higher, instead of fighting over a few cattle, or a few women, or a few acres of land, they're fighting over...
Speaker: vast empires and beautiful cities and continental trade flows.
Speaker: And these are incredibly capable, incredibly ambitious, incredibly psychologically robust people locked in competition for their entire lives with people who are just as competent.
Speaker: And the price of losing in these wars is always the genocide of the men and the enslavement and rape of the women and children.
Speaker: And as the city and the sociality that you've created becomes more and more beautiful, the thought of losing it becomes correspondingly agonizing.
Speaker: And so this aristocratic regime finds itself constantly balanced on this knife's edge between total destruction and unimaginable glory.
Speaker: And the psychological problems facing these Greeks, all the new dreams to be achieved,
Speaker: all the wealth and power and capacity that they'd accumulated, the old discipline that got them there couldn't accommodate it.
Speaker: And so they find themselves asking, you know, what is courage and manliness really?
Speaker: What is arete?
Speaker: Who among us is really the best?
Speaker: And these are obviously dangerous questions to have young men asking.
Speaker: if you need them to stay the course and preserve the aristocracy's place in the world.
Speaker: But it's not that thinking those thoughts makes them inert or makes them want to give up.
Speaker: It kind of just sends them exploding into a thousand different directions.
Speaker: Bapp calls it a tropical proliferation of human types.
Speaker: These incredibly heroic, incredibly capable people start marrying people they're not supposed to marry, doing things they're not supposed to do, thinking thoughts they're not supposed to think.
Speaker: And most of this is detrimental, destructive, doesn't go anywhere.
Speaker: and in fact leads to a lot of what Nietzsche describes as kind of the central problem of modern life, which is all modern people are these admixed chimeras of confused and paradoxical and unfulfillable drives.
Speaker: And that's sort of the detritus of this explosion of misbreeding.
Speaker: But while most of it's useless, some of these chimeras are really extraordinary.
Speaker: They have this potential that couldn't have been developed within the framework of the gnomos.
Speaker: And that's, according to Nietzsche, the birth of genius.
Speaker: You can't actually have all the philosophy and the poetry and the music and the political theory and the scheming if everybody's doing what they're supposed to be doing in this breeding program, which is drilling with their spears and shields and sharpening themselves to a razor's edge in the agone.
Speaker: At the same time, if your great-grandparents hadn't participated in that breeding program,
Speaker: if they hadn't been pounded into shape by the aristocratic nomos and made to do the things they were supposed to do, and if the sort of inferior or botched ones hadn't been denied the chance to breed, and the superior ones breeding with the ones they're supposed to in the way that they're supposed to, if all that didn't happen, you wouldn't have, at this point, the biological capacity to produce this extraordinary creative bloom that emerges under conditions of aristocratic decadence.
Speaker: He notes that the Spartans never really had a decadent period, and they also never had a profusion of high culture.
Speaker: Sparta died out because their breeding program was so selective and so subtractive that they just ran out of people, which I think has ramifications for our time.
Speaker: There's a general trend of antinatalism, but the trend seems to be strongest among ambitious, intelligent people.
Speaker: And I think among bright, vital, ambitious people, there's an increasing desperation
Speaker: because they, I think fairly, don't want to be saddled to somebody who can't keep up.
Speaker: But finding someone who wants a family and approximately shares their values within their own social and intellectual class seems almost hopeless.
Speaker: And so some of what I'm trying to do with the natalism conference and with Exit is to create that connectivity across distance, kind of like these Mediterranean princes traveling hundreds of miles to go pick up a bride.
Speaker: I think you have to create a lot of infrastructure to allow people to do that and to do it safely.
Speaker: And when BAP talks about these heroes being unconcerned with domesticity, it's like, well, yeah, but they had all kinds of social and political infrastructure to get their kids raised within the aristocratic milieu.
Speaker: It's like Captain Picard preaching about how they don't worry about money in the 24th century or whatever.
Speaker: Like, yeah, they don't worry about money.
Speaker: They have a magic machine that can give them whatever they want.
Speaker: Of course they don't worry about money.
Speaker: It's not because they have, like, different priorities.
Speaker: They're morally superior.
Speaker: Like, if you want to raise six sons who are leaders of the people and eager for excellence right now, you've got to homebrew that in a way that Pelops didn't have to.
Speaker: Anyway, back to this condition of aristocratic decadence.
Speaker: Nietzsche describes this in Beyond Good and Evil, and Bap quotes it here.
Speaker: I'll read it in full.
Speaker: Finally, however, at some point a fortunate time arises which lets the immense tension ease.
Speaker: Perhaps there are no more enemies among the neighbors, and the means for living, even for enjoying life, are there in abundance.
Speaker: Variation, whether as something abnormal, something higher, finer, rarer, or as degeneration and monstrosity suddenly bursts onto the scene in the greatest abundance and splendor.
Speaker: The individual dares to be individual and stand out.
Speaker: At these historical turning points, there appear alongside each other, and often involved in mixing up together, marvelous multifaceted jungle-like growths, an upward soaring, a kind of tropical tempo in competitiveness for growing, and an immense annihilation and self-destruction, thanks to the wild egoisms turned against each other and as it were exploding, which wrestle with one another for sun and light and no longer know how to derive any limit, any restraint, or any consideration from the morality they have had up to that point.
Speaker: This very morality was the one which built up such immense power, which bent the bow in such a threatening manner.
Speaker: Now, at this moment, it has become outdated.
Speaker: The dangerous and disturbing point is reached where the greater, more multifaceted, and more comprehensive life lives over and above the old morality.
Speaker: The genius of the race brimming over from all the horns of plenty with good and bad, a catastrophic simultaneous presence of spring and autumn, full of new charms and veils, characteristic of young, still unexhausted, still unwearied depravity.
Speaker: Once again there's danger there, the mother of morality, great danger, this time transferred into the individual, into one's own neighbor and friend, into the alleyways, into one's own child, into one's own heart, into all the most personal and most secret wishes and desires.
Speaker: So this aristocratic breeding program emerged in an environment of extreme danger.
Speaker: And its values, the straightforward martial values of Andrea and Phrynosis, are harder to relate to, harder to apply to your own life when, as far as you can tell, for miles around, all the asses have already been kicked.
Speaker: It's not like you're gonna relax and stop competing, you're not like psychologically capable of that.
Speaker: You're built to crush your enemies and hear the lamentation of their women.
Speaker: So, like Nietzsche says, the danger becomes a psycho-spiritual danger.
Speaker: And philosophy is essentially the abstraction and radicalization of the end toward which the aristocratic gnomos was driving the whole time, which is the freedom and the power and the excellence of the individual.
Speaker: And so the paragon of ultimate freedom and ultimate power and ultimate excellence is the person of the tyrant.
Speaker: He's the aristocrat who is so aristocratic that in comparison with him, the aristocratic nomos is a herd of sheep and slaves.
Speaker: His strength and his cunning and his will and his ambition are so great that he can take whatever he wants from whoever he wants.
Speaker: And basically, he and his buddies recapitulate the Manurbund, the youth gang, the band of pirates, and they prey on the aristocratic state in the same way that their ancestors preyed on weak, backward Hutu farmers.
Speaker: And Platonic moral philosophy characterizes philosophy as the antidote to tyranny.
Speaker: And this is how most people understand philosophy today.
Speaker: You should have a philosopher teach your kids so that they know how to be a good boy, and love their country, and eat their vegetables, and do as they're told.
Speaker: Or slightly more charitably, you think of philosophy as this civilizing, stabilizing influence.
Speaker: Like the big brains in Greece realized there was more to life than fighting, and so they decided to dedicate themselves to the serenity of logic and the life of the mind.
Speaker: And then you hear that the Athenians made Socrates drink hemlock, and you think, well, they must have been just persecuting this poor sweet guy for no reason.
Speaker: Or maybe he was, like, teaching their kids to play hacky sack instead of doing their shield wall drills.
Speaker: Or maybe they didn't like that he was smarter than them and maybe poked fun at them and they couldn't take a joke and they killed him.
Speaker: But Bap's case is that, no, that's not what philosophy was.
Speaker: That's not who Socrates was.
Speaker: That's not why they had him killed.
Speaker: And it wasn't just him, it was a general persecution of philosophers and philosophy as such, because it was a legitimate danger to the state.
Speaker: And Plato's moral philosophy was essentially crafted in response to this persecution.
Speaker: Not because Plato disagreed with the conclusion of philosophy as kind of the midwife of tyranny, but because he saw the need to conceal it.
Speaker: Socrates was executed because a group of his students, led by Critias,
Speaker: had overthrown the Athenian democracy, killed about 5% of the city, seized the oligarch's property, and ruled with an iron fist for about eight months before being themselves overthrown.
Speaker: Bapp talks about philosophers being stereotyped at the time as the lackeys of tyrants or the lickspittles of tyrants, and a solid chunk of the middle of his dissertation is devoted to the Gorgias.
Speaker: This is a dialogue written by Plato about 20 years after the 30 tyrants and the execution of Socrates.
Speaker: And the part of the dialogue that Bapp cares about the most is Socrates' conversation with Callicles, who is a young sophist and a student of Gorgias, who presents essentially the antinomian argument that Bapp is saying is the true essence of philosophy.
Speaker: that the good is getting what you want and fulfilling your desires, that the strong should rule over the weak, and that democracy is the tyranny of the many over the exceptional individual.
Speaker: He says that morality is mere convention, that the nomos depends on lies and fantasies, that it's against nature and therefore against the truth.
Speaker: that praise and blame are tools of the nomos used to enslave the rightly constructed or the well-turned-out against their own interests to the benefit of the weak.
Speaker: Basically, he argues that civilization itself is kind of just a herd instinct.
Speaker: It's a way of people banding together to protect themselves from the forces of nature and from stronger men.
Speaker: And so if you are one of these stronger men, these predatory men, you have no moral obligation to the city.
Speaker: It exists either to hang a yoke on you or to keep you out.
Speaker: But, interestingly, he talks about philosophy as something for children, or at least young men.
Speaker: That it's unseemly to hear an old man talking about philosophy in the same sense that it's unseemly to see him, like, lisping and playing with toys.
Speaker: He's sort of accusing Socrates of being, like, a Reddit nerd, like, playing with Funko Pops.
Speaker: But the reasoning behind that, according to Bapp, is not that...
Speaker: philosophy in itself is ineffectual, but that philosophy leads inevitably to the insight, the discovery of nature, the discovery that might makes right.
Speaker: And so a philosopher who contents himself with quiet contemplation and refuses to liberate himself in the real world and seize power,
Speaker: doesn't actually love the truth, doesn't actually love nature, and is therefore not a true philosopher.
Speaker: Because the truth of nature is imminent, it's embodied, it's made real.
Speaker: It can't just be apprehended passively.
Speaker: And this goes back to the concept of fusis as a thing that can only be realized in the contest.
Speaker: And Bat makes a pretty complex case that the arguments that Plato puts in Socrates' mouth don't make a lot of sense or are disingenuous.
Speaker: Now, I read this dialogue.
Speaker: It's not very long.
Speaker: And I'm not sure that I caught what he did.
Speaker: It's sort of like my favorite genre of movie review where I say, you know, is the Barbie movie secretly based?
Speaker: Like, it could be that they're making a bad argument on purpose, but it could just be that they're making a bad argument.
Speaker: Now, I read this thing one time, and I don't speak Greek, and these are smart people.
Speaker: So if Babs says he's being dumb on purpose, maybe he's being dumb on purpose.
Speaker: Anyway, Calicles says...
Speaker: that the satisfaction of your desires is what leads to a happy life.
Speaker: And that telling people not to do this is basically just a way of manipulating the superior at the expense of the inferior.
Speaker: And Socrates starts to pick that apart.
Speaker: He says, what is superior?
Speaker: Obviously, if the people are able to arrest and execute you, then are they not superior to you?
Speaker: Like, in what sense are you superior if you can't prove it by actually being in charge?
Speaker: Which is probably the best argument against all kinds of supremacist philosophies.
Speaker: You know, if you were the master race, why didn't you win World War II kind of a thing.
Speaker: But Bapp says, A jackery, again, is never a revolution.
Speaker: A jackery meaning like a peasant revolt.
Speaker: and it is historically easily put down.
Speaker: Callicles believes that the practice of rhetoric is what gives the power of rule to an elite in a democracy.
Speaker: He is simply more cynical about the ambitions of those who claim to speak for the people.
Speaker: So he's basically saying, the strong prey on the weak anyway.
Speaker: You get oligarchy anyway.
Speaker: So why can't we just be honest about it?
Speaker: And Socrates also picks at this idea of the satisfaction of your desires being the source of a happy life.
Speaker: He says, you know, what if somebody just wants to scratch himself all the time or wants to be a catamite?
Speaker: And he's defending the concept of temperance, the concept of self-restraint, by saying that, like, there are some desires that you shouldn't give in to.
Speaker: And he says that licentiousness is the symptom of a sick soul in pain.
Speaker: But here I'm quoting Bap, So he's saying like, yeah, maybe there's like weirdos and perverts who shouldn't give in to all their desires, but if you're a healthy person, then your appetites and desires will be right and you should listen to them.
Speaker: Bapp puts it this way, licentiousness itself is not an evil but absolutely a positive good when the soul is healthy, and that it is only an evil when the soul is sick.
Speaker: Now what Socrates doesn't say in this dialogue, but that Bapp and Nietzsche are reading between the lines, is that, frankly, Athenian society is sick.
Speaker: Their aristocratic decline has advanced to the point where they do have all kinds of disordered desires that need to be hemmed in.
Speaker: And if you were to advocate the rule of the strong and licentiousness even beyond the aristocratic class, but to the people, it'd be a catastrophe because they couldn't handle it.
Speaker: He says,
Speaker: The accusation is an indication to philosophers that making their erotic character public and defending it in the Caliclean manner will lead to general political and social decay, for as Nietzsche says, there is no congruence between the sensuality of the artist and of the people.
Speaker: Bapp says that Socrates isn't criticizing Calicles' arguments on the facts, but just that he's being a little too frank, a little too naive, in fact, a little bit too conventional.
Speaker: He hasn't actually liberated himself from the gnomos because he believes that he can just go into the agora and speak the right words and win.
Speaker: Calicles doesn't understand that the rhetorician or the demagogue leads the people where they want to go.
Speaker: In order to gain power, Calicles will have to praise and blame all the same things the regime does.
Speaker: And so the king by divine right may be a direct slave to convention, like everybody understands that he has to fulfill the role he's been placed in, but the populist revolutionary is also a slave to convention in that he's at the mercy of the nomos inside the hearts of the people who put him in power.
Speaker: So Socrates isn't saying you're wrong to hate the nomos, he's actually saying you need a purer and a deeper hostility to the nomos.
Speaker: And so what Bap characterizes as Plato's real conclusion, that the real point he's trying to make in this dialogue, is that the power Calicles wants can't be captured overtly, and so it has to be sublimated.
Speaker: It has to become subterranean.
Speaker: It has to be intellectualized and spiritualized.
Speaker: And what does that look like?
Speaker: Well, that looks like Plato doing an about-face and essentially saying, oh no, philosophy is all about...
Speaker: The general welfare.
Speaker: It's about the health of the society and of the state, the moral and spiritual health.
Speaker: Now we know better than you.
Speaker: We've done a lot of thinking about this.
Speaker: We're the experts and you should trust the experts.
Speaker: So it's a change from the philosopher aspiring to be a tyrant to the philosopher aspiring to be a priest.
Speaker: And so the philosopher's will to power, which he agrees with Calicles as a good thing, is sublimated into this moral authority, making himself the arbiter of what's good and evil.
Speaker: And of course, from the perspective of this superior philosopher, the teaching of temperance and justice to the masses is good because it makes them easier to control.
Speaker: Nietzsche says that Plato wanted to found a new religion but failed with the Greeks.
Speaker: It was the Christians who eventually took up Platonic moral philosophy.
Speaker: And what he identifies as the problem is that they took that exoteric meaning, the sort of moralizing how to be a good boy messaging, and they forgot about the pursuit of power that that teaching was meant to protect.
Speaker: Which meant people actually started believing in universal equality and universal morality, which means...
Speaker: Regimes of selective breeding became untenable, which means that the people who should be aristocrats have become this disordered mishmash of conflicting and subterranean and paradoxical desires, which has rendered them inert and incapable of producing high culture.
Speaker: So in the same sense that Plato's effort to conceal the nature of philosophy was this emergency surgery intended to save it from an existential threat, Nietzsche hoped that by removing the mask and preaching antinomianism directly, like Callicles,
Speaker: He could defend the interests of the superior against the ubiquitous modern egalitarianism.
Speaker: But, this is from the book, his insights have become, by our time, the tools of the most extreme egalitarianism that seeks to destroy all nature and to justify the very life of the last man that Nietzsche denounced.
Speaker: Philosophers must defend the virtues of the many, chiefly self-restraint, temperance, and justice, if they are to rule and if they are to have anything to rule at all.
Speaker: The public function of platonic moral philosophy was to bring order to the anarchy of the instincts, to reestablish virtue on a new foundation because the better foundation of aristocratic breeding and education had already collapsed.
Speaker: Now he says in the intro to the dissertation that he talks out both sides of his mouth in some cases because it's, you know, it's for a PhD.
Speaker: He's got to let the grown-ups read it.
Speaker: And this sounds like one of those cases.
Speaker: It doesn't really sound like something Bap would say.
Speaker: But I actually kind of agree with it.
Speaker: Like, if people were too warped and stunted and bent back against themselves in Socrates' time to make antinomianism tenable, it certainly doesn't make any sense now.
Speaker: Like, it strikes me as just another way of saying, if all men were angels, no government would be necessary.
Speaker: Like yes, if our desires were rightly ordered it would make sense to indulge them, but they're not rightly ordered.
Speaker: So what can you really do with that?
Speaker: And maybe Bap's argument would be that our stuntedness and our smallness is such an existential problem that even if our desires are kind of warped and paradoxical and screwed up, they're so weak and so flaccid that like now is not the time to put on the brakes.
Speaker: And in turn, a worldview that's built around bridling the intense, vital passions of a much simpler and healthier people may just be like really bad for a person like you.
Speaker: At the same time though, if we're talking about human phenomena that we're stipulating are totally a matter of biological material, and we no longer possess that biological material, and we can't recreate the conditions under which that biological material was collected and refined,
Speaker: Besides which, we just are what we are, and so we'll either summon the will to correct this, or we won't.
Speaker: It's, I don't know, it's hard to summon a sense of urgency about this from within the frame that Bap presents.
Speaker: Like, does it make sense to me as a question of vibes?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And maybe that's all it has to be.
Speaker: Vibes are pretty much the way that I decide whether or not things are true.
Speaker: Certainly about these kinds of questions, questions of meaning, I don't know how else you could possibly answer them.
Speaker: And I think the reason that so many of us have been fascinated by Bap over the last couple of years is that some of the things that he says resonate in the same way that other deeply held truths resonate while being like seemingly impossible to fit inside our existing metaphysical framework.
Speaker: And this, I think, is why everyone's looking for the Christian-Nietzschean, Christian-Vitalist synthesis.
Speaker: There is this sense that mainstream Christianity is being eaten by progressivism, and that in some senses progressivism is a truer and cleaner instantiation of Platonic Christian morality, and that it could only get there by jettisoning the person of Christ, which obviously presents a paradox.
Speaker: Now this is super convenient for me as a non-Platonic Christian, because what I can say is that essentially you had these Platonic interpolations on top of Christianity, and in the absence of Revelation, they've basically eaten the substrate that they were built on, and now all that's left is Plato.
Speaker: And so in order for me to reject that, I don't have to reject Christ, I just have to reject Plato.
Speaker: And I realize that's not going to work for many, most of you.
Speaker: But I do think it's worth saying that Plato is just not in the Bible and neither is René Girard and the valorization of victim as victim, the valorization of self-denial, of self-annihilation, the fleeing from life and from the physical world.
Speaker: All these things are just not in there as I read it.
Speaker: And if you want to engage angrily with my brand on the internet about that, that's fine.
Speaker: But let's get back to, in an immediate sense, what can be done with all this?
Speaker: Well, let's walk through the premises one more time.
Speaker: Let's stipulate that beauty and excellence and heroism and adventure and discovery, that these things are good and should exist.
Speaker: Like, let's not even say that they're better than ordinary life or that ordinary life isn't justified.
Speaker: Let's just say they should exist.
Speaker: I'm trying to make the easiest case I can here because, frankly, I'm not sure where I stand on some of this stuff.
Speaker: But I can say at least...
Speaker: excellence is good courage is good aesthetic and intellectual brilliance is good okay second stipulation let's stipulate that the presence or absence of this excellence has something to do with biology the movie gattaca is supposed to be a refutation of this idea that ethan hawk lives in this genetic engineering utopia where everyone's assigned to their task according to their genetic propensities and
Speaker: He's one of the few non-engineered humans conceived through ordinary reproduction.
Speaker: And he cons his way into being an astronaut going to Jupiter, and he goes out for a swim with his genetically superior, genetically engineered brother, and he beats him in a swim race because he says, I didn't save anything for the swim back.
Speaker: So that's supposed to mean that grit and desire and cussedness can overcome natural ability.
Speaker: But like, obviously that movie becomes ridiculous if you give Ethan Hawke Down syndrome.
Speaker: Like they deliberately situate the action within the range of capacities at which you can imagine the tortoise outrunning the hare.
Speaker: But like the capacity means something.
Speaker: We all accept that.
Speaker: We just disagree about maybe the range in which it matters.
Speaker: Or we rightly or wrongly situate grit and persistence and hunger as being something outside the purview of biology and heredity.
Speaker: And I actually believe that's true.
Speaker: But I believe it for pre-rational, non-rational, irrational reasons.
Speaker: But I don't think Ethan Hawke with Down syndrome is going to Jupiter.
Speaker: Now I think those two premises are pretty hard to argue with.
Speaker: The third premise, which, you know, your boomer aunt might take a little convincing on, but won't be shocking to anybody in our sphere, is that those first two premises face an existential threat.
Speaker: That the dominant post-Christian platonic morality of our time, the religion guarding all the doors and holding all the keys,
Speaker: is animated and united and defined by nothing other than hostility to those two premises.
Speaker: The idea that courage is better than cowardice, the idea that strength is better than weakness, the idea that brightness is better than dimness.
Speaker: Like, yes, they're opposed to biological hierarchy, but mostly because it's a hierarchy.
Speaker: Biological hierarchy is a more successful thought terminator for them because they've successfully convinced the world that Satan was an Austrian corporal.
Speaker: But it really is the idea that some things are better than other things.
Speaker: That's all it is.
Speaker: And so you don't have to be a radical like BAP is, in the belief that mere life is valueless or even has negative value.
Speaker: You just have to believe that excellence counts for something, because literally every structure of power around you is bent on annihilating it.
Speaker: Now this seems so simple.
Speaker: Why does it seem so impossible to get ordinary people on board with this?
Speaker: One place where I would kind of break company with BAP is that I think ordinary people like beauty.
Speaker: I think they admire courage and leadership, and they want leaders.
Speaker: And I think if you can liken our situation to any of these historical stages of development that he talks about, it's the young man on the hilltop looking on the village from the outside for the first time.
Speaker: I consulted with a professor of Nietzsche for this episode, and he talked about what the realization of the justice of nature feels like.
Speaker: So platonic justice is always that the strong serve the weak or at least don't harm the weak.
Speaker: But the justice of nature is the disgust of seeing mediocrities in possession of things they don't deserve.
Speaker: Now this is difficult to disentangle from resentment, which is maybe Nietzsche's like number one enemy.
Speaker: Basically the difference in his mind is whether or not you really are better.
Speaker: You see like a gross pigeon-chested dork dating a girl you really like, and the way you get justice is you go steal his girl.
Speaker: And if you don't do that, or you can't do that,
Speaker: That's when your revulsion becomes subterranean and sublimated and internalized and starts attacking you.
Speaker: And that leads to all the complexities and pathologies that Nietzsche associates with resentment.
Speaker: To the extent that the young men on the hilltop have a morality of any kind, that's their morality.
Speaker: We see these weak, stupid, tyrannical people just doing nothing, being nothing, and not allowing anyone else to do or be anything.
Speaker: And eventually they go to hell with this, and that's when they ride into town.
Speaker: And you've probably had a conversation like that with some like-minded friends, and it seems so self-evident and so justified and so right, but then you try it on some ordinary people and it doesn't work at all, it doesn't play, and you don't know why.
Speaker: And that's also the relationship between the philosopher and the tyrant.
Speaker: The tyrant is the expression of the philosopher's hatred of the nomos.
Speaker: I'm not going to be left alone within this system, so all I can do is to smash it.
Speaker: And why is that wrong?
Speaker: Well, if you're the young man on the hilltop the first time, there's no problem.
Speaker: The system isn't equipped to deal with you.
Speaker: But if you're in a system that's developed centuries worth of antibodies from encountering and internalizing people like yourself, then they just arrest you and they make you drink hemlock.
Speaker: They have a social and intellectual complexity that they didn't have before.
Speaker: So Plato's solution is to turn that complexity against itself.
Speaker: He finds the intellectual and social terrain that isn't being guarded and uses that to seize power.
Speaker: instead of what Calicles wanted, which was just to storm the gates.
Speaker: So now in our time, you've got lots of strategies in place simultaneously.
Speaker: The dumbest strategies, apart from like literal fed posting, are appeals to intellectual honesty and justice and fair play.
Speaker: That intellectual terrain is absolutely captured and fortified.
Speaker: They own the moral technocracy.
Speaker: They're the ones who decide what's fair and what's not.
Speaker: In fact, that's the basis of their rule.
Speaker: They'll never give it up voluntarily.
Speaker: Now, to some extent, they're mining that foundation themselves, and maybe we can accelerate that process, but they're never going to go, you were right, we were wrong, and give you what you want.
Speaker: But the right answer can't possibly be to go back to a dumber and a simpler iteration.
Speaker: Not only are our societies more complex, we're more complex psychologically.
Speaker: And so the solution has to be to look again for the opportunities that are created by this new social and intellectual complexity.
Speaker: What doors aren't being guarded?
Speaker: What aren't they paying attention to?
Speaker: In the short and medium term, that's what I'm looking for at Exit.
Speaker: How does this complex legal and ethical system that they've built to justify their power, how does it hamstring them?
Speaker: What are the lines that they can't cross without jeopardizing their own legitimacy?
Speaker: And then in the long term, it's about taking that space that we've carved out to build something that seduces them.
Speaker: Something they can't expropriate, but that they want.
Speaker: And this, again, I suspect maybe Bap would disagree with,
Speaker: But the reason I think it can work that way is that hierarchy doesn't have to be adversarial.
Speaker: The whole concept of the regime that we're up against is that hierarchy is inherently exploitative.
Speaker: And when I think about the ordinary people who have changed their mind about that, it wasn't because they saw the right, like, takedown of how ugly and resentful and hypocritical the left is.
Speaker: In many cases, it's because they experienced a healthy hierarchy, usually in a family.
Speaker: The family is the wellspring of all functional hierarchies.
Speaker: The state of the family and state of family life now obviously makes the Neolithic longhouse pretty compelling as a metaphor, but I don't think I buy it as the natural state of humanity.
Speaker: I mean, even leaving aside spiritual considerations, just thinking about the obvious physical and psychological advantages of patriarchy,
Speaker: and the fact that every form of government is this obvious abstraction of the relationships between fathers and sons and brothers.
Speaker: Like you can't possibly believe in the cohesion of piratical brotherhoods if you don't believe in the cohesion of actual brotherhoods, where your blood and your biology and your nature actually tell you to defend each other.
Speaker: There's a reason that mafias are called crime families.
Speaker: Obviously that doesn't mean that biological kinship is all it takes, but ties of blood are obviously the easiest way to inculcate trust and cooperation and loyalty.
Speaker: That's why essentially every pre-modern society on earth was organized in tribes and clans.
Speaker: It's why in Europe for millennia the ways that two houses would cement their loyalty to one another was through marriage.
Speaker: Because then they would share grandchildren and they could trust in the natural loyalty of their potential ally, or maybe their former enemy, and his own grandchildren.
Speaker: It's why medieval oaths of fealty were obvious abstractions of the relationship between a father and a son.
Speaker: Throughout this book and all of the selections of Nietzsche that I read as a consequence of reading this book...
Speaker: The relationship between superior and inferior is characterized as obviously and inescapably hostile.
Speaker: It has to be by definition predatory or parasitic in one direction or the other.
Speaker: And I would argue that's a huge gap in their understanding of hierarchy because there can also be hierarchies that are pedagogical.
Speaker: like the relationship between a father and a son, where you're actually trying to draw him up to meet you.
Speaker: You're hoping that he comes into his own kingdom and that whatever he builds in a certain sense glorifies you as much as it glorifies him.
Speaker: And a relationship between superior and inferior can also be erotic, like the love between a man and a woman.
Speaker: The desire to take something that's beautiful and subdue it and possess it and tame it and make it more beautiful is
Speaker: or build something beautiful with it.
Speaker: And there's also just pure friendship and enjoyment that can transcend these power dynamics.
Speaker: The clearest example is between a man and his dog.
Speaker: You know your dog's capacities.
Speaker: You know what he can understand and what he can't.
Speaker: And you can laugh when he's being silly, but without contempt.
Speaker: And you can in fact have tremendous respect for a dog, and the virtues that a dog exhibits of courage and loyalty and tenacity.
Speaker: And it's easy to find examples of aristocrats expressing these kinds of feelings and having these kinds of relationships with common people.
Speaker: And it's just as easy to find common people expressing genuine love and honor and appreciation and respect for aristocrats.
Speaker: with zero confusion about who's who on either side, with no pretense of equality.
Speaker: And in fact, I believe the reason there's so much resentment and contempt in our society is that we're expected to lie about the existence of these hierarchies all of the time.
Speaker: And if our goal is to rehabilitate hierarchies of nature, then the best place to start is the most fundamental natural hierarchies which are found in the family.
Speaker: And that brings us back to where we started with selective breeding.
Speaker: The drive towards selective breeding in these steppe aristocracies was the imminent threat of death.
Speaker: They had to become dangerous because they lived in a dangerous world.
Speaker: Now those conditions don't exist now, and it seems like the vitalist plan, if you can call it a plan,
Speaker: is to wait for and hope for and fantasize about a day when those conditions will reemerge.
Speaker: And when that day comes to be prepared to rape and pillage and claim your place in the new aristocracy.
Speaker: But I actually think that we're already facing an existential threat.
Speaker: And if you don't respond to this one, you're not going to make it to the Thunderdome where you can show your quality in the Bronze Age sense.
Speaker: And that existential threat, which is putting your biological material at as much hazard as a bronze spear in your guts, is the collapse of family formation.
Speaker: Like BAP is right that it can't just be about biological replication.
Speaker: Certainly can't be about trying to outbreed our enemies just in terms of raw biomass.
Speaker: But like if you care about human quality, and if your quality is high,
Speaker: and the type of person you are is scarce, then yes, whatever great deeds are inside you to do, you have to do them.
Speaker: But you also have to see to your posterity, which is actually a much taller order because it means you can't just have kids.
Speaker: You have to have kids with the right woman, which means you have to find and seduce the right kind of woman, which is incredibly hard.
Speaker: You may be back in a situation where you have to do some deeds, like Pelops, to win a bride and to actually win her.
Speaker: Like, not just to marry her, but to secure her loyalty and her commitment to you and to the quest.
Speaker: Because as Bat points out, the political and social infrastructure is totally arrayed against you.
Speaker: All marriage is gay marriage.
Speaker: And so to even approximate the historical and healthy and natural relationship between a man and a woman takes immense force of personality.
Speaker: But you have to produce heirs, and you have to be around to raise them, and there's not really any other way to do it.
Speaker: So while I think BAP is basically right about the headwinds facing fathers in the modern family law and cultural environment, I basically just think you have to do it anyway.
Speaker: What else are you going to do?
Speaker: And then you've got to see to it that your kids who will, let's face it, have variable natural ability, you have to see to it that they make it through this bottleneck and not only make it through, but thrive and elevate themselves and create beauty, create beautiful families.
Speaker: And so I want my kids around the best people I can find.
Speaker: So many things they need to know that I can't give them as a dad, but I know the guys who can teach them.
Speaker: And I want them to have the best peers and rivals and romantic partners that they can possibly have.
Speaker: And I don't think there's any place on earth where they're going to encounter that spontaneously at this point, which means we got to build it.
Speaker: And so you may wish for a moment that demands the archetype of the warrior and selects for that, but right now it seems like if you want to bring any beauty, any genius, any excellence through this filter, it's going to call upon the masculine archetype of the king.
Speaker: Anyway, that was Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy by Kostin Alamariou.
Speaker: Fantastic book.
Speaker: I hope he's not upset that I gave so much away.
Speaker: There's tons more in there.
Speaker: It's absolutely worth picking up.
Speaker: If you want to learn more about Exit, you can check us out at exitgroup.us.
Speaker: And if you're interested in this problem of demographic decline, we're holding a conference on natalism December 1st and 2nd in Austin, Texas.
Speaker: It's going to be two days with some of the most interesting people in the space, not just giving talks, but working together to solve some of these problems.
Speaker: You can learn more about that at natalism.org.
Speaker: You can also follow me on x at extradeadjcb or exit underscore org.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
